Indeed. Android is killing both Gnome and KDE. It is more succesful by all measures, it is already the leading "Linux desktop" (as in: "Joe User uses it"). KDE and Gnome are no better than XFCE - hacky and not very successful projects for people that doesn't want the mainstream.
It is happening much faster than everyone expected, and I'm very happy about it - Android knows what the user want and they know how to provide it and how to compete with propietary platforms, they are not a bunch of mental masturbators who spend their time with flamewars and continuous rewrites of everything. I really hope Android extends some day their APIs to allow desktop apps and not just touch stuff, so that we can forget this old G/K stuff.
Muslim/arabic countries are important. There is a reason why USA has spent a half century fighting wars there. If you don't care about what is happening it's your problem, not ours.
What article are you reading? The one I'm reading says "Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing [...] Transition to an R&D setup where 90% of all Nokia R&D takes place in only two geographical locations. One of them will be in Finland and the other will be defined later. There will be no more R&D projects with resources in multiple cities and different time zones. Only small tactical software projects will be allowed to take place outside two main R&D locations"
QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK). Developers would be really interested in something like that, but for some reason Nokia doesn't care.
They are going to release another MeeGo phone (N8?), so the N900 is not the last. I guess they have to release something while they put Windows Phone on other devices.
Exelon [largest nuclear operator in USA] said it needs natural gas prices to reach about $8 per million B.T.U. — almost double today’s price — and a carbon fee of $25 a ton to make the project worthwhile economically. “We don’t have the right stimulus right now,” said Christopher M. Crane, president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview.
It is not a "dumb idea". It depends. In areas with lots of big cities it has a lot of sense. Also, this is a technological transition - in a few decades all rails will be high speed and we will drop the current technology, in the same way nobody uses steam trains anymore. You have to start somewhere, and yes, it is expensive. If you are a third world country and you can't afford it, I guess you have no choice. But USA is not in that situation.
As for security measures...why are you even thinking about that? Internet makes terrorism much easier, and nobody is switching it off. High Speed Rails have good security measures to avoid obstacles, and they also have some "counterterrorism advantages": You can't hit a building with them, and they don't fall from the sky.
Accelerating the release cycle can improve the quality. Less stuff merged in each major version means less bugs to deal with for the release, finding the cause of a bug is easier, low quality code has less pressure to get merged because it can wait another 3 months...
Well, they are not dead, but they seem to be becoming irrelevant. Consumers really like touch phones and pads and app stores, and only android seem to work well in these devices.
I like changes, but I hate radical changes. I think that good web design is about improving little things every day, get feedback from users, etc. Launching a new interface redesign every few years is wrong.
And I hate even more when radical changes don't fix the stupid old problems. Like the stupid, stupid, stupid "preview->submit" proccess (hint, slashdot: we shouldn't need a "preview" phase to comment). Or the stupid and annoying "disable advertising" checkbox. Or the two links to my account in two different things of the page for no reason. Or the ugly list of replies to my comments. And why 4 small comments need a whole screen in slashdot, while reddit packs lots of comments in the same space? And while we are at it, why good comments can't get more than 5 votes?
Yes, isn't that funny? Unlike Nvidia, Intel and AMD take Linux seriously. They want to fix the damn thing and they are helping. Nvidia on the other hand doesn't care, they only support Linux because the big studios ask for it, and as soon as supporting old hardware becomes an inconvenience they drop support and then your only option is to use the Nouveau drivers (which work on top of the same infrastructure Intel and AMD are helping to fix). Or waste money in a new Nvidia card, of course.
Graphic cards manufacturers do take Linux seriously. At least Intel and AMD/ATI do, they contribute with open source drivers, engineers and even specs.
And after years of supporting opensource drivers, they still suck. The problem is that a good quality graphic driver is really hard. It takes years and several engineers to write one, so often the drivers are late or incomplete. As if that wasn't bad enought, Linux has needed to rewrite big chunks of the graphic stack: KMS, and now Gallium3D, which force a kernel/mesa driver rewrite. And then there are other problems, like the fact that X sucks and graphic drivers have not been able to make Xrender really fast (some times toolkits seem to be faster using software than using Xrender; also Xrender doesn't reports which parts of its interface are hardware accelerated and which ones are using a software fallback which makes hard to trust it)
According to insidehpc, Oracle has stopped developing Lustre and developers "have reportedly been encouraged to apply for other positions within the company".
A group of Lustre users already created OpenSFS on October 2010 to continue developing Lustre.
Indeed, I have a personal interest in good governments. I remember reading news about how California was going bankrupt, and how Schwarzenegger was planning severe all kind of budget cuts to education and other welfare. Now I read this and I wonder: why didn't he confiscated all these phones before doing that?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Android is killing both Gnome and KDE. It is more succesful by all measures, it is already the leading "Linux desktop" (as in: "Joe User uses it"). KDE and Gnome are no better than XFCE - hacky and not very successful projects for people that doesn't want the mainstream.
It is happening much faster than everyone expected, and I'm very happy about it - Android knows what the user want and they know how to provide it and how to compete with propietary platforms, they are not a bunch of mental masturbators who spend their time with flamewars and continuous rewrites of everything. I really hope Android extends some day their APIs to allow desktop apps and not just touch stuff, so that we can forget this old G/K stuff.
Uh? SF is an important piece of the opensource ecosystem. I find this quite interesting.
Muslim/arabic countries are important. There is a reason why USA has spent a half century fighting wars there. If you don't care about what is happening it's your problem, not ours.
Microsoft research does really cool things, but somehow the bureaucracy always kill them. I don't think it will be different this time.
What article are you reading? The one I'm reading says "Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing [...] Transition to an R&D setup where 90% of all Nokia R&D takes place in only two geographical locations. One of them will be in Finland and the other will be defined later. There will be no more R&D projects with resources in multiple cities and different time zones. Only small tactical software projects will be allowed to take place outside two main R&D locations"
I don't think they are proposing what you think.
QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK). Developers would be really interested in something like that, but for some reason Nokia doesn't care.
Uh? Differentiating? How is Nokia going to differentiate from the rest of companies that use windows phone?
They are going to release another MeeGo phone (N8?), so the N900 is not the last. I guess they have to release something while they put Windows Phone on other devices.
of course we can't have that because its nuclear
Wrong, you can't because nuclear is too expensive:
Exelon [largest nuclear operator in USA] said it needs natural gas prices to reach about $8 per million B.T.U. — almost double today’s price — and a carbon fee of $25 a ton to make the project worthwhile economically. “We don’t have the right stimulus right now,” said Christopher M. Crane, president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview.
It is not a "dumb idea". It depends. In areas with lots of big cities it has a lot of sense. Also, this is a technological transition - in a few decades all rails will be high speed and we will drop the current technology, in the same way nobody uses steam trains anymore. You have to start somewhere, and yes, it is expensive. If you are a third world country and you can't afford it, I guess you have no choice. But USA is not in that situation.
As for security measures...why are you even thinking about that? Internet makes terrorism much easier, and nobody is switching it off. High Speed Rails have good security measures to avoid obstacles, and they also have some "counterterrorism advantages": You can't hit a building with them, and they don't fall from the sky.
Less changes in every release means it will be easier to port extensions.
Accelerating the release cycle can improve the quality. Less stuff merged in each major version means less bugs to deal with for the release, finding the cause of a bug is easier, low quality code has less pressure to get merged because it can wait another 3 months...
Another good question is why a document viewer needs to add a preloader to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
Well, they are not dead, but they seem to be becoming irrelevant. Consumers really like touch phones and pads and app stores, and only android seem to work well in these devices.
I like changes, but I hate radical changes. I think that good web design is about improving little things every day, get feedback from users, etc. Launching a new interface redesign every few years is wrong.
And I hate even more when radical changes don't fix the stupid old problems. Like the stupid, stupid, stupid "preview->submit" proccess (hint, slashdot: we shouldn't need a "preview" phase to comment). Or the stupid and annoying "disable advertising" checkbox. Or the two links to my account in two different things of the page for no reason. Or the ugly list of replies to my comments. And why 4 small comments need a whole screen in slashdot, while reddit packs lots of comments in the same space? And while we are at it, why good comments can't get more than 5 votes?
Calm down, nobody is saying that you will have to wait to 4.1 to have a stable release. The summary is just speculating (wildly) about it.
They don't need that. Firefox has more than enought money to fund itself. In 2009, Mozilla had 104 millions in revenue. Expenses were 61$ million.
Firefox developers just don't care about SVG fonts because they think they are useless. And most people seem to agree with them.
Yes, isn't that funny? Unlike Nvidia, Intel and AMD take Linux seriously. They want to fix the damn thing and they are helping. Nvidia on the other hand doesn't care, they only support Linux because the big studios ask for it, and as soon as supporting old hardware becomes an inconvenience they drop support and then your only option is to use the Nouveau drivers (which work on top of the same infrastructure Intel and AMD are helping to fix). Or waste money in a new Nvidia card, of course.
Graphic cards manufacturers do take Linux seriously. At least Intel and AMD/ATI do, they contribute with open source drivers, engineers and even specs.
And after years of supporting opensource drivers, they still suck. The problem is that a good quality graphic driver is really hard. It takes years and several engineers to write one, so often the drivers are late or incomplete. As if that wasn't bad enought, Linux has needed to rewrite big chunks of the graphic stack: KMS, and now Gallium3D, which force a kernel/mesa driver rewrite. And then there are other problems, like the fact that X sucks and graphic drivers have not been able to make Xrender really fast (some times toolkits seem to be faster using software than using Xrender; also Xrender doesn't reports which parts of its interface are hardware accelerated and which ones are using a software fallback which makes hard to trust it)
According to insidehpc, Oracle has stopped developing Lustre and developers "have reportedly been encouraged to apply for other positions within the company".
A group of Lustre users already created OpenSFS on October 2010 to continue developing Lustre.
Right now their "success" is measured purely by how much money they spend.
Yeah, it's not like managers of big companies do that kind of things.
Indeed, I have a personal interest in good governments. I remember reading news about how California was going bankrupt, and how Schwarzenegger was planning severe all kind of budget cuts to education and other welfare. Now I read this and I wonder: why didn't he confiscated all these phones before doing that?
Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server...
Yes, note that firefox doen't ship H.264 either. In Europe, Firefox + Chrome share is 52.69%, IE 37.52%.
Also, Google owns Youtube and is working to make every video available in VP8.