Microsoft has said that they have broken the compatibility with older app, so apps will need at least a recompilation. It's possible that Microsoft has dropped completely all the Winmo UI code, so you migh also need to rewrite the UI parts.
I don't think the app store matters at all. The problem here is that Microsoft does not allow to write apps in native code (except for partners like Adobe). It doesn't matter how open is the store, Firefox is not going to pass the filters because it's native code.
I always thought that the best word that describes opensource is meritocracy. The best people makes the decisions. You are free to fork the tree, but other people is not forced to listen you if they think you are stupid. I agree with Shuttleworth, they can (and must) listen users...but allowing users to have a veto on decisions? Hell, no.
If I remember correctly, switching to open source was more expensive than keeping the propietary software. But they still went for open source and open standards, because long term it would be more cheap - no licenses, possibility of choosing different software that implements the same protocol, posibility of choosing better software vendors, not just one...etc etc.
Regional government of the autonomous community of Valencia (Spain) also switched to free software, last year they released a detailed report (english) of the problems they found and how they fixed it. It took a lot of time to complete it (4 years) and they still depend on propietary software for some systems. These migrations need a lot of work...
Windows Phone 7 will break compatibility with software written for previous versions of Windows Mobile. That's a very interesting fact that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide, but it's very important if you are willing to give it an opportunity.
That's how we are doing it in Spain. In the last decade, we have built gas power plants and closed almost all our coal power plants. We use as much wind/hydroeletric power as we can (also nuclear), and gas power to get the rest.
Spain has got more than 50% of our energy on a few peak days. On november 3 we got 53% of our energy from wind. On average, in the last 12 months we got 14.45% of our energy from wind. And we are not communist hippies, thank you.
Well, I don't know how that ramdoubler was implemented, but unlike that ramdoubler this is not a extension made by a third party developer to a propietary kernel. It should be transparent to programs.
Which is one of the reasons it's inexpensive. If you want a system without waits even for small problems, it's going to be more expensive, because the hospital will need to have extra resources and experts available "just in case". Public systems maximize the usage of resources. USA spends 16% of their GDP in health care, Canada 10%, my country (Spain) 8.5% (and our GDP per capita is lower than USA) . I'm not saying that waits are cool, but their cause is not inefficiency.
In 2008 alone USA installed 25 Gigawatts of wind energy. Even if wind energy don't peak all the time, it's way more energy than what the nuclear industry can put in the table _today_.
This is not a political debate. In the entire world, there's more wind power being added to the grids than nuclear. Even if nuclear stations were build as fast as possible, it can't keep up with the growth rate of wind + solar, and the trends are only improving. The fact is that it's wind where most of the world is searching new power. Nuclear power can't keep up.
And before some tells me that renewable energy is expensive, let me quote TFA: "it is anticipated that Obama's budget for the coming year will add $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees for nuclear facilities — on top of $18.5 billion already budgeted but not spent."
Smartphones have become another computing device. There is Android, and there is MeeGoo. Ubuntu has missed the oportunity of creating a phone version of Ubuntu like Apple did with iPhone OS....what is Canonical going to do in this area? Create a phone version of Ubuntu and hope that some vendor chooses it? Support Android? Or Meego?
The Adobe Linux guys wrote a blog post explaining why Adobe Flash is so slow. It seems that because Flash needs to mix the video image with other flash controls, it can't accelerate video like a typical player does. It seems that the HTML5 people have the same problem.
"The key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data. Their counterpart Windows drivers do allow this which is why this feature is supported in Windows.
That's for Linux. What about Mac? I'm not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications (if the APIs exist at all, which I'm not sure they do)"
It's really a problem? I mean, package wars are so 1999. I recently switched to a RPM based distro after 9 years using and loving APT. And while there're differences (some advantages, some disadvantages), these days they're pretty much the same thing. I'm using KDE 4.4 from Fedora rawhide in my Fedora 13 base system, just as I would have done in Ubuntu. There're things far more important in this merge than using RPM instead of DEB. Like, for example, focusing on QT instead of Clutter.
The question is, should we even bother to look at this release?
Yes, you should. Not only Plasma has become a viable replacement of the old desktop, it has improved to the point where I would miss it in a KDE3/Gnome desktop. The netbook plasmoid is interesting not only because it's better for netbooks, it's a proof of how flexible the whole infrastructure is. You even can switch your desktop to the netbook plasmoid in the desktop preferences (it's not only useful for netbooks, newbie users could use it aswell in workstations).
Amarok dropped the new ugly UI, and went back to a UI like the one they had in the 1.x series.
Nepomuk not only it is becoming a cool tool, it is also starting to allow to do today the same kind of things Gnome's zeitgeist will do
External projects like Koffice 2, K3B or Gwenview are stabilizing after the switch to KDE4....
I'm afraid that the KDE brand is ruined only in the head of people who haven't bothered to look at how cool KDE4 is...
I recommend trying Krita aswell...often forgotten, but quite powerful and, unlike Gimp, it is not limited to use the graphic toolkit(QT), it also uses features from other parts of KDE, so it's well integrated with the rest of the kde desktop. I'm using 2.1 and while I've had a crash (which I didn't really notice it because Krita autosaves your work and it asks if you want to continue working on it after reloading the app), it has worked quite well. And it uses a single window UI today...
Which is perfectly fine, but it shows the autism in the google culture when it comes to working with people from outside. There're many companies working on Linux (doing more serious hacking than Android does), and they have learnt to interact with the Linux community when they want to add a feature. They ask maintainers what design they should follow to implement some feature. They listen, they write code, they get reviews, they make changes, they repost the patches. In other words, they interact with the community, they are a part of the community. SGI, for example, has done a tremendous amount of work in the past years to get the kernel in shape for their beasts with thousands of CPUs, they have touched a lot of complex core code, yet they did all contributing with the community, targetting the main kernel in first place.
Google, in the other hand, is not a "part" of the community. It hacks the kernel for months without any contact outside of Google, some day it announces a future product using the code and only after that, it drops a shitload of code to the community which does very weird things that many Linux hackers don't like. Then it does nothing to improve the design (because there's already production code depending on it), and it makes zero efforts to fix it or get it merged. Then it claims that everything is fine, because the code is GPL which means you can reuse it. In other words: Google doesn't care about what the rest of the community thinks before modifying the code, and it doesn't care when it releases either.
Given that Android is supposed to be not just a Google project but a community, and Google is a opensource oriented company, one would expect that Google would have done it better. Sadly, Android has become one of the best examples of how not to work in a opensource community,
Hey, Google doesn't need to contribute back their code to the Linux main tree. It's perfectly fine not try to merge it. But because it makes sense for everyone (end users, Google, Android developers, hardware manufacturers), people is trying to fix the situation. Maybe you don't care about working together, but Linux people do.
This is what Ellison said before he started his Red Hat clone (unbreakable linux, way before they bought sun):
"I'd like to have a complete stack," he said. "We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."
It seems logical that now that they have their own operative system, they will use it. On the other hand, it'd be stupid for them to fight Linux, since maaaany people use it for Oracle. They will probably support both.
It's not the waiting what sucks. What sucks is that the old development model was more unstable. For big projects linux with a lot of activity, long development cycles just don't work. You don't have releases, so users don't test it. Once you get out the first stable release, users notice that it's very buggy (but you still don't know all the bugs, because most users and distros are still not using it because it has too many bugs), and it takes a full year to get the codebase into a decent shape. That's what happened with Linux 2.6. They had been dropping thousands of LoC for a couple of years. Because it's a "unstable cycle", quality was not so important, the main tree was used as a repository for "work in progress" code, and even if it was important (which it isn't, even it there's a corporate policy that says that it must be) you can't measure the quality of the code, because the users are not using it.
The new model, in the other hand, allows new feaures in every release, but it's much easier to track regressions compared to the previous model. The new features are required to have some quality, they can't have serious bugs, maintainers must agree that they can be merged, and they only can be merged in the first two weeks of the 3 months development period. It allows to make progress faster, and at the same time bugginess is controlled more easily. Previously, you had a huge diff of several MB, users reporting that the huge diff was causing several bugs and regressions in their systems, and developers had to start debugging the alpha code they had written, and had not tested, two years ago. IMO, long term, it's much better for everybody. It's not surprising that FreeBSD and Solaris are using this model too, it makes sense for Mozilla to use it aswell.
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Microsoft has said that they have broken the compatibility with older app, so apps will need at least a recompilation. It's possible that Microsoft has dropped completely all the Winmo UI code, so you migh also need to rewrite the UI parts.
I don't think the app store matters at all. The problem here is that Microsoft does not allow to write apps in native code (except for partners like Adobe). It doesn't matter how open is the store, Firefox is not going to pass the filters because it's native code.
I always thought that the best word that describes opensource is meritocracy. The best people makes the decisions. You are free to fork the tree, but other people is not forced to listen you if they think you are stupid. I agree with Shuttleworth, they can (and must) listen users...but allowing users to have a veto on decisions? Hell, no.
If I remember correctly, switching to open source was more expensive than keeping the propietary software. But they still went for open source and open standards, because long term it would be more cheap - no licenses, possibility of choosing different software that implements the same protocol, posibility of choosing better software vendors, not just one...etc etc.
Regional government of the autonomous community of Valencia (Spain) also switched to free software, last year they released a detailed report (english) of the problems they found and how they fixed it. It took a lot of time to complete it (4 years) and they still depend on propietary software for some systems. These migrations need a lot of work...
Windows Phone 7 will break compatibility with software written for previous versions of Windows Mobile. That's a very interesting fact that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide, but it's very important if you are willing to give it an opportunity.
That's how we are doing it in Spain. In the last decade, we have built gas power plants and closed almost all our coal power plants. We use as much wind/hydroeletric power as we can (also nuclear), and gas power to get the rest.
Spain has got more than 50% of our energy on a few peak days. On november 3 we got 53% of our energy from wind. On average, in the last 12 months we got 14.45% of our energy from wind. And we are not communist hippies, thank you.
As always, Firefox ate much less memory than competitors...specially against opera & chrome.
Well, I don't know how that ramdoubler was implemented, but unlike that ramdoubler this is not a extension made by a third party developer to a propietary kernel. It should be transparent to programs.
You are still a pirate!
Which is one of the reasons it's inexpensive. If you want a system without waits even for small problems, it's going to be more expensive, because the hospital will need to have extra resources and experts available "just in case". Public systems maximize the usage of resources. USA spends 16% of their GDP in health care, Canada 10%, my country (Spain) 8.5% (and our GDP per capita is lower than USA) . I'm not saying that waits are cool, but their cause is not inefficiency.
In 2008 alone USA installed 25 Gigawatts of wind energy. Even if wind energy don't peak all the time, it's way more energy than what the nuclear industry can put in the table _today_.
This is not a political debate. In the entire world, there's more wind power being added to the grids than nuclear. Even if nuclear stations were build as fast as possible, it can't keep up with the growth rate of wind + solar, and the trends are only improving. The fact is that it's wind where most of the world is searching new power. Nuclear power can't keep up.
And before some tells me that renewable energy is expensive, let me quote TFA: "it is anticipated that Obama's budget for the coming year will add $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees for nuclear facilities — on top of $18.5 billion already budgeted but not spent."
Smartphones have become another computing device. There is Android, and there is MeeGoo. Ubuntu has missed the oportunity of creating a phone version of Ubuntu like Apple did with iPhone OS....what is Canonical going to do in this area? Create a phone version of Ubuntu and hope that some vendor chooses it? Support Android? Or Meego?
The Adobe Linux guys wrote a blog post explaining why Adobe Flash is so slow. It seems that because Flash needs to mix the video image with other flash controls, it can't accelerate video like a typical player does. It seems that the HTML5 people have the same problem.
"The key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data. Their counterpart Windows drivers do allow this which is why this feature is supported in Windows.
That's for Linux. What about Mac? I'm not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications (if the APIs exist at all, which I'm not sure they do)"
RPM 4.8 (included in Fedora 13) is insanely faster.
It's really a problem? I mean, package wars are so 1999. I recently switched to a RPM based distro after 9 years using and loving APT. And while there're differences (some advantages, some disadvantages), these days they're pretty much the same thing. I'm using KDE 4.4 from Fedora rawhide in my Fedora 13 base system, just as I would have done in Ubuntu. There're things far more important in this merge than using RPM instead of DEB. Like, for example, focusing on QT instead of Clutter.
MeeGo will be ARM/x86, so it's not like Intel is not going to benefit from this.
People have a finite amount of time, a finite amount of interest, and patience.
We are talking of Linux here. Nerds have a lot of free time, they will try KDE4 again.
The question is, should we even bother to look at this release?
Yes, you should. Not only Plasma has become a viable replacement of the old desktop, it has improved to the point where I would miss it in a KDE3/Gnome desktop. The netbook plasmoid is interesting not only because it's better for netbooks, it's a proof of how flexible the whole infrastructure is. You even can switch your desktop to the netbook plasmoid in the desktop preferences (it's not only useful for netbooks, newbie users could use it aswell in workstations).
Amarok dropped the new ugly UI, and went back to a UI like the one they had in the 1.x series.
Nepomuk not only it is becoming a cool tool, it is also starting to allow to do today the same kind of things Gnome's zeitgeist will do
External projects like Koffice 2, K3B or Gwenview are stabilizing after the switch to KDE4....
I'm afraid that the KDE brand is ruined only in the head of people who haven't bothered to look at how cool KDE4 is...
I recommend trying Krita aswell...often forgotten, but quite powerful and, unlike Gimp, it is not limited to use the graphic toolkit(QT), it also uses features from other parts of KDE, so it's well integrated with the rest of the kde desktop. I'm using 2.1 and while I've had a crash (which I didn't really notice it because Krita autosaves your work and it asks if you want to continue working on it after reloading the app), it has worked quite well. And it uses a single window UI today...
Which is perfectly fine, but it shows the autism in the google culture when it comes to working with people from outside. There're many companies working on Linux (doing more serious hacking than Android does), and they have learnt to interact with the Linux community when they want to add a feature. They ask maintainers what design they should follow to implement some feature. They listen, they write code, they get reviews, they make changes, they repost the patches. In other words, they interact with the community, they are a part of the community. SGI, for example, has done a tremendous amount of work in the past years to get the kernel in shape for their beasts with thousands of CPUs, they have touched a lot of complex core code, yet they did all contributing with the community, targetting the main kernel in first place.
Google, in the other hand, is not a "part" of the community. It hacks the kernel for months without any contact outside of Google, some day it announces a future product using the code and only after that, it drops a shitload of code to the community which does very weird things that many Linux hackers don't like. Then it does nothing to improve the design (because there's already production code depending on it), and it makes zero efforts to fix it or get it merged. Then it claims that everything is fine, because the code is GPL which means you can reuse it. In other words: Google doesn't care about what the rest of the community thinks before modifying the code, and it doesn't care when it releases either.
Given that Android is supposed to be not just a Google project but a community, and Google is a opensource oriented company, one would expect that Google would have done it better. Sadly, Android has become one of the best examples of how not to work in a opensource community,
Hey, Google doesn't need to contribute back their code to the Linux main tree. It's perfectly fine not try to merge it. But because it makes sense for everyone (end users, Google, Android developers, hardware manufacturers), people is trying to fix the situation. Maybe you don't care about working together, but Linux people do.
This is what Ellison said before he started his Red Hat clone (unbreakable linux, way before they bought sun):
"I'd like to have a complete stack," he said. "We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."
It seems logical that now that they have their own operative system, they will use it. On the other hand, it'd be stupid for them to fight Linux, since maaaany people use it for Oracle. They will probably support both.
It's not the waiting what sucks. What sucks is that the old development model was more unstable. For big projects linux with a lot of activity, long development cycles just don't work. You don't have releases, so users don't test it. Once you get out the first stable release, users notice that it's very buggy (but you still don't know all the bugs, because most users and distros are still not using it because it has too many bugs), and it takes a full year to get the codebase into a decent shape. That's what happened with Linux 2.6. They had been dropping thousands of LoC for a couple of years. Because it's a "unstable cycle", quality was not so important, the main tree was used as a repository for "work in progress" code, and even if it was important (which it isn't, even it there's a corporate policy that says that it must be) you can't measure the quality of the code, because the users are not using it.
The new model, in the other hand, allows new feaures in every release, but it's much easier to track regressions compared to the previous model. The new features are required to have some quality, they can't have serious bugs, maintainers must agree that they can be merged, and they only can be merged in the first two weeks of the 3 months development period. It allows to make progress faster, and at the same time bugginess is controlled more easily. Previously, you had a huge diff of several MB, users reporting that the huge diff was causing several bugs and regressions in their systems, and developers had to start debugging the alpha code they had written, and had not tested, two years ago. IMO, long term, it's much better for everybody. It's not surprising that FreeBSD and Solaris are using this model too, it makes sense for Mozilla to use it aswell.