Well I have used konqueror as my main browser for about 3 years now and I have not run into almost any major rendering flaws when viewing webpages in about a year or two. I actually write some fairly complex web based apps and I don't run into problems with that either. I rarely run into any problems rendering pages with gecko,khtml or opera based browers except ones that use IE only extensions.
However I probably don't go to the same places on the net as you do and I don't see these "massive" problems that you run into. The problems I have found I report but they where fairly advanced css stuff that gecko and opera have also had wrong.
I think you mean that C# is STATICALLY typed which means the typing is done at compile time. C#, Ruby and Python are all strongly typed but Ruby and Python do the typing at runtime. So C# is Static Strong Typing and Ruby/Python are Runtime Strong Typing.
My experience so far even with stuff that has tens of thousands of very well refactored code is that static typing has caused me more problems then it has solved.
Mostly because type systems are not very good and most bugs I run into have nothing to do with object type.
How right can a war be if you can't convince your citizens to fight in it? If you have to resort to forcing them to fight then you have already failed. This country is supposed to be a republic and one way or another it is supposed to be our will that governs. The politicians serve us not the other way around and if they can't convince us that some war is a good idea then they have no basis for us fighting in it.
My view is that if a draft is needed then a war is automatically unjust. If you can't support an action from showing the evidence to the public and asking for people to enlist then you are already far in the wrong.
String "Theory" is not a theory. The "scientists" that keep promoting it as that should be thrown out and through of as complete nuts. It is not even a hypothesis. It makes no predictions about the universe that can be tested. Other things become a scientifice theory once they have been a hypothesis and then stood the test of time for a long time and then if they survive even longer they are accepted as laws. For example we have newton's hypothesis about gravitation. Most people learn it as newton's laws about gravity but that just means the hypothesis survived a long time.
String "theory" is just not on the same level. At best it is string fantasy since when you look at it you are hard pressed to find real science in it.:)
My experience is that office does about as good of a job as opening old office documents as openoffice does. The other thing I have run into is documents that where somehow damaged. Word would crash trying to open the document but openoffice could open it fine and if you resaved the document then word could open it again.
How well it works depends on what version of word you are using, what version the document is, what version of openoffice you have etc. However the main issue is that the word document format is not a standard and so it is very hard to read and write it since even ms has proved they don't do it all that well. Hopefully the OASIS OpenDocument format won't have that issue long term.
Umm actually IE does not implement HTTP very well either. Look at stuff like content-disposition and redirects to non html resources. You can check the ms knowledge base if you want but IE is probably the worst implementation of http of any browser I have had to work with and that includes the lame one that is built into emacs.
IE has problems with more then just the html standards. I know I have run into many problems with IE and HTTP issues which are a pain to solve. Most of the toolkits you use to build web stuff hides those details from you.
I disagree with this. For example the kde ioslaves and gnome vfs layer. I am mostly familiar with the kde one so I will comment on that. I deal a lot with remote resources like webdav, sftp, etc. With kde I can read and write to almost any protocol I can think of. So in any file dialog box I can just open something up with sftp and save it via webdavs somewhere else. This also works in anything that expects a url. So I can right click on an image to grab its url and just stick that in a file upload box in an web page and hit upload and kde will go ahead and grab the item at that url for me and then upload it.
I have heard many times that this is a stupid feature, that it does not save time etc but I have been using it now for at least 3 years and there is no way I would give it up. Not having to deal with some special app for lots of different protocols saves me several hours per week. From my view is it windows and mac that are at least 4 years behind the times with nothing I can see that will change that.
I also used os/2 2.0 through 4.0 and can comment on that also. There are many features of os/2 4.0 that you are right linux is far behind, however mac and windows are also very far behind what os/2 offered. Being able to right click on a file and convert it and on whole groups is a feature I have not seen anywhere else. I can't right click on a wav file in windows or mac and convert it other formats like mp3, ogg etc. I have also not seen any equivalent to the os/2 workspaces either. The workplace shell and system object model are still amazing systems, sure they need a bit of polish but it is better then windows, mac and kde desktops. I would love to have the os/2 wps with the kde ioslaves.
Plone is slow for many reasons but zope itself is very fast and zope does something that NONE of those other frameworks does. It offers security at a granularity level that those other systems can not touch. When used with the buildin object database I have attribute and method level access controls and everything is security checked. I have not seen any other system that comes close to that and no relational database can do that. Even oracle does not have cell level access controls which would be the closest equivalent you could have in a relational database.
When I need an app setup and I need it to work securely especialy if customers will be working with it I have not seen anything better then zope so far.
The reason most zope apps are slow is mostly because people are not very good at writing them. I just make sure mine run fast enough, beyond that there is no point in investing more effort.
I was behind the SUV at the time and it did not use any kind of signal at all. It just started to change lanes. I could not see the drivers head to see if they even looked first but I do know that on signals where use.
That is a major thing that pisses me off. People that don't use turn signals should just have their licenses taken. It would be even nicer if we had good computers on board and the system would not allow a lane change unless the turn signal had been turned on except in an emergency but we all know that wouldn't work for thousands of technical reasons so no point going further on that. You can't fix human problems with technical solutions but sometimes you have to admit it would be nice if you could.
Those hummers should not even be street legal. Look at where the bumper level will hit a normal car. I would rather get hit by a semi then a hummer. The semi is more likely to push you since the bumper is designed to hit as low as possible while the hummer is going to just run over you.
I also don't know why but some of the most dangerous driving I have seen was done in the largest suvs. Things like the hummer and those suburban things. I watched someone yesterday on the freeway change lanes right into one a smaller car was already occupying. The person swerved very quickly and avoided the accident but there is no reason it should have happened. The car would not have been in their blind spot it just seemed like they did not see it. My guess is that people in those larger vehicles are only looking at vehicles that they see as a threat, ie the same size or larger and so they are a far more serious threat to other vehicles on the road.
I know there are some legitimate reasons to have them. The mountain rescue service around here has hummers that they use for rescues but they should not be used for regular driving around.
Some conditions are easier to deal with in ways other then medicine though. I have asthma and it was my doctor that taught me medication and breathing exercises. It works far better then any medication does except when you are having an attack.
The problem with using medicine all the time instead of breathing exercises is that your body adapts to it and it takes more to achieve the same effect.
I am not saying that medicine is bad but that medicine combined with other methods can achieve a much better result at lower cost and more safely.
I have been doing that for about 5 years and I don't see the issue with not knowing what time it is. Why is it important to know that? So long as you are getting all of your work done does it really matter what the time of day is?
I have had checkups even and the doctors have said there is nothing wrong with me in any way. Even my skin has a healthy color despite getting almost no sunlight at all. I just don't buy that arguement that we need sunlight.
What IE rendering standard are you talking about? Are you talking about IE6 on w2k? IE6 on windows XP with SP1 with SP2? I have looked over microsofts website and msdn areas and have never found an IE rendering standard. From my experience IE6 does not render the same on all platforms and stuff designed for the IE5.5 and IE5.0 rendering does not always work correctly with IE6.
There IS NO IE STANDARD. THERE NEVER HAS BEEN AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE!
You are designing for the quirks in the particular browsers you are testing and that breaks from version to version. Even ms products that export to html don't work in all IE6 properly. Different patches do change the behavior of the rendering engine.
Hmm the approach I have seen is a little different. I have not seen debian not have the correct/etc/apt.sources.list before. All I tend to do is setup an icon on the desktop that is kdesu synaptic. When you click on it you get prompted for your password and you can update, install and remove software with simple clicks and easily search for anything you need. I have set that up for a number of people that are not particularly skilled with computers and they have not had any problems with it. Why someone would use aptitude instead of synaptic I just don't get unless you want to work from a console which is not what your grandmother needs.
kpackage has also improved recently and does a very good job also. You can just click on it, browse stuff etc but when you go to do something that requires admin privelages it will ask for it. Either way there are two simple ways to install just about anything in a uniform way. Which is easier then tracking down a website and getting it from there. The biggest difference is in keeping the system running. So far I have not seen any systems for windows that make it easy to keep your software up to date. Each program does it updates its own way and many of them require you to manually grab the updates and so the updates just don't happen. I could teach my grandmother to just click the update button and let the system update everything at once on its own.
Here is what I don't get. I recently got a soundblaster audigy 2 zs platinum pro. I plugged it into the box and turned it on and under linux sound immediately worked. There was no configuration of any kind and even all 7.1 channels worked. This is on a debian box and before that I had a soundblaster live. Ever since the emu10k1 driver went into the kernel many years ago I have not had problems with any of those cards just working. With the driver built in statically it just loads without any issues and if it is a module as long as hotplug is installed that just works and those have been standard for a long time. I have not tried it on gentoo I admit but I have tried redhat, suse, mandrake and debian and had no issues at all with those.
The story under windows was pretty different. Sure it all worked but installing all the driver software for it and doing all the updates with all the reboots took a few hours.
I have consistently had better luck with hardware just working under linux then I have under windows. With windows I can get it to work but only after some fiddling.
I use windows just for video games since then when it screws up I don't lose much and can fix it whenever I have time. I use debian linux for all of my work and I have had the same install now for about 6 years and not one piece of hardware including the case is the same during that time. The time I had to spend fiddling with linux to get it to do what I want is insignificant compared to the time to get windows to do what I want which just involved games.
Plug and Play pretty much just works now because ISA is dead. Windows XP does not do play and play any better with ISA then windows 95, linux etc does mostly because ISA sucks pretty badly.
Windows 95 could do a good job of plug and play in an all PCI system also. However other things have gotten better since then also on the hardware side to make things easier. We have those nice APIC controllers on almost all boards that give something like 255 irqs. Even more importantly just about any device will share an irq without any issue. Remember the big deal with was with ISA cards about sharing and all the problems that don't exist with PCI?
We are also using usb now instead of parallel ports and serial ports pretty much and that makes life easier also.
I am not saying that windows xp has not improved over windows 95 just saying that plug and play has gotten vastly easier since then.
I have used them since 2.6.1 or so. When is it going to start costing me more over time? I pick hardware carefully to not have issues and I have done that since I have been using computers. I pick software even more carefully and nothing the business relies on can be proprietary.
My problem with "advanced features" is most of the time they are not advanced or mysterious in any way. They are just not covered in how to learn xxxx programming language in 24 hours or some equiv. I have seen a lot of features of languages that are portable, faster, more reliable and a hell of a lot clearer to use an understand but are considered advanced features for some strange reason.
I admit there are some features that are also called advanced features which are horrible black areas of the language that are not portable, have some of the strangest and hard to debug issues but I don't just like throwing stuff into a general advanced category.
Programming can't be done by stupid people at least not well so if you want stuff that works you need to have people that are willing to read stuff like the language spec, caveats in the compilers you are going to be using, other information on the language (patterns and stuff like that). Recently I have mostly been doing python stuff and it still sickens me when I see people write 1000 lines of something and complain how slow it is and that python sucks and I show them how to do it in 1-5 lines and have it run easily a thousand times faster and have it be more clear, use less memory, far easier to understand etc. However I saw the same thing with c++ so it is not python specific in any way.
Well I have used every macos version from 7 to osx, windows from 3 to xp, os/2, gnome, kde etc and my view is very different. I find that macosx and windows interfaces are almost unusable for me to get work done. I do db development for web apps and I spend a lot of time working with remote resources. In kde that is transparent. I can open/save with just about any protocol at any time. So I can just sftp to a remote server and just edit the file there and then hit save. It just works transparently and quickly. No latency from the network connection for editing so it works over slow or high latency links without any slowdowns that you see. I save several hours every week just from having url transparency and until you have REALLY used url transparency you just can't understand what it saves. I use sftp, webvdav, webdavs, ftp, http etc to work with files all the time. KDE even has those things so integrated in a file upload control for a web page you can put in ANY url that kde can understand and when you submit the page it will download the file from wherever that resource is and send it. Stuff like that I have not seen on anything else but I have heard that plan9 can do network transparency like that.
kde and gnome are even doing work to try and get their vfs layers merged and my hope is that eventually it gets moved to some kind of general filesystem layer so that linux will have everything as a url instead of just everything as a file.
Think of grep something sftp://server/path/to/file | webdavs://server:/path/to/result and have it just work. No need to lots of special tools to download and upload stuff.
Macs and windows look good but linux and kde allows me to get my work done in a lot less time and with fewer headaches. Some people seem upset with how customizable kde is because it makes it harder for people. From what I can see the defaults are set well but that customizability is stuff that I require. I use a 4 monitor setup that is tuned for exactly how I do my work and I hope to get more monitors at some point.
Hmm it looks like someone abandoned that software. However drivers do break under windows also. I have an older video card and have run into printers, scanners etc that are only a year or two older then windows xp that won't work with it because the drivers where never made.
I am using 2.6.11 right now I have a a via kt880 chipset and I have the SATA and PATA on the same chip and my SATA hard drive and both cdroms that are PATA are working without issue.
The motherboard is SY-KT880 Dragon 2 v2.0
Yes I know that board has two SATA controller chips but I am using the VIA one for both the SATA and PATA functions.
On the plus side this has also been a great board so far. Everything seems to work fine under linux with free drivers but I have not tested the other SATA controller yet.
With kde you can script just about everything from the commandline using dcop. There is a program you can use called dcop from the commandline so you can use pipes etc but there are also language bindings for c,c++,java,python, perl, ruby and others. Now if kde and gnome could just get a shared object system that would solve the issue also. Work is progressing on that also.
If you handn't noticed that all of those things that break are binary only drivers. vmware, ati and nvidia all depend on a binary kernel module. I have been using 2.6.x for a long time on desktops, servers and laptops and had no issues however the only proprietary apps that are even installed are acrobat and opera and those are only for testing stuff.
For servers none of those should be an issue at all.
Why can't a company just set up a package repository with the packages in it? You can use something like synaptic to trivially add a new package source and then install programs from it. So the person could just go to the webiste and add that repository. More importantly whenever the company makes an update to that package for security etc reasons the users will auto get it on their next update.
Some companies do provide a repository you can pull from and it sure makes my life easier to deal with many computers. I know that if I have to use closed source that it weighs pretty heavily in a vendors favor if they have a repository for my dist.
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Well I have used konqueror as my main browser for about 3 years now and I have not run into almost any major rendering flaws when viewing webpages in about a year or two. I actually write some fairly complex web based apps and I don't run into problems with that either. I rarely run into any problems rendering pages with gecko,khtml or opera based browers except ones that use IE only extensions.
However I probably don't go to the same places on the net as you do and I don't see these "massive" problems that you run into. The problems I have found I report but they where fairly advanced css stuff that gecko and opera have also had wrong.
I think you mean that C# is STATICALLY typed which means the typing is done at compile time. C#, Ruby and Python are all strongly typed but Ruby and Python do the typing at runtime. So C# is Static Strong Typing and Ruby/Python are Runtime Strong Typing.
My experience so far even with stuff that has tens of thousands of very well refactored code is that static typing has caused me more problems then it has solved.
Mostly because type systems are not very good and most bugs I run into have nothing to do with object type.
How right can a war be if you can't convince your citizens to fight in it? If you have to resort to forcing them to fight then you have already failed. This country is supposed to be a republic and one way or another it is supposed to be our will that governs. The politicians serve us not the other way around and if they can't convince us that some war is a good idea then they have no basis for us fighting in it.
My view is that if a draft is needed then a war is automatically unjust. If you can't support an action from showing the evidence to the public and asking for people to enlist then you are already far in the wrong.
String "Theory" is not a theory. The "scientists" that keep promoting it as that should be thrown out and through of as complete nuts. It is not even a hypothesis. It makes no predictions about the universe that can be tested. Other things become a scientifice theory once they have been a hypothesis and then stood the test of time for a long time and then if they survive even longer they are accepted as laws. For example we have newton's hypothesis about gravitation. Most people learn it as newton's laws about gravity but that just means the hypothesis survived a long time.
:)
String "theory" is just not on the same level. At best it is string fantasy since when you look at it you are hard pressed to find real science in it.
My experience is that office does about as good of a job as opening old office documents as openoffice does. The other thing I have run into is documents that where somehow damaged. Word would crash trying to open the document but openoffice could open it fine and if you resaved the document then word could open it again.
How well it works depends on what version of word you are using, what version the document is, what version of openoffice you have etc. However the main issue is that the word document format is not a standard and so it is very hard to read and write it since even ms has proved they don't do it all that well. Hopefully the OASIS OpenDocument format won't have that issue long term.
Umm actually IE does not implement HTTP very well either. Look at stuff like content-disposition and redirects to non html resources. You can check the ms knowledge base if you want but IE is probably the worst implementation of http of any browser I have had to work with and that includes the lame one that is built into emacs.
IE has problems with more then just the html standards. I know I have run into many problems with IE and HTTP issues which are a pain to solve. Most of the toolkits you use to build web stuff hides those details from you.
I disagree with this. For example the kde ioslaves and gnome vfs layer. I am mostly familiar with the kde one so I will comment on that. I deal a lot with remote resources like webdav, sftp, etc. With kde I can read and write to almost any protocol I can think of. So in any file dialog box I can just open something up with sftp and save it via webdavs somewhere else. This also works in anything that expects a url. So I can right click on an image to grab its url and just stick that in a file upload box in an web page and hit upload and kde will go ahead and grab the item at that url for me and then upload it.
I have heard many times that this is a stupid feature, that it does not save time etc but I have been using it now for at least 3 years and there is no way I would give it up. Not having to deal with some special app for lots of different protocols saves me several hours per week. From my view is it windows and mac that are at least 4 years behind the times with nothing I can see that will change that.
I also used os/2 2.0 through 4.0 and can comment on that also. There are many features of os/2 4.0 that you are right linux is far behind, however mac and windows are also very far behind what os/2 offered. Being able to right click on a file and convert it and on whole groups is a feature I have not seen anywhere else. I can't right click on a wav file in windows or mac and convert it other formats like mp3, ogg etc. I have also not seen any equivalent to the os/2 workspaces either. The workplace shell and system object model are still amazing systems, sure they need a bit of polish but it is better then windows, mac and kde desktops. I would love to have the os/2 wps with the kde ioslaves.
Plone is slow for many reasons but zope itself is very fast and zope does something that NONE of those other frameworks does. It offers security at a granularity level that those other systems can not touch. When used with the buildin object database I have attribute and method level access controls and everything is security checked. I have not seen any other system that comes close to that and no relational database can do that. Even oracle does not have cell level access controls which would be the closest equivalent you could have in a relational database.
When I need an app setup and I need it to work securely especialy if customers will be working with it I have not seen anything better then zope so far.
The reason most zope apps are slow is mostly because people are not very good at writing them. I just make sure mine run fast enough, beyond that there is no point in investing more effort.
I was behind the SUV at the time and it did not use any kind of signal at all. It just started to change lanes. I could not see the drivers head to see if they even looked first but I do know that on signals where use.
That is a major thing that pisses me off. People that don't use turn signals should just have their licenses taken. It would be even nicer if we had good computers on board and the system would not allow a lane change unless the turn signal had been turned on except in an emergency but we all know that wouldn't work for thousands of technical reasons so no point going further on that. You can't fix human problems with technical solutions but sometimes you have to admit it would be nice if you could.
Those hummers should not even be street legal. Look at where the bumper level will hit a normal car. I would rather get hit by a semi then a hummer. The semi is more likely to push you since the bumper is designed to hit as low as possible while the hummer is going to just run over you.
I also don't know why but some of the most dangerous driving I have seen was done in the largest suvs. Things like the hummer and those suburban things. I watched someone yesterday on the freeway change lanes right into one a smaller car was already occupying. The person swerved very quickly and avoided the accident but there is no reason it should have happened. The car would not have been in their blind spot it just seemed like they did not see it. My guess is that people in those larger vehicles are only looking at vehicles that they see as a threat, ie the same size or larger and so they are a far more serious threat to other vehicles on the road.
I know there are some legitimate reasons to have them. The mountain rescue service around here has hummers that they use for rescues but they should not be used for regular driving around.
Some conditions are easier to deal with in ways other then medicine though. I have asthma and it was my doctor that taught me medication and breathing exercises. It works far better then any medication does except when you are having an attack.
The problem with using medicine all the time instead of breathing exercises is that your body adapts to it and it takes more to achieve the same effect.
I am not saying that medicine is bad but that medicine combined with other methods can achieve a much better result at lower cost and more safely.
I have been doing that for about 5 years and I don't see the issue with not knowing what time it is. Why is it important to know that? So long as you are getting all of your work done does it really matter what the time of day is?
I have had checkups even and the doctors have said there is nothing wrong with me in any way. Even my skin has a healthy color despite getting almost no sunlight at all. I just don't buy that arguement that we need sunlight.
What IE rendering standard are you talking about? Are you talking about IE6 on w2k? IE6 on windows XP with SP1 with SP2? I have looked over microsofts website and msdn areas and have never found an IE rendering standard. From my experience IE6 does not render the same on all platforms and stuff designed for the IE5.5 and IE5.0 rendering does not always work correctly with IE6.
There IS NO IE STANDARD. THERE NEVER HAS BEEN AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE!
You are designing for the quirks in the particular browsers you are testing and that breaks from version to version. Even ms products that export to html don't work in all IE6 properly. Different patches do change the behavior of the rendering engine.
Hmm the approach I have seen is a little different. I have not seen debian not have the correct /etc/apt.sources.list before. All I tend to do is setup an icon on the desktop that is kdesu synaptic. When you click on it you get prompted for your password and you can update, install and remove software with simple clicks and easily search for anything you need. I have set that up for a number of people that are not particularly skilled with computers and they have not had any problems with it. Why someone would use aptitude instead of synaptic I just don't get unless you want to work from a console which is not what your grandmother needs.
kpackage has also improved recently and does a very good job also. You can just click on it, browse stuff etc but when you go to do something that requires admin privelages it will ask for it. Either way there are two simple ways to install just about anything in a uniform way. Which is easier then tracking down a website and getting it from there. The biggest difference is in keeping the system running. So far I have not seen any systems for windows that make it easy to keep your software up to date. Each program does it updates its own way and many of them require you to manually grab the updates and so the updates just don't happen. I could teach my grandmother to just click the update button and let the system update everything at once on its own.
Here is what I don't get. I recently got a soundblaster audigy 2 zs platinum pro. I plugged it into the box and turned it on and under linux sound immediately worked. There was no configuration of any kind and even all 7.1 channels worked. This is on a debian box and before that I had a soundblaster live. Ever since the emu10k1 driver went into the kernel many years ago I have not had problems with any of those cards just working. With the driver built in statically it just loads without any issues and if it is a module as long as hotplug is installed that just works and those have been standard for a long time. I have not tried it on gentoo I admit but I have tried redhat, suse, mandrake and debian and had no issues at all with those.
The story under windows was pretty different. Sure it all worked but installing all the driver software for it and doing all the updates with all the reboots took a few hours.
I have consistently had better luck with hardware just working under linux then I have under windows. With windows I can get it to work but only after some fiddling.
I use windows just for video games since then when it screws up I don't lose much and can fix it whenever I have time. I use debian linux for all of my work and I have had the same install now for about 6 years and not one piece of hardware including the case is the same during that time. The time I had to spend fiddling with linux to get it to do what I want is insignificant compared to the time to get windows to do what I want which just involved games.
Plug and Play pretty much just works now because ISA is dead. Windows XP does not do play and play any better with ISA then windows 95, linux etc does mostly because ISA sucks pretty badly.
Windows 95 could do a good job of plug and play in an all PCI system also. However other things have gotten better since then also on the hardware side to make things easier. We have those nice APIC controllers on almost all boards that give something like 255 irqs. Even more importantly just about any device will share an irq without any issue. Remember the big deal with was with ISA cards about sharing and all the problems that don't exist with PCI?
We are also using usb now instead of parallel ports and serial ports pretty much and that makes life easier also.
I am not saying that windows xp has not improved over windows 95 just saying that plug and play has gotten vastly easier since then.
I have used them since 2.6.1 or so. When is it going to start costing me more over time? I pick hardware carefully to not have issues and I have done that since I have been using computers. I pick software even more carefully and nothing the business relies on can be proprietary.
My problem with "advanced features" is most of the time they are not advanced or mysterious in any way. They are just not covered in how to learn xxxx programming language in 24 hours or some equiv. I have seen a lot of features of languages that are portable, faster, more reliable and a hell of a lot clearer to use an understand but are considered advanced features for some strange reason.
I admit there are some features that are also called advanced features which are horrible black areas of the language that are not portable, have some of the strangest and hard to debug issues but I don't just like throwing stuff into a general advanced category.
Programming can't be done by stupid people at least not well so if you want stuff that works you need to have people that are willing to read stuff like the language spec, caveats in the compilers you are going to be using, other information on the language (patterns and stuff like that). Recently I have mostly been doing python stuff and it still sickens me when I see people write 1000 lines of something and complain how slow it is and that python sucks and I show them how to do it in 1-5 lines and have it run easily a thousand times faster and have it be more clear, use less memory, far easier to understand etc. However I saw the same thing with c++ so it is not python specific in any way.
Well I have used every macos version from 7 to osx, windows from 3 to xp, os/2, gnome, kde etc and my view is very different. I find that macosx and windows interfaces are almost unusable for me to get work done. I do db development for web apps and I spend a lot of time working with remote resources. In kde that is transparent. I can open/save with just about any protocol at any time. So I can just sftp to a remote server and just edit the file there and then hit save. It just works transparently and quickly. No latency from the network connection for editing so it works over slow or high latency links without any slowdowns that you see. I save several hours every week just from having url transparency and until you have REALLY used url transparency you just can't understand what it saves. I use sftp, webvdav, webdavs, ftp, http etc to work with files all the time. KDE even has those things so integrated in a file upload control for a web page you can put in ANY url that kde can understand and when you submit the page it will download the file from wherever that resource is and send it. Stuff like that I have not seen on anything else but I have heard that plan9 can do network transparency like that.
kde and gnome are even doing work to try and get their vfs layers merged and my hope is that eventually it gets moved to some kind of general filesystem layer so that linux will have everything as a url instead of just everything as a file.
Think of grep something sftp://server/path/to/file | webdavs://server:/path/to/result and have it just work. No need to lots of special tools to download and upload stuff.
Macs and windows look good but linux and kde allows me to get my work done in a lot less time and with fewer headaches. Some people seem upset with how customizable kde is because it makes it harder for people. From what I can see the defaults are set well but that customizability is stuff that I require. I use a 4 monitor setup that is tuned for exactly how I do my work and I hope to get more monitors at some point.
Hmm it looks like someone abandoned that software. However drivers do break under windows also. I have an older video card and have run into printers, scanners etc that are only a year or two older then windows xp that won't work with it because the drivers where never made.
I am using 2.6.11 right now I have a a via kt880 chipset and I have the SATA and PATA on the same chip and my SATA hard drive and both cdroms that are PATA are working without issue.
The motherboard is SY-KT880 Dragon 2 v2.0
Yes I know that board has two SATA controller chips but I am using the VIA one for both the SATA and PATA functions.
On the plus side this has also been a great board so far. Everything seems to work fine under linux with free drivers but I have not tested the other SATA controller yet.
With kde you can script just about everything from the commandline using dcop. There is a program you can use called dcop from the commandline so you can use pipes etc but there are also language bindings for c,c++,java,python, perl, ruby and others. Now if kde and gnome could just get a shared object system that would solve the issue also. Work is progressing on that also.
If you handn't noticed that all of those things that break are binary only drivers. vmware, ati and nvidia all depend on a binary kernel module. I have been using 2.6.x for a long time on desktops, servers and laptops and had no issues however the only proprietary apps that are even installed are acrobat and opera and those are only for testing stuff.
For servers none of those should be an issue at all.
Why can't a company just set up a package repository with the packages in it? You can use something like synaptic to trivially add a new package source and then install programs from it. So the person could just go to the webiste and add that repository. More importantly whenever the company makes an update to that package for security etc reasons the users will auto get it on their next update.
Some companies do provide a repository you can pull from and it sure makes my life easier to deal with many computers. I know that if I have to use closed source that it weighs pretty heavily in a vendors favor if they have a repository for my dist.