A free market economy doesn't create joblessness. What it creates is an unequal distribution of wealth, resulting in poverty. Joblessness is due to measures put in place to alleviate this problem, which tend to directly or indirectly raise the price of unskilled or currently not profitable labour above its market value, thereby creating a surplus.
Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing, as there is nothing in the free market system that is preventing unprofitable labourers to die from starvation. Quite the opposite, this is usually considered a feature of the system when it happens to companies instead of individuals!
I doubt the orignal poster was not aware of this possibility.
The catch is, there are no good-looking Mozilla themes in existance. Which is not surprising, since creating them is not very satisfying and somewhat difficult. Especially one that blends in seamlessly with (as opposed to looks superficially the same as) the rest of the user interface, which is almost impossible to achieve with XUL.
It's really a question of what you regard as more important, conformance to web standards or to platform user interface standards. The Mozilla team chose to go with the first option, for good reasons (except for the "Mozilla is really an application platform" argument, which is unrealistic).
Many people would have preferred a different choice, for equally good reasons. Since Mozilla's design makes it very difficult to implement a different choice (witness the numerous quirks and inefficiencies in galeon) we'll just have to see how the public takes it. Maybe the developers were right. Personally, I don't believe it.
Hot swapping floppy disks does not require any special care. IDE devices are a bit more complicated, and somewhat limited in their capabilities. You have to issue an appropriate system call. Newer versions of hdparm might help here, but if you're interested in a GUI tool, I've written one that should work if your CD/DVD is the only device attached to the secondary IDE interface (ide1).
But in general you're right, hot swapping and power management is very poorly supported in the linux kernel. (Actually, the core support is there but many drivers, notably the IDE stuff, don't use it.) Windows ME is actually not much better, hot swapping is still a bit of a kludge. Windows 2000 does it quite well. If you can get anything useful done with Windows, you're probably better off using it on a portable. I couldn't.
I used to think hibernate was a handy feature when I bought my laptop, but in practice I found it actually takes considerably longer than booting up.
Maybe the software implementation in Windows is faster in some cases because it only saves memory that is allocated? But then again, why would you need to hibernate a computer if there is hardly anything running on it?
Re:If you want better cross platform support..
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 1
This is a very good point that can't be stressed too much. Not only is it good practice in any case to program in a modular way and separate the user interface from the internal workings.
Despite what some people claim, the UI is also very much not the right place for platform independence. Think about it, the UI is to a large degree what defines the platform, certainly from the user's point of view. If you care about the user interface you have to worry about useability and consistency with existing applications. The placement and choice of widgets, design of icons, shortcuts, MDI modes &c. will all have to depend on the platform. This cannot really be achieved with cross-platform toolkits. If you don't care about the UI, please stick to a command line interface, you'll likely end up with something less user hostile...
In any case, designing multiple user interfaces should be easier than it sounds. You should use interface builders wherever possible, which make the choice of underlying languages (C, C++, whatever) to a large degree irrelevant. Generally, if you spend more time programming than desinging your UI you're probably taking the wrong approach.
Come on, this is a matter of taste. Personally I find a well configured Motif visually much more pleasing than almost any GTK+ theme. (Ignoring the horrible 2.0 Notebook widget for a moment---nobody uses that anyway).
However, I agree it's very easy to completely mess up Motif interfaces if the programmer starts to enforce their weird colour prefences and to dump widgets all over the place without regard for user interface design considerations. GTK+ prevents that to some extent.
Licensing, possibly. Some people like the fact that GTK+ is available under the GPL. I'm currently trying to find some time looking into GTK+ partly because of that reason. (Not that I'm a zealot in any way, but I do see some advantages)
Also, while I completely agree that GTK+s design is pretty questionable and annoying for programmers who expect something else, the library itself is written fairly well and copies you get with recent Linux distributions tend to be more stable than the default Motif libraries found on many commercial Unixes.
Agreed, you can't. But while I concur that portability is a worthwhile goal, I don't think your GUI toolkit is the right place for it.
The GUI is, or should be, part of the platform. Think about it, the real justification for spending system and programming resources on a sophisticated toolkit is usability, and for most people this strongly implies consistency.
The other problem is that relying on a cross platform toolkit removes the incentive to cleanly separate the user interface from the backend, leading to less maintainable and portable code in the end (think Mozilla).
If you really think the additional effort isn't worth it, for example if you have to keep hundreds of dialog boxes in synchronisation, you could still use an effort such as wxWindows. For most smaller applications, however, the effort in porting just the user interface (assuming that is possible) is probably less than the effort in cross-platform testing, which had to be done anyway.
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A free market economy doesn't create joblessness. What it creates is an unequal distribution of wealth, resulting in poverty. Joblessness is due to measures put in place to alleviate this problem, which tend to directly or indirectly raise the price of unskilled or currently not profitable labour above its market value, thereby creating a surplus.
Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing, as there is nothing in the free market system that is preventing unprofitable labourers to die from starvation. Quite the opposite, this is usually considered a feature of the system when it happens to companies instead of individuals!
I doubt the orignal poster was not aware of this possibility.
The catch is, there are no good-looking Mozilla themes in existance. Which is not surprising, since creating them is not very satisfying and somewhat difficult. Especially one that blends in seamlessly with (as opposed to looks superficially the same as) the rest of the user interface, which is almost impossible to achieve with XUL.
It's really a question of what you regard as more important, conformance to web standards or to platform user interface standards. The Mozilla team chose to go with the first option, for good reasons (except for the "Mozilla is really an application platform" argument, which is unrealistic).
Many people would have preferred a different choice, for equally good reasons. Since Mozilla's design makes it very difficult to implement a different choice (witness the numerous quirks and inefficiencies in galeon) we'll just have to see how the public takes it. Maybe the developers were right. Personally, I don't believe it.
Hot swapping floppy disks does not require any special care. IDE devices are a bit more complicated, and somewhat limited in their capabilities. You have to issue an appropriate system call. Newer versions of hdparm might help here, but if you're interested in a GUI tool, I've written one that should work if your CD/DVD is the only device attached to the secondary IDE interface (ide1).
But in general you're right, hot swapping and power management is very poorly supported in the linux kernel. (Actually, the core support is there but many drivers, notably the IDE stuff, don't use it.) Windows ME is actually not much better, hot swapping is still a bit of a kludge. Windows 2000 does it quite well. If you can get anything useful done with Windows, you're probably better off using it on a portable. I couldn't.
I used to think hibernate was a handy feature when I bought my laptop, but in practice I found it actually takes considerably longer than booting up.
Maybe the software implementation in Windows is faster in some cases because it only saves memory that is allocated? But then again, why would you need to hibernate a computer if there is hardly anything running on it?
This is a very good point that can't be stressed too much. Not only is it good practice in any case to program in a modular way and separate the user interface from the internal workings.
Despite what some people claim, the UI is also very much not the right place for platform independence. Think about it, the UI is to a large degree what defines the platform, certainly from the user's point of view. If you care about the user interface you have to worry about useability and consistency with existing applications. The placement and choice of widgets, design of icons, shortcuts, MDI modes &c. will all have to depend on the platform. This cannot really be achieved with cross-platform toolkits. If you don't care about the UI, please stick to a command line interface, you'll likely end up with something less user hostile...
In any case, designing multiple user interfaces should be easier than it sounds. You should use interface builders wherever possible, which make the choice of underlying languages (C, C++, whatever) to a large degree irrelevant. Generally, if you spend more time programming than desinging your UI you're probably taking the wrong approach.
Plutocracy.
Come on, this is a matter of taste. Personally I find a well configured Motif visually much more pleasing than almost any GTK+ theme. (Ignoring the horrible 2.0 Notebook widget for a moment---nobody uses that anyway).
However, I agree it's very easy to completely mess up Motif interfaces if the programmer starts to enforce their weird colour prefences and to dump widgets all over the place without regard for user interface design considerations. GTK+ prevents that to some extent.
Licensing, possibly. Some people like the fact that GTK+ is available under the GPL. I'm currently trying to find some time looking into GTK+ partly because of that reason. (Not that I'm a zealot in any way, but I do see some advantages)
Also, while I completely agree that GTK+s design is pretty questionable and annoying for programmers who expect something else, the library itself is written fairly well and copies you get with recent Linux distributions tend to be more stable than the default Motif libraries found on many commercial Unixes.
Agreed, you can't. But while I concur that portability is a worthwhile goal, I don't think your GUI toolkit is the right place for it.
The GUI is, or should be, part of the platform. Think about it, the real justification for spending system and programming resources on a sophisticated toolkit is usability, and for most people this strongly implies consistency.
The other problem is that relying on a cross platform toolkit removes the incentive to cleanly separate the user interface from the backend, leading to less maintainable and portable code in the end (think Mozilla).
If you really think the additional effort isn't worth it, for example if you have to keep hundreds of dialog boxes in synchronisation, you could still use an effort such as wxWindows. For most smaller applications, however, the effort in porting just the user interface (assuming that is possible) is probably less than the effort in cross-platform testing, which had to be done anyway.
Or simply:
Do_not_click_on_this_file.exe
That would actually increase the probability that the thing spreads...
This is amazingly pointless. It certainly supports the idea that people do things for no other reason than that it can be done...