Over 75% of all IT projects fail totally, is late or over budget. Most of them are not Linux projects.
So, Microsoft is in no position to gloat over any Linux setbacks in Munich.
This is a problem that probably has more to do with leadership, management methods than with any specific technology like Linux or Windows.
Even if the up front cost for switching to Linux turns out to be higher than expected, it will probably be cheaper in the long run. Using Linux they will be in much better control of their future upgrade costs.
Not to mention that, money spent on Linux stays in the local economy instead of feeding a foreign company.
I certainly agree that fragmentation is a bad thing when it reduces choise. Even Microsoft is starting to use the lack of integration against free desktops in their get the facts campaign. It would be nice if we could prove them wrong.
Even if Gnome/Gtk and KDE/Qt are very different toolkits, that should not prevent users from having a good user experience even if toolkits are mixed. The tookit choise should be a developer only issue.This is possible in windows and on MacOS so why not on free desktops.
E.g. why must each browser have their own bookmark file format and bookmark file lokation? Both Gnome and KDE use a folder as Trash, why not use the same location for that folder by default?
Both Gnome and KDE have a postit applet for small desktop notes, why not use the same file format and file location.
Why not make it possible to do drag&drop between nautilus and konqueror. After all there is a XDND standard that both KDE and Gnome tries to follow in other applications. And if we drag a file from konqueror to the Trash in Nautilus we should get the expected behavior.
Browsers and some other applications have icons that have similar functions in both Gnome and KDE. E.g. Back and Forward icons for browsers. Why not let the icons have the same name in both Gnome and KDE.
Perhaps all such config options and data that is common to both Gnome and KDE could be held in a separate folder named e.g..freedesktop.org.
1) Write an article on general software problems 2) Use a headline that refers to open source. 3) Hope to get paid by Microsoft.
The auther is right, there is a security problem. But that apply to closed source as well. How do we know that the new peace of software isn't full of trojans. In opensource we can at least check it for ourselves, in closed source we can't. And what's more important the distributer knows that we can't.
Then we have the problems with insiders modifying the openly available source, before patches are applied to your systems. A sysadmin with bad intents can always do damage to your systems. It doesn't matter if the code is closed or open.
The solution is to make sure that there is no superuser in your system that have access to everything.
Mutually exclusive parts of sensitive software should handled by different people. E.g. if you are responsible for the login system in a banking system you should not be responsible, or have access to the code that handles money more than on a need to know basis.
Good tools for doing such things would be to implement MAC (Mandatory Access Control). This would give you very high protection but is also important to realize that security costs money, just as unsecurity. E.g. MAC is a PITA to use so make sure that the things you protect is worth the extra trouble.
Lastly you will also have to realize that security is not only about software, locked doors and surveillance. It is very much about people and the spirit of your organization. The employeess must not only know that security is important but also why, or else your efforts to strengthen security may have opposite effects as you employees may start circumvent security procedures to make life easier.
Yes, it sounds low. But as the article states if Linux gets as much as 10% Microsoft will start feel the pain, and we can expect them doing something about it, and do so long before it reaches those figures. One such action could anticipated by the article would be to lower the prices.
I wouldn't be surprised if you will get a free (as in beer) copy of some Windows XP Light bundled with every computer magazine you buy, and that Microsoft instead focus on sales of various kinds of OS related services. After all that's what.Net are for. Such development would slow down Linux adaptation significantly as many people will install such a free windows just out of curiosity.
But even at 6% Linux will be a potentially interesting market. And more and more software companies will port their software to Linux. When that happens, the Linux growth will increase even further over the years to come.
It is also interesting to note that the article predicts that Linux will have 6% of the market while windows will have the remaining 94%. That is probably not true. I would expect Mac OS to remain at something like 3% if not better.
And remember even if MS decides to make their money from services just like Red Hat and other Linux companies do today, MS have to carry the whole cost of development of their OS while the cost of Linux development is shared among many diferent parties. This means that Linux venders can spend more money on developing their services than MS and hopefully that will show as a difference in quality, and ultimately in user preferences for Linux.
There have always bin rumors that closed source Microsoft applications have leaked to terrorists or the Russian mob.
Thinking about it, an OS used often to hold and guard highly sensitive information wordwide is almost certain to get its source stolen, if not by terrorists so by intellegence organizations round the world.
But it could have bin much worse. Imagine a not too distant future world where access to documents software etc is controlled by DRM technology. In such a world, there would be little incentive for sofware companies to spend R&D money on securing their systems apart from what DRM offers.
Imagine what damages we could get if cryptography keys to such systems fell into the wrong hands. Even if such keys would be handled by a lot fewer persons than the windows source code, there is no guarntee that they will not be persuaded to reveal their secret.
In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
If this is true, that seams incredybly stupid. From what I understand Novell have revoked the SCO revokation of the AIX license. So that would mean that SCO could win and IBM could still say sorry guys we have the rights to sell AIX, just not from you. Or am I missing something?
Reading the rest of your post, I think I see the problem: You and GNOME people seem to equate "Useable" with "Feature-starved". Just because GNOME's epiphany can't be configureed does NOT mean it's more useable! I don't know who first introduced this "No options is inherently superior" doctrine, but I don't like it, and it is just plain wrong.
I could not agree more. Feature starvation do NOT mean usability, just as little as many features do. The more features you add, the more you will have to care about usability issues. And KDE 3.2 doesn't make it.
Configured correctly KDE is quite easy to use. But that doesn't make KDE usable as you should not have to configure it to make it easy to use. It should be configured that way by default.
One example: KDE is configured to use single click mode by default. I have done usability studies on this, and so far I haven't found a single user new to KDE that is confortable with this. They tend to activate/open/view things by mistake. One could easily think that this is only because they are used to using windows or MacOS, but not so. Even users that only have had access to web based interfaces, where single click is the standard, have problems.
Why? In the web interface they base their doings on a cognitive model based on navigation. While in a desktop oriented system like KDE they act like if they are handling objects on that desktop. They pick up objects and do something with them. If you use single click users do not figure out how to pick the object up.
Still the new KDE 3.2 is better than previous versions, so they are moving in the right direction.
Re:Really? Infamous?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree, doing object orientation by ideom is really ugly. But there is something called gtkmm that puts a true objectoriented wrapper around the gtk libraries. That ought to improve the situation. Gtkmm uses pure C++ instead of some language extensions requiring preprocessing like QT. But even so, I feel more at home using QT, but that is perhaps just me.
Anyway, I wish that the KDE people could get their act together on usability. As they clearly have a technical edge over Gnome this is really sad they they doesn't do better in this area.
Look at the navigation toolbar of Konqueror and compare that to Epiphany or Mozilla. In KDE the toolbar looks crowded. Some icons are very similar to each other. E.g. they use looking glasslike symbols for both search and zoom functions. Why not use a pair of binoculars for the search function instead.
The icon for changing fonts is an image of two T:s close together that looks like an antenna. Of course the T stands for text. But in how many countries is text called something that starts with T? I would guess that a picture of an "A" would be better as it have a more distinctive form, and it is also used in many other desktop environments to denote font changing facilities. It would also make it less likely that the symbol with the two T:s close together refers to true type fonts only.
If the toolbars are crowded, the context menus are even worse. E.g. in the right menu button menu of the konquerer file manager you have both a "Move to trash" and a "Delete" item. Wouldn't it have bin better to just have a "Move to trash" item, and then configure the trash to perform the correct action this would have bin more in line with the desktop metaphor. On the your normal desktop you put things you don't want in the waste basket, and then you decide when to empty it.
Even if most things regarding usability is as bad as they used to be in KDE, there is at least one major improvement in KDE 3.2. The menu that pops up when you drop a file over a folder now gives you the alternatives "Move Here", "Copy Here" and "Link Here" and "Cancel" instead of "Copy Here", "Move Here"... This great since move is a much more common operation than copy for most people.
A positive side effect on changing the order in this menu is that the lack of icon for the "Move Here" item doesn't look so bad on the first item as it did when it was the second menu item. The menu still have a dominating red cancel button. That button is probably the first thing the user sees when he drops a file over a folder, and the menu pops up. To me its somewhat unclear why this menu needs a cancel button in the first place, all other menus seam to be able to do without it. And second why does it have to be that eye catching. After all in most of the cases "Cancel" is not what the user is most likely to do.
So, if you need a lot of functionality but doesn't care about usability KDE is for you. In a way this is in true Unix tradition, there is no limit to what you can do, if you just could find out how. In my opinion there is few if any desktop environment that can rival KDE in configurability and number of functions.
Even though the usability could have bin better KDE 3.2 contains a lot of improvements and it is well worth the trouble of upgrading if you run some previous version of KDE.
If we are going to pay postage, we must have some electronic way of doing that. It could be creditcard or something else. Whatever it is you will have to be able to do payments through your computer. That will probably include som account information et.
What an admirable target for viruses, trojans or spyware that would be. The relatively small problem of using e-mail filters to prevent your inbox from clogging up will be replaced with the bigger problem of keeping your money in the wallet.
A better way would probably be to only accept digitally signed mails, that way the sender could always be identified, and if spam was illegal in most countries we would be able to prevent spam with legal processes.
The problem is that there could be legitimate use of anonnymous mail. E.g. who would send an e-mail to the press telling that their company is doing an Enron to the press or even the police if they knew they could be identified.
But I think its easier to learn to live with this disadvantage, than to loose the money in your wallet. After all wistle blowers could still slip a paper note into an unmarked envelope and slip it under the doorstep of the reciever.
Re:Linux will be mainstream competition in a year.
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Linux Going Mainstream
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· Score: 1
One could always dream.
A more realistic prediction would be that Linux surpasses MacOS-X in that timeframe. This could be important as its much easier to convince a software vender to port a program to the second biggest desktop OS than to something that is believed to be rarely used. This is especially true to companies that produce both for MacOS and windows. After all if you can make the program for the most comman OS and the third ranking OS then why not produce it for the second ranked OS.
Even if there are good OpenSource programs for many tasks, they do not always share the same fileformats as popular closed source software. This is one of the major problems in rapid Linux adaptation. Even though you could find opensource tools to do the job of propriatory programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, AutoCAD,... they do not share the same file formats. This means you will have difficulties accessing your old files. This is the secret of OpenOffice success. My guess is that the interopeability between OpenOffice.org and MS-Office is responsible for far more Linux adaptaions than any even so impressive improvements in Gnome or KDE over the last 3 years.
So getting the software industry to port existing closed source software to Linux, or to create inteoperable open source alternatives, is crucial to the succes of the Linux desktop. This will take time. I would guess that we will have to wait at least 10 years for that to have happened to the extent that Linux and windows have equal marketshares.
But even so, a 5-10% marketshare is worth a lot of money and I expect that this could happen in just a coulple of years.
Not only superior technology
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The claims that it was superior search technology that made google a succes. I think this was only one factor. To me the graphical design was very important. The google pages are not full of ads, in the beginning there were no ads at all. And now they are tasteful and dont compete for my attention when I look at my search results. The clean design gave an impression of integrety and a belief that search results was unbiased by economical interests.I think it will be hard for Microsoft to match.
So if Microsoft was to beat google, how would they do it? They could use local tools on the OS that collects user information, e.g. scanning office documents and downloaded e-mail to get a user profile that could be fed into the search engine to get better quality of search results. However, such things could backfire seriously if users felt that their personal privacy was at stake.
Not becasuse I don't like KDE, I really do. But it's sad to see that they couldn't focus on what I assume they liked the best.
Now we probably end up with another KDE support fiasco a la Red Hat. It would be much better if people who liked and was good at KDE created pure KDE distros and people who prefered Gnome did Gnome distros.
It's usually better to download and complie KDE yourself on a Gnome oreinted distro ( I guess the same is true for Gnome on KDE oriented distros)
If Sun had done their job properly, this would never have happened. IBM considered (I think they even tried) using swing for Eclips but found that is was too porly optimized.
And even worse, swing was full of bugs. Up until j2se 1.4.x swing doesn't support european keyboards, and some characters commonly used in many programming languages can't be typed using various European locales on some platforms. This bug has bin around since the day of jdk1.2 and there are numerous others that act as show stoppers for writing serious applications with java GUI. And they have bin around for years.
This is very sad since the swing architecture is quite elegant. But somehow Sun decided that java was for the server side only.
Now they complain that a major app like an IDE isn't using their archtecturally good, but in reality unsuported GUI framework. Sun would do much better if they started to fix the bugs in swing, and perhaps use some profiling tool to find the worst performance bottlenecks, than to try to make development tools of their own.
That way people could actually use java for creating cross platform GUI apps. This is what java once was intended for. As it is today, you are probably better of using QT and C++ for cross platform work.
Today the developers have already chosen Eclips.It have a good chance of replacing emacs as the swiss army knife of software development.Just like most people extending emacs didn't complain that they had to use lisp to extend their tool even if they normally didn't do their work in lisp, people extending eclipse will not mind using swt.
As Eclipse is the dominating java IDE of today tool venders will have to support it for a long period of time. A defacto standard is alread set.
By creating an alternative standard Sun is the one who is creating the fragmentation. And given Suns long tradition of creating IDEs with low usability fragment is probably the only thing it will be. The only OK development tool I have seen so far is Forte/Netbeans and that was adopted by Sun in a quit mature state.
Instead Sun should focus on fixing swing. That way people might start using it for their cross platform GUIs regardless of what IDE they prefer to use. If they don't, people might find out that swing in reality only sort of works on windows, and then having a native swt library support for a few other platforms doesn't seam too bad.
JBoss is somewhat harder to configure and deploy applications to than e.g. IBM Websphere. That will raise the costs somewhat.
However the situation is improving, at least when it comes to deployment, by useing a nice plugin for eclipes called lomboz (www.lomboz.org) development, debugging and deployment is significantly simplyfied.
No, this has nothing to do with KDE, this feature is available directly from XFree86, provided it is configured properly.
However, this could be improved. Right now you can only have one active GUI user at the time per computer. It would be nice if you could connect multiple sets of keyboards, screens and soundcards to one computer and have multiple users use them. With no network latancys, imagine what cool multiuser game platform that could become.
Today windows is plagued with viruses, trojans and worms. If Linux usage becomes more wide spread among users with little knowledge in computers, networks and security, we might see similar problems in Linux in the future. The fact that Linux is a much better acrhitecture than windows will probably not be enough to protect Linux from incompetent users.
To prevent this, it would be nice if some kind of sandboxing technology was implemented. E.g it could be based on digital signature technologies, where applications could be given capabilities depending on who signed them. That way an adminstrator could allow only applications signed by approved vendors or himself to run on the system.
Apart from raising the security in Linux it could, provided it is done right, also make it clear to users that DRM technologies a la Microsot is there to provide security for the content provider, not the user. That is if Linux in reality was just as secure as MS technology is in theory, nobody would accept hardware locking users out of their own system.
Doing DDoS on SCO just makes people feel sorry for them. They do not deserve that.
Besides SCO doesn't need the internet as they hardly can expect to have any real customers left.
Nowdays their business model is based purely on litegation. To my knowledge lawsuits are delivered by hand, so a DDoS would not disturb their business at all.
Re:Patents can definitly be a problem.
on
Perens on Patents
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· Score: 1
Perhaps, there should be substantial a fine for the applicant, if prior art was found. That way he would have to investigate prior art before filing a patent.
If people gets used to that law is something that is guarded by technical devices and not by moral and ethical standards of the citizens, we are on a very dangerous path. If peple are forced to follow they will find ways to break it, just for the feeling of freedom it would create.
Perhaps that is true. But there are different types of users. Linux, or Windows XP for that matter, have very little to offer to the home user. They are built for use in large installations. Having to handle multiple users etc only makes life more complicated in home user environmnets.
But for business use, Linux is much easier to conigure than windows for somebody who knows what he is doing. And in a businesss situations you usually have sombody with that nessary knowledge to do it for you, and not a beginner.
By it's higher degree of configurability Linux can better be adjusted to fit business processes, A good admin can remove all stuff that is not needed for conducting buiness.
The "ease of use" of windows could actually be a disadvantage as it creates hidden administration costs. E.g. users swapping screen savers and audioclips instead of doing real work. We also have the problem of users fixing things themselves. At first this sounds like a good thing, but what if the thing fixed not is a local problem, and we have many users fixing the same thing over and over again. In that case we would be better of if the user only have tools to conduct his business tasks, and call techsupport when ths system doesn't work properly.
Today the Linux GUI is good enough. The problem is the lack of applications. But apps or desktop use will emerge given time, just like they have on the server side. However we can expect that it will take somewhat longer time than what it did on the server side, as we have many Linux desktops (e.g. Gnome, KDE,..). Even if X11 makes it technically possible to mix and match application from various origin, mixing different toolkits will not give enough consistency in the desktop environment for professional use. Given the time MS needed get their current position, five years before the Linux desktop goes mainstream is probably not a bad estimate.
A couple of years ago the difference in technology advancement was important in the choise between Gnome/Gtk and KDE/QT. Event though Qt still have a technological lead, Gtk of today is good enough.
Having good enough technology, focus shifts to usability. This is needed to attract new non tech savy users. In this field Gnome has much more to offer than KDE. Anyone with a background in usability who looks at konqueror, the KDE flagship, can see this. While KDE still exels in the number of functions, Gnome makes it simpler to find the functions used by most users. And that is a winning formula.
As there are far more experienced coders than there are usability experts active in the opensource movement, my guess is that Gnome will have a better chance of fixing their technical deficienses, than KDE to fix their usability problems.
And for the record, QT wouldn't have bin free software today if Gnome/Gtk hadn't offered a semi free (LGPL) competing alternative. So I would say that Gnome was founded for all the right reasons.
Still, I will miss KDE if Gnome comes out on top, as Qt is much easier to develop in than Gtk. I was able to fix bugs in KDE within hours after I first saw the code, while I still have a lot to figure out in Gtk before I get to the same level.
You are missing the point.If we can get Gnome stuff look like native KDE stuff in KDE, and KDE stuff look like real Gnome stuff in Gnome. Then we get more choises, not less. The trick is to get this dualism work for both for developers and for users. This is what all this is all about.
If we can't unite on some low level, e.g. how theming, drag & drop, naming of icons representing similar things, we get lock in effects that just as bad as the barrier between windows and open source systems.
Integrating GUI stuff and the Linux kernel is probably not a good idea. This is how it is done in windows and is probably one of the reasons for the instability of windows. But if you talk about integration of the GNU part of the GNU/Linux system, then it would be less problematic. But even then, there are more free OSes out there that may need a X like GUI. So keeping the GUI separate might still be a good idea. It is also good systems design practice to build things with low coupling as it simplifies maintainance. The general idea in unix-like systems is to have many small components that does one thing well. I see little reason to abandon this strategy in our choise of GUI for Linux et al. free OSes.
Slashdot Mirror
Over 75% of all IT projects fail totally, is late or over budget. Most of them are not Linux projects.
So, Microsoft is in no position to gloat over any Linux setbacks in Munich.
This is a problem that probably has more to do with leadership, management methods than with any specific technology like Linux or Windows.
Even if the up front cost for switching to Linux turns out to be higher than expected, it will probably be cheaper in the long run. Using Linux they will be in much better control of their future upgrade costs.
Not to mention that, money spent on Linux stays in the local economy instead of feeding a foreign company.
I certainly agree that fragmentation is a bad thing when it reduces choise. Even Microsoft is starting to use the lack of integration against free desktops in their get the facts campaign. It would be nice if we could prove them wrong.
.freedesktop.org.
Even if Gnome/Gtk and KDE/Qt are very different toolkits, that should not prevent users from having a good user experience even if toolkits are mixed. The tookit choise should be a developer only issue.This is possible in windows and on MacOS so why not on free desktops.
E.g. why must each browser have their own bookmark file format and bookmark file lokation? Both Gnome and KDE use a folder as Trash, why not use the same location for that folder by default?
Both Gnome and KDE have a postit applet for small desktop notes, why not use the same file format and file location.
Why not make it possible to do drag&drop between nautilus and konqueror. After all there is a XDND standard that both KDE and Gnome tries to follow in other applications. And if we drag a file from konqueror to the Trash in Nautilus we should get the expected behavior.
Browsers and some other applications have icons that have similar functions in both Gnome and KDE. E.g. Back and Forward icons for browsers. Why not let the icons have the same name in both Gnome and KDE.
Perhaps all such config options and data that is common to both Gnome and KDE could be held in a separate folder named e.g.
This article follows the standard pattern:
1) Write an article on general software problems
2) Use a headline that refers to open source.
3) Hope to get paid by Microsoft.
The auther is right, there is a security problem. But that apply to closed source as well. How do we know that the new peace of software isn't full of trojans. In opensource we can at least check it for ourselves, in closed source we can't. And what's more important the distributer knows that we can't.
Then we have the problems with insiders modifying the openly available source, before patches are applied to your systems. A sysadmin with bad intents can always do damage to your systems. It doesn't matter if the code is closed or open.
The solution is to make sure that there is no superuser in your system that have access to everything.
Mutually exclusive parts of sensitive software should handled by different people. E.g. if you are responsible for the login system in a banking system you should not be responsible, or have access to the code that handles money more than on a need to know basis.
Good tools for doing such things would be to implement MAC (Mandatory Access Control). This would give you very high protection but is also important to realize that security costs money, just as unsecurity. E.g. MAC is a PITA to use so make sure that the things you protect is worth the extra trouble.
Lastly you will also have to realize that security is not only about software, locked doors and surveillance. It is very much about people and the spirit of your organization. The employeess must not only know that security is important but also why, or else your efforts to strengthen security may have opposite effects as you employees may start circumvent security procedures to make life easier.
Yes, it sounds low. But as the article states if Linux gets as much as 10% Microsoft will start feel the pain, and we can expect them doing something about it, and do so long before it reaches those figures. One such action could anticipated by the article would be to lower the prices.
.Net are for. Such development would slow down Linux adaptation significantly as many people will install such a free windows just out of curiosity.
I wouldn't be surprised if you will get a free (as in beer) copy of some Windows XP Light bundled with every computer magazine you buy, and that Microsoft instead focus on sales of various kinds of OS related services. After all that's what
But even at 6% Linux will be a potentially interesting market. And more and more software companies will port their software to Linux.
When that happens, the Linux growth will increase even further over the years to come.
It is also interesting to note that the article predicts that Linux will have 6% of the market while windows will have the remaining 94%. That is probably not true. I would expect Mac OS to remain at something like 3% if not better.
And remember even if MS decides to make their money from services just like Red Hat and other Linux companies do today, MS have to carry the whole cost of development of their OS while the cost of Linux development is shared among many diferent parties. This means that Linux venders can spend more money on developing their services than MS and hopefully that will show as a difference in quality, and ultimately in user preferences for Linux.
There have always bin rumors that closed source Microsoft applications have leaked to terrorists or the Russian mob.
Thinking about it, an OS used often to hold and guard highly sensitive information wordwide is almost certain to get its source stolen, if not by terrorists so by intellegence organizations round the world.
But it could have bin much worse. Imagine a not too distant future world where access to documents software etc is controlled by DRM technology. In such a world, there would be little incentive for sofware companies to spend R&D money on securing their systems apart from what DRM offers.
Imagine what damages we could get if cryptography keys to such systems fell into the wrong hands.
Even if such keys would be handled by a lot fewer persons than the windows source code, there is no guarntee that they will not be persuaded to reveal their secret.
In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
If this is true, that seams incredybly stupid.
From what I understand Novell have revoked the SCO revokation of the AIX license. So that would mean that SCO could win and IBM could still say sorry guys we have the rights to sell AIX, just not from you. Or am I missing something?
Reading the rest of your post, I think I see the problem: You and GNOME people seem to equate "Useable" with "Feature-starved". Just because GNOME's epiphany can't be configureed does NOT mean it's more useable! I don't know who first introduced this "No options is inherently superior" doctrine, but I don't like it, and it is just plain wrong. I could not agree more. Feature starvation do NOT mean usability, just as little as many features do. The more features you add, the more you will have to care about usability issues. And KDE 3.2 doesn't make it. Configured correctly KDE is quite easy to use. But that doesn't make KDE usable as you should not have to configure it to make it easy to use. It should be configured that way by default. One example: KDE is configured to use single click mode by default. I have done usability studies on this, and so far I haven't found a single user new to KDE that is confortable with this. They tend to activate/open/view things by mistake. One could easily think that this is only because they are used to using windows or MacOS, but not so. Even users that only have had access to web based interfaces, where single click is the standard, have problems. Why? In the web interface they base their doings on a cognitive model based on navigation. While in a desktop oriented system like KDE they act like if they are handling objects on that desktop. They pick up objects and do something with them. If you use single click users do not figure out how to pick the object up. Still the new KDE 3.2 is better than previous versions, so they are moving in the right direction.
I agree, doing object orientation by ideom is really ugly. But there is something called gtkmm that puts a true objectoriented wrapper around the gtk libraries. That ought to improve the situation. Gtkmm uses pure C++ instead of some language extensions requiring preprocessing like QT.
But even so, I feel more at home using QT, but that is perhaps just me.
Anyway, I wish that the KDE people could get their act together on usability. As they
clearly have a technical edge over Gnome this is
really sad they they doesn't do better in this area.
Look at the navigation toolbar of Konqueror and compare that to Epiphany or Mozilla. In KDE the toolbar looks crowded. Some icons are very similar to each other. E.g. they use looking glasslike symbols for both search and zoom functions. Why not use a pair of binoculars for the search function instead.
The icon for changing fonts is an image of two T:s close together that looks like an antenna. Of course the T stands for text. But in how many countries is text called something that starts with T? I would guess that a picture of an "A" would be better as it have a more distinctive form, and it is also used in many other desktop environments to denote font changing facilities.
It would also make it less likely that the symbol with the two T:s close together refers to true type fonts only.
If the toolbars are crowded, the context menus are even worse. E.g. in the right menu button menu of the konquerer file manager you have both a "Move to trash" and a "Delete" item. Wouldn't it have bin better to just have a "Move to trash" item, and then configure the trash to perform the correct action this would have bin more in line with the desktop metaphor. On the your normal desktop you put things you don't want in the waste basket, and then you decide when to empty it.
Even if most things regarding usability is as bad as they used to be in KDE, there is at least one major improvement in KDE 3.2. The menu that pops up when you drop a file over a folder now gives you the alternatives "Move Here", "Copy Here" and "Link Here" and "Cancel" instead of "Copy Here", "Move Here"... This great since move is a much more common operation than copy for most people.
A positive side effect on changing the order in this menu is that the lack of icon for the "Move Here" item doesn't look so bad on the first item as it did when it was the second menu item.
The menu still have a dominating red cancel button. That button is probably the first thing the user sees when he drops a file over a folder, and the menu pops up. To me its somewhat unclear why this menu needs a cancel button in the first place, all other menus seam to be able to do without it. And second why does it have to be that eye catching. After all in most of the cases "Cancel" is not what the user is most likely to do.
So, if you need a lot of functionality but doesn't care about usability KDE is for you. In a way this is in true Unix tradition, there is no limit to what you can do, if you just could find out how. In my opinion there is few if any desktop environment that can rival KDE in configurability and number of functions.
Even though the usability could have bin better KDE 3.2 contains a lot of improvements and it is well worth the trouble of upgrading if you run some previous version of KDE.
If we are going to pay postage, we must have some electronic way of doing that. It could be creditcard or something else. Whatever it is you will have to be able to do payments through your computer. That will probably include som account information et.
What an admirable target for viruses, trojans or spyware that would be. The relatively small problem of using e-mail filters to prevent your inbox from clogging up will be replaced with the bigger problem of keeping your money in the wallet.
A better way would probably be to only accept digitally signed mails, that way the sender could always be identified, and if spam was illegal in most countries we would be able to prevent spam with legal processes.
The problem is that there could be legitimate use of anonnymous mail. E.g. who would send an e-mail to the press telling that their company is doing an Enron to the press or even the police if they knew they could be identified.
But I think its easier to learn to live with this disadvantage, than to loose the money in your wallet. After all wistle blowers could still slip a paper note into an unmarked envelope and slip it under the doorstep of the reciever.
One could always dream.
A more realistic prediction would be that Linux surpasses MacOS-X in that timeframe. This could be important as its much easier to convince a software vender to port a program to the second biggest desktop OS than to something that is believed to be rarely used. This is especially true to companies that produce both for MacOS and windows. After all if you can make the program for the most comman OS and the third ranking OS then why not produce it for the second ranked OS.
Even if there are good OpenSource programs for many tasks, they do not always share the same fileformats as popular closed source software. This is one of the major problems in rapid Linux adaptation. Even though you could find opensource tools to do the job of propriatory programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, AutoCAD,... they do not share the same file formats. This means you will have difficulties accessing your old files. This is the secret of OpenOffice success. My guess is that the interopeability between OpenOffice.org and MS-Office is responsible for far more Linux adaptaions than any even so impressive improvements in Gnome or KDE over the last 3 years.
So getting the software industry to port existing closed source software to Linux, or to create inteoperable open source alternatives, is crucial to the succes of the Linux desktop. This will take time. I would guess that we will have to wait at least 10 years for that to have happened to the extent that Linux and windows have equal marketshares.
But even so, a 5-10% marketshare is worth a lot of money and I expect that this could happen in just a coulple of years.
The claims that it was superior search technology that made google a succes. I think this was only one factor. To me the graphical design was very important. The google pages are not full of ads, in the beginning there were no ads at all. And now they are tasteful and dont compete for my attention when I look at my search results. The clean design gave an impression of integrety and a belief that search results was unbiased by economical interests.I think it will be hard for Microsoft to match.
So if Microsoft was to beat google, how would they do it? They could use local tools on the OS that collects user information, e.g. scanning office documents and downloaded e-mail to get a user profile that could be fed into the search engine to get better quality of search results. However, such things could backfire seriously if users felt that their personal privacy was at stake.
Not becasuse I don't like KDE, I really do.
But it's sad to see that they couldn't focus on what I assume they liked the best.
Now we probably end up with another KDE support fiasco a la Red Hat. It would be much better if people who liked and was good at KDE created pure KDE distros and people who prefered Gnome did Gnome distros.
It's usually better to download and complie KDE yourself on a Gnome oreinted distro ( I guess the same is true for Gnome on KDE oriented distros)
If Sun had done their job properly, this would never have happened. IBM considered (I think they even tried) using swing for Eclips but found that is was too porly optimized.
And even worse, swing was full of bugs. Up until j2se 1.4.x swing doesn't support european keyboards, and some characters commonly used in many programming languages can't be typed using various European locales on some platforms. This bug has bin around since the day of jdk1.2 and there are numerous others that act as show stoppers for writing serious applications with java GUI. And they have bin around for years.
This is very sad since the swing architecture is quite elegant. But somehow Sun decided that java was for the server side only.
Now they complain that a major app like an IDE isn't using their archtecturally good, but in reality unsuported GUI framework. Sun would do much better if they started to fix the bugs in swing, and perhaps use some profiling tool to find the worst performance bottlenecks, than to try to make development tools of their own.
That way people could actually use java for creating cross platform GUI apps. This is what java once was intended for. As it is today, you are probably better of using QT and C++ for cross platform work.
Today the developers have already chosen Eclips.It have a good chance of replacing emacs as the swiss army knife of software development.Just like most people extending emacs didn't complain that they had to use lisp to extend their tool even if they normally didn't do their work in lisp, people extending eclipse will not mind using swt.
As Eclipse is the dominating java IDE of today tool venders will have to support it for a long period of time. A defacto standard is alread set.
By creating an alternative standard Sun is the one who is creating the fragmentation. And given Suns long tradition of creating IDEs with low usability fragment is probably the only thing it will be.
The only OK development tool I have seen so far is Forte/Netbeans and that was adopted by Sun in a quit mature state.
Instead Sun should focus on fixing swing. That way people might start using it for their cross platform GUIs regardless of what IDE they prefer to use. If they don't, people might find out that swing in reality only sort of works on windows, and then having a native swt library support for a few other platforms doesn't seam too bad.
JBoss is somewhat harder to configure and deploy applications to than e.g. IBM Websphere. That will raise the costs somewhat.
However the situation is improving, at least when it comes to deployment, by useing a nice plugin for eclipes called lomboz (www.lomboz.org) development, debugging and deployment is significantly simplyfied.
No, this has nothing to do with KDE, this feature is available directly from XFree86, provided it is configured properly.
However, this could be improved. Right now you can only have one active GUI user at the time per computer. It would be nice if you could connect multiple sets of keyboards, screens and soundcards to one computer and have multiple users use them.
With no network latancys, imagine what cool multiuser game platform that could become.
Today windows is plagued with viruses, trojans and worms. If Linux usage becomes more wide spread among users with little knowledge in computers, networks and security, we might see similar problems in Linux in the future. The fact that Linux is a much better acrhitecture than windows will probably not be enough to protect Linux from incompetent users.
To prevent this, it would be nice if some kind of sandboxing technology was implemented. E.g it could be based on digital signature technologies, where applications could be given capabilities depending on who signed them. That way an adminstrator could allow only applications signed by approved vendors or himself to run on the system.
Apart from raising the security in Linux it could, provided it is done right, also make it clear to users that DRM technologies a la Microsot is there to provide security for the content provider, not the user. That is if Linux in reality was just as secure as MS technology is in theory, nobody would accept hardware locking users out of their own system.
Doing DDoS on SCO just makes people feel sorry for them. They do not deserve that.
Besides SCO doesn't need the internet as they hardly can expect to have any real customers left.
Nowdays their business model is based purely on litegation. To my knowledge lawsuits are delivered by hand, so a DDoS would not disturb their business at all.
Perhaps, there should be substantial a fine for the applicant, if prior art was found. That way he would have to investigate prior art before filing a patent.
If people gets used to that law is something that is guarded by technical devices and not by moral and ethical standards of the citizens, we are on a very dangerous path. If peple are forced to follow they will find ways to break it, just for the feeling of freedom it would create.
Perhaps that is true. But there are different types of users. Linux, or Windows XP for that matter, have very little to offer to the home user. They are built for use in large installations. Having to handle multiple users etc only makes life more complicated in home user environmnets.
But for business use, Linux is much easier to conigure than windows for somebody who knows what he is doing. And in a businesss situations you usually have sombody with that nessary knowledge to do it for you, and not a beginner.
By it's higher degree of configurability Linux can better be adjusted to fit business processes, A good admin can remove all stuff that is not needed for conducting buiness.
The "ease of use" of windows could actually be a disadvantage as it creates hidden administration costs. E.g. users swapping screen savers and audioclips instead of doing real work. We also have the problem of users fixing things themselves. At first this sounds like a good thing, but what if the thing fixed not is a local problem, and we have many users fixing the same thing over and over again. In that case we would be better of if the user only have tools to conduct his business tasks, and call techsupport when ths system doesn't work properly.
Today the Linux GUI is good enough. The problem is the lack of applications. But apps or desktop use will emerge given time, just like they have on the server side. However we can expect that it will take somewhat longer time than what it did on the server side, as we have many Linux desktops (e.g. Gnome, KDE,..). Even if X11 makes it technically possible to mix and match application from various origin, mixing different toolkits will not give enough consistency in the desktop environment for professional use. Given the time MS needed get their current position, five years before the Linux desktop goes mainstream is probably not a bad estimate.
SCO has no IP rights on Europe to license.
But on the other hand, having no rights haven't stopped them from trying to sell Linux licenses.
A couple of years ago the difference in technology advancement was important in the choise between Gnome/Gtk and KDE/QT. Event though Qt still have a technological lead, Gtk of today is good enough.
Having good enough technology, focus shifts to usability. This is needed to attract new non tech savy users. In this field Gnome has much more to offer than KDE. Anyone with a background in usability who looks at konqueror, the KDE flagship, can see this. While KDE still exels in the number of functions, Gnome makes it simpler to find the functions used by most users. And that is a winning formula.
As there are far more experienced coders than there are usability experts active in the opensource movement, my guess is that Gnome will have a better chance of fixing their technical deficienses, than KDE to fix their usability problems.
And for the record, QT wouldn't have bin free software today if Gnome/Gtk hadn't offered a semi free (LGPL) competing alternative. So I would say that Gnome was founded for all the right reasons.
Still, I will miss KDE if Gnome comes out on top, as Qt is much easier to develop in than Gtk.
I was able to fix bugs in KDE within hours after I first saw the code, while I still have a lot to figure out in Gtk before I get to the same level.
You are missing the point.If we can get Gnome stuff look like native KDE stuff in KDE, and KDE stuff look like real Gnome stuff in Gnome. Then we get more choises, not less. The trick is to get this dualism work for both for developers and for users. This is what all this is all about.
If we can't unite on some low level, e.g. how theming, drag & drop, naming of icons representing similar things, we get lock in effects that just as bad as the barrier between windows and open source systems.
Integrating GUI stuff and the Linux kernel is probably not a good idea. This is how it is done in windows and is probably one of the reasons for the instability of windows. But if you talk about integration of the GNU part of the GNU/Linux system, then it would be less problematic. But even then, there are more free OSes out there that may need a X like GUI. So keeping the GUI separate might still be a good idea. It is also good systems design practice to build things with low coupling as it simplifies maintainance. The general idea in unix-like systems is to have many small components that does one thing well. I see little reason to abandon this strategy in our choise of GUI for Linux et al. free OSes.