Nokia spurns sanity, Elops with Microsoft. First thing that has to go: all low end phones where Nokia currently dominates. Search continues for shortest path to cliff edge.
I switched from Kate to Geany by the way. It does everything that Kate does without such stupid design mistakes.
Other stupid design mistakes, most probably. I followed your suggestion, installed Geany, and tried a few simple things. My immediate impression: not bad for a GTK program. The file open/save dialog is light years beyond that dire old thing where you needed to know magic tricks to enter the name of a file you already know instead of clicking your way through a file tree. It's curious that the name entry field for "open" is called "location" whereas for "save as" it is "name" as I would expect. Oh well. I was a little surprised to find the dynamic line wrap setting under "document" instead of "view". It may be true that Geany remembers this per document but it still seems like "foolish consistency" to me. I find the main settings under "edit/preferences", an odd stylistic affectation that really irritates me. I wish that would die quietly along with Netscape Navigator. A top level "settings" menu just seems so much more sensible, easier to find and a significant time saver. Just cosmetic things... again, not bad for a GTK program. The first really obviously wrong behavior I noticed is, this editor insists on adding a line feed at the end of a file, whether I type it or not. Suppose I don't want that line feed for some reason? Another irritation: with line wrap on, the "end" key takes you to the end of wrapped line, not the end of the displayed line. There might be cases where that is in fact what you want, for example recording a keyboard macro, but it interferes with keyboard navigation. No obvious way to turn that off. I really do not appreciate an editor inventing text that I did not type.
Well, I barely scratched the surface and I promise to give Geany a fair trial on some real project, but I am pretty sure that "other stupid design mistakes" is exactly what I will hit. It's nice to see there isn't just one serious, active editor project on the go. There is a lot more right than wrong with both these projects. It's too bad Geany is coded in C. I took a quick surf into the (Git) source repo and sure enough, preprocessor macros out the yinyang. The "real men can OOP without a compiler" mindset. That can't be good in the long run, however I must say the work looks more than competent so far. Not entirely to my taste, but solid. Thanks for the tip.
Kate has always been a mess in terms of bus and interface mistakes, failing to share the search context between tabs being a good example. There must be a design factoring reason for that, which needs revisiting. That said, I would not judge KDE by the quality of Kate. Use gedit if you like, these days it's hard to tell with a casual glance that it's not a KDE app. And having also said that, I still just use Kate and suffer through the oddities, they are bearable, they gradually improve over time, and the price is right.
4.5 is fine for me, it got to the point long ago where I don't think about it much. The biggest annoyance is not really a kde issue, it is dbus, which does not seem to be designed well at all, it is a single point of failure where any app leaking dbus connections can stuff up the whole desktop so applications and asynchronous tasks won't start and dbus starts eating 100% cpu. The old ICE transport used in 3.5 seemed a lot more robust. It seems to me that dbus needs a major rethink, it is just wrong that it should be able to fail the way it does.
The next most annoying thing for me after dbus is losing the ability to slide my task bar out of the way to the side. If the KDE 4 component model is really great it should be easy to re-implement that nice feature, no? Or maybe I'm the only one who misses it. Anyway, taskbar sliding is getting well into niggle territory, that is a good sign.
...the US debt has increased every year since President Eisenhower in 1957
In absolute terms you are correct, however in inflation-corrected dollars and as a proportion of GNP, US debt has sometimes decreased including during the Clinton administration.
I guess that after a lot of tension there will be a big group hug. In the mean time, dust off your c++ skills, which are hardly obsolete. After all, c++ produces applications that start faster and run faster and smoother than Java, on the whole.
It seems these days that the high are of user interface design consists of removing essential functionality to make the interface look "cleaner". In the mockup there is just a single giant back button all by its lonesome. So where's my forward button? (which I use constantly, maybe that's just me.) Where's my "reload"? (which I use constantly, maybe that's just me.) It was bad enough when Firefox 5 obscured the reload by tucking it away as part of the URL bar, now the intention seems to be to hide it completely. One word for that: dontwant.
Here is what I dowant: "back forward reload home". Like before. It wasn't broken.
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use.
That is true, however SVN is painful and limited. Don't even think about developing on a branch. (Works fine until its time to merge.) Mercurial on the other hand is just as easy to use as SVN and supports the same distributed, object based model as Git.
I think that HD-DVD *should* have won in a free market, without the backroom deal, and Sony's vertical monopoly over blueray technology and the media for it.
It was a question of who do you want to abuse you, Microsoft or Sony?
For me the one real disappointment is Youtube on PS3. It blows chunks for playing HD Youtube videos on my HD TV. There's workarounds but why are they even needed?
The PS3 web browser is beyond bad as well. Sony made a tactical error in not simply using Linux for their OS like Google does with Android. Then they'd be running webkit and maybe not sucking nearly as much.
PS3 makes for a crappy media computer. It can't play as many audio/video formats and you can't automate any tasks since the PS3 isn't programmable in any way...
The PS3 isn't particularly quick about going from the off-state to starting a new Blu-Ray title that it hasn't seen before, either. (Or at least neither of mine have ever been.)
True, it takes a couple of minutes to start a Blu-ray usually, not counting having to manually skip each preview and not being able to skip the offensive piracy warnings at all. Puts me off the "experience" entirely. Can't help thinking dark thoughts about Sony every time I play a disk, which is getting rarer all the time.
It's the most updateable Blu-Ray player. I don't actually know anyone who uses it for games (although this is obviously a statistically insignificant sample size).
The PS3 is an awfully noisy blu-ray player, never mind expensive and with limited features. Also clumsier than a dedicated player, going through a menu for power off gets old fast. The expensive remote control always drops the first button press when waking up. Call me underwhelmed.
Indeed. Subjectively, my dual ARM Xoom delivers far more compute power while eating less power than my Atom 450 netbook (Dell mini 10). This gives me hope for the future of the desktop, which as of today usually entails large amounts of heat and noise. In my ideal scenario, Android gets a big chunk of the tablet market, so vendors come up with the novel concept of Android desktop machines. Soon they discover that users are wiping Android and putting on standard Linux in order to run real desktop apps. So the vendors offer preloaded Ubuntu, which by this time has learned about touchscreens and how to run Android apps.
The community certainly will do this even if the vendors don't. Android may be nice for consuming media and running dumbed down games, but for nearly everything else it does not compare to a standard desktop. (Multiple windows?... )
I thought a major advantage of Linux was supposed to be that you only had to boot it once and then it ran forever...
A well deserved reputation. However there are such things as power interruptions, kernel upgrades, physical relocation of a workstation, hardware changes. My Shuttle SD11G5 running as a server (quiet enough for always-on in the home) has typical uptime of a few months.
There is also kernel development in which boot time can easily dominate the development cycle, indirectly affecting kernel quality and hence every user.
I didn't (and still don't) see the point in using Linux if the first thing you're going to do is spend time looking for commercial solutions to every little problem that comes up; it doesn't take many £29.99 problems before it's just as cheap to say "forget it" and make your next computer a mac, particularly if the existing machine's getting on in years anyway. It's an operating system, not a religion - it has one purpose to its existence and that's to get the hell out of the way so I can do something useful.
Your false dichotomy between "operating system" and "religion" is rhetoric designed to cast your respondent in an unfavorable light, when in fact religion is not the only reason someone would prefer to avoid the products of a particular company. For me, a big reason is that Apple as a company and a culture appears to be ethically challenged, as evidenced by believing there is nothing wrong with its draconian actions in the case of Jason Chen. An even bigger reason is that I do not feel comfortable of Apple's walled garden, unabashedly designed to maximize Apple's profit at the expense of my freedoms. I do not have an issue with a company maximizing its profits, but do have serious issues with a company that is willing to abuse me in the process. And the biggest reason is, Apple's products are just too dumbed down. It is the one button mouse philosophy taken much, much further.
If you are comfortable with Apple's products and ethical issues do not trouble you, I am happy that you are happy. However, I am not impressed with your attack on the obvious alternative, mainly relying on dredging up old issues. What is the point, to help yourself feel better about your choice, when in fact you may be troubled by the same issues I am?
This isn't about the language at all, this is strictly about VM at this point.
And my understanding is that, if Oracle's patents are valid, it is very hard to create a high-performance VM without trodding on them - one patent in particular is pretty much a patent for JIT-compiling bytecode.
So don't JIT it, compile to native code at application install time. This would likely improve the user experience anyway. I don't know about you, but I would happily accept a longer install time in return for a faster application start and snappier execution.
There seems to be a small industry built around providing drivers for poorly supported printers, on a variety of platforms including Linux. I haven't tried this, but maybe if you need it... Turboprint.
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense?
This was a few years ago, and TBH it wasn't the polish of the desktop environment itself that pushed me. It was the fact that (at the time at least) it didn't take very much work to turn yourself into a corner case that was poorly supported and even more poorly tested. Multi-monitor support was dire, if I bought a modern inkjet printer I'd typically have to wait 6-12 months for it to get good support (which is a PITA when your average inkjet is only on the market for 12 months or so). There was no single event that pushed me, it was more a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of thing that eventually led to me saying "Enough! If I'm going to battle with a desktop OS, I'm going to be paid for it!"
YMMV and all that.
Indeed, my mileage does vary, I enjoy not having to put in a driver disk to install a printer. My printer experience on Linux lately has been that you plug in the USB cable to whatever printer, new or old, and it prints. And you can generally expect printing to continue to work properly even after many years of system updates. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule, I just haven't hit any recently. And Windows PCs are hardly immune from printer problems.
More than that, I'm fairly sure Apple called it "System Settings" before KDE did, which makes this really hypocritical on the part of the KDE devs.
Perhaps you should consider reading the article before slinging accusations. The issue is who used the name first, but that the newly introduced name collision breaks the Unity interface.
Implemented it first, you mean. The one who implemented it second is the one who broke the system and is therefore at fault. I would like to believe it was an accident.
Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino
I did the same thing about six years ago. Frankly, even then it was obvious that F/OSS on the desktop was going to be in a constant catch-up with Microsoft...
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense? I don't have to double click on a web link, why should starting an application be different? There are so many little issues of fit and finish like this, it is now Microsoft who should consider trying to catch up.
Personally, I would prefer that Blu-ray just fade away and be replaced by some new optical media standard backed by a broadly based industry consortium not involving Sony. Apart from my growing distaste for Sony as a company, I do not at all feel comfortable about being watched while I watch my media. The last Blu-ray movie I played wanted to connect to the internet. I said no and I have to say that again every time I play the disk. At least it asked. How do I know what sort of spyware is loading onto my Blu-ray player? The day BD-J was concocted was a dark day for privacy, never mind the stupidly long time it takes to boot a JVM on a minimally powerful embedded processor and load the bloated code that implements those buggy, laggy menu interfaces.
Granted, this is all about Blu-ray as a media format. As a data format... well, if there is a better technology on the horizon with 10 times the capacity, I say die Blu-ray, die.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia spurns sanity, Elops with Microsoft. First thing that has to go: all low end phones where Nokia currently dominates. Search continues for shortest path to cliff edge.
I switched from Kate to Geany by the way. It does everything that Kate does without such stupid design mistakes.
Other stupid design mistakes, most probably. I followed your suggestion, installed Geany, and tried a few simple things. My immediate impression: not bad for a GTK program. The file open/save dialog is light years beyond that dire old thing where you needed to know magic tricks to enter the name of a file you already know instead of clicking your way through a file tree. It's curious that the name entry field for "open" is called "location" whereas for "save as" it is "name" as I would expect. Oh well. I was a little surprised to find the dynamic line wrap setting under "document" instead of "view". It may be true that Geany remembers this per document but it still seems like "foolish consistency" to me. I find the main settings under "edit/preferences", an odd stylistic affectation that really irritates me. I wish that would die quietly along with Netscape Navigator. A top level "settings" menu just seems so much more sensible, easier to find and a significant time saver. Just cosmetic things... again, not bad for a GTK program. The first really obviously wrong behavior I noticed is, this editor insists on adding a line feed at the end of a file, whether I type it or not. Suppose I don't want that line feed for some reason? Another irritation: with line wrap on, the "end" key takes you to the end of wrapped line, not the end of the displayed line. There might be cases where that is in fact what you want, for example recording a keyboard macro, but it interferes with keyboard navigation. No obvious way to turn that off. I really do not appreciate an editor inventing text that I did not type.
Well, I barely scratched the surface and I promise to give Geany a fair trial on some real project, but I am pretty sure that "other stupid design mistakes" is exactly what I will hit. It's nice to see there isn't just one serious, active editor project on the go. There is a lot more right than wrong with both these projects. It's too bad Geany is coded in C. I took a quick surf into the (Git) source repo and sure enough, preprocessor macros out the yinyang. The "real men can OOP without a compiler" mindset. That can't be good in the long run, however I must say the work looks more than competent so far. Not entirely to my taste, but solid. Thanks for the tip.
Kate has always been a mess in terms of bus and interface mistakes, failing to share the search context between tabs being a good example. There must be a design factoring reason for that, which needs revisiting. That said, I would not judge KDE by the quality of Kate. Use gedit if you like, these days it's hard to tell with a casual glance that it's not a KDE app. And having also said that, I still just use Kate and suffer through the oddities, they are bearable, they gradually improve over time, and the price is right.
4.5 is fine for me, it got to the point long ago where I don't think about it much. The biggest annoyance is not really a kde issue, it is dbus, which does not seem to be designed well at all, it is a single point of failure where any app leaking dbus connections can stuff up the whole desktop so applications and asynchronous tasks won't start and dbus starts eating 100% cpu. The old ICE transport used in 3.5 seemed a lot more robust. It seems to me that dbus needs a major rethink, it is just wrong that it should be able to fail the way it does.
The next most annoying thing for me after dbus is losing the ability to slide my task bar out of the way to the side. If the KDE 4 component model is really great it should be easy to re-implement that nice feature, no? Or maybe I'm the only one who misses it. Anyway, taskbar sliding is getting well into niggle territory, that is a good sign.
...the US debt has increased every year since President Eisenhower in 1957
In absolute terms you are correct, however in inflation-corrected dollars and as a proportion of GNP, US debt has sometimes decreased including during the Clinton administration.
I guess that after a lot of tension there will be a big group hug. In the mean time, dust off your c++ skills, which are hardly obsolete. After all, c++ produces applications that start faster and run faster and smoother than Java, on the whole.
It seems these days that the high are of user interface design consists of removing essential functionality to make the interface look "cleaner". In the mockup there is just a single giant back button all by its lonesome. So where's my forward button? (which I use constantly, maybe that's just me.) Where's my "reload"? (which I use constantly, maybe that's just me.) It was bad enough when Firefox 5 obscured the reload by tucking it away as part of the URL bar, now the intention seems to be to hide it completely. One word for that: dontwant.
Here is what I dowant: "back forward reload home". Like before. It wasn't broken.
As stupid as it sounds, I don't like any of the workflows for setting up an initial repository.
Oh I know what you mean:
git init && git add . && git commit -a
It's even harder in Mercurial:
hg init && hg add . && hg commit
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use.
That is true, however SVN is painful and limited. Don't even think about developing on a branch. (Works fine until its time to merge.) Mercurial on the other hand is just as easy to use as SVN and supports the same distributed, object based model as Git.
I think that HD-DVD *should* have won in a free market, without the backroom deal, and Sony's vertical monopoly over blueray technology and the media for it.
It was a question of who do you want to abuse you, Microsoft or Sony?
For me the one real disappointment is Youtube on PS3. It blows chunks for playing HD Youtube videos on my HD TV. There's workarounds but why are they even needed?
The PS3 web browser is beyond bad as well. Sony made a tactical error in not simply using Linux for their OS like Google does with Android. Then they'd be running webkit and maybe not sucking nearly as much.
PS3 makes for a crappy media computer. It can't play as many audio/video formats and you can't automate any tasks since the PS3 isn't programmable in any way...
True, and the fan noise is awfully annoying.
The PS3 isn't particularly quick about going from the off-state to starting a new Blu-Ray title that it hasn't seen before, either. (Or at least neither of mine have ever been.)
True, it takes a couple of minutes to start a Blu-ray usually, not counting having to manually skip each preview and not being able to skip the offensive piracy warnings at all. Puts me off the "experience" entirely. Can't help thinking dark thoughts about Sony every time I play a disk, which is getting rarer all the time.
It's the most updateable Blu-Ray player. I don't actually know anyone who uses it for games (although this is obviously a statistically insignificant sample size).
The PS3 is an awfully noisy blu-ray player, never mind expensive and with limited features. Also clumsier than a dedicated player, going through a menu for power off gets old fast. The expensive remote control always drops the first button press when waking up. Call me underwhelmed.
The atom isn't an especially efficient CPU.
Indeed. Subjectively, my dual ARM Xoom delivers far more compute power while eating less power than my Atom 450 netbook (Dell mini 10). This gives me hope for the future of the desktop, which as of today usually entails large amounts of heat and noise. In my ideal scenario, Android gets a big chunk of the tablet market, so vendors come up with the novel concept of Android desktop machines. Soon they discover that users are wiping Android and putting on standard Linux in order to run real desktop apps. So the vendors offer preloaded Ubuntu, which by this time has learned about touchscreens and how to run Android apps.
The community certainly will do this even if the vendors don't. Android may be nice for consuming media and running dumbed down games, but for nearly everything else it does not compare to a standard desktop. (Multiple windows? ... )
I thought a major advantage of Linux was supposed to be that you only had to boot it once and then it ran forever...
A well deserved reputation. However there are such things as power interruptions, kernel upgrades, physical relocation of a workstation, hardware changes. My Shuttle SD11G5 running as a server (quiet enough for always-on in the home) has typical uptime of a few months.
There is also kernel development in which boot time can easily dominate the development cycle, indirectly affecting kernel quality and hence every user.
I didn't (and still don't) see the point in using Linux if the first thing you're going to do is spend time looking for commercial solutions to every little problem that comes up; it doesn't take many £29.99 problems before it's just as cheap to say "forget it" and make your next computer a mac, particularly if the existing machine's getting on in years anyway. It's an operating system, not a religion - it has one purpose to its existence and that's to get the hell out of the way so I can do something useful.
Your false dichotomy between "operating system" and "religion" is rhetoric designed to cast your respondent in an unfavorable light, when in fact religion is not the only reason someone would prefer to avoid the products of a particular company. For me, a big reason is that Apple as a company and a culture appears to be ethically challenged, as evidenced by believing there is nothing wrong with its draconian actions in the case of Jason Chen. An even bigger reason is that I do not feel comfortable of Apple's walled garden, unabashedly designed to maximize Apple's profit at the expense of my freedoms. I do not have an issue with a company maximizing its profits, but do have serious issues with a company that is willing to abuse me in the process. And the biggest reason is, Apple's products are just too dumbed down. It is the one button mouse philosophy taken much, much further.
If you are comfortable with Apple's products and ethical issues do not trouble you, I am happy that you are happy. However, I am not impressed with your attack on the obvious alternative, mainly relying on dredging up old issues. What is the point, to help yourself feel better about your choice, when in fact you may be troubled by the same issues I am?
This isn't about the language at all, this is strictly about VM at this point.
And my understanding is that, if Oracle's patents are valid, it is very hard to create a high-performance VM without trodding on them - one patent in particular is pretty much a patent for JIT-compiling bytecode.
So don't JIT it, compile to native code at application install time. This would likely improve the user experience anyway. I don't know about you, but I would happily accept a longer install time in return for a faster application start and snappier execution.
There seems to be a small industry built around providing drivers for poorly supported printers, on a variety of platforms including Linux. I haven't tried this, but maybe if you need it... Turboprint.
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense?
This was a few years ago, and TBH it wasn't the polish of the desktop environment itself that pushed me. It was the fact that (at the time at least) it didn't take very much work to turn yourself into a corner case that was poorly supported and even more poorly tested. Multi-monitor support was dire, if I bought a modern inkjet printer I'd typically have to wait 6-12 months for it to get good support (which is a PITA when your average inkjet is only on the market for 12 months or so). There was no single event that pushed me, it was more a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of thing that eventually led to me saying "Enough! If I'm going to battle with a desktop OS, I'm going to be paid for it!"
YMMV and all that.
Indeed, my mileage does vary, I enjoy not having to put in a driver disk to install a printer. My printer experience on Linux lately has been that you plug in the USB cable to whatever printer, new or old, and it prints. And you can generally expect printing to continue to work properly even after many years of system updates. No doubt there are exceptions to this rule, I just haven't hit any recently. And Windows PCs are hardly immune from printer problems.
More than that, I'm fairly sure Apple called it "System Settings" before KDE did, which makes this really hypocritical on the part of the KDE devs.
Perhaps you should consider reading the article before slinging accusations. The issue is who used the name first, but that the newly introduced name collision breaks the Unity interface.
Who cares who thought of it "first"?
Implemented it first, you mean. The one who implemented it second is the one who broke the system and is therefore at fault. I would like to believe it was an accident.
Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino
Yeah. Because Apple would never dumb down their interface for 25+ years with a one-button mouse.
Or have the police kick in the front door of a journalist.
Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino
I did the same thing about six years ago. Frankly, even then it was obvious that F/OSS on the desktop was going to be in a constant catch-up with Microsoft...
That's odd, your experience apparently does not mirror mine. From time to time I run a Microsoft PC and these days it always feels like slumming compared to my KDE/Linux experience. Why does Microsoft think it is a good idea to end your scroll drag if you happen to drift more than X pixels to the side of the scroll bar? And what is this double clicking nonsense? I don't have to double click on a web link, why should starting an application be different? There are so many little issues of fit and finish like this, it is now Microsoft who should consider trying to catch up.
Personally, I would prefer that Blu-ray just fade away and be replaced by some new optical media standard backed by a broadly based industry consortium not involving Sony. Apart from my growing distaste for Sony as a company, I do not at all feel comfortable about being watched while I watch my media. The last Blu-ray movie I played wanted to connect to the internet. I said no and I have to say that again every time I play the disk. At least it asked. How do I know what sort of spyware is loading onto my Blu-ray player? The day BD-J was concocted was a dark day for privacy, never mind the stupidly long time it takes to boot a JVM on a minimally powerful embedded processor and load the bloated code that implements those buggy, laggy menu interfaces.
Granted, this is all about Blu-ray as a media format. As a data format... well, if there is a better technology on the horizon with 10 times the capacity, I say die Blu-ray, die.