Absolutely. Either GNOME catches up or Kubuntu 8.10 will become mainstream Ubuntu. Gnome will never catch up, for one simple reason. C versus C++. And bear in mind that I am first and foremost a C programmer. It has been blatantly obvious for many years that C++'s ability to express abstraction far exceeds that of C, with a corresponding increase in developer productivity. Remember, I am a C programmer, there is no bias here, just cold facts.
there is something about the look of KDE that just never felt right. Not sure if the colours, the icons, the combination of it, but GNOME comes through as a cleaner environment, when it is not. Perhaps in KDE4 this will change - or not, since this might be solely my perception of it and tastes differ Colors and icons are themable, so probably you just haven't found the right theme yet. Though it is true, there has arguably been more effort put into the icon art than any other part of Gnome. Remember Eazel dropped something like $35 million on Gnome development and produced a barely functional desktop browser, with beautiful icons? Well the icon and decoration art got imported into Gnome standard themes. I agree they are nice, but overblown at the same time. I like understated, personally.
All round, I prefer KDE's single taskbar at the bottom of the screen to Gnome's two bars, one at the top, one at the bottom. It is simply wasteful having two bars when one will do. All of Gnome feels like this to me. Contrived, forced, too much where it doesn't matter and missing fit and finish all over the place. Don't even get me started on the Gnome file open dialog.
If Python had a decent native code compiler I would consider it for more applications. It is good for rapid development, yes I've experienced that, but it is cryingly, mind numbingly slow, which really hurts in any application that needs to think the slightest bit hard. Troll? How is living in dreamland? It is a fact that Python is dirt slow. Of the popular interpreters, bash is slower and that is about it. Please do not kid yourself.
That said, I like Python a lot. I just will not use it for many applications because of performance problems. Pity.
Well, me... I'm personally holding out for a Python API. Python is really good for RAD work, and well, I gotta tell you, I don't have time for traditional development methods these days. Python is easy and quick. And that's how mobile app development should be -- you should be able to write apps on the go! If Python had a decent native code compiler I would consider it for more applications. It is good for rapid development, yes I've experienced that, but it is cryingly, mind numbingly slow, which really hurts in any application that needs to think the slightest bit hard.
Why, oh why, do they have to do stupid things like this when restoring/touching-up old movies!?! Blade Runner is a classic, a masterpiece. The Director's Cut is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned. I was hoping it would eventually get the restoration treatment, maybe remove the wires from the vehicles as they floated up, things like that. But changing, what I think is, such an important piece of dialog like that is beyond aggravating. Amen. That little bit of info just flipped me from "I have to have this disk right now" to "I don't need this disk, ever". So sad. I'm out of this thread.
People in a company I was working for awhile ago received a phishing email that was targeted to us and our environment. I, and a few other people noticed something weird. I did research and realized it was phishing fairly quickly and got the network people to immediately block that site and send out mail to everybody asking anybody who visited that site before it was blocked to have their computer fully checked for malware. Check each computer to see if it is running Windows, and it it is, remove it. There you go, no more phishing problems.
I am pretty sure that US antitrust law forbids monopolies from selling at a loss to gain market share/hurt competitors; MS is certainly not a monopoly in the music player business. It doesn't have to be. Google "cross subsidization" and "predatory marketing".
What I know about Best Buy is, it's pretty much a Microsoft lap dog, and when the keyboard on the Vaio I bought from them failed, they failed to honor their warrantee that cost me $300. Enough data for me. I do not patronize Best Buy, I do not recommend anybody patronize Best Buy, and I take great pains to steer my friends and associates clear of Best Buy.
My first question has to be, what's a valid receipt? My question would be: since when is the onus of proof of ownership on the possessor of the software? I have a house full of goods here; very few of them have receipts, which were discarded. Does that make me liable to have the things I own repossessed? I think not.
Here is what Microsoft specifically claimed about SP1 performance (thanks to faoli for the link): Performance The following list describes some of the performance improvements that Windows Vista SP1 will include
Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release
version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
Improves performance of Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and
speeding JavaScript parsing.
Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain
computers.
Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTL-
ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares
consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.
Hmm, file shares are slow? Perhaps Microsoft should switch to Samba, which is fast.
It's fair to call a straw man when someone puts words in someone else's mouth and then defeats that argument. Is it fair to try to divert attention away from an actual issue (Vista performance is terrible and is not improved by the latest service pack) to a stupid wankfest about whether Microsoft actually claimed they would improve the poor Vista performance? Either way, Vista performance is poor and not getting better.
Meanwhile, I hear the Walmart Green PC at $199 is selling like hotcakes, because it performs very well running Linux + Enlightenment. Perhaps this shows that people really do care about poor Vista performance. And not what Microsoft claimed they would try to do about it.
It's also much easier and safer to be consistent about publishing all of it except those very few components that are not GPL (such as their latest clustering software). As far as I know, Red Hat's clustering software is entirely GPL.
Not entirely correct. Installation scripts and interfaces definition files must be included. Access to CVS/CVN of the code without these would not satisfy the GPL (v2).
Wasn't aware of that, but you still need the configuration files. E.g. sendmail.cf, httpd.conf, etc. for the various configurations. A lot of these are readily available but things like Selinux policy files, pam configurations, etc. are redhat specific and wouldn't need to be distributed or may be distributed using a restrictive license.
The config files are set up by the rpm installation scripts which must be included according to the GPL, so no loophole there either.
Actually, Gates himself confirmed this point when asked about Chinese piracy. Indeed, and likened the process to drug dealing: "They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Bill Gates
Currently they make SRPMs available, which makes the life of Whitebox, CentOS, et al, much simpler. If they really hated such efforts they'd just resort to making only tar balls available. The GPL says otherwise: "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable." It would be a prohibitive amount of work to package up the installation scripts in tarball form (if that is even possible) and then there would be the PR cost of being perceived as a GPL evader.
Maybe then avoid Doc, Ajax, even WAV, or Samba? Doc files last here only as long as it takes me to convert them to odf. Ajax is not a protocol at all, read about it. WAV is a complete joke, it has been years since I've seen one, your mileage may vary. A contender for worst audio format even devised. Samba is an implementation of CIFS/SMB, a cruddy pile of poo, as even Samba developers will admit. Only ever used to talk to M$ Windoze boxes.
Which isn't a problem with GConf, if it uses XML. It is a complete fiction that XML makes things less brittle, and your argument is a red herring anyway, since use of XML is independent of whether are single heirarchy is used or not. It is the single hierarchy that makes things brittle. That is the main thing that people don't like about gconf. Very un-unix.
Organizing something which is naturally of a hierarchical nature in a hierarchical way is not exactly an original contribution of MS... You can look at your friendly/etc directory to see a predecessor of gconf. And what is wrong with/etc for global configuration and ~ for local? Hint: this is exactly what the Gnome folks got wrong. Doomed to reinvent Unix badly and all that.
The only thing GConf and the Registry have in common is that the default editor tool presents all settings in a hierarchical tree. This is the main design characteristic of Microsoft's registry and the differences you mentioned are implementation details.
Why is everyone so opposed to taking MS's technology and running? Because Microsoft uses any technology they control to further extend their illegal monopoly and do not care who or what they crush while doing it. Any more questions?
I agree. Miguel was exposed as a cynical sellout some time ago when he supported the Novell Microsoft pact. How about it, Miguel, got anything to say for yourself?
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All round, I prefer KDE's single taskbar at the bottom of the screen to Gnome's two bars, one at the top, one at the bottom. It is simply wasteful having two bars when one will do. All of Gnome feels like this to me. Contrived, forced, too much where it doesn't matter and missing fit and finish all over the place. Don't even get me started on the Gnome file open dialog.
That said, I like Python a lot. I just will not use it for many applications because of performance problems. Pity.
What I know about Best Buy is, it's pretty much a Microsoft lap dog, and when the keyboard on the Vaio I bought from them failed, they failed to honor their warrantee that cost me $300. Enough data for me. I do not patronize Best Buy, I do not recommend anybody patronize Best Buy, and I take great pains to steer my friends and associates clear of Best Buy.
(print (eval (eval (eval (quote (quote (quote (quote payme))))))))
The motto is "don't be evil".
Here is what Microsoft specifically claimed about SP1 performance (thanks to faoli for the link):
Performance
The following list describes some of the performance improvements that Windows Vista SP1 will include
Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release
version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
Improves performance of Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and
speeding JavaScript parsing.
Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain
computers.
Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTL-
ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares
consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.
Hmm, file shares are slow? Perhaps Microsoft should switch to Samba, which is fast.
Meanwhile, I hear the Walmart Green PC at $199 is selling like hotcakes, because it performs very well running Linux + Enlightenment. Perhaps this shows that people really do care about poor Vista performance. And not what Microsoft claimed they would try to do about it.
Wasn't aware of that, but you still need the configuration files. E.g. sendmail.cf, httpd.conf, etc. for the various configurations. A lot of these are readily available but things like Selinux policy files, pam configurations, etc. are redhat specific and wouldn't need to be distributed or may be distributed using a restrictive license.
The config files are set up by the rpm installation scripts which must be included according to the GPL, so no loophole there either.I agree. Miguel was exposed as a cynical sellout some time ago when he supported the Novell Microsoft pact. How about it, Miguel, got anything to say for yourself?