Oh, and to all of you who say "Watch how high the price of Windows goes for HP", Microsoft won't dare do anything of the sort. Having both IBM and HP actively looking to
It also becomes harder and harder for Microsoft as Linux desktops become more and more viable. It's getting close to the point where threats of exorbitant pricing of Windows to OEMs will be met with "Oh, okay then, we'll just pre-install with Linux instead..."
Given the trouble MS have gone to to stop various governments going the open source road (massive discounts and all) how long before OEMs realise all they have to do is threaten to go with an open source desktop to make MS very very nervous?
In the meantime, what MS is equally frightened of is the mindshare than Apple has been getting. Sure, they still own a very small percent of the desktop market, but they have become more and more visible. The dominance of the iPod and iTunes, and the success of iTMS has only served to make them even more visible. And MS knows very well that once they lose real mindshare the Windows Hegemony will crumble.
We're not facing a complete collapse of MS here, but you could see a serious change in the market share when people start getting around to upgrading and decide to try these Apple machines they've been hearing about - especially if Longhorn hasn't hit by then. A lot of those people who bought a PC in the mid to late 90's to get in on this "internet" thing are going to be looking at upgrading in the next few years. That's what MS is worried about.
Organisation conducting experiments into reaching other worlds; experiment goes wrong; creatures and entities from other world start appearing.
I'm sure I saw a ginger haired guy with glasses near that reactor... hmmm
Well, that was the exact plot for Doom 1, so, um really...Jedidiah
Casinos will love this!
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This most likely will happen.
I used to work doing data visualisation for casinos - nice pretty visualisations showing slot machine usage. It was a huge hit with the casinos that used it. Most casinos use customer cards you see - you earn bonus points for awards if you put your card in the reader of the slot machine while you play. That allows the the casino to track your slot machine spending. More importantly it allows you to create visualisations of slot activity broken down by demographics (of course they collect a few personal details when they assign you your awards card...) so that they can better direct promotions, reorganise the slots on the floor (knowing where to place a bank of new slot machines can be worth a few million dollars!) etc.
The big problem was that while you could track turnover volume on the gaming tables, you just couldn't track the movement of players very well - there was just no information on that. With this they can have you swipe your awards card when you collect your chips, then watch those chips disperse about the tables. More importantly they can track the ebb and flow - movement vectors for the chips about the floor - that can be very useful information.
This will be a huge boon to the casino industry, who are always lookign for that new way to fleece a few more dollars of the statistically ignorant.
So, yes, I can certainly see how a CEO is worth 2,000 workers. It is fairly simple. If a CEO has the vision (or maybe the celebrity status) to boost a company, he (or she) is just as valuable as any number of workers because that person is the life line of that company. Consider Apple and Steve Jobs: with the demise of Steve Jobs, how many Apple employees lost their jobs? And where was Apple the company going? How many stock holders lost money in Apple? Has any one Porgrammer had such an obvious effect on a company (in Apple or outside it)?
Quite possibly a programmer has made that big a difference - but that's not one we'd hear about, because they aren't that high profile - that is, there's not much publicity when Joe Programmer leaves a company (even if he is the head programmer for X new up and coming software). Find a high profile programmer, and ask what would happen if he left his job: How do you think id software would get on if John Carmack decided to leave?
There are very, very few people qualified to run major corporations, compared to the positions available. That's just an unpleasant fact. In IT, particularly after the job losses of recent years, the situation is more a buyer's market.
Depends on what you mean by "Qualified". There are probably plenty of people willing to take their best shot at the job for those sorts of pay rates. IT is fairly similar - plenty of people willing to do the job, not many good ones. IT, of course has MCSE which lets someone be "qualified" without necessarily knowing anything.
What we need is a nice piece of paper qualification that lets you be an exec, and all you have to do is sleep through a bunch of courses to get it... Oh, wait, that would be an MBA wouldn't it?
On the other hand, it's quite frequent, when using the GIMP, for me to inadvertently click on a program in the background, and have to manually re-raise each GIMP window. Additionally, the unnecessary window decorations (full titlebar, outline, etc) waste a great deal of screen real estate when applied to several windows of the same program.
That's the downside of GIMP for windows - which I presume is what you are using: it is designed for Linux, so doesn't work well with Windows slightly more spare window management facilities. With Gimp 1.x I just kept my palettes and toolbox in the same window group, so they all raised simultaneously. Should I have several images open and I somehow raise a window above them, "send to back" (opposite a window raise) does the job very nicely. Multiple desktops also make this sort of thing easier - I usually have all my GIMP windows layed out on one desktop and do other work on different desktops, so it is rare that I would have other windows interfering with my GIMP work.
On the other hand, to try and adress the growing market for Windows and Mac, they have made pretty much all the palettes etc. dockable in 2.0, and I hear Windows is getting multiple desktops soon (and at least has a powertoy to do it already), so some of your issues may be remedied.
The difference between PhotoShop and The Gimp is like the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice... If OO was 100% compatible with MS Office's filetypes. Namely: One is very expensive, the other is free.
There's not a lot you could do in Photoshop but not in the Gimp, OTOH, there's quite a lot you can do in The Gimp that you can't do in PhotoShop
Fairly good analogy actually. It does extend though - if you're a hard core professional user who uses every damn feature of Office/Photoshop regularly you may percieve the free option to be lacking afew vital things. 99% of people are not in the hard core professional user category of course.
And the Gimp doesn't quite fully support Photoshop files (or didn't, haven't tried the latest version), it still doesn't quite know what to do with adjustment layers from.psd files.
I saw a good point the other day that US export laws on cryptography were fairly stupid when you consider that other countries have the skills/intelligence to develop strong cryptography outside the US in the first place. For example, RSA was originally developed in the UK.
At GCHQ, where is was kept under lock and key, and no one knew about it until long after Rivest Adleman and Shamir had published their paper.
It is exactly this kind of vague assertion that I can't rationalize with my experience. For example, you say that "once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out," the desktop will be more on-par with others. But that was said when AbiWord was first under development. It was said again when evolution was in beta. Again when Gnome 2.0's HIG was first published. What line do we draw in the sand to say, "this is now a desktop"?
Well, there's two points on that one:
(1) It is a moving target that is trying to be hit. Is Linux desktop ready? Yes. Is Linux still playing a bit of catchup with other desktops out there? Yes. (2) Partly that's down to not being able to see past the biggest stumbling block. The biggest thing in the way of catching up is about to be knocked down - great, it will be ready then! Except there will be a new stumbling block - a smaller one, but definitely another.
What's more, what applications are you refering to, and what sort of work do you have in mind?
I was really thinking more of features than tools. Tools wise I prefer Linux - it has more different gadgets to do more different things. Features wise it has a few glitches. Copy and Paste is most often cited. I manage fine, but I do understand some of the complaints about copying and pasting, say, images, or spreadsheets cells or...
The biggest thing lacking at the moment though is no fault of GNOME or KDE, it's the apps that use them: The guts of the system is rapidly catching up, but it hasn't been in existence long enough for all the apps to use them fully and properly. There are still plenty of apps that (currently) still use GTK+ 1.2 (Evolution for instance), that don't take proper advantage of all the goodies GNOME or KDE offers (but instead just use the base toolkit) etc. That means that we don't have the nice clean slick uniformity os style, feel, and usability that one would ideally expect.
Of course, that's no nightmare, and it is coming. If you don't mind juggling between slightly different interaction styles then it's fine (and you will still have to do this on Windows to a much greater extent than some people make out!). For me Linux is a great a desktop.
In the end, Linux (and BSD and even MacOS) have a huge advantage for technical users (programmers, researchers, etc.) which is the command-line
I agree entirely - it's the reason I use Linux for my desktop. Several years ago when I was a researcher at a company that used Windows as their desktops I found myself loading up on cygwin to the hilt just to get anything useful done.
In the end, I'm not saying the Linux desktop is bad - just definitely not all that it could be, and that that is being worked on as we speak. It has definitely improved far faster than any of the competing desktops, so I'm sure it will finish the catch up soon (though I'm sure plenty of people will stay it is still behind - it's all perception and opinion anyway, right?). Personally I think the Linux desktop is very good, and use it exclusively because Windows and Mac don't offer me what I want in a desktop.
I have been using Linux as my exclusive desktop for the last 4 years, so I don't disagree that it is definitely very useable. I claim it's playing catchup because
(1) it definitely started out being behind. (2) the tools and features it lacks tend to be basic ones, while those it holds over the competition are innovative, but not core tools.
Which is not to say that it doesn't make a perfectly viable and useable desktop for a great many people. I gave my parents my old Linux box when I moved to Canada, and they're doing just fine (well, as fine as they ever did with windows).
For now though, it is still just behind the curve though. The gap has narrowed very quickly though. Once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out I think most of the bases will soon be covered.
Because people here are always complaining about how "bad" Windows is, yet cheer when one of its features is ripped off.
Yes. But then you must remember that they are idiots.
It makes the Linux GUI projects look like mere attempts to provide free versions of Windows-alikes rather than their own unique innovations on the desktop paradigm.
That's a little unfair. Certainly GNOME isn't looking like all that much of a Windows alike - only as much as MacOS X. Progress is a little uneven. There are some things that are pushing forward, and Windows will be borrowing. Other areas, such as the file selector have lagged shockingly behind, so Windows gets borrowed from. It's swings and round abouts. In the end the Linux desktop is still playing catchup though. It should be interesting where GNOME and KDE stand when Longhorn eventually comes out. We may be closer to a level playing field by then (because GNOME and KDE are catching up (and excelling past in some areas).
The again I think if you want real innovation you ought to look to fringe projects - GNOME and KDE are both, largely, steady as she goes deals. It's the small projects that often pioneer interesting new ideas that eventually make their way into the larger projects. I'm still waiting for tabbed windows (originally in PWM, but most famous in Fluxbox)to become standard in both GNOME and KDE. I'm also hoping they'll stop rewriting the base libraries for Enlightenment and get around to working on the desktop - Enlightenment used to harbour some of the more creative and original ideas.
Especially since it's more ripping-off of Windows XP, when meanwhile the community claims to despise Windows.
It does bear a lot of resemblance to Windows yes. And the KDE select dialog (which bears a lot of resemblance to Windows, yet again). It also bears some resemblance to the MacOS X file selector.
As far as copying ideas - given the state of the current GTK file selector, they had a LOT of catching up to do, so it's inevitable that they'll just copy the current modern file selectors to get up to speed. Windows has a pretty good file selector - it occasionally changes from app to app, and the bare bones file selector from Win2k era used by some apps was pretty poor, but in general, and especially by XP they have it down fairly well. Why not use some of the good ideas?
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Ideally all of those icons are completely configureable (and easily). If that is the case, then you simply set whichever icons you want to use instead of the stock GNOME ones. There were always going to be a few complications for using GTK apps in a non-GNOME environment, but ideally it should be a quick and easy configure away.
You have to click and click to get to any file. shell-like tab completion might be useful(?)
You are aware that the current old GTK file selector allows tab completion adn wildcards in the entry widget? Perhaps you're just trolling. If not, I assure you it works - I hardly ever bother to click any mouse buttons on the current GTK file selector.
I love osnews little version, with all the directories in the path displayed at the top, the idea being you could click on them to go back to that directory.
It's a terrible idea, and, to be honest, typical of Eugenia's design style: Think of something cute, but don't bother to think it through. What happens when your path is very very long? Do you have lots of buttons? Do you stretch the window, or squeeze the buttons so they're unreadable? How is it an improvement over the standard option menu widget for dropping back directories that's even in the current GNOME file select dialog? The option menu scheme, as used in Tigert's mockup is slimmer, and provides identical functionality.
And what's with the weird layout on Eugenia's design?
I do like the drag and drop to add new shortcuts though.
I must say though, that for someone who bitches about bad GUI design all the time Eugenia produces some pretty shocking stuff herself.
You fanboys just dont get it. 32 bit vs 64 bit has nothing to do with speed. The 32 bit mode that Mathematica runs in is not the "slower" mode. All of the performance increases in Athlon64 are due to architectural enhancements that are completely independant of the size of the registers...
disclaimer: I am no expert on CPU stuff, I just do a lot of math computations.
If he's actually doing any serious work in Mathematica then 64 bit does start to matter. High powered math is one of the areas where having 64 bit word sizes can make a significant difference. Of course, that's not making much difference in terms of speed, but rather precision (unless of course you're having to do lots of nasty juggling in 32bit mode to handle the required precision).
Now they'll have to "monetize" the search service. Then the pay for ranking results move up and webmasters start blocking the crawler because they charge. And it goes to shit.
I gather Google does quite well with it's present money making schemes: text ads, and licensing the search technology. They aren't exactly printing money, but they are comfortably in the black from what I hear. As long as it only stays at 1/3 of stock sold and the current people remain in control, I very much doubt Google will have to monetize anything.
Even at the possible 7% mentioned, I'm sure it wouldn't take long to make a lot of money considering how ridiculously well-established google is in so many homes and businesses. One wonders how inflated they could wind up looking though. Could the google stigma raise their own market value above what it will be able to maintain? I guess this is why they're selling that 33% and not 49.
Unfortunately high usage does not immediately equte to high revenue. Not that Google is doing badly - I expect they do quite well with the text ads and licesing the search technology, but neither of those represent massive revenue generators. What Google hopefully gains from its ubiquity is stability - hopefully we can expect it to be solid, and around for sometime.
Well, we hope we an - there are always plenty of new search engines in the wings (though the ones posted today certainly both sucked).
Google will cease to be of any use once they have to satisfy a bunch of share-holder's demands.
They are only selling 1/3 of the stock, which means they will be maintianing full control themselves. I think we have much more to worry about from all the people trying to spam googles page ranking system. And even then, they seem to be making some progress with that.
For those of you wondering where Transmeta can be found (like I was), Here's a list of laptops
I thought it was interesting to note that most of the models of laptop linked to there are Japanese models. It seems the Japanese have embraced Transmeta, while the US is still "Intel inside" obsessed.
I imagine stores that show computers like this have had to deal with their fair share of people trying to break the system.
A local chain of cheap electronics stores in NZ were selling machines preinstalled with Linux. They left display models running on the shop floor. I must say, bringing up a terminal and running history showed some interesting goings on. The eventually left the machines unplugged so no one could mess with them.
Could someone please mod the parent as overrated or troll, rather than insightful! 2048 bit RSA, El Gamal, or Public Key Algorithm of choice is not in any way vulnerable to being brute forced any time in the near future. The most vulnerable is probably RSA which some research is showing MIGHT be THEORETICALLY be breakable (by some more cunning factoring algorithms and a lot of custom silicon) at 1024 if you're willing to spend a small fortune. But even that's not BRUTE FORCING.
That part is just eerie. Even the UN thought there was a really good chance *something* was going on, which is why they passed all those resolutions. Am I to believe that the Iraqi regime had destroyed the weapons all along, yet was willing to be destroyed rather than allow the UN to verify it?
I think, in the end, the weapon inspector hassles were largely attempted gamesmanship on Hussein's part. At the very least he wanted his immediate neighbours to be worried that he might have something. Yeah, stupid, but quite likely given his style.
As to the rest - mostly fair. I think, in the end, we agree far more than we disagree. My issues with the Iraq invasion are not so much that it was done, but how it was done: a lot of media hype and propaganda followed by some unilateral action. It was mostly the "We must attack now, now, NOW!" approach that concerns me. It was good to liberate the country - it would have been far better to have done so in a careful controlled manner with full international support and a better organised plan for the end of hostilities. There was a big rush to attack, and that meant forgoing a careful, multilateral action. The rush was founded on WMD, which looks very dubious now.
Thanks for some intelligent discussion (on slashdot even!)
Yeah, but 90% of the expense is getting into LEO. Besides, the X prize doesn't even get you that far, just 100km up - the boundary of space. Once basic cheap launch technology is in place though, the rest can be developed fairly quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and to all of you who say "Watch how high the price of Windows goes for HP", Microsoft won't dare do anything of the sort. Having both IBM and HP actively looking to
It also becomes harder and harder for Microsoft as Linux desktops become more and more viable. It's getting close to the point where threats of exorbitant pricing of Windows to OEMs will be met with "Oh, okay then, we'll just pre-install with Linux instead..."
Given the trouble MS have gone to to stop various governments going the open source road (massive discounts and all) how long before OEMs realise all they have to do is threaten to go with an open source desktop to make MS very very nervous?
In the meantime, what MS is equally frightened of is the mindshare than Apple has been getting. Sure, they still own a very small percent of the desktop market, but they have become more and more visible. The dominance of the iPod and iTunes, and the success of iTMS has only served to make them even more visible. And MS knows very well that once they lose real mindshare the Windows Hegemony will crumble.
We're not facing a complete collapse of MS here, but you could see a serious change in the market share when people start getting around to upgrading and decide to try these Apple machines they've been hearing about - especially if Longhorn hasn't hit by then. A lot of those people who bought a PC in the mid to late 90's to get in on this "internet" thing are going to be looking at upgrading in the next few years. That's what MS is worried about.
Jedidiah.
Organisation conducting experiments into reaching other worlds; experiment goes wrong; creatures and entities from other world start appearing.
I'm sure I saw a ginger haired guy with glasses near that reactor... hmmm
Well, that was the exact plot for Doom 1, so, um really...Jedidiah
This most likely will happen.
I used to work doing data visualisation for casinos - nice pretty visualisations showing slot machine usage. It was a huge hit with the casinos that used it. Most casinos use customer cards you see - you earn bonus points for awards if you put your card in the reader of the slot machine while you play. That allows the the casino to track your slot machine spending. More importantly it allows you to create visualisations of slot activity broken down by demographics (of course they collect a few personal details when they assign you your awards card...) so that they can better direct promotions, reorganise the slots on the floor (knowing where to place a bank of new slot machines can be worth a few million dollars!) etc.
The big problem was that while you could track turnover volume on the gaming tables, you just couldn't track the movement of players very well - there was just no information on that. With this they can have you swipe your awards card when you collect your chips, then watch those chips disperse about the tables. More importantly they can track the ebb and flow - movement vectors for the chips about the floor - that can be very useful information.
This will be a huge boon to the casino industry, who are always lookign for that new way to fleece a few more dollars of the statistically ignorant.
Jedidiah.
Well, running python etc. under cygwin is rather like compiling and running VC++ code under wine really - so why not do that?
Jedidiah.
So, yes, I can certainly see how a CEO is worth 2,000 workers. It is fairly simple. If a CEO has the vision (or maybe the celebrity status) to boost a company, he (or she) is just as valuable as any number of workers because that person is the life line of that company. Consider Apple and Steve Jobs: with the demise of Steve Jobs, how many Apple employees lost their jobs? And where was Apple the company going? How many stock holders lost money in Apple? Has any one Porgrammer had such an obvious effect on a company (in Apple or outside it)?
Quite possibly a programmer has made that big a difference - but that's not one we'd hear about, because they aren't that high profile - that is, there's not much publicity when Joe Programmer leaves a company (even if he is the head programmer for X new up and coming software). Find a high profile programmer, and ask what would happen if he left his job: How do you think id software would get on if John Carmack decided to leave?
Jedidiah
There are very, very few people qualified to run major corporations, compared to the positions available. That's just an unpleasant fact. In IT, particularly after the job losses of recent years, the situation is more a buyer's market.
Depends on what you mean by "Qualified". There are probably plenty of people willing to take their best shot at the job for those sorts of pay rates. IT is fairly similar - plenty of people willing to do the job, not many good ones. IT, of course has MCSE which lets someone be "qualified" without necessarily knowing anything.
What we need is a nice piece of paper qualification that lets you be an exec, and all you have to do is sleep through a bunch of courses to get it... Oh, wait, that would be an MBA wouldn't it?
Jedidiah.
On the other hand, it's quite frequent, when using the GIMP, for me to inadvertently click on a program in the background, and have to manually re-raise each GIMP window. Additionally, the unnecessary window decorations (full titlebar, outline, etc) waste a great deal of screen real estate when applied to several windows of the same program.
That's the downside of GIMP for windows - which I presume is what you are using: it is designed for Linux, so doesn't work well with Windows slightly more spare window management facilities. With Gimp 1.x I just kept my palettes and toolbox in the same window group, so they all raised simultaneously. Should I have several images open and I somehow raise a window above them, "send to back" (opposite a window raise) does the job very nicely. Multiple desktops also make this sort of thing easier - I usually have all my GIMP windows layed out on one desktop and do other work on different desktops, so it is rare that I would have other windows interfering with my GIMP work.
On the other hand, to try and adress the growing market for Windows and Mac, they have made pretty much all the palettes etc. dockable in 2.0, and I hear Windows is getting multiple desktops soon (and at least has a powertoy to do it already), so some of your issues may be remedied.
Jedidiah.
The difference between PhotoShop and The Gimp is like the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice... If OO was 100% compatible with MS Office's filetypes. Namely: One is very expensive, the other is free.
.psd files.
There's not a lot you could do in Photoshop but not in the Gimp, OTOH, there's quite a lot you can do in The Gimp that you can't do in PhotoShop
Fairly good analogy actually. It does extend though - if you're a hard core professional user who uses every damn feature of Office/Photoshop regularly you may percieve the free option to be lacking afew vital things. 99% of people are not in the hard core professional user category of course.
And the Gimp doesn't quite fully support Photoshop files (or didn't, haven't tried the latest version), it still doesn't quite know what to do with adjustment layers from
Jedidiah.
I saw a good point the other day that US export laws on cryptography were fairly stupid when you consider that other countries have the skills/intelligence to develop strong cryptography outside the US in the first place. For example, RSA was originally developed in the UK.
At GCHQ, where is was kept under lock and key, and no one knew about it until long after Rivest Adleman and Shamir had published their paper.
Jedidiah
It is exactly this kind of vague assertion that I can't rationalize with my experience. For example, you say that "once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out," the desktop will be more on-par with others. But that was said when AbiWord was first under development. It was said again when evolution was in beta. Again when Gnome 2.0's HIG was first published. What line do we draw in the sand to say, "this is now a desktop"?
Well, there's two points on that one:
(1) It is a moving target that is trying to be hit. Is Linux desktop ready? Yes. Is Linux still playing a bit of catchup with other desktops out there? Yes.
(2) Partly that's down to not being able to see past the biggest stumbling block. The biggest thing in the way of catching up is about to be knocked down - great, it will be ready then! Except there will be a new stumbling block - a smaller one, but definitely another.
What's more, what applications are you refering to, and what sort of work do you have in mind?
I was really thinking more of features than tools. Tools wise I prefer Linux - it has more different gadgets to do more different things. Features wise it has a few glitches. Copy and Paste is most often cited. I manage fine, but I do understand some of the complaints about copying and pasting, say, images, or spreadsheets cells or...
The biggest thing lacking at the moment though is no fault of GNOME or KDE, it's the apps that use them: The guts of the system is rapidly catching up, but it hasn't been in existence long enough for all the apps to use them fully and properly. There are still plenty of apps that (currently) still use GTK+ 1.2 (Evolution for instance), that don't take proper advantage of all the goodies GNOME or KDE offers (but instead just use the base toolkit) etc. That means that we don't have the nice clean slick uniformity os style, feel, and usability that one would ideally expect.
Of course, that's no nightmare, and it is coming. If you don't mind juggling between slightly different interaction styles then it's fine (and you will still have to do this on Windows to a much greater extent than some people make out!). For me Linux is a great a desktop.
In the end, Linux (and BSD and even MacOS) have a huge advantage for technical users (programmers, researchers, etc.) which is the command-line
I agree entirely - it's the reason I use Linux for my desktop. Several years ago when I was a researcher at a company that used Windows as their desktops I found myself loading up on cygwin to the hilt just to get anything useful done.
In the end, I'm not saying the Linux desktop is bad - just definitely not all that it could be, and that that is being worked on as we speak. It has definitely improved far faster than any of the competing desktops, so I'm sure it will finish the catch up soon (though I'm sure plenty of people will stay it is still behind - it's all perception and opinion anyway, right?). Personally I think the Linux desktop is very good, and use it exclusively because Windows and Mac don't offer me what I want in a desktop.
By the way, nice photos on your website.
Jedidiah.
I have been using Linux as my exclusive desktop for the last 4 years, so I don't disagree that it is definitely very useable. I claim it's playing catchup because
(1) it definitely started out being behind.
(2) the tools and features it lacks tend to be basic ones, while those it holds over the competition are innovative, but not core tools.
Which is not to say that it doesn't make a perfectly viable and useable desktop for a great many people. I gave my parents my old Linux box when I moved to Canada, and they're doing just fine (well, as fine as they ever did with windows).
For now though, it is still just behind the curve though. The gap has narrowed very quickly though. Once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out I think most of the bases will soon be covered.
Jedidiah.
Because people here are always complaining about how "bad" Windows is, yet cheer when one of its features is ripped off.
Yes. But then you must remember that they are idiots.
It makes the Linux GUI projects look like mere attempts to provide free versions of Windows-alikes rather than their own unique innovations on the desktop paradigm.
That's a little unfair. Certainly GNOME isn't looking like all that much of a Windows alike - only as much as MacOS X. Progress is a little uneven. There are some things that are pushing forward, and Windows will be borrowing. Other areas, such as the file selector have lagged shockingly behind, so Windows gets borrowed from. It's swings and round abouts. In the end the Linux desktop is still playing catchup though. It should be interesting where GNOME and KDE stand when Longhorn eventually comes out. We may be closer to a level playing field by then (because GNOME and KDE are catching up (and excelling past in some areas).
The again I think if you want real innovation you ought to look to fringe projects - GNOME and KDE are both, largely, steady as she goes deals. It's the small projects that often pioneer interesting new ideas that eventually make their way into the larger projects. I'm still waiting for tabbed windows (originally in PWM, but most famous in Fluxbox)to become standard in both GNOME and KDE. I'm also hoping they'll stop rewriting the base libraries for Enlightenment and get around to working on the desktop - Enlightenment used to harbour some of the more creative and original ideas.
Jedidiah.
Especially since it's more ripping-off of Windows XP, when meanwhile the community claims to despise Windows.
It does bear a lot of resemblance to Windows yes. And the KDE select dialog (which bears a lot of resemblance to Windows, yet again). It also bears some resemblance to the MacOS X file selector.
As far as copying ideas - given the state of the current GTK file selector, they had a LOT of catching up to do, so it's inevitable that they'll just copy the current modern file selectors to get up to speed. Windows has a pretty good file selector - it occasionally changes from app to app, and the bare bones file selector from Win2k era used by some apps was pretty poor, but in general, and especially by XP they have it down fairly well. Why not use some of the good ideas?
Jedidiah.
The problem with those mockups is that they seem specificaly tailord to GNOME. Ie it uses icons for HOME, Desktop, Most recent files etc but all of these are classic things that are integrated within gnome and no use to someone that uses blackbox or other light window managers as they're primary window manager.
Ideally all of those icons are completely configureable (and easily). If that is the case, then you simply set whichever icons you want to use instead of the stock GNOME ones. There were always going to be a few complications for using GTK apps in a non-GNOME environment, but ideally it should be a quick and easy configure away.
Jedidiah
You have to click and click to get to any file.
shell-like tab completion might be useful(?)
You are aware that the current old GTK file selector allows tab completion adn wildcards in the entry widget? Perhaps you're just trolling. If not, I assure you it works - I hardly ever bother to click any mouse buttons on the current GTK file selector.
Jedidiah
I love osnews little version, with all the directories in the path displayed at the top, the idea being you could click on them to go back to that directory.
It's a terrible idea, and, to be honest, typical of Eugenia's design style: Think of something cute, but don't bother to think it through. What happens when your path is very very long? Do you have lots of buttons? Do you stretch the window, or squeeze the buttons so they're unreadable? How is it an improvement over the standard option menu widget for dropping back directories that's even in the current GNOME file select dialog? The option menu scheme, as used in Tigert's mockup is slimmer, and provides identical functionality.
And what's with the weird layout on Eugenia's design?
I do like the drag and drop to add new shortcuts though.
I must say though, that for someone who bitches about bad GUI design all the time Eugenia produces some pretty shocking stuff herself.
Jedidiah
You fanboys just dont get it. 32 bit vs 64 bit has nothing to do with speed. The 32 bit mode that Mathematica runs in is not the "slower" mode. All of the performance increases in Athlon64 are due to architectural enhancements that are completely independant of the size of the registers...
disclaimer: I am no expert on CPU stuff, I just do a lot of math computations.
If he's actually doing any serious work in Mathematica then 64 bit does start to matter. High powered math is one of the areas where having 64 bit word sizes can make a significant difference. Of course, that's not making much difference in terms of speed, but rather precision (unless of course you're having to do lots of nasty juggling in 32bit mode to handle the required precision).
Jedidiah
Now they'll have to "monetize" the search service. Then the pay for ranking results move up and webmasters start blocking the crawler because they charge. And it goes to shit.
I gather Google does quite well with it's present money making schemes: text ads, and licensing the search technology. They aren't exactly printing money, but they are comfortably in the black from what I hear. As long as it only stays at 1/3 of stock sold and the current people remain in control, I very much doubt Google will have to monetize anything.
Jedidiah
Even at the possible 7% mentioned, I'm sure it wouldn't take long to make a lot of money considering how ridiculously well-established google is in so many homes and businesses. One wonders how inflated they could wind up looking though. Could the google stigma raise their own market value above what it will be able to maintain? I guess this is why they're selling that 33% and not 49.
Unfortunately high usage does not immediately equte to high revenue. Not that Google is doing badly - I expect they do quite well with the text ads and licesing the search technology, but neither of those represent massive revenue generators. What Google hopefully gains from its ubiquity is stability - hopefully we can expect it to be solid, and around for sometime.
Well, we hope we an - there are always plenty of new search engines in the wings (though the ones posted today certainly both sucked).
Jedidiah.
Google will cease to be of any use once they have to satisfy a bunch of share-holder's demands.
They are only selling 1/3 of the stock, which means they will be maintianing full control themselves. I think we have much more to worry about from all the people trying to spam googles page ranking system. And even then, they seem to be making some progress with that.
Jedidiah.
For those of you wondering where Transmeta can be found (like I was), Here's a list of laptops
I thought it was interesting to note that most of the models of laptop linked to there are Japanese models. It seems the Japanese have embraced Transmeta, while the US is still "Intel inside" obsessed.
Jedidiah
I imagine stores that show computers like this have had to deal with their fair share of people trying to break the system.
A local chain of cheap electronics stores in NZ were selling machines preinstalled with Linux. They left display models running on the shop floor. I must say, bringing up a terminal and running history showed some interesting goings on. The eventually left the machines unplugged so no one could mess with them.
Jedidiah.
Could someone please mod the parent as overrated or troll, rather than insightful! 2048 bit RSA, El Gamal, or Public Key Algorithm of choice is not in any way vulnerable to being brute forced any time in the near future. The most vulnerable is probably RSA which some research is showing MIGHT be THEORETICALLY be breakable (by some more cunning factoring algorithms and a lot of custom silicon) at 1024 if you're willing to spend a small fortune. But even that's not BRUTE FORCING.
Jedidiah
That part is just eerie. Even the UN thought there was a really good chance *something* was going on, which is why they passed all those resolutions. Am I to believe that the Iraqi regime had destroyed the weapons all along, yet was willing to be destroyed rather than allow the UN to verify it?
I think, in the end, the weapon inspector hassles were largely attempted gamesmanship on Hussein's part. At the very least he wanted his immediate neighbours to be worried that he might have something. Yeah, stupid, but quite likely given his style.
As to the rest - mostly fair. I think, in the end, we agree far more than we disagree. My issues with the Iraq invasion are not so much that it was done, but how it was done: a lot of media hype and propaganda followed by some unilateral action. It was mostly the "We must attack now, now, NOW!" approach that concerns me. It was good to liberate the country - it would have been far better to have done so in a careful controlled manner with full international support and a better organised plan for the end of hostilities. There was a big rush to attack, and that meant forgoing a careful, multilateral action. The rush was founded on WMD, which looks very dubious now.
Thanks for some intelligent discussion (on slashdot even!)
Jedidiah.
Yeah, but 90% of the expense is getting into LEO. Besides, the X prize doesn't even get you that far, just 100km up - the boundary of space. Once basic cheap launch technology is in place though, the rest can be developed fairly quickly.
Jedidiah