Bad analogy. You are not seeing a replay of Wintel vs. Unix. That was never, ever a real competition and was over before it started because AT&T wanted too much in royalties for Unix to compete with lower cost operating systems. The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr, Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before.
Microsoft's genius with Windows was to marshal hardware manufacturing capacity and force price competition to lower the cost of hardware. Companies like Chips & Technologies, Intel, AMD and others provided reference designs to lower R&D costs and sell their chipsets and microprocessors. MS provided the operating system that made everything work. The chip makers got orders, and MS got installs. The result was that competing manufacturers who were not using Windows + Intel had much higher R&D costs and could not compete on price, or availability. Those competitors ranged from Apple, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, Commodore, Apollo (who became HP's Unix division), to Sun. Anyone who didn't have a Wintel box had to build or license their own OS, and would have to compete with a slightly inferior competitor (well, in some cases, very inferior) that generally delivered a better price:performance ratio. Who needs a Silicon Graphics workstation when a PC with a Targa card could (almost, kinda) do the same thing for 1/2 the price? Why buy a $4,500 Mac II when a $2,000 PC can run PageMaker?
Google and chip suppliers are executing the exact same strategy against Apple - chip manufacturers provide reference designs to phone manufacturers who extend reference designs to better compete. Android makes it all work. The Wintel / Qualdroid (Qualcomm/Android) strategy is a very effective way to rapidly increase market share and scale a market at the same time. It also guarantees all the other players niche status when all the shouting is over. As soon a cell carriers figure out that they are locking themselves out of revenue by not letting users have more control of their phones, the fragmentation problem will go away as users remove the crappy stuff they don't want, and install the stuff they do... just like they do when they take a freemium infested PC home from Best Buy.
If you are creating an operating system that can be extended to support new devices with different hardware, it is a given that fragmentation will occur. In the end, fragmentation abates as hardware manufacturers start seeing software publishers ignore devices because of compatibility. This process is not working well with cell phones because of the 1 and 2 year contract models the carriers use to sell phones. People often don't know the device they are buying has issues or isn't going to get any software maintenance or upgrades until after the return period expires on their smartphone purchase, so they have to wait until the contract is up.
Delicious had great tools for sharing bookmarks with friends. A couple of years ago I started a blogging agency and we used Del.icio.us as a database of source links. It was great because as we saved links, we could notify our writers. If Yahoo really closes it, it will be a tragedy.
Call me slow today, but Jimbo Wales is the same guy started/ran the old Bomis.com site... As I recall it was mostly populated by webrings devoted to mostly... ah... artistic photographic content (and I use artistic in the most base sense). Funny to see such a great thing as Wikipedia come from such a sordid background. I guess porn does drive innovation.
It's all about pageviews, and not about the "slant," The bublegum machine comes out for more outrageous or controversial articles. Drudge never has been about the content of the story, only the magnitude of the story. It's too bad that the left hates him for breaking a story about a blue dress and a semen stain.
Actually, it's hard for Drudge to spin anything: he simply breaks headlines, and does so way before the traditional media plods along on a story. If Drudge has any slant at all, it's simply biased to controversy.
I sometimes think the US should give up control of the DNS root, but then I think about who might end up with control... and conclude the US isn't that bad, and really has done a very good job for a very long time.
The only person who can answer your question is the prosecuting attorney for the action against torrent-finder.com. I certainly can't. I think it's likely an overreach.
I believe it's in section 506 that criminal infringement is outlined. There is no civil suit requirement, and as in any criminal investigation, the government can seize evidence and the means used to commit the crime. In this case, it looks like the only one of the sites seized that may be problematic is torrent-finder.com.
As with most crimes in progress, the law allows the police to take action to stop the crime and seize the evidence. The disposition of the evidence and means of committing the crime will be dealt with as part of whatever trial is coming.
In this case, it looks like a ICE took down a bunch of sellers of counterfeit goods and may have overreached on the torrent site. That said, we'll all soon learn what the relationship of torrent-finder.com is to the rest of the seized domains.
Q:... then why so few distro's use it as their default DE? A: Because there was a time, 10 years ago when Gnome was created to address a licensing problem with the library that powers KDE called QT. Gnome was built using GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit), which was GPL. KDE's QT was under a permissive commercial license that was not 100% GPL compatible. So most distributions that cared about free went the Gnome route, despite it consistently lacking features vs. KDE. At this point, KDE's QT is GPL licensed, and has been for some time and KDE has advanced significantly in capability over the past two years to the point that it's really not even close, so far as features, flexibility and technology under the hood go.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5. So far as performance goes, if your GPUs drivers are decent, KDE4 will run rings around Gnome (especially if you turn on OpenGL rendering for QT which effectively uses your GPU for rendering everything).
Really when it comes down to it, it's GREAT that there is a choice for users between KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Evolution and GNUstep. Giving users a real choice in how they interact with their computer is a really good thing because new and better ideas come from competition and exchange of ideas. It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war, because the holy part of the war died when QT was released under the GPL.
1. Akonadi - makes sense now that most people have big address books, have to sync calendar & contact data with multiple cloud based services and have multiple email addresses. The idea is much like an SQL server: let MySQL do the storage and retrieval work, and let the client application focus on logic. It's a great idea, but it's taken some time to get the implementation right. One of the real reasons that there are only a few viable desktop PIM applications is that you have an amazing amount of code to maintain to store and retrieve data. The Akonadi model will really pay off as developers start using it to integrate PIM data into their applications. 2. All the stuff running in the background: check the service manager in system settings. Now, if we could only get the program name reported to ps to be the same as the clear, easy to understand description in the service manager. 3. Well... there's AmaroK, BasKet, Okular and many others that don't start with K. It is actually nice though to be able to quickly see what is KDE and what isn't by the file name. 4. The recent two releases have really cleaned up a lot of the nagging problems KDE has had since the 4.0 change. The desktop is rock solid now.
You have to be kidding about configurability and themes, though. Even our desktop themes (see QTCurve & Bespin) and window decoration themes (see DeKorator & Arorae) have themes.
First, I'm sorry you were modded a troll. You are not. The fact you think this is about downloading porn illustrates how complete the net neutrality people's failure is.
The issue isn't about personal bandwidth or degrading p2p file sharers at all. It's actually about preventing the Internet being turned into cable TV, where your $35/month plan comes with access to certain websites and services, and where many services simply are not available without paying more (want Skype instead of Comcast voice? That will cost you). This really is about your freedom... and it's not about some technical networking mumbo-jumbo.
If you have to pay every ISP access fees to get your new, cool website on their walled off Internet, we'll never see the blistering pace of innovation we see today, and your opportunity to create something and make money will be severely limited.
We don't want no government controlling MY internet.
This is correct.
The problem is that the people running the pro net-neutrality campaign are incredibly incompetent. Americans don't like big corporations controlling things either. Basically, Americans don't like anyone controlling anything. Unless it's them.
The basic problem with the net neutrality battle is that it is called "net neutrality". The average American hears this when you say net neutrality:
net = COMPLICATED COMPUTER THINGY neutrality = Switzerland
So it's no surprise at all that people don't care, and the Republicans don't get it. Want to change the game? Make this all about Online Freedom and make the story how greedy carriers want to take away freedom / violate my rights. It's about explaining how carriers want to LIMIT WHERE YOU CAN GO, CHARGE YOU FOR ACCESS TO THINGS YOU HAVE NOW, AND TAKE AWAY YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO DO BUSINESS ONLINE.
People aren't that stupid, but they are not that well educated. If you make your case using language that the average Wal*Mart consumer can understand, you can get anything you want out of Washington because those are the people that change their minds in elections and cause congresspeople to lose their jobs as they did yesterday. Nine out of ten times when you see voters support something that is bad for them, it's because one side used language like "net neutrality" to sell their side of the story.
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Bad analogy. You are not seeing a replay of Wintel vs. Unix. That was never, ever a real competition and was over before it started because AT&T wanted too much in royalties for Unix to compete with lower cost operating systems. The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr, Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before.
Microsoft's genius with Windows was to marshal hardware manufacturing capacity and force price competition to lower the cost of hardware. Companies like Chips & Technologies, Intel, AMD and others provided reference designs to lower R&D costs and sell their chipsets and microprocessors. MS provided the operating system that made everything work. The chip makers got orders, and MS got installs. The result was that competing manufacturers who were not using Windows + Intel had much higher R&D costs and could not compete on price, or availability. Those competitors ranged from Apple, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, Commodore, Apollo (who became HP's Unix division), to Sun. Anyone who didn't have a Wintel box had to build or license their own OS, and would have to compete with a slightly inferior competitor (well, in some cases, very inferior) that generally delivered a better price:performance ratio. Who needs a Silicon Graphics workstation when a PC with a Targa card could (almost, kinda) do the same thing for 1/2 the price? Why buy a $4,500 Mac II when a $2,000 PC can run PageMaker?
Google and chip suppliers are executing the exact same strategy against Apple - chip manufacturers provide reference designs to phone manufacturers who extend reference designs to better compete. Android makes it all work. The Wintel / Qualdroid (Qualcomm/Android) strategy is a very effective way to rapidly increase market share and scale a market at the same time. It also guarantees all the other players niche status when all the shouting is over. As soon a cell carriers figure out that they are locking themselves out of revenue by not letting users have more control of their phones, the fragmentation problem will go away as users remove the crappy stuff they don't want, and install the stuff they do... just like they do when they take a freemium infested PC home from Best Buy.
If you are creating an operating system that can be extended to support new devices with different hardware, it is a given that fragmentation will occur. In the end, fragmentation abates as hardware manufacturers start seeing software publishers ignore devices because of compatibility. This process is not working well with cell phones because of the 1 and 2 year contract models the carriers use to sell phones. People often don't know the device they are buying has issues or isn't going to get any software maintenance or upgrades until after the return period expires on their smartphone purchase, so they have to wait until the contract is up.
Don't worry, the IRS is in charge so everything will work out just fine.
I would prefer something that does *not* require a toolbar... er... spybar, thank you.
Hell, I'd pay five bucks a year for a subscription
This. Del.icio.us was always a product that was good enough that they could have charged for it.
That is why there is metamoderation, where the moderators are moderated. The question is who moderates the metamoderators.
Delicious had great tools for sharing bookmarks with friends. A couple of years ago I started a blogging agency and we used Del.icio.us as a database of source links. It was great because as we saved links, we could notify our writers. If Yahoo really closes it, it will be a tragedy.
Call me slow today, but Jimbo Wales is the same guy started/ran the old Bomis.com site... As I recall it was mostly populated by webrings devoted to mostly... ah... artistic photographic content (and I use artistic in the most base sense). Funny to see such a great thing as Wikipedia come from such a sordid background. I guess porn does drive innovation.
It's all about pageviews, and not about the "slant," The bublegum machine comes out for more outrageous or controversial articles. Drudge never has been about the content of the story, only the magnitude of the story. It's too bad that the left hates him for breaking a story about a blue dress and a semen stain.
Actually, it's hard for Drudge to spin anything: he simply breaks headlines, and does so way before the traditional media plods along on a story. If Drudge has any slant at all, it's simply biased to controversy.
I'd rather feed hungry people right now.
To be fair to the KDE dev team, they did warn everyone all over the place - it's just that many chose to ignore the warnings.
False. Section 506 of the Copyright Law defines criminal infringement, and it is very much a federal crime.
So, if one isn't innocent, they are handcrafted, soft and cuddly?
I sometimes think the US should give up control of the DNS root, but then I think about who might end up with control... and conclude the US isn't that bad, and really has done a very good job for a very long time.
The only person who can answer your question is the prosecuting attorney for the action against torrent-finder.com. I certainly can't. I think it's likely an overreach.
Some people have a problem with form and function. If something works, but does not work as they would like, they get a tad grumpy.
I believe it's in section 506 that criminal infringement is outlined. There is no civil suit requirement, and as in any criminal investigation, the government can seize evidence and the means used to commit the crime. In this case, it looks like the only one of the sites seized that may be problematic is torrent-finder.com.
As with most crimes in progress, the law allows the police to take action to stop the crime and seize the evidence. The disposition of the evidence and means of committing the crime will be dealt with as part of whatever trial is coming.
In this case, it looks like a ICE took down a bunch of sellers of counterfeit goods and may have overreached on the torrent site. That said, we'll all soon learn what the relationship of torrent-finder.com is to the rest of the seized domains.
Q: ... then why so few distro's use it as their default DE?
A: Because there was a time, 10 years ago when Gnome was created to address a licensing problem with the library that powers KDE called QT. Gnome was built using GTK (the Gimp Tool Kit), which was GPL. KDE's QT was under a permissive commercial license that was not 100% GPL compatible. So most distributions that cared about free went the Gnome route, despite it consistently lacking features vs. KDE. At this point, KDE's QT is GPL licensed, and has been for some time and KDE has advanced significantly in capability over the past two years to the point that it's really not even close, so far as features, flexibility and technology under the hood go.
Most user complaints stem from people who used a development release (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) of KDE 4 and thought it would measure up to a stable release (3.5). This was made worse by Ubuntu and other distributions removing KDE 3.5 around 4.1 and 4.2 being released, meaning there was no real stable KDE release for about a year. Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5. So far as performance goes, if your GPUs drivers are decent, KDE4 will run rings around Gnome (especially if you turn on OpenGL rendering for QT which effectively uses your GPU for rendering everything).
Really when it comes down to it, it's GREAT that there is a choice for users between KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Evolution and GNUstep. Giving users a real choice in how they interact with their computer is a really good thing because new and better ideas come from competition and exchange of ideas. It's unfortunate that people view the whole KDE vs. Gnome thing as some kid of holy war, because the holy part of the war died when QT was released under the GPL.
Here's what's going on:
1. Akonadi - makes sense now that most people have big address books, have to sync calendar & contact data with multiple cloud based services and have multiple email addresses. The idea is much like an SQL server: let MySQL do the storage and retrieval work, and let the client application focus on logic. It's a great idea, but it's taken some time to get the implementation right. One of the real reasons that there are only a few viable desktop PIM applications is that you have an amazing amount of code to maintain to store and retrieve data. The Akonadi model will really pay off as developers start using it to integrate PIM data into their applications.
2. All the stuff running in the background: check the service manager in system settings. Now, if we could only get the program name reported to ps to be the same as the clear, easy to understand description in the service manager.
3. Well... there's AmaroK, BasKet, Okular and many others that don't start with K. It is actually nice though to be able to quickly see what is KDE and what isn't by the file name.
4. The recent two releases have really cleaned up a lot of the nagging problems KDE has had since the 4.0 change. The desktop is rock solid now.
You have to be kidding about configurability and themes, though. Even our desktop themes (see QTCurve & Bespin) and window decoration themes (see DeKorator & Arorae) have themes.
That's already happened... and the Striesand effect seems to be quite the deterrent.
First, I'm sorry you were modded a troll. You are not. The fact you think this is about downloading porn illustrates how complete the net neutrality people's failure is.
The issue isn't about personal bandwidth or degrading p2p file sharers at all. It's actually about preventing the Internet being turned into cable TV, where your $35/month plan comes with access to certain websites and services, and where many services simply are not available without paying more (want Skype instead of Comcast voice? That will cost you). This really is about your freedom... and it's not about some technical networking mumbo-jumbo.
If you have to pay every ISP access fees to get your new, cool website on their walled off Internet, we'll never see the blistering pace of innovation we see today, and your opportunity to create something and make money will be severely limited.
We don't want no government controlling MY internet.
This is correct.
The problem is that the people running the pro net-neutrality campaign are incredibly incompetent. Americans don't like big corporations controlling things either. Basically, Americans don't like anyone controlling anything. Unless it's them.
The basic problem with the net neutrality battle is that it is called "net neutrality". The average American hears this when you say net neutrality:
net = COMPLICATED COMPUTER THINGY
neutrality = Switzerland
So it's no surprise at all that people don't care, and the Republicans don't get it. Want to change the game? Make this all about Online Freedom and make the story how greedy carriers want to take away freedom / violate my rights. It's about explaining how carriers want to LIMIT WHERE YOU CAN GO, CHARGE YOU FOR ACCESS TO THINGS YOU HAVE NOW, AND TAKE AWAY YOUR OPPORTUNITY TO DO BUSINESS ONLINE.
People aren't that stupid, but they are not that well educated. If you make your case using language that the average Wal*Mart consumer can understand, you can get anything you want out of Washington because those are the people that change their minds in elections and cause congresspeople to lose their jobs as they did yesterday. Nine out of ten times when you see voters support something that is bad for them, it's because one side used language like "net neutrality" to sell their side of the story.