Accusing the KDE and GNOME teams of copying off of each other is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
KDE desperately tries to be Windows, while GNOME attempts to be as Mac-like as it possibly can.
If each project adopts the more successful aspects of its counterpart, I'd say that the state of open source software is taking a huge step forward. (After all, one of the major points of OSS is the ability to copy and imitate what works)
I looked at that graph. Which 70 or 80% do you not want?
Defense is kind of important (whether or not you agree on our current strategy)
Assuming that the legislature don't deliberately bankrupt it, you'll eventually benefit from Social Security (and as the past year or so has shown, people are horrible at staying out of debt, let alone saving for retirement).
You'll also eventually want Medicare (or at least need the services it provides).
Of course, if you plan to die before retirement age under foreign occupation....yeah, we can throw away the 80% of the budget that you don't think we need.
Putting a huge petrol engine in anything designed for heavyweight towing is pointless.
Diesels produce more torque, and get (much) better mileage. This is why all big trucks, locomotives, ships, etc. burn diesel.
Although they have slightly less desirable driving characteristics (a bit slower to accelerate), they're quite popular in small cars in Europe. That said, I've driven a Jetta Turbodiesel, and found it to be a blast to drive (and it gets ~45mpg). Given the choice between a diesel and a hybrid, there's really no contest.
The idea that Quicktime is something that the users of other platforms should covet is a big fat joke.
Final Cut Pro (one of, if not the most popular video editing packages on both the professional and amateur levels) is little more than a wrapper for the QuickTime libraries. It also works quite well on rather old hardware.
Wrap your head around that, and rethink your statement. Whatever opinion you have about Quicktime that is based around the QT Player is irrelevant.
I won't argue that Apple were dumb not to include certain codecs in some of the recent releases, although there are codecs such as Perian to solve this issue. However, as a professional video-editing library, Quicktime has no peers.
pydoc's great in the same way that manpages are great.
However, given that it's 2009, I'd like to take advantage of what HTML and the web have to offer.
If I forget the syntax for strcmp, I can simply type 'www.php.net/strcmp' into my browser, and I'll get the right page, complete with syntax highlighting and user-contributed notes in the event that the official documentation is inadequate and/or confusing.
If I forget the function name and type 'www.php.net/strcomp,' the search engine usually picks up on my error, and redirects me to the right page.
That all said, Python does have pretty good online documentation, and is a nice language in its own right.
The CPU-intensiveness alone is reason enough to despise it!
Although the windows version is borderline-acceptable, Flash absolutely crawls on Mac and Linux boxes (the PPC mac versions were particularly bad, and no PPC linux version ever existed).
I'm sorry, but a 320x240 YouTube video should *not* bring a modern system to its knees. VLC can play.FLV files using no more than 5% CPU on my fairly unremarkable 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini.
The fact that a hacked-together reverse-engineered codec performs 20x faster than the official implementation is just sad.
(As much as I want to love the HTML5 video element, there's little realistic chance of it actually being used unless Microsoft hop on board, and we all agree on a standard codec. Theora fits the bill, but isn't a particularly good codec compared to the proprietary options)
This was an official Verizon store. I'm tempted to bring it to another and see if I'll have better luck there.
It was also irksome to have to wait 20ish minutes to talk to somebody that could help me.
(Coincidentally, I had to go to the DMV last week. I was in and out in under 15 minutes. Everybody there was courteous and professional. There was also a seating area, should there have been a queue.)
He's right. The Audi Quattros and Subarus are the only cars I've encountered that can even come close to or surpass the cold-weather performance of the old Saabs. (This will likely change, as other manufacturers finally adopt AWD in their cars)
Also look at what people who live in colder climates actually drive. I lived for a short while in Fairbanks, AK. Very few SUVs, and lots of Subarus.
Have you examined the typical American diet? It's very bland; flavored only with fat, sugar, and salt.
Clearly you've never been to Britain.
Yes, "traditional American" cuisine sucks. It's part of the reason why Americans themselves don't eat much of it. If you ever get a chance to visit the New York metro area, you'll find some of the best cuisine on the planet, thanks to the huge and diverse immigrant population (now mostly 2nd or 3rd generation). Many (myself included) are of the opinion that there is a greater abundance of good Italian food in Brooklyn than there is in Italy.
The 9-3 and 9-5 have the highest percentage of original components out of any GM car. If you drive one, you'll realize that the "experience" is quite different from the typical GM car.
Comparing a Saab to Opel or Chevy is like comparing VW to Audi, Toyota to Lexus, etc. Yes, they share things in common, but are ultimately very different vehicles.
The 9-2x and 9-7 were colossal failures. No argument there. Badge engineering is, and has always been a stupid idea.
Re:Your argument is over 20 years out of date
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 1
Also consider that the mid-1980s Saab 900s are among the only consumer-level cars from the 80s that don't appear horrendously dated today. They were, and still are great looking cars.
Actually, both parent and GP are right. PHP is wonderful for web development, but has more than a few annoying quirks with regard to consistency.
On the flipside, it has hands-down some of the best documentation on the planet, which makes the quirks tolerable, and is a big part of the reason why the language is so popular (especially with new programmers)
I'm seriously hoping that a new PHP release finally clears up all of the inconsistencies in the main namespace once and for all. It'll be painful at first, but a very-good-thing in the long term. Updating old scripts could even be a semi-automated process, given that the necessary changes are extremely superficial.
The sad thing is that the open-source community hates flash (with *very* good reason), but hasn't brought forth any legitimate alternatives. Moon/silverlight is a legitimately good alternative, but has been bogged down by licensing concerns (the legally-binding promises made by Microsoft don't even appear to have registered on the consciousness of RMS and the like)
That said, I wonder if some sort of legal class-action can be brought against Adobe for making such a fantastically inefficient piece of software. The effect on power-consumption across an entire enterprise must be quite high.
My LG enV2 with Verizon has had 6 or 7 firmware updates since I got it, all of which correct serious bugs with the original firmware (including a particularly pesky one in which the keyguard can randomly deactivate itself).
Although the device theoretically supports pulling down firmware updates over the air, Verizon don't appear to use this feature. Frustrated by the phone's various quirks, I brought it to a Verizon store a few weeks ago to have it reflashed. The clerk there told me that she could do it, but that she'd probably brick my phone in the process, but that for just $100, they'd be able to guarantee me that it wouldn't be bricked (ie. they'd replace the handset with a new one). My contacts would also be lost in either case -- this particularly reeked of BS, given that Verizon offer a backup/transfer service at no charge.
I looked the poor girl straight in the eye, and said "Are you serious? You're going to break my phone and charge me for it?" To which she replied "Pretty much." I told her my contract was due to be up, that I was almost certainly switching to another carrier, and that I wanted my phone back. She clung onto it, and told me she might be able to convince her manager to sell me a new phone for $75 instead. It took several minutes (and finally some rather loud profanity) to get her to finally give me my phone back. (I should add that I'm a *very* mild-mannered individual, and that I've never raised my voice to a retail clerk prior to or since this incident)
My contract is up in January, and most certainly will not be renewed thanks to this, and many other similar incidents.
I don't think I understand your logic. Are you arguing that EtherPad is feature-incomplete? What additional features are necessary for it to function adequately for the vast majority of users?
Any significant expansion of EtherPad would logically lead to something not all that different from Google Wave. (which is already open-source).
I'm not implying that the "feature-complete" argument applies to terribly many software packages. However, I would argue that it does here.
You can lock your version of the software away, meaning somebody can Embrace Extend and Extinguish the opensource version (example needed).
That phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The very worst a company can do to EtherPad (already a complete, and excellent package) is to not improve it, or not release their improvements. The arguments against the BSD license don't really hold water when the package in question is stable and feature-complete.
This is an interesting problem. I think it's solvable, to a reasonable level of accuracy. But you'd have to calibrate the system, which would require something that most slashdotters don't have access to....
Actually, I happen to agree with the second poster. Although I won't contest that Qt is nicer to develop for in a lot of ways, KDE itself is an absolute nightmare. It's painfully obvious that KDE doesn't do UI testing, while GNOME appears to have at least made an attempt.
I present this screenshot of Amarok, which many KDE users seem to consider to be the "crown jewel" of the suite as evidence.
A few observations:
Lots and lots of empty space. This could be fixed effortlessly, and yet it hasn't.
Less than one third of the screen space is devoted to the application's primary function -- finding and playing music. It's nice that Amarok does lots of other stuff, but there's WAY too much going on all at once. (I always liked Winamp's collapsible interface -- there when you need it, gone when you don't)
Lots of tiny icons with no apparent function. Although I commend KDE for finally drifting away from indistinguishable tiny blue icons, the replacements aren't much better. With the exception of the save icon, I cannot even begin to guess what the controls under the playlist do.
Why are there tiny icons next to huge icons up top? The same three icons also appear below. WTF?
Why is there a stop button?
In the screenshot, the status bar is completely superfluous and unnecessary.
The typefaces used in the UI are quite poor, and terriblykerned. I'll concede that this effects open source UIs across the board, though it is still unacceptable given that good open-source fonts are gradually becoming available, and that LaTeX's industry-leading typesetting algorithms have been open to the public for many years.
Moonlight does not include the full suite of video codecs used by silverlight.
However, the framework is good for much more than watching videos online. It will likely be the best solution for bringing native-application-like functionality to web browsers in the next year or two. At the very least, one could hope that it will displace Flash.
Microsoft have a vested interest in making Silverlight and C# succeed, even if it means opening up to other platforms. At the very least, it means there will be more C# developers in the world. If anything, I'd say that this development was necessary for C# to be taken seriously as a language, and is a pretty good thing, because C# is pretty nice for developing applications.
Why is it that nobody makes this argument about Sun with relation to Java? IMHO, C# and Silverlight actually might achieve Java's original design goals, which would be a great thing for computing in general.
Sadly, thanks to the recession, this sort of practice is becoming more commonplace. A similar thing happened a few years ago with K-Mart, and this year with GM. Both brands survived relatively intact, but had most of their debts relieved (and screwed their investors in the process). GM, in particular, seems intent on making its emergence from bankruptcy as destructive and painful as possible (Pontiac, Saab, and Saturn were all viable businesses that got squashed. The attempted sale of Saab in particular reeked of bad faith on the part of GM)
Slashdot Mirror
Accusing the KDE and GNOME teams of copying off of each other is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
KDE desperately tries to be Windows, while GNOME attempts to be as Mac-like as it possibly can.
If each project adopts the more successful aspects of its counterpart, I'd say that the state of open source software is taking a huge step forward. (After all, one of the major points of OSS is the ability to copy and imitate what works)
I looked at that graph. Which 70 or 80% do you not want?
Defense is kind of important (whether or not you agree on our current strategy)
Assuming that the legislature don't deliberately bankrupt it, you'll eventually benefit from Social Security (and as the past year or so has shown, people are horrible at staying out of debt, let alone saving for retirement).
You'll also eventually want Medicare (or at least need the services it provides).
Of course, if you plan to die before retirement age under foreign occupation....yeah, we can throw away the 80% of the budget that you don't think we need.
Putting a huge petrol engine in anything designed for heavyweight towing is pointless.
Diesels produce more torque, and get (much) better mileage. This is why all big trucks, locomotives, ships, etc. burn diesel.
Although they have slightly less desirable driving characteristics (a bit slower to accelerate), they're quite popular in small cars in Europe. That said, I've driven a Jetta Turbodiesel, and found it to be a blast to drive (and it gets ~45mpg). Given the choice between a diesel and a hybrid, there's really no contest.
Before GM got their dirty hands on the brand, SAAB constructed a prototype V8 engine, and put it in a Saab 9000.
According to the engineers, there was enough room under the hood to drop it in without major modification to the car.
So, yeah. You might be able to do that.
The idea that Quicktime is something that the users of other platforms should covet
is a big fat joke.
Final Cut Pro (one of, if not the most popular video editing packages on both the professional and amateur levels) is little more than a wrapper for the QuickTime libraries. It also works quite well on rather old hardware.
Wrap your head around that, and rethink your statement. Whatever opinion you have about Quicktime that is based around the QT Player is irrelevant.
I won't argue that Apple were dumb not to include certain codecs in some of the recent releases, although there are codecs such as Perian to solve this issue. However, as a professional video-editing library, Quicktime has no peers.
pydoc's great in the same way that manpages are great.
However, given that it's 2009, I'd like to take advantage of what HTML and the web have to offer.
If I forget the syntax for strcmp, I can simply type 'www.php.net/strcmp' into my browser, and I'll get the right page, complete with syntax highlighting and user-contributed notes in the event that the official documentation is inadequate and/or confusing.
If I forget the function name and type
'www.php.net/strcomp,' the search engine usually picks up on my error, and redirects me to the right page.
That all said, Python does have pretty good online documentation, and is a nice language in its own right.
The CPU-intensiveness alone is reason enough to despise it!
Although the windows version is borderline-acceptable, Flash absolutely crawls on Mac and Linux boxes (the PPC mac versions were particularly bad, and no PPC linux version ever existed).
I'm sorry, but a 320x240 YouTube video should *not* bring a modern system to its knees. VLC can play .FLV files using no more than 5% CPU on my fairly unremarkable 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini.
The fact that a hacked-together reverse-engineered codec performs 20x faster than the official implementation is just sad.
(As much as I want to love the HTML5 video element, there's little realistic chance of it actually being used unless Microsoft hop on board, and we all agree on a standard codec. Theora fits the bill, but isn't a particularly good codec compared to the proprietary options)
This was an official Verizon store. I'm tempted to bring it to another and see if I'll have better luck there.
It was also irksome to have to wait 20ish minutes to talk to somebody that could help me.
(Coincidentally, I had to go to the DMV last week. I was in and out in under 15 minutes. Everybody there was courteous and professional. There was also a seating area, should there have been a queue.)
Care to enlighten us of languages that do it better?
He's right. The Audi Quattros and Subarus are the only cars I've encountered that can even come close to or surpass the cold-weather performance of the old Saabs. (This will likely change, as other manufacturers finally adopt AWD in their cars)
Also look at what people who live in colder climates actually drive. I lived for a short while in Fairbanks, AK. Very few SUVs, and lots of Subarus.
Have you examined the typical American diet? It's very bland; flavored only with fat, sugar, and salt.
Clearly you've never been to Britain.
Yes, "traditional American" cuisine sucks. It's part of the reason why Americans themselves don't eat much of it. If you ever get a chance to visit the New York metro area, you'll find some of the best cuisine on the planet, thanks to the huge and diverse immigrant population (now mostly 2nd or 3rd generation). Many (myself included) are of the opinion that there is a greater abundance of good Italian food in Brooklyn than there is in Italy.
The 9-3 and 9-5 have the highest percentage of original components out of any GM car. If you drive one, you'll realize that the "experience" is quite different from the typical GM car.
Comparing a Saab to Opel or Chevy is like comparing VW to Audi, Toyota to Lexus, etc. Yes, they share things in common, but are ultimately very different vehicles.
The 9-2x and 9-7 were colossal failures. No argument there. Badge engineering is, and has always been a stupid idea.
Also consider that the mid-1980s Saab 900s are among the only consumer-level cars from the 80s that don't appear horrendously dated today. They were, and still are great looking cars.
Actually, both parent and GP are right. PHP is wonderful for web development, but has more than a few annoying quirks with regard to consistency.
On the flipside, it has hands-down some of the best documentation on the planet, which makes the quirks tolerable, and is a big part of the reason why the language is so popular (especially with new programmers)
I'm seriously hoping that a new PHP release finally clears up all of the inconsistencies in the main namespace once and for all. It'll be painful at first, but a very-good-thing in the long term. Updating old scripts could even be a semi-automated process, given that the necessary changes are extremely superficial.
The sad thing is that the open-source community hates flash (with *very* good reason), but hasn't brought forth any legitimate alternatives. Moon/silverlight is a legitimately good alternative, but has been bogged down by licensing concerns (the legally-binding promises made by Microsoft don't even appear to have registered on the consciousness of RMS and the like)
That said, I wonder if some sort of legal class-action can be brought against Adobe for making such a fantastically inefficient piece of software. The effect on power-consumption across an entire enterprise must be quite high.
My firmware update story:
My LG enV2 with Verizon has had 6 or 7 firmware updates since I got it, all of which correct serious bugs with the original firmware (including a particularly pesky one in which the keyguard can randomly deactivate itself).
Although the device theoretically supports pulling down firmware updates over the air, Verizon don't appear to use this feature. Frustrated by the phone's various quirks, I brought it to a Verizon store a few weeks ago to have it reflashed. The clerk there told me that she could do it, but that she'd probably brick my phone in the process, but that for just $100, they'd be able to guarantee me that it wouldn't be bricked (ie. they'd replace the handset with a new one). My contacts would also be lost in either case -- this particularly reeked of BS, given that Verizon offer a backup/transfer service at no charge.
I looked the poor girl straight in the eye, and said "Are you serious? You're going to break my phone and charge me for it?" To which she replied "Pretty much." I told her my contract was due to be up, that I was almost certainly switching to another carrier, and that I wanted my phone back. She clung onto it, and told me she might be able to convince her manager to sell me a new phone for $75 instead. It took several minutes (and finally some rather loud profanity) to get her to finally give me my phone back. (I should add that I'm a *very* mild-mannered individual, and that I've never raised my voice to a retail clerk prior to or since this incident)
My contract is up in January, and most certainly will not be renewed thanks to this, and many other similar incidents.
Why would facts about EtherPad be irrelevant to a discussion about EtherPad?
I don't think I understand your logic. Are you arguing that EtherPad is feature-incomplete? What additional features are necessary for it to function adequately for the vast majority of users?
Any significant expansion of EtherPad would logically lead to something not all that different from Google Wave. (which is already open-source).
I'm not implying that the "feature-complete" argument applies to terribly many software packages. However, I would argue that it does here.
You can lock your version of the software away, meaning somebody can Embrace Extend and Extinguish the opensource version (example needed).
That phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The very worst a company can do to EtherPad (already a complete, and excellent package) is to not improve it, or not release their improvements. The arguments against the BSD license don't really hold water when the package in question is stable and feature-complete.
This is an interesting problem. I think it's solvable, to a reasonable level of accuracy. But you'd have to calibrate the system, which would require something that most slashdotters don't have access to....
An oscilloscope?
Actually, I happen to agree with the second poster. Although I won't contest that Qt is nicer to develop for in a lot of ways, KDE itself is an absolute nightmare. It's painfully obvious that KDE doesn't do UI testing, while GNOME appears to have at least made an attempt.
I present this screenshot of Amarok, which many KDE users seem to consider to be the "crown jewel" of the suite as evidence.
A few observations:
Moonlight does not include the full suite of video codecs used by silverlight.
However, the framework is good for much more than watching videos online. It will likely be the best solution for bringing native-application-like functionality to web browsers in the next year or two. At the very least, one could hope that it will displace Flash.
Microsoft have a vested interest in making Silverlight and C# succeed, even if it means opening up to other platforms. At the very least, it means there will be more C# developers in the world. If anything, I'd say that this development was necessary for C# to be taken seriously as a language, and is a pretty good thing, because C# is pretty nice for developing applications.
Why is it that nobody makes this argument about Sun with relation to Java? IMHO, C# and Silverlight actually might achieve Java's original design goals, which would be a great thing for computing in general.
That way he can get his spine fixed and I can get my $7.50 back.
Not so fast, in the future, government controls medicine...
(the future is about 2 years away)
Get out of our thread, poli-troll!
(Also, there have never been any serious proposals to eliminate private healthcare. Even communist China has private medicine.)
Sadly, thanks to the recession, this sort of practice is becoming more commonplace. A similar thing happened a few years ago with K-Mart, and this year with GM. Both brands survived relatively intact, but had most of their debts relieved (and screwed their investors in the process). GM, in particular, seems intent on making its emergence from bankruptcy as destructive and painful as possible (Pontiac, Saab, and Saturn were all viable businesses that got squashed. The attempted sale of Saab in particular reeked of bad faith on the part of GM)