There was one snippet of news buried in the last page that I think is pretty big:
"Another interesting development is that we currently got a team of about 7 french students who are going to make a GStreamer-based non-linear video editor as the final year project."
7 students running a final year project suggests it ought to be good, so does that mean we might finally have some really high quality video editing software other than Cinelerra? If so, that's brilliant!
I like the fact that GStreamer support is now filtering even into non-GNOME apps like Juk (in KDE). Good stuff:)
That was the sound of utter terror from ten-thousand Nvidia, Ati, AMD and Intel engineers who can now look forward to putting out a bleeding-edge new graphics card / CPU in less then four months.
And the spontaneous orgasms of thousands of Nvidia, Ati, AMD and Intel sales persons awaiting the gullible geeks desperate for a video card upgrade to enjoy the full splendour of a video game for > 300
Well, you must have done something because I went camping not too long ago and no one cared.
Post a few similar looking stores about a camping trip with yourself, Darl McBride, Steve Ballmer and a couple of other nutjobs and say you hacked out the answer to trolls with the guy who "invented" SOAP and you're there.
Actually, I'd say that a great deal of the thrill in geek-camping comes from having lots of sophisticated electronic equipment in a setting where it's not really supposed to exist. The surreal superposition, the defiance of nature and embracing of technology -- I mean, cool, eh?
Why do people like feeling that they're defying nature? To borrow an old Taoist saying, When you climb up a mountain, you haven't conquered that mountain... the mountain has lifted you up that high. What a team -- you and the mountain;)
Personally, when I go camping I like to completely escape things like computers, TVs, radios, work, etc. and just go walking. It's so difficult to find a way to really just appreciate nature, to walk and enjoy clean air, or to have a really good climb up a nearby hill, that it seems like a waste to load up Slashdot.
But if you do like to take some hi-tech with you, why not think of it as finding a new kind of communion with your environment, sitting peacefully outside your tent hacking away, rather than beating it?
First, the philosophy of science came before science as you and I know it. In fact, science itself is simply an extension of philosophy, and owes much of its methodology to philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes and even Newton, all of whom not only wrote on scientific theories but also theorised about the purpose and methodology of science itself. So your statement is completely backward.
Second, perhaps you shouldn't judge the philosophy of science as an academic discipline according by your bad experiences, and should instead really look very carefully at the field again. If you think asking questions about the nature, significance, accuracy and morality of science is absurd, then perhaps you should go back to a time before philosphy began, and see if by the 21st century you'd be in the same position without the humanities.
And your offhand remarks about ethics and rights really do you no favours; you give the impression that you gave the issue all of a couple of seconds thought, which isn't exactly the sign of a rational animal, is it now?
So a next-generation save/open box should include comprehensive network protocol support.
With all due respect, I think that this is a really, really awful idea.... The reason why I'm not a fan of implementing network transparency at the KIOSlave or GNOME-VFS or whatnot layers is that this sort of functionality is *not* KDE or GNOME or whathaveyou specific. It just isn't part of the desktop environment. It should be implemented at a lower level, so that *all* programs running on the machine can take advantage of the functionality.
Hmm, you didn't give a reason why, and I'm not sure it's as obvious as you suggest. It would certainly be good if KDE and GNOME continue work through freedesktop.org to unify the underlying technologies that needn't be split up, like the coming transition to DBUS. It would be really great if the kio_slave system went the same way, forming the inspiration and basis for a cross-desktop protocol transparent filesystem (and note also X11 independent, since freedesktop.org doesn't rely on X11 for a lot of its technologies, e.g. DBUS).
But why all apps? When would most people really need all apps to do this? And how could KDE, for example, effect this sort of ground-level change?
Rather than wait around for someone to develop something that could be used by *all* applications, the KDE Project went ahead and made their own system that worked and is now influencing others. And thanks to technologies like Fuse and AVFS we may find that the kio_slave system is sort of "backported" to the basic UNIX filesystems by way of allowing them to be mounted onto the filesystem just as you'd mount a CDROM.
If most people's expectation of software was to create "cooperation and community", RMS mmight be onto something here. But the truth is that most people and businesses want software that fulfills a particular need (or set of needs).
As long as RMS continues to deny the purpose of software for most people, free software will never meet the needs of the masses.
I'm afraid that RMS will never "get" that point. Nor will I, for that matter. You may be interested in ways that information technology can be made usable for consumers in the short term, but I am interested in ways that information technology can be made useful and accessible for citizens and communities in the long term. If you don't understand that, you're not going to understand what RMS is talking about.
Able to exist on a purely philosophical level, the technogensia fail to see that free software has reached the edge of its current potential. Apple, Sun, and Red Hat will take "free" software to the next level, where it accomplishes solid, practical tasks for real people.
I don't accept that; your three examples are more different than you make out.
Apple are a good example of a company that has built almost all of the important user interface stuff themselves, and tacked it onto a Free Software underbelly.
Sun are a good example of a company that has taken a whole Free Software system, and put a lot of money and work into various Free Software communities that are central to that system (most notably GNOME) and have then packed it all into a Sun-branded commercial OS.
RedHat are a good example of a company that is right inside the Free Software world, developing lots of different component parts and being fairly agnostic about which parts they use, giving the choice to the user instead whilst selecting certain defaults. They have both a community system (Fedora) and a commercial branded system (RedHat).
Excepting Apple, almost all Free Software distributors absolutely rely on the good work done in the Free Software community, often aided by themselves, in making the software appropriate for "real people". This doesn't seem to be changing; rather, those projects that really show potential in the user interface world are experiencing huge increases in corporate investment, usability research, bug fixing, etc. GNOME, KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice are all good examples here.
I would predict then that in 2004 we sill simply see this trend continue, with more investment, both in terms of money and work, in a dozen or so userland applications.
Whilst your points are well made, Cringely was clearling talking about the Linux kernel developer community's organisation in relation to the SCO case. Since the only remotely valid point SCO has raised is the question of validating intellectual property rights on all code submitted, Cringely must be suggesting that the community will have to become tighter about the way it accepts code.
Of course, that suggestion is complete nonsense, since the only way the community could verify that no code was breaking any copyrights would be to have access to the source code of all of the products whose copyrights it might break. But that doesn't stop dopes like Cringely from saying it to sound clever;-)
There are, broadly speaking, several general reasons why Perens' decision have been criticised:
1) If you succeed, you will make GNOME A de-facto standard and do to KDE, XFCE etc. what Windows did to Netscape
2) You won't succeed because cutting out KDE will castrate your system
3) You are wrong; KDE is better
Personally, I'm open to discussions around reason 1, and I quite agree with the 'KDE side' on reason 2.
What isn't made very clear in Perens' article is that by removing KDE, you don't just remove an alternative desktop environment, you also remove all applications that use Qt & KDE. If you start to think about it, then, you are cutting out all of the KDE apps like Kontact, Kolab and Quanta that will really be a boon in the enterprise market, and that have no equivalents that aren't Qt/KDE. You'll also cut out the massive number of Qt-based commercial apps that already exist from companies like Adobe, Opera, Samsung and lots of others listed in this comment.
In other words, cutting out Qt/KDE and simply not offering KDE as a desktop environment are different propositions. That is why Perens' proposal will castrate UserLinux.
A much better solution is to have GNOME as the only desktop environment, include Qt/KDE libs and apps, and then work through freedesktop.org so that Qt/KDE and Gtk/GNOME apps seamlessly interoperate. Then you can have an office using GNOME, Kolab, Kontact, Epiphany, a GNOME equivalent of KIOSK and all the other best technologies without ever needing to know about the bits underneath. Then those who wish to use it as a development platform also needn't worry about maintaining both toolkits, since their software can make a choice and still interoperate with all of UserLinux without a problem.
In my (very limited) experience, Xandros and Lindows aren't worth going for if you're going to set the PC up and you already know Mandrake.
Install Mandrake, carefully tailor it to her needs (so remove all apps that she won't need, add ones she will, clean up the menus, the desktop & the panel appropriately), clean up some of the KDE/GNOME toolbars and menus so they don't confuse her (or install KDE 3.2 beta2;P) and install WINE. There, you have something that is probably better than Xandros and Lindows, and that you have experience working with.
The after-install configuration really isn't that bad, and you can save yourself a lot of bother by backing up the KDE/GNOME configuration once you're done and using it as a skeleton for any more systems you set-up in the future, or in case you decide to move her to another distro afterall.
I have to agree. One of the most ludicrous things mentioned in the article is this:
I don't need four text editors in the same submenu (Kate, KWrite, Kedit and Kommander-something), I need one. While each one of the four have a bit different specialty (e.g. Kate is a good programmer's text editor) the fact remains, there should be one solution offered. KDevelop should do the rest of the job for the programmers.
So each editor is different, and serves a different purpose, but you want KDE to dump them all and only offer you one? I use Kate for coding projects, Kwrite for coding with only one file open, my girlfriend uses KEdit for plain text files and I know plenty of people use KDevelop for complicated projects. So they're all useful, and providing the option of them all, at the expense of a few MB, is a great thing.
All the rambling about kparts and context menus is also nonsense. The root level of most context menus is very minimal, with things like zip, cervisia, write to CD and other more odd options that people do use (and so should be present) all hidden in submenus like "actions". Konqueror is becoming one very elegant and powerful app that realy has no equivalent.
The difficulty that now faces KDE, IMO, is to make it more clear to users why each app is different, and to keep working on consistency. But then if Eugenia subscribed to the kde-usability mailing list, tracked the KDE community pages like the CVS digest, KDE mailing list traffic and dot.kde.org she'd know that these are being tackled.
Other points were well made, but the egotism of moaning that her grumbles hadn't been sufficiently address, combined with the really irrational points like that one highlighted above, just make this review little more than a troll checking out some software.
This functionality is now available in Xfree 4.3, there just aren't many interfaces to it that make it easy to use.
In KDE 3.2, when it comes out of beta stages, you can have a little icon in your systray just like the monitor in Windows, and change your resolution exactly as you described, rather than the fairly unusable zoom feature.
I admit my response was rather offhand and rudde; I was in a rut responding to people accusing the UN of having no worth. Not a great excuse, but anyway...
Kyoto wasn't drafted with attacking US interests in mind. It was drafted to try to provide some piecemeal beginning to efforts to tackle climate change, and to manage that it just so happened that the world's biggest polluter was going to be hit the hardest, and that the nations least able to act now would be exempt, for the sake of getting some treaty through, and in the hope that in the future, properly pushed, better and more far reaching treaties could succeed it to include developing nations.
Of course, whether or not it is in America's long term interests depends on what you think about climate change. For my part, I believe the reports from the UK & US governments, from the UN panel on climate change (IPCC) and from just about every scientific body that isn't associated with the Global Climate Coalition, a mouthpiece for Esso/ExxonMobil, that suggest that it is a serious problem, perhaps (according to Hans Blix) even more of a worry than WMDs. Only the US Republican Party and some US Democrats seem opposed to Kyoto, and that strikes me of extremely misjudged short-termism. Climate change is something that can only be tackled collectively (hence the link to the prisoners' dilemma); if we don't act collectively and accept small losses now, we'll all be faced with extremely large losses in the future.
The U.S. should rightfully continue to refuse to agree to any treaty that has not been shown to be in the best interests of the citizens of the U.S.
Of course if you are so uneducated as to not know that treaties like Kyoto and the ICC, whilst not obviously in America's short term interests, are in fact in America's long term interests, you might say something so daft in the context of Kyoto and the ICC.
Yes. But the best thing they can do is have a talkfest accomplishing nothing, like all the other UN world summits. As long as they issue some bland communique talking about how we need to make technology better for the children, that is fine. If the ITU tries to take over the internet, the US needs to shitcan that treaty faster than Kyoto.
Take a step back and ask yourself why many UN summits, debates and conferences, are only able to produce bland communiques. Answer? Because the UN is a forum of nation states, and supposing that all of those states might reach some kind of consensus is pretty hopeful. Does this make them pointless? No! Of course not! The UN is a debating society in a sense, and it provides one of the few opportunities for countries to talk to each other with equally sized delegations in supposed equality.
And out of these debates come, eventually, solid policy that is usually good. Look at the IPCC, UNESCO, the UNHCR, UNAIDS, and lots of other valuable agencies and initiates that aren't reported because the media usually dislike success unless it's patriotic.
So would the UN come out with some solid policy that takes over the Internet, that provides vast powers to governments to censor and control information, that (dear God) violates Americans' rights? Extremely unlikely, IMO, since there would simply be too many Governments opposed to it. If you look at what they're actually discussing, and put aside the paranoid ramblings some people are spewing at this news, it's all about widening access and closing the digital divide that is a *big* problem in all nations, yes even the US, but especially in developing nations, as well as combating SPAM.
Nascent in the sense that their industries are largely serving foreign customers and a small subsection of Indian society. When they're serving the billion or so Indians, they'll be more established and will be grateful for the opportunities that FOSS is providing them, and that they will take up and provide for others.
What a coincedence, I gave a lecture on FOSS to some CS students this morning, and talked a bit about FOSS in developing countries. One person asked if software is really an issue where there are still large numbers of people living below the poverty line and where access to clean water and a fairly paid job is generally a more important issue than whether or not someone can hack around on a PC.
But this shows why it is important, if not as important as trade and development issues. Countries like India in particular have nascent computer industries, and growing numbers of users. The more we can do to combat the digital divide and welcome all people in this world onto the Internet and into the logic age, the better. FOSS is key to doing this IMO, and will ensure that as this happens, information technology is controlled by those that use it not those that provide the means to use it.
Sorry, but they can't manage anything. The United Nations is a failed idea looking for relevance.
Right, so you've nothing to say on UNESCO, UNHCR, IPCC and goodness knows how many other good things the UN does that are fantastic and absolutely necessary. You just don't mention them because many media outlets, out of ignorance and a desire to criticise, have got an obsession with claiming the UN is worthless.
Worse, the UN routinely caves into member states that are notorious violators of human rights. What good can from an organization that has human rights committees comprised of brutal dictatorships? Of disarnament committees run by the same?
Do you know why? Think for the moment of what the UN is: a forum for governments. Maybe the failure of the UN to really tackle human rights issues is because the governments in the UN, and in particular in the security council, deliberately skirt around human rights and try not to get too many legally binding documents through that would kill off their own industries. Hello UK, USA, France, Germany, Russia, etc. The problem with the UN in this regard is that its member states can be so damn hypocritical.
Sorry, a UN managed internet would simply give certain 3rd world countries (and some European) a new means to bash or otherwise attempt to restrict prospering Western countries. It would advance anti-Jewish attitudes, probably going as far as to restrict Israel! China would be given free reign to threaten Tiawan and run ramshackle over tibet. Can you imagine what these nations would want to classify as SPAM?
Wow. Evidence? Does the UN routinely "bash" Israel? It passes motions condemning its human rights abuses, just as it does for all human rights abusers, but it is hardly anti-semitic. The only people who claim that are those who simply cannot discern the difference between anti-Semitism and 'anti-Israeli-Governments'-policy-ism'. It's like all the 'anti-American' nonsense.
I'm worried about what the WSIS will come up with too, but let's at least be rational about this, rather than sensationalising ignorant nosense!
Just the event itself, a debate with approx. 6,000 delegates from around the world, is a worthwhile thing. I know that of late we've been bombarded by a lot of numbskulls trying to suggest that debate is pointless, and that we must act, but we must realise that it is worthless acting if the actors do not yet know why they are acting, what for, how, nor even if their actions are correct.
Basically, this meeting will being a good opportunity for states to share ideas, argue and perhaps come away slightly wiser as to how and where the global community can unite or work more closely. That will then filter down into many more small meetings constantly convening, and slowly things will change.
The WSIS is in a position to change things, as are all UN agencies; just look at how most countries react to recommendations from groups like the UN Climate Change panel or UNESCO. And even if they can't change policy in the really big important actors (in this case I'd suspect it'd be the USA and China, and perhaps a smattering of other G8 nations), then they will come out with documents which will prove very handy for future meetings and for diplomats, lobbyists and interest groups.
Surely UserLinux should be component-agnostic to a certain extent, so the GNOME vs. KDE debate is something the user or business thinks about, not the distribution? Except, of course, that there has to be some kind of default, and given the difference between the two, it seems sensible to go with the one that is going to look most attractive to the largest number of people.
The licensing difference doesn't really matter for defaults; it only matters if people are going to pick up UserLinux and extend it in proprietary ways, in which case they can then just choose to use GNOME or KDE depending on their priorities.
I am talking about ideology, yes. For me, the ideological bases of the Free Software movement provide something far more radical and interesting than another commercial competitor that your friends might pick up and use because they saw an advert on TV.
And let's not forget what Free Software can do for the billions of people in this world for whom proprietary software just isn't suitable, is often unaffordable, inaccessible or comes with too many restrictions.
I think this obsession with pushing GNU/Linux for the benefit of middle class western families even if it means compromising its ideological basis is a big mistake.
Perhaps you ought to clarify your original statement. I was merely providing a list of countries whose economic and social policies are quite different to yours in the US.
I'm fairly certain that if you were to spend a few months studying some other countries, you might be slightly less smug about your own country.
As america goes, so goes the rest of the world. This is particularly true with regards to economics and civil liberties.
Any evidence?
What about Europe? What about China? What about Japan? What about South Africa? What about many South American nations? They all seem to stand out as exceptions to this maxim of yours.
OSS, for all its strengths, lacks a commercial leadership.
And therein lies the strength and future of the Free Software movement. If you step back and look at the whole software industry, or perhaps even the whole information industry, you see the Free Software movement, and the other pro-commons movements with which it is related, making such a stir in the industry that governments, NGOs, companies and individuals are getting more and more interested, and traditional players in the industry are either lashing out (RIAA, MPAA) or name calling (Microsoft, SCO) or taking the lessons onboard and becoming better and stronger for it (Apple, IBM).
The lack of centralised leadership, along with many other features of the very politicised hackerish Free Software community, are what make it stand apart from the rest, not particular technologies. Losing one of the most defining features would reduce the FOSS movement to little more than a commercial competitor, sucked into an outdated property system.
Slashdot Mirror
There was one snippet of news buried in the last page that I think is pretty big:
:)
"Another interesting development is that we currently got a team of about 7 french students who are going to make a GStreamer-based non-linear video editor as the final year project."
7 students running a final year project suggests it ought to be good, so does that mean we might finally have some really high quality video editing software other than Cinelerra? If so, that's brilliant!
I like the fact that GStreamer support is now filtering even into non-GNOME apps like Juk (in KDE). Good stuff
That was the sound of utter terror from ten-thousand Nvidia, Ati, AMD and Intel engineers who can now look forward to putting out a bleeding-edge new graphics card / CPU in less then four months.
And the spontaneous orgasms of thousands of Nvidia, Ati, AMD and Intel sales persons awaiting the gullible geeks desperate for a video card upgrade to enjoy the full splendour of a video game for > 300
Well, you must have done something because I went camping not too long ago and no one cared.
Post a few similar looking stores about a camping trip with yourself, Darl McBride, Steve Ballmer and a couple of other nutjobs and say you hacked out the answer to trolls with the guy who "invented" SOAP and you're there.
Actually, I'd say that a great deal of the thrill in geek-camping comes from having lots of sophisticated electronic equipment in a setting where it's not really supposed to exist. The surreal superposition, the defiance of nature and embracing of technology -- I mean, cool, eh?
;)
Why do people like feeling that they're defying nature? To borrow an old Taoist saying, When you climb up a mountain, you haven't conquered that mountain... the mountain has lifted you up that high. What a team -- you and the mountain
Personally, when I go camping I like to completely escape things like computers, TVs, radios, work, etc. and just go walking. It's so difficult to find a way to really just appreciate nature, to walk and enjoy clean air, or to have a really good climb up a nearby hill, that it seems like a waste to load up Slashdot.
But if you do like to take some hi-tech with you, why not think of it as finding a new kind of communion with your environment, sitting peacefully outside your tent hacking away, rather than beating it?
First, the philosophy of science came before science as you and I know it. In fact, science itself is simply an extension of philosophy, and owes much of its methodology to philosophers like Aristotle, Descartes and even Newton, all of whom not only wrote on scientific theories but also theorised about the purpose and methodology of science itself. So your statement is completely backward.
Second, perhaps you shouldn't judge the philosophy of science as an academic discipline according by your bad experiences, and should instead really look very carefully at the field again. If you think asking questions about the nature, significance, accuracy and morality of science is absurd, then perhaps you should go back to a time before philosphy began, and see if by the 21st century you'd be in the same position without the humanities.
And your offhand remarks about ethics and rights really do you no favours; you give the impression that you gave the issue all of a couple of seconds thought, which isn't exactly the sign of a rational animal, is it now?
With all due respect, I think that this is a really, really awful idea.
The reason why I'm not a fan of implementing network transparency at the KIOSlave or GNOME-VFS or whatnot layers is that this sort of functionality is *not* KDE or GNOME or whathaveyou specific. It just isn't part of the desktop environment. It should be implemented at a lower level, so that *all* programs running on the machine can take advantage of the functionality.
Hmm, you didn't give a reason why, and I'm not sure it's as obvious as you suggest. It would certainly be good if KDE and GNOME continue work through freedesktop.org to unify the underlying technologies that needn't be split up, like the coming transition to DBUS. It would be really great if the kio_slave system went the same way, forming the inspiration and basis for a cross-desktop protocol transparent filesystem (and note also X11 independent, since freedesktop.org doesn't rely on X11 for a lot of its technologies, e.g. DBUS).
But why all apps? When would most people really need all apps to do this? And how could KDE, for example, effect this sort of ground-level change?
Rather than wait around for someone to develop something that could be used by *all* applications, the KDE Project went ahead and made their own system that worked and is now influencing others. And thanks to technologies like Fuse and AVFS we may find that the kio_slave system is sort of "backported" to the basic UNIX filesystems by way of allowing them to be mounted onto the filesystem just as you'd mount a CDROM.
If most people's expectation of software was to create "cooperation and community", RMS mmight be onto something here. But the truth is that most people and businesses want software that fulfills a particular need (or set of needs).
As long as RMS continues to deny the purpose of software for most people, free software will never meet the needs of the masses.
I'm afraid that RMS will never "get" that point. Nor will I, for that matter. You may be interested in ways that information technology can be made usable for consumers in the short term, but I am interested in ways that information technology can be made useful and accessible for citizens and communities in the long term. If you don't understand that, you're not going to understand what RMS is talking about.
Able to exist on a purely philosophical level, the technogensia fail to see that free software has reached the edge of its current potential. Apple, Sun, and Red Hat will take "free" software to the next level, where it accomplishes solid, practical tasks for real people.
I don't accept that; your three examples are more different than you make out.
Apple are a good example of a company that has built almost all of the important user interface stuff themselves, and tacked it onto a Free Software underbelly.
Sun are a good example of a company that has taken a whole Free Software system, and put a lot of money and work into various Free Software communities that are central to that system (most notably GNOME) and have then packed it all into a Sun-branded commercial OS.
RedHat are a good example of a company that is right inside the Free Software world, developing lots of different component parts and being fairly agnostic about which parts they use, giving the choice to the user instead whilst selecting certain defaults. They have both a community system (Fedora) and a commercial branded system (RedHat).
Excepting Apple, almost all Free Software distributors absolutely rely on the good work done in the Free Software community, often aided by themselves, in making the software appropriate for "real people". This doesn't seem to be changing; rather, those projects that really show potential in the user interface world are experiencing huge increases in corporate investment, usability research, bug fixing, etc. GNOME, KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice are all good examples here.
I would predict then that in 2004 we sill simply see this trend continue, with more investment, both in terms of money and work, in a dozen or so userland applications.
Whilst your points are well made, Cringely was clearling talking about the Linux kernel developer community's organisation in relation to the SCO case. Since the only remotely valid point SCO has raised is the question of validating intellectual property rights on all code submitted, Cringely must be suggesting that the community will have to become tighter about the way it accepts code.
;-)
Of course, that suggestion is complete nonsense, since the only way the community could verify that no code was breaking any copyrights would be to have access to the source code of all of the products whose copyrights it might break. But that doesn't stop dopes like Cringely from saying it to sound clever
There are, broadly speaking, several general reasons why Perens' decision have been criticised:
1) If you succeed, you will make GNOME A de-facto standard and do to KDE, XFCE etc. what Windows did to Netscape
2) You won't succeed because cutting out KDE will castrate your system
3) You are wrong; KDE is better
Personally, I'm open to discussions around reason 1, and I quite agree with the 'KDE side' on reason 2.
What isn't made very clear in Perens' article is that by removing KDE, you don't just remove an alternative desktop environment, you also remove all applications that use Qt & KDE. If you start to think about it, then, you are cutting out all of the KDE apps like Kontact, Kolab and Quanta that will really be a boon in the enterprise market, and that have no equivalents that aren't Qt/KDE. You'll also cut out the massive number of Qt-based commercial apps that already exist from companies like Adobe, Opera, Samsung and lots of others listed in this comment.
In other words, cutting out Qt/KDE and simply not offering KDE as a desktop environment are different propositions. That is why Perens' proposal will castrate UserLinux.
A much better solution is to have GNOME as the only desktop environment, include Qt/KDE libs and apps, and then work through freedesktop.org so that Qt/KDE and Gtk/GNOME apps seamlessly interoperate. Then you can have an office using GNOME, Kolab, Kontact, Epiphany, a GNOME equivalent of KIOSK and all the other best technologies without ever needing to know about the bits underneath. Then those who wish to use it as a development platform also needn't worry about maintaining both toolkits, since their software can make a choice and still interoperate with all of UserLinux without a problem.
In my (very limited) experience, Xandros and Lindows aren't worth going for if you're going to set the PC up and you already know Mandrake.
;P) and install WINE. There, you have something that is probably better than Xandros and Lindows, and that you have experience working with.
Install Mandrake, carefully tailor it to her needs (so remove all apps that she won't need, add ones she will, clean up the menus, the desktop & the panel appropriately), clean up some of the KDE/GNOME toolbars and menus so they don't confuse her (or install KDE 3.2 beta2
The after-install configuration really isn't that bad, and you can save yourself a lot of bother by backing up the KDE/GNOME configuration once you're done and using it as a skeleton for any more systems you set-up in the future, or in case you decide to move her to another distro afterall.
I have to agree. One of the most ludicrous things mentioned in the article is this:
I don't need four text editors in the same submenu (Kate, KWrite, Kedit and Kommander-something), I need one. While each one of the four have a bit different specialty (e.g. Kate is a good programmer's text editor) the fact remains, there should be one solution offered. KDevelop should do the rest of the job for the programmers.
So each editor is different, and serves a different purpose, but you want KDE to dump them all and only offer you one? I use Kate for coding projects, Kwrite for coding with only one file open, my girlfriend uses KEdit for plain text files and I know plenty of people use KDevelop for complicated projects. So they're all useful, and providing the option of them all, at the expense of a few MB, is a great thing.
All the rambling about kparts and context menus is also nonsense. The root level of most context menus is very minimal, with things like zip, cervisia, write to CD and other more odd options that people do use (and so should be present) all hidden in submenus like "actions". Konqueror is becoming one very elegant and powerful app that realy has no equivalent.
The difficulty that now faces KDE, IMO, is to make it more clear to users why each app is different, and to keep working on consistency. But then if Eugenia subscribed to the kde-usability mailing list, tracked the KDE community pages like the CVS digest, KDE mailing list traffic and dot.kde.org she'd know that these are being tackled.
Other points were well made, but the egotism of moaning that her grumbles hadn't been sufficiently address, combined with the really irrational points like that one highlighted above, just make this review little more than a troll checking out some software.
This functionality is now available in Xfree 4.3, there just aren't many interfaces to it that make it easy to use.
In KDE 3.2, when it comes out of beta stages, you can have a little icon in your systray just like the monitor in Windows, and change your resolution exactly as you described, rather than the fairly unusable zoom feature.
I admit my response was rather offhand and rudde; I was in a rut responding to people accusing the UN of having no worth. Not a great excuse, but anyway...
Kyoto wasn't drafted with attacking US interests in mind. It was drafted to try to provide some piecemeal beginning to efforts to tackle climate change, and to manage that it just so happened that the world's biggest polluter was going to be hit the hardest, and that the nations least able to act now would be exempt, for the sake of getting some treaty through, and in the hope that in the future, properly pushed, better and more far reaching treaties could succeed it to include developing nations.
Of course, whether or not it is in America's long term interests depends on what you think about climate change. For my part, I believe the reports from the UK & US governments, from the UN panel on climate change (IPCC) and from just about every scientific body that isn't associated with the Global Climate Coalition, a mouthpiece for Esso/ExxonMobil, that suggest that it is a serious problem, perhaps (according to Hans Blix) even more of a worry than WMDs. Only the US Republican Party and some US Democrats seem opposed to Kyoto, and that strikes me of extremely misjudged short-termism. Climate change is something that can only be tackled collectively (hence the link to the prisoners' dilemma); if we don't act collectively and accept small losses now, we'll all be faced with extremely large losses in the future.
The U.S. should rightfully continue to refuse to agree to any treaty that has not been shown to be in the best interests of the citizens of the U.S.
Of course if you are so uneducated as to not know that treaties like Kyoto and the ICC, whilst not obviously in America's short term interests, are in fact in America's long term interests, you might say something so daft in the context of Kyoto and the ICC.
Have a read about the prisoners' dilemma and you might see what I mean.
Yes. But the best thing they can do is have a talkfest accomplishing nothing, like all the other UN world summits. As long as they issue some bland communique talking about how we need to make technology better for the children, that is fine. If the ITU tries to take over the internet, the US needs to shitcan that treaty faster than Kyoto.
Take a step back and ask yourself why many UN summits, debates and conferences, are only able to produce bland communiques. Answer? Because the UN is a forum of nation states, and supposing that all of those states might reach some kind of consensus is pretty hopeful. Does this make them pointless? No! Of course not! The UN is a debating society in a sense, and it provides one of the few opportunities for countries to talk to each other with equally sized delegations in supposed equality.
And out of these debates come, eventually, solid policy that is usually good. Look at the IPCC, UNESCO, the UNHCR, UNAIDS, and lots of other valuable agencies and initiates that aren't reported because the media usually dislike success unless it's patriotic.
So would the UN come out with some solid policy that takes over the Internet, that provides vast powers to governments to censor and control information, that (dear God) violates Americans' rights? Extremely unlikely, IMO, since there would simply be too many Governments opposed to it. If you look at what they're actually discussing, and put aside the paranoid ramblings some people are spewing at this news, it's all about widening access and closing the digital divide that is a *big* problem in all nations, yes even the US, but especially in developing nations, as well as combating SPAM.
Nascent in the sense that their industries are largely serving foreign customers and a small subsection of Indian society. When they're serving the billion or so Indians, they'll be more established and will be grateful for the opportunities that FOSS is providing them, and that they will take up and provide for others.
What a coincedence, I gave a lecture on FOSS to some CS students this morning, and talked a bit about FOSS in developing countries. One person asked if software is really an issue where there are still large numbers of people living below the poverty line and where access to clean water and a fairly paid job is generally a more important issue than whether or not someone can hack around on a PC.
But this shows why it is important, if not as important as trade and development issues. Countries like India in particular have nascent computer industries, and growing numbers of users. The more we can do to combat the digital divide and welcome all people in this world onto the Internet and into the logic age, the better. FOSS is key to doing this IMO, and will ensure that as this happens, information technology is controlled by those that use it not those that provide the means to use it.
Sorry, but they can't manage anything. The United Nations is a failed idea looking for relevance.
Right, so you've nothing to say on UNESCO, UNHCR, IPCC and goodness knows how many other good things the UN does that are fantastic and absolutely necessary. You just don't mention them because many media outlets, out of ignorance and a desire to criticise, have got an obsession with claiming the UN is worthless.
Worse, the UN routinely caves into member states that are notorious violators of human rights. What good can from an organization that has human rights committees comprised of brutal dictatorships? Of disarnament committees run by the same?
Do you know why? Think for the moment of what the UN is: a forum for governments. Maybe the failure of the UN to really tackle human rights issues is because the governments in the UN, and in particular in the security council, deliberately skirt around human rights and try not to get too many legally binding documents through that would kill off their own industries. Hello UK, USA, France, Germany, Russia, etc. The problem with the UN in this regard is that its member states can be so damn hypocritical.
Sorry, a UN managed internet would simply give certain 3rd world countries (and some European) a new means to bash or otherwise attempt to restrict prospering Western countries. It would advance anti-Jewish attitudes, probably going as far as to restrict Israel! China would be given free reign to threaten Tiawan and run ramshackle over tibet. Can you imagine what these nations would want to classify as SPAM?
Wow. Evidence? Does the UN routinely "bash" Israel? It passes motions condemning its human rights abuses, just as it does for all human rights abusers, but it is hardly anti-semitic. The only people who claim that are those who simply cannot discern the difference between anti-Semitism and 'anti-Israeli-Governments'-policy-ism'. It's like all the 'anti-American' nonsense.
I'm worried about what the WSIS will come up with too, but let's at least be rational about this, rather than sensationalising ignorant nosense!
Will anything actually come out of this?
Just the event itself, a debate with approx. 6,000 delegates from around the world, is a worthwhile thing. I know that of late we've been bombarded by a lot of numbskulls trying to suggest that debate is pointless, and that we must act, but we must realise that it is worthless acting if the actors do not yet know why they are acting, what for, how, nor even if their actions are correct.
Basically, this meeting will being a good opportunity for states to share ideas, argue and perhaps come away slightly wiser as to how and where the global community can unite or work more closely. That will then filter down into many more small meetings constantly convening, and slowly things will change.
The WSIS is in a position to change things, as are all UN agencies; just look at how most countries react to recommendations from groups like the UN Climate Change panel or UNESCO. And even if they can't change policy in the really big important actors (in this case I'd suspect it'd be the USA and China, and perhaps a smattering of other G8 nations), then they will come out with documents which will prove very handy for future meetings and for diplomats, lobbyists and interest groups.
Buerocratic, yes, but not worthless.
Surely UserLinux should be component-agnostic to a certain extent, so the GNOME vs. KDE debate is something the user or business thinks about, not the distribution? Except, of course, that there has to be some kind of default, and given the difference between the two, it seems sensible to go with the one that is going to look most attractive to the largest number of people.
The licensing difference doesn't really matter for defaults; it only matters if people are going to pick up UserLinux and extend it in proprietary ways, in which case they can then just choose to use GNOME or KDE depending on their priorities.
I am talking about ideology, yes. For me, the ideological bases of the Free Software movement provide something far more radical and interesting than another commercial competitor that your friends might pick up and use because they saw an advert on TV.
And let's not forget what Free Software can do for the billions of people in this world for whom proprietary software just isn't suitable, is often unaffordable, inaccessible or comes with too many restrictions.
I think this obsession with pushing GNU/Linux for the benefit of middle class western families even if it means compromising its ideological basis is a big mistake.
Perhaps you ought to clarify your original statement. I was merely providing a list of countries whose economic and social policies are quite different to yours in the US.
I'm fairly certain that if you were to spend a few months studying some other countries, you might be slightly less smug about your own country.
As america goes, so goes the rest of the world. This is particularly true with regards to economics and civil liberties.
Any evidence?
What about Europe? What about China? What about Japan? What about South Africa? What about many South American nations? They all seem to stand out as exceptions to this maxim of yours.
OSS, for all its strengths, lacks a commercial leadership.
And therein lies the strength and future of the Free Software movement. If you step back and look at the whole software industry, or perhaps even the whole information industry, you see the Free Software movement, and the other pro-commons movements with which it is related, making such a stir in the industry that governments, NGOs, companies and individuals are getting more and more interested, and traditional players in the industry are either lashing out (RIAA, MPAA) or name calling (Microsoft, SCO) or taking the lessons onboard and becoming better and stronger for it (Apple, IBM).
The lack of centralised leadership, along with many other features of the very politicised hackerish Free Software community, are what make it stand apart from the rest, not particular technologies. Losing one of the most defining features would reduce the FOSS movement to little more than a commercial competitor, sucked into an outdated property system.