Can isn't the same as actually doing it. Yes, the code is out there, but there isn't very much cross-pollination, AFAIK, at least not from KDE to Gnome. Much of the code isn't directly transferrable and I think there's a bit of NIH working against it too. Of course you can run KDE and Gnome programs at the same time, but I don't really know how often that happens.
As for narrow-mindedness: Yes, it's nice to have a choice and competition is good as he himself pointed out in another part of the interview. However, he was mainly talking from the POV of a commercial developer who has to decide which environment to support when creating/porting a product. And it can be a problem: how can you be sure that when you choose KDE libs, the Gnome users won't shun your product, or the other way around? Besides, you can't be nowhere near sure that a user actually has the needed desktop environment on her Linux box.
Don't be blinded by the fact that he works for Microsoft. He does have a valid viewpoint and things aren't perfect in the Linux community. The current situation does have it good points, but there's the flipside, too.
On the other hand, it should be noted that U2 is these days so filthy rich that they can easily afford to say "let's figure out how to get paid later." Not everyone is in that position, some bands actually need every dollar they can get out of record sales.
I do know the jury is still out on whether or not Napster is hurting sales, but still, I can see why everyone isn't all that enthusiastic.
More relevant? Hardly. It's hard to see building mice for Windows users as a recipe for success for a systems company. Apple is not in the business of building accessories. They are in the business of building systems; their hardware loaded with their operating system, shipping with their accessories.
They used to do more accessories, remember, but stopped doing it during the late 90's restructuring. I suppose they could start doing it again, selling Apple-branded stuff to the Windows market. However, it would be a change of business strategy (making cool computers and only the absolutely necessary accessories designed to look good with those computers) which has made them again profitable, and, to use your word, relevant.
You could argue that they should change the mouse they ship with their own systems, so it could be marketed to a wider audience. However, their focus is MacOS and its UI has been designed to work with one button, and they seem to believe, with good reason, that one button is simpler to use than two buttons. Why make things more complicated to your own users just to sell more mice to a different market?
These statistics about caffeine content in various drinks tend to be annoyingly limited - there's no Red Bull, no Solstice, in fact pretty much none of the energy drinks popular all around Europe. They tend to contain loads of caffeine (I seem to remember that Red Bull has more caffeine in it than Jolt), taurine, vitamine b and sometimes guarana. Sugar too, of course. I usually favor a good tea or latte or espresso, but nothing I've tried works quite as well as Red Bull, especially as I think it tastes better than many other energy drinks and soft drinks. Drinking two or three cans of it has me buzzing for an hour or two, pretty much unable two sit still. Cheap it isn't, and probably not healthy either:-)
[Big corporations] want us all to be rich and properous so we will buy yet more of their goods and services.
They do? They most certainly have interesting ways to demonstrate this. Moving production into the export processing zones in the third world where the local labor laws, much laxer than those in the western world, are viewed mainly as a guideline and where the factories don't pay taxes, most certainly doesn't increase anyone's prosperity except the shareholders'.
Or perhaps the McJobs bring riches to the teeming masses of consumers? Yeah, that must be it. Temps and part-timers who are paid something that is barely above the minimum wage aren't exactly happy customers.
You talk about taking classes - what about the people with university degrees selling coffee at Starbucks? A few classes, eh, so that they would be more employable, and could get real jobs? That must be the solution.
I'm not saying we should return to protectionism, I don't consider that much of a better option. But the transnationals aren't out there to make everyone's lifes better; they are building brands (and shoving those brands down our throats) while getting rid of production capability in favor of subcontractors in Indonesia, China, etc, to maximize profits and shareholder value. And while violence against your local McD franchise isn't probably the solution to world's problems (might get you the fifteen minutes of fame, though), neither is the current situation some utopian dream come true.
Anyone remember Sun's Reality Checks, the silly marketing BS they (used to?) post on their web site? Claiming that they talked about reality, while others spread FUD, but in the end it was just as bad as everyone else, just way more annoying.
For some strange reason, this Microsoft thing reminds me of that. Perhaps they have hired Sun's marketing dept?
Have you actually followed the gnome-gui mailing list? I've been lurking there for ages, and, well... if that is the future of open source UI design, you don't need the shades. The list has been plagued with flamewars, whining and cluelessness (I might not be any more clueful about UI design, although I do believe I know something about it, but at least I don't shout it out to the world.) Some Gnome developers have voiced similar opinions.
I suppose the jury's still out on the UI hit squad, but it seems they might make things better. James Cape has shown a lot more restraint than certain earlier would-be UI improvers, and the other people on the team seem to be of the rational sort. Apparently they believe more in making small improvements rather than dreaming of totally new, cool, beautiful, hard-to-implement and untested interface concepts. Which might be a good thing, especially in the beginning.
And while talking about Gnome and UI, I have started with Gtk a few times on one of my pet projects, but always get discouraged when I remember that doing edit in place with GtkCList is impossible (or is it?), or something else like that, and decide to shelve the project or just do a web interface. The tools for implementing the basics of good UI seem to still have some room for improvement.
I don't know, perhaps that was sarcasm and I'm just being thick, but that last line in the article just happened to struck a nerve; it's one of my recent pet peeves: "All that hype for nothing."
Exactly what hype are you talking about? Yes, the press has been talking about the stuff and people on slashdot have been speculating far more than they should have, as usual.
But there has been absolutely no hype, at least none generated by Transmeta. Of course, you could argue that their marketing department is just smarter and stealthier than that of most other companies. It might even be true, but still, all the so-called hype that has reached the consumers has been speculation and rumors. Not anything that Transmeta has said directly. You can hardly argue that Crusoe has been vaporware or something.
It's quite possible that you expected more from Crusoe. But I think it's kind of silly to hold Transmeta responsible for not living up to expectations people have built up based on rumors.
Do people actually use CGI these days? I've been a professional web developer for four or so years, and it seems to me, at least, that traditional CGI scripting is pretty much dying off if you don't count small scripts people create for their homepages and such.
I used to do Perl and CGI's but that came to an end (except in some projects where I have to build on an old code base) over a year ago; these days, Java servlets and application servers, PHP, ColdFusion, StoryServer, Zope etc are pretty much the tools that I see being used (on Unix side of things, I'm not well-informed about the things NT developers use these days.) It all comes down to three things: ease of development, ease of maintenance and performance.
Perl is a quick language to develop small hacks in, but larger scale projects are a different story. An old-fashioned CGI is just way too slow for pretty much anything; I'm not sure about the performance of mod_perl vs. servlets, though. For ease of development, developing scripts from ground up can't compete with a nice application server where you can count on the product to handle DB connections, persistence etc for you.
And for smaller projects, products such as PHP and ColdFusion offer in many cases an even shorter development time than Perl.
Of course, YMMV; my views might be somewhat colored by my rather intense dislike of Perl (mind you, I hate Java too, and that is my primary development language these days:-))
Slashdot Mirror
As for narrow-mindedness: Yes, it's nice to have a choice and competition is good as he himself pointed out in another part of the interview. However, he was mainly talking from the POV of a commercial developer who has to decide which environment to support when creating/porting a product. And it can be a problem: how can you be sure that when you choose KDE libs, the Gnome users won't shun your product, or the other way around? Besides, you can't be nowhere near sure that a user actually has the needed desktop environment on her Linux box.
Don't be blinded by the fact that he works for Microsoft. He does have a valid viewpoint and things aren't perfect in the Linux community. The current situation does have it good points, but there's the flipside, too.
I do know the jury is still out on whether or not Napster is hurting sales, but still, I can see why everyone isn't all that enthusiastic.
They used to do more accessories, remember, but stopped doing it during the late 90's restructuring. I suppose they could start doing it again, selling Apple-branded stuff to the Windows market. However, it would be a change of business strategy (making cool computers and only the absolutely necessary accessories designed to look good with those computers) which has made them again profitable, and, to use your word, relevant.
You could argue that they should change the mouse they ship with their own systems, so it could be marketed to a wider audience. However, their focus is MacOS and its UI has been designed to work with one button, and they seem to believe, with good reason, that one button is simpler to use than two buttons. Why make things more complicated to your own users just to sell more mice to a different market?
These statistics about caffeine content in various drinks tend to be annoyingly limited - there's no Red Bull, no Solstice, in fact pretty much none of the energy drinks popular all around Europe. They tend to contain loads of caffeine (I seem to remember that Red Bull has more caffeine in it than Jolt), taurine, vitamine b and sometimes guarana. Sugar too, of course. I usually favor a good tea or latte or espresso, but nothing I've tried works quite as well as Red Bull, especially as I think it tastes better than many other energy drinks and soft drinks. Drinking two or three cans of it has me buzzing for an hour or two, pretty much unable two sit still. Cheap it isn't, and probably not healthy either :-)
They do? They most certainly have interesting ways to demonstrate this. Moving production into the export processing zones in the third world where the local labor laws, much laxer than those in the western world, are viewed mainly as a guideline and where the factories don't pay taxes, most certainly doesn't increase anyone's prosperity except the shareholders'.
Or perhaps the McJobs bring riches to the teeming masses of consumers? Yeah, that must be it. Temps and part-timers who are paid something that is barely above the minimum wage aren't exactly happy customers.
You talk about taking classes - what about the people with university degrees selling coffee at Starbucks? A few classes, eh, so that they would be more employable, and could get real jobs? That must be the solution.
I'm not saying we should return to protectionism, I don't consider that much of a better option. But the transnationals aren't out there to make everyone's lifes better; they are building brands (and shoving those brands down our throats) while getting rid of production capability in favor of subcontractors in Indonesia, China, etc, to maximize profits and shareholder value. And while violence against your local McD franchise isn't probably the solution to world's problems (might get you the fifteen minutes of fame, though), neither is the current situation some utopian dream come true.
For some strange reason, this Microsoft thing reminds me of that. Perhaps they have hired Sun's marketing dept?
I suppose the jury's still out on the UI hit squad, but it seems they might make things better. James Cape has shown a lot more restraint than certain earlier would-be UI improvers, and the other people on the team seem to be of the rational sort. Apparently they believe more in making small improvements rather than dreaming of totally new, cool, beautiful, hard-to-implement and untested interface concepts. Which might be a good thing, especially in the beginning.
And while talking about Gnome and UI, I have started with Gtk a few times on one of my pet projects, but always get discouraged when I remember that doing edit in place with GtkCList is impossible (or is it?), or something else like that, and decide to shelve the project or just do a web interface. The tools for implementing the basics of good UI seem to still have some room for improvement.
Exactly what hype are you talking about? Yes, the press has been talking about the stuff and people on slashdot have been speculating far more than they should have, as usual.
But there has been absolutely no hype, at least none generated by Transmeta. Of course, you could argue that their marketing department is just smarter and stealthier than that of most other companies. It might even be true, but still, all the so-called hype that has reached the consumers has been speculation and rumors. Not anything that Transmeta has said directly. You can hardly argue that Crusoe has been vaporware or something.
It's quite possible that you expected more from Crusoe. But I think it's kind of silly to hold Transmeta responsible for not living up to expectations people have built up based on rumors.
Do people actually use CGI these days? I've been a professional web developer for four or so years, and it seems to me, at least, that traditional CGI scripting is pretty much dying off if you don't count small scripts people create for their homepages and such.
:-))
I used to do Perl and CGI's but that came to an end (except in some projects where I have to build on an old code base) over a year ago; these days, Java servlets and application servers, PHP, ColdFusion, StoryServer, Zope etc are pretty much the tools that I see being used (on Unix side of things, I'm not well-informed about the things NT developers use these days.) It all comes down to three things: ease of development, ease of maintenance and performance.
Perl is a quick language to develop small hacks in, but larger scale projects are a different story. An old-fashioned CGI is just way too slow for pretty much anything; I'm not sure about the performance of mod_perl vs. servlets, though. For ease of development, developing scripts from ground up can't compete with a nice application server where you can count on the product to handle DB connections, persistence etc for you.
And for smaller projects, products such as PHP and ColdFusion offer in many cases an even shorter development time than Perl.
Of course, YMMV; my views might be somewhat colored by my rather intense dislike of Perl (mind you, I hate Java too, and that is my primary development language these days
// Juri