Good CS programs aren't there to teach students how to use this shell, that programming language, or some particular CPU instruction set. Schools should not zero in on any of that stuff.
Good schools teach about designing efficient and effective algorithms(often in pseudo-code), and good software design principles. Things like C, C++, SQL, Unix, etc, aren't ignored, but they're just used as tools for teaching and sharing ideas, same as the textbooks. And like textbooks, these tools change from year to year, professor to professor, and, in the long run, are minor details. (Many of the courses I've taken have allowed assignments to be on the platform/language of the student's choosing)
BTW, some of the things you listed aren't even 20 years old yet, so I'd say they qualify as changing quite significantly in the last 20-30 years.
Resolution independence for one thing. You can apply effects to an object, and later change the object (usually), and the effect carries over. You can have textured objects, gradient objects, grouped objects. Objects can be lines, rectangles, ellipses, wacky custom polygons, text, pixel images. Objects can undergo transformations while the original object is remembered and the transformation is done when rendered. Also, file sizes tend to be much smaller (Depending on how complicated the image is).
All in all, it's more useful for creating and editing object-oriented graphics, whereas Gimp/PhotoPaint/Photoshop are better for image manipulation, touching-up photos, etc.
I once had a job making large posters for a government department. These posters were about 6x3', but the drafts could be printed to standard 8x11" paper. I'd never even consider using a pixel-based program for that stuff.
I think it would have been nice if Rex were a little more thorough in his rebuttals. While Becky said/implied various unflattering unfacts about linux systems, such as being incompatable with digital cameras, not immune to ILOVEYOU ("because most malicious code is written for Unix"...say what?), to list a few, he just let them fly by with no argument.
Mind you, having tried CorelLinux (1.0), it has gtk 1.0, not 1.2, so I don't know if you could get gphoto working on it or not, so maybe that camera argument is valid there.
I'm not so fond of the Corel distribution myself. I managed to fubar the whole setup just trying to upgrade some packages to something half-way up to date. CL may look nice, but it doesn't play nice if you stray from the software Corel provides. Well, at least it didn't in my case. I imagine CorelLinux 1.1 is somewhat better though.
This may just be a crazy idea off the top of my head, but sometimes in X I zoom in on a window (with Ctrl+Alt +/-) for whataver reason, and moving the mouse pans the screen display around the entire area of the desktop. I think it would be convenient if I could just turn on Scroll Lock, and the mouse would be confined to the visible area of the screen, not panning outside of that. Of course, releasing the Scroll lock would return the mouse behavior to normal.
First of all, the responses to your original comment do address the second part of your message, as did I. To reiterate, I do not see Corel's bundling as a comparable fact to MS's bundling, simply because Corel has a neither a monopoly on word processors or Linux distributions. (Although I do agree, it would be nice to be able to get a stand-alone distribution of CDL, I'm sure that if Corel makes CDL available for download, you'll probably only have to download the packages you intend to install, as is the case with other distributions)
IE may well be hard-coded into Win98 for all I know, but that's not at all comparable to KDE. If all you can do in Win98 is delete IE icons, then it's a world of difference. "but we don't bitch about that" because KDE isn't integrated into the kernel, and also, KDE's components can run independent of each other. I can run kfm with another window manager, run KDE applications in GNOME, run GNOME with KDE's window manager, or I can remove KDE and use another deskop environment all together. That's why we don't complain, we have choices, and we can even mix and match most times.
MS is in trouble because they're trying to corner one market (browser) by using their monopoly power from another market (desktop OS).
As for Corel, it's probably as simple as this: If you want WordPerfect for Linux, buy it, and it happens to include a complementary distribution of CDL, which you may or may not choose to install. Like they say, it will work with all other distributions, so they're not tying you to anything. If you want CDL without WordPerfect, ...hmmm... think of it as buying CDL, and it happens to include a complementary copy of WP, which you may or may not choose to install. I dunno, or just get Debian + KDE.:)
Actually I think it's the other way around. They hired somebody to write the SB-Live drivers (binary only I'm afriad), but the guy they happened to hire was from the GGI project and showed them what it was all about, and Creative decided to get him to write video drivers aswell. That was a few months ago, I have no idea how they're coming along now.
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Good CS programs aren't there to teach students how to use this shell, that programming language, or some particular CPU instruction set. Schools should not zero in on any of that stuff.
Good schools teach about designing efficient and effective algorithms(often in pseudo-code), and good software design principles. Things like C, C++, SQL, Unix, etc, aren't ignored, but they're just used as tools for teaching and sharing ideas, same as the textbooks. And like textbooks, these tools change from year to year, professor to professor, and, in the long run, are minor details. (Many of the courses I've taken have allowed assignments to be on the platform/language of the student's choosing)
BTW, some of the things you listed aren't even 20 years old yet, so I'd say they qualify as changing quite significantly in the last 20-30 years.
Resolution independence for one thing.
You can apply effects to an object, and later change the object (usually), and the effect carries over. You can have textured objects,
gradient objects, grouped objects.
Objects can be lines, rectangles, ellipses, wacky custom polygons, text, pixel images.
Objects can undergo transformations while the original object is remembered and the transformation is done when rendered.
Also, file sizes tend to be much smaller (Depending on how complicated the image is).
All in all, it's more useful for creating and editing object-oriented graphics, whereas Gimp/PhotoPaint/Photoshop are better for image manipulation, touching-up photos, etc.
I once had a job making large posters for a government department. These posters were about 6x3', but the drafts could be printed to standard
8x11" paper. I'd never even consider using a pixel-based program for that stuff.
Mind you, having tried CorelLinux (1.0), it has gtk 1.0, not 1.2, so I don't know if you could get gphoto working on it or not, so maybe that camera argument is valid there.
I'm not so fond of the Corel distribution myself. I managed to fubar the whole setup just trying to upgrade some packages to something half-way up to date. CL may look nice, but it doesn't play nice if you stray from the software Corel provides. Well, at least it didn't in my case. I imagine CorelLinux 1.1 is somewhat better though.
Maybe I'll switch to MacOS 9 ;)
This may just be a crazy idea off the top of my head, but sometimes in X I zoom in on a window (with Ctrl+Alt +/-) for whataver reason, and moving the mouse pans the screen display around the entire area of the desktop. I think it would be convenient if I could just turn on Scroll Lock, and the mouse would be confined to the visible area of the screen, not panning outside of that. Of course, releasing the Scroll lock would return the mouse behavior to normal.
First of all, the responses to your original comment do address the second part of your message, as did I. To reiterate, I do not see Corel's bundling as a comparable fact to MS's bundling, simply because Corel has a neither a monopoly on word processors or Linux distributions. (Although I do agree, it would be nice to be able to get a stand-alone distribution of CDL, I'm sure that if Corel makes CDL available for download, you'll probably only have to download the packages you intend to install, as is the case with other distributions)
IE may well be hard-coded into Win98 for all I know, but that's not at all comparable to KDE.
If all you can do in Win98 is delete IE icons, then it's a world of difference. "but we don't bitch about that" because KDE isn't integrated into the kernel, and also, KDE's components can run independent of each other. I can run kfm with another window manager, run KDE applications in GNOME, run GNOME with KDE's window manager, or I can remove KDE and use another deskop environment all together. That's why we don't complain, we have choices, and we can even mix and match most times.
MS is in trouble because they're trying to corner one market (browser) by using their monopoly power from another market (desktop OS).
:)
As for Corel, it's probably as simple as this:
If you want WordPerfect for Linux, buy it, and it happens to include a complementary distribution of CDL, which you may or may not choose to install. Like they say, it will work with all other distributions, so they're not tying you to anything. If you want CDL without WordPerfect,
...hmmm... think of it as buying CDL, and it happens to include a complementary copy of WP, which you may or may not choose to install. I dunno, or just get Debian + KDE.
Actually I think it's the other way around. They hired somebody to write the SB-Live drivers (binary only I'm afriad), but the guy they happened to hire was from the GGI project and showed them what it was all about, and Creative decided to get him to write video drivers aswell.
That was a few months ago, I have no idea how they're coming along now.