The people filing this suit likely know perfectly well that even if they win, nothing will change, but that is not what they want. They are exploiting the death of their family member to get money for themselves, and to me this seems like it is dishonoring the memory of those who had died. I really hope they do lose this one, there are so many precedents to follow. The only direct responsibility is that of the attackers, indirectly, maybe those who bullied them so much. Video Games didn't trigger this, if anything it may have given them a place to vent. Blame the parents for being so neglectful. Blame the bullies for unfairly tormenting people. Certainly, blame the attackers for not dealing with their problems in a better way. But don't go leeching money off anyone with deep pockets who can turn a tragic death of a child into a ticket to fame and fortune.
So many major Linux companies are in trouble of some sort. Indrema and Eazel look to be going bust. Redhat seems to be doing badly economically (look at the stock). Linux companies seem to be going the way of the web companies in this economic environment, and I'm doubtful that the craze will ever return. After a few months of this, I guess we'll see what Linux companies/organizations can truly have their act together. Fortunately, GNOME, KDE, Debian, and of course, the kernel itself have truly non-profit motives, and so there is some route mostly guaranteed for Linux to stand the test of time and of the economy.
Seems like a great browser, but when I installed KDE 2.1.1 and loaded up Konq, I couldn't try to load any web page without it crashing. Is this common, or just an oddity for me. It really annoyed me, was looking forward to trying it out. Galeon works like a charm however, and plain mozilla is too sluggish to pay any attention to whatsoever. If netscape 4.x wasn't so ugly viewing a lot of pages nowadays, it would still be my browser of choice, it still seems to render faster than any mozilla-based project. Can't wait to see a Mozilla 1.0 with all the sluggish debugging ripped out. I wish there was a branch where debugging was removed just to show off what mozilla could be capable of. Maybe then we wouldn't criticize that so much.
Re:Good question in "talkbacks"
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 2
As near as I can tell, the culprit seems to be the hugely bloated chrome interface. Use a project such as galeon, which embeds the mozilla renderer in a decently fast UI, and things seem much better. Pretty stable too.
I think that would be kinda stupid. Annoying ads are not always that size, and some useful graphics happen to be that size. A URL filtering proxy is a much cleaner solution. Very effective, for me, just setting 4 URL regexes have, for me, essentially eliminated ads, fmads.osdn.com, ad.doubleclick.net, images.slashdot.org/banner, and adtegrity.spinbox.net. Whenever I find a new banner ad, I just add the ad site URL in, and it goes away. I still get to see the 468x60 images I have an interest in, and don't get annoyed by certain non-standard ads/pop-up tricks ads pull. Of course, I use galeon tabbed interface to minimize pain of pop-ups as well as my junkbuster proxy which forwards all requests through a squid cache before going out. I know there are cleaner ways of doing this, but it is effective and easiest this way.
But what they are doing is *not* copying th look and feel of Macintosh for other environments. They are providing a tool that allows users to change the appearance of the classic MacOS environment from the default Platinum look. A lot like Kaleidoscope for Macs, but intrudes further into the depths of the system than Apple likes. I don't see how this project in any possible way could hurt Apple's bottom line. It is a product that offers a nice feature *only* to Mac systems. You would almost think that this was a case of completely clueless IP lawyers seeing the words "mac" and "theme" in a free project and lump it together will all the other stupid theme related stuff they have been going after. I still am of the opinion that it will take more than different window decorations to make me shell out a few thousand for a new computer, and that all this stuff does nothing but hurt apple. I wonder if they would be as eager to toss around cease and desist orders at people who actually had enough money to defend themselves, and not just at people who they know lack the money to go to court to defend themselves.. Seems somhow cowardly to me..
Well, until recently I think this would have been true. Witht he economy in the state it is in, VCs are a lot more hesitant to pump money into troubled companies. It was ridiculous some of the stuff that had money thrown at it, and I think we are seeing a correction for this now.
But from the start I did not think that Indrema had a good chance. Being "linux-based" isn't a magic pill to get things popular. Sure it has a lot of cool features, but a large part of what they were relying on was the hype surrounding linux. On a game console, this doesn't buy them all that much functionality wise. It may be different if there was a large number of linux based video games, but there aren't. They were trying to enter a market deeply entrenched by the likes of Sony and Nintendo. A very necessary resource to have a chance of breaking into that market would involve really deep pockets, like Microsoft has. Indrema couldn't afford to lose as much money as they would need on the console itself yet, no way they could afford a good marketing campaign. Now they are down to the hope of last minute investors in a economy that is going downhill. Maybe they could have done something much earlier, if they timed it just right, when the media was super-hyping linux, economy was booming, and there were many investors ready to throw money at all things computer based, but even then I would think they would have a snowball's chance in hell of success. Too bad, it would've been nice to have been proved wrong. They did seem to be getting a quality product developed that would've been techincally superior to most other things out there, but as we have seen many times before, quality isn't the only factor...
There is a degree of vagueness in all the answers, and non-comittance, but in most cases he does address the issue asked. The *MAJOR* notable exception in my eyes is the question on licensing. The question seemed to be asking about the technical problems with the scheme, not the dieology of it. He repsonds with almost a sermon on how evil pirates are hurting microsoft and they have every right to do what it takes to control that. I don't think that piracy concerns are the only thing microsoft is worried about here, there are other, much more acceptable strategies such as dongles for this. Having the software strap itself more firmly to existing hardware has a few implications/possiblities.
For one, some people have more than one computer, but do not feel that a single user with multiple computers should have to purchase multiple copies. This seems legitimate feeling to me, but to microsoft, this is considered wrong and lost revenue, but from a legal standpoint, it is an uncertain area. This serves to take care of that "problem".
Also, a number of users have hardware lifecycles that are shorter than their operating system lifecycles. They will continue to buy new systems, but Microsoft is unable to offer new features that warrant purchase of new versions as quickly as they would like. For example, in the environment I work with, brand new PCs have winNT 4.0 and win95 installed, because those are still good enough, and the appeal of ME/98/98SE/2000 has not been enough to purchase new software, though the hardware gains have been great. By tying a purchased version of the OS to the current hardware, they are forcing the consumer to purchase another OS copy, even if perfectly identical to the old one, when buying new computer equipment.
I would much prefer dongles, if they are going to continue to charge outrageous prices for their products, they can afford dongles. If they lower prices to more reasonable levels, fewer people may wish to pirate it. The privacy and limitiations of this new licensing, if it goes in effect, will certainly keep me from purchasing this product, and I have made significant purchases of MS products before... I also think many IT outfits will not go for this licensing idea and search for alternatives/simply not purchase the product.
I refuse to buy their CDs. They are completely ripping off people, and by trying to copy-protect CDs, all they will do in the long run is gyp the customers, as people who want to pirate the music will always find a way to circumvent it. And also, their talk of replacing CDs is interesting. They only want to switch for copy protection, not for quality. I don't think the consumer market is going to care enough about protecting the companies to invest a LOT of money in upgrading stereos when CDs of equal quality are still released. Any attempt to try to replace mp3 with a copy-protected scheme also will fail, because mp3 is good enough and familiar to people. They need to move towards selling music downloadable online and dropping CD prices. I used to buy CDs, then wisened up. I also don't download mp3s either, just completely abstain from the music industry. Maybe one day they will wise up as to a good consumer-friendly way to conduct business.
I haven't seen nearly as much uproar about WPA (The "Product Activation" scheme, where every install sends all kinds of data to Microsoft about the installation to prevent any sort of privacy). After the intel Processor ID fiasco with privacy, you would think everyone would be up in arms over this one. This includes more than just a number, from my understanding, so I would assume that this other data is non trivial... Is the world ready to trust Microsoft with such information? I certainly am not. Probably makes installation a nightmare too, as it would require a net connection of some sort. There has to be some other, non-intrusive anti-piracy scheme they could come up with. In my view, a company should respect consumer privacy first, and then worry about piracy, especially a company with money to burn like Microsoft, piracy may be rampant with their products, but their bottom line seems to be strong still yet.
Also, I wonder how good the backwards compatibility is. For example, some programs in win2000 after installation could only be used by installer, no matter what. Will this also be the case in XP, that registry entries will be the same as to cause such a problem?
Are you actually color blind? I would guess not. I am red-green colorblind (relatively common). The color schemes used to signify active/inactive windows has no problem with red/green, the most common, and I don't see a potential problem for blue/yellow. The extremely rare dichromat is the only possible problem, but even then the colors are customizable, and shades can be used. Also, the "greeen means go" reference just refers to the start button being colored green in addition to lettering, and I don't think anyone will have a problem with this. These companies do a lot of research, and colorblindness is a big part of every interface designers design process. I really dislike XP on other grounds, but use of color to accentuate is not that bad..
If you have an intel Linux box, try divx.euro.ru for avifile, if you don't have QT, try that site and http://xtheater.sourceforge.net for a gtk player..
Now this is a troll if I ever saw one. No one could ever seriously think of CDE as a good thing. Even Sun is stating a move to Gnome. While I cannot say whether gnome or kde is better, but I'll take almost anything over CDE, that thing is just a horrible piece of crap..
there are so many more things I wish I knew about GTK programming myself, the API documentation is a bit more poor, in my opionion than others. I can see, however, cases in which tying abstract data
directly to a widget would be little better than using globals/big structs. I also would like to know where the documentation for stuff like pulling off inheritance in C is.. OO code in C gets way too messy... Maybe I ought to look into gtkmm more:)
While I don't think KDE is fading away or anything like that anytime soon, I do think that KDE is not as widely spread as Gnome. One big reason is that RedHat, the most widely used among new people, uses gnome by default, and those are the people who care more about desktops. Second, of the ones who bother to change, GPL zealotry dstill stands against KDE, even though it isn't at all valid anymore. Just because of the fact that QT was at one time not GPL, and also that it is owned by a company, it is evil and should not be used.. That kind of idiocy also makes KDE less popular..
And finally, the C zealots who claim that C++ is too slow, despite the fact that there is no longer any discernible difference in speed in modern compilers.
So all in all, I think the install base of Gnome to be larger, but I'm not certain. In any case, the only things keeping it down still are myths and misconceptions. In my opinion, KDE is much more sophisticated and has their act together better than Gnome does, and more than gnome propbably ever will... Gnome is pretty good now, much improved over the old days, but still trailing, in terms of Anti-Aliasing (gtk fault) and general consistency..
Gnome is ok, but KDE really needs more recognition for the stuff they have accomplished..
All this coming from someone whose only project is a GTK app:)
Not like high school programming courses matter anyway... Maybe it would get you exempted from something in college, but in any case people going into the field learn it one way or another, most likely in college, where, in general, they actually hire appropriate people for the job..
You only have two sets of mime types? I got three:) For some reason, gnome seems to have two entirely independent mime-type databases for different things, and I find this really wrong. I also have an application that trie to play nice with whatever the user may wish to drag and drop it with. This requires special cases, one each for netscape, Kde, nautlius, and gmc. nautilus for some dumb reason is almost just like gmc, but puts a space at the end of every drop... efm matched gmc behavior, and the gmc way seems to be most prevalent, but in any case, there really is too much difference and too little documentation about such things..
Some of my favorite case designs are sold by
http://www.colorcase.com/
They have some really nice looking cases. Next
time I build a system, I plan on purchasing one
of their cases, unless something else really
nice comes along.
Actually, I would say the S-Video connector became prolific because of it's popularity as a DVD player connection more than SVHS, SVHS didn't make a drop in the bucket as far as market share goes. DVHS will go the same way. For a product to succeed, it must be *greatly* improved over an existing standard in the eyes of the consumer. For example, Betamax was a techinically superior product, but not sufficiently superior to make people feel it was worht the investment. DVDs are3 a pretty established standard only because it offers better lasting media and essentially double the quality of VHS. This DVHS improvement would be questionable at best in the eyes of the consumer, and so will fail. The only chance it has is for it to become an affordable, feasbile recording media before DVD can..
I guess I'll share my high school experience.
In Junior High, I upstaged the idiots who sold the school computers, the school recognized me, and I became the preferred person to contact when things went bad, or were not performing as quickly as expected. I was free and knew better what I was doing than the adults who they paid. Then I went on to high school, and one day started fixing problems with their network, by the time someone came by, the printers were printing faster,
several systems that weren't working were, and things were in good shape. The library person thought things were broken because the printers were printing things faster than they "are supposed to". After this, the principal called me in, and made me tell him that I would never touch a school computer again, not so much as touch it.
After about half an hour of me trying to explain to them, and they not listening, I did agree. At the end of that year I went to another high-school, one with a SunOS network and a PC network, and they made me an administrator there, a refreshing change from previous school, and those sun4/260s were so awesome too, so things went well. Then I went to college and now here I am, being paid to run a particular companys ultra boxes. I had hoped that public schools might have improved over the years, but I guess they have not. As far as computers go, high schools have some of the biggest idiots I have ever seen. Of course the same is true for most smaller government associations I have had to work with...
What is it about a 3D Workspace that is so appealing on a 2D Display. I understand how 3D plays a role in games that are meant to be immersive, it adds a great deal. However, when trying to take in most data on a screen, it is much easier to have everything presented orthogonal for best visibility anyway. Take for example MAME, you can rotate the angle however you
wish and draw a neat arcade machine model to draw the game onto. Nice eye candy, but when you want to play the game, you switch to make it match up to the screen. 3D UIs I don't see as solving any issues besides providing eye candy. In fact, without drastically differenet input/output devices, I would think navigating a 3D UI would be both more cumbersome to navigate and provide more ways in which things on the display could be obscured from view. I think the idea of 3D for everything hasn't really come about due to both performance and the fact that the benefits are dubious at best. 3D is great in games and engineering applications, but how well does it apply to everyday computing?
Does anyone know if this release supports YUV overlays with a Voodoo3? Cool to see that the
XRender support is there, but I am really intereseted in the status of the Xvideo stuff.
It will be interesting when this support gets folded into the toolkits, and maybe all the existing, ugly anti-aliasing and alpha blending hacks can go away in favor of this. Cannot wait for gtk, qt, evas, gdk-pixbuf, and eterm to support this natively. This stuff could also *greatly* improve the speed of nautilus and kde 2.1. Very good to see XFree advancing so nicely, getting the needed features to do any multimedia stuff on par with other OSes.
Binaries are important to maintain interest in a project, particularly large, long compiles. In my case I usually install as much as possible from source (for better compiler optimization). I distribute my project in source form only, but I try to make it so that it will compile as easily as possible. My system is such that binaries compiled on it will not work correctly with any stock linux install. This is the downside to binaries under linux. There are so many different, somewhat incompatible versions of many libraries (i.e. glibc) that binary distribution is difficult to pull off for everyone. The code base for open source projects are ever changing and evolving, and while this means the best possible product every step of the way, there is limited compatibility between any two given steps.
Software engineering is not going downhill. It is true that many many open source projects do not undergo sufficient testing, but the biggest ones do. But this is not the point I think he has completely off base..
His statement that 30-year old technology has no place in modern software engineering is a really stupid generalization. Akin to saying that wheels are stupid because they have been around so long with little different about them.
Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris demonstrate that the market is quite willing to work with UNIX systems, and with projects like GNOME and KDE, more and more of what he considers obscure and user unfriendly are hidden from view. That is not to say that it is to the point of hiding things as much as windows, but it is rapidly getting there.
For now, a clear niche for UNIX systems is for people who want more power and flexibility with their systems and know what they are doing. Windows UI does make things easier for the typical user, but it also restricts in many ways power users who want to do some really interesting stuff. NT/2000 go a way to correct this, but if you are UNIX savy, it is hard to give up that power and flexibility, and it is because of this that UNIX is still around today, it is a proven technology.
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The people filing this suit likely know perfectly well that even if they win, nothing will change, but that is not what they want. They are exploiting the death of their family member to get money for themselves, and to me this seems like it is dishonoring the memory of those who had died. I really hope they do lose this one, there are so many precedents to follow. The only direct responsibility is that of the attackers, indirectly, maybe those who bullied them so much. Video Games didn't trigger this, if anything it may have given them a place to vent. Blame the parents for being so neglectful. Blame the bullies for unfairly tormenting people. Certainly, blame the attackers for not dealing with their problems in a better way. But don't go leeching money off anyone with deep pockets who can turn a tragic death of a child into a ticket to fame and fortune.
So many major Linux companies are in trouble of some sort. Indrema and Eazel look to be going bust. Redhat seems to be doing badly economically (look at the stock). Linux companies seem to be going the way of the web companies in this economic environment, and I'm doubtful that the craze will ever return. After a few months of this, I guess we'll see what Linux companies/organizations can truly have their act together. Fortunately, GNOME, KDE, Debian, and of course, the kernel itself have truly non-profit motives, and so there is some route mostly guaranteed for Linux to stand the test of time and of the economy.
Seems like a great browser, but when I installed KDE 2.1.1 and loaded up Konq, I couldn't try to load any web page without it crashing. Is this common, or just an oddity for me. It really annoyed me, was looking forward to trying it out. Galeon works like a charm however, and plain mozilla is too sluggish to pay any attention to whatsoever. If netscape 4.x wasn't so ugly viewing a lot of pages nowadays, it would still be my browser of choice, it still seems to render faster than any mozilla-based project. Can't wait to see a Mozilla 1.0 with all the sluggish debugging ripped out. I wish there was a branch where debugging was removed just to show off what mozilla could be capable of. Maybe then we wouldn't criticize that so much.
As near as I can tell, the culprit seems to be the hugely bloated chrome interface. Use a project such as galeon, which embeds the mozilla renderer in a decently fast UI, and things seem much better. Pretty stable too.
I think that would be kinda stupid. Annoying ads are not always that size, and some useful graphics happen to be that size. A URL filtering proxy is a much cleaner solution. Very effective, for me, just setting 4 URL regexes have, for me, essentially eliminated ads, fmads.osdn.com, ad.doubleclick.net, images.slashdot.org/banner, and adtegrity.spinbox.net. Whenever I find a new banner ad, I just add the ad site URL in, and it goes away. I still get to see the 468x60 images I have an interest in, and don't get annoyed by certain non-standard ads/pop-up tricks ads pull. Of course, I use galeon tabbed interface to minimize pain of pop-ups as well as my junkbuster proxy which forwards all requests through a squid cache before going out. I know there are cleaner ways of doing this, but it is effective and easiest this way.
But what they are doing is *not* copying th look and feel of Macintosh for other environments. They are providing a tool that allows users to change the appearance of the classic MacOS environment from the default Platinum look. A lot like Kaleidoscope for Macs, but intrudes further into the depths of the system than Apple likes. I don't see how this project in any possible way could hurt Apple's bottom line. It is a product that offers a nice feature *only* to Mac systems. You would almost think that this was a case of completely clueless IP lawyers seeing the words "mac" and "theme" in a free project and lump it together will all the other stupid theme related stuff they have been going after. I still am of the opinion that it will take more than different window decorations to make me shell out a few thousand for a new computer, and that all this stuff does nothing but hurt apple. I wonder if they would be as eager to toss around cease and desist orders at people who actually had enough money to defend themselves, and not just at people who they know lack the money to go to court to defend themselves.. Seems somhow cowardly to me..
Well, until recently I think this would have been true. Witht he economy in the state it is in, VCs are a lot more hesitant to pump money into troubled companies. It was ridiculous some of the stuff that had money thrown at it, and I think we are seeing a correction for this now.
But from the start I did not think that Indrema had a good chance. Being "linux-based" isn't a magic pill to get things popular. Sure it has a lot of cool features, but a large part of what they were relying on was the hype surrounding linux. On a game console, this doesn't buy them all that much functionality wise. It may be different if there was a large number of linux based video games, but there aren't. They were trying to enter a market deeply entrenched by the likes of Sony and Nintendo. A very necessary resource to have a chance of breaking into that market would involve really deep pockets, like Microsoft has. Indrema couldn't afford to lose as much money as they would need on the console itself yet, no way they could afford a good marketing campaign. Now they are down to the hope of last minute investors in a economy that is going downhill. Maybe they could have done something much earlier, if they timed it just right, when the media was super-hyping linux, economy was booming, and there were many investors ready to throw money at all things computer based, but even then I would think they would have a snowball's chance in hell of success. Too bad, it would've been nice to have been proved wrong. They did seem to be getting a quality product developed that would've been techincally superior to most other things out there, but as we have seen many times before, quality isn't the only factor...
There is a degree of vagueness in all the answers, and non-comittance, but in most cases he does address the issue asked. The *MAJOR* notable exception in my eyes is the question on licensing. The question seemed to be asking about the technical problems with the scheme, not the dieology of it. He repsonds with almost a sermon on how evil pirates are hurting microsoft and they have every right to do what it takes to control that. I don't think that piracy concerns are the only thing microsoft is worried about here, there are other, much more acceptable strategies such as dongles for this. Having the software strap itself more firmly to existing hardware has a few implications/possiblities.
For one, some people have more than one computer, but do not feel that a single user with multiple computers should have to purchase multiple copies. This seems legitimate feeling to me, but to microsoft, this is considered wrong and lost revenue, but from a legal standpoint, it is an uncertain area. This serves to take care of that "problem".
Also, a number of users have hardware lifecycles that are shorter than their operating system lifecycles. They will continue to buy new systems, but Microsoft is unable to offer new features that warrant purchase of new versions as quickly as they would like. For example, in the environment I work with, brand new PCs have winNT 4.0 and win95 installed, because those are still good enough, and the appeal of ME/98/98SE/2000 has not been enough to purchase new software, though the hardware gains have been great. By tying a purchased version of the OS to the current hardware, they are forcing the consumer to purchase another OS copy, even if perfectly identical to the old one, when buying new computer equipment.
I would much prefer dongles, if they are going to continue to charge outrageous prices for their products, they can afford dongles. If they lower prices to more reasonable levels, fewer people may wish to pirate it. The privacy and limitiations of this new licensing, if it goes in effect, will certainly keep me from purchasing this product, and I have made significant purchases of MS products before... I also think many IT outfits will not go for this licensing idea and search for alternatives/simply not purchase the product.
I refuse to buy their CDs. They are completely ripping off people, and by trying to copy-protect CDs, all they will do in the long run is gyp the customers, as people who want to pirate the music will always find a way to circumvent it. And also, their talk of replacing CDs is interesting. They only want to switch for copy protection, not for quality. I don't think the consumer market is going to care enough about protecting the companies to invest a LOT of money in upgrading stereos when CDs of equal quality are still released. Any attempt to try to replace mp3 with a copy-protected scheme also will fail, because mp3 is good enough and familiar to people. They need to move towards selling music downloadable online and dropping CD prices. I used to buy CDs, then wisened up. I also don't download mp3s either, just completely abstain from the music industry. Maybe one day they will wise up as to a good consumer-friendly way to conduct business.
I haven't seen nearly as much uproar about WPA (The "Product Activation" scheme, where every install sends all kinds of data to Microsoft about the installation to prevent any sort of privacy). After the intel Processor ID fiasco with privacy, you would think everyone would be up in arms over this one. This includes more than just a number, from my understanding, so I would assume that this other data is non trivial... Is the world ready to trust Microsoft with such information? I certainly am not. Probably makes installation a nightmare too, as it would require a net connection of some sort. There has to be some other, non-intrusive anti-piracy scheme they could come up with. In my view, a company should respect consumer privacy first, and then worry about piracy, especially a company with money to burn like Microsoft, piracy may be rampant with their products, but their bottom line seems to be strong still yet.
Also, I wonder how good the backwards compatibility is. For example, some programs in win2000 after installation could only be used by installer, no matter what. Will this also be the case in XP, that registry entries will be the same as to cause such a problem?
Are you actually color blind? I would guess not. I am red-green colorblind (relatively common). The color schemes used to signify active/inactive windows has no problem with red/green, the most common, and I don't see a potential problem for blue/yellow. The extremely rare dichromat is the only possible problem, but even then the colors are customizable, and shades can be used. Also, the "greeen means go" reference just refers to the start button being colored green in addition to lettering, and I don't think anyone will have a problem with this. These companies do a lot of research, and colorblindness is a big part of every interface designers design process. I really dislike XP on other grounds, but use of color to accentuate is not that bad..
If you have an intel Linux box, try divx.euro.ru for avifile, if you don't have QT, try that site and http://xtheater.sourceforge.net for a gtk player..
Now this is a troll if I ever saw one. No one could ever seriously think of CDE as a good thing. Even Sun is stating a move to Gnome. While I cannot say whether gnome or kde is better, but I'll take almost anything over CDE, that thing is just a horrible piece of crap..
there are so many more things I wish I knew about GTK programming myself, the API documentation is a bit more poor, in my opionion than others. I can see, however, cases in which tying abstract data :)
directly to a widget would be little better than using globals/big structs. I also would like to know where the documentation for stuff like pulling off inheritance in C is.. OO code in C gets way too messy... Maybe I ought to look into gtkmm more
While I don't think KDE is fading away or anything like that anytime soon, I do think that KDE is not as widely spread as Gnome. One big reason is that RedHat, the most widely used among new people, uses gnome by default, and those are the people who care more about desktops. Second, of the ones who bother to change, GPL zealotry dstill stands against KDE, even though it isn't at all valid anymore. Just because of the fact that QT was at one time not GPL, and also that it is owned by a company, it is evil and should not be used.. That kind of idiocy also makes KDE less popular.. :)
And finally, the C zealots who claim that C++ is too slow, despite the fact that there is no longer any discernible difference in speed in modern compilers.
So all in all, I think the install base of Gnome to be larger, but I'm not certain. In any case, the only things keeping it down still are myths and misconceptions. In my opinion, KDE is much more sophisticated and has their act together better than Gnome does, and more than gnome propbably ever will... Gnome is pretty good now, much improved over the old days, but still trailing, in terms of Anti-Aliasing (gtk fault) and general consistency..
Gnome is ok, but KDE really needs more recognition for the stuff they have accomplished..
All this coming from someone whose only project is a GTK app
Not like high school programming courses matter anyway... Maybe it would get you exempted from something in college, but in any case people going into the field learn it one way or another, most likely in college, where, in general, they actually hire appropriate people for the job..
You only have two sets of mime types? I got three :) For some reason, gnome seems to have two entirely independent mime-type databases for different things, and I find this really wrong. I also have an application that trie to play nice with whatever the user may wish to drag and drop it with. This requires special cases, one each for netscape, Kde, nautlius, and gmc. nautilus for some dumb reason is almost just like gmc, but puts a space at the end of every drop... efm matched gmc behavior, and the gmc way seems to be most prevalent, but in any case, there really is too much difference and too little documentation about such things..
Some of my favorite case designs are sold by
http://www.colorcase.com/
They have some really nice looking cases. Next
time I build a system, I plan on purchasing one
of their cases, unless something else really
nice comes along.
Actually, I would say the S-Video connector became prolific because of it's popularity as a DVD player connection more than SVHS, SVHS didn't make a drop in the bucket as far as market share goes. DVHS will go the same way. For a product to succeed, it must be *greatly* improved over an existing standard in the eyes of the consumer. For example, Betamax was a techinically superior product, but not sufficiently superior to make people feel it was worht the investment. DVDs are3 a pretty established standard only because it offers better lasting media and essentially double the quality of VHS. This DVHS improvement would be questionable at best in the eyes of the consumer, and so will fail. The only chance it has is for it to become an affordable, feasbile recording media before DVD can..
I guess I'll share my high school experience.
In Junior High, I upstaged the idiots who sold the school computers, the school recognized me, and I became the preferred person to contact when things went bad, or were not performing as quickly as expected. I was free and knew better what I was doing than the adults who they paid. Then I went on to high school, and one day started fixing problems with their network, by the time someone came by, the printers were printing faster,
several systems that weren't working were, and things were in good shape. The library person thought things were broken because the printers were printing things faster than they "are supposed to". After this, the principal called me in, and made me tell him that I would never touch a school computer again, not so much as touch it.
After about half an hour of me trying to explain to them, and they not listening, I did agree. At the end of that year I went to another high-school, one with a SunOS network and a PC network, and they made me an administrator there, a refreshing change from previous school, and those sun4/260s were so awesome too, so things went well. Then I went to college and now here I am, being paid to run a particular companys ultra boxes. I had hoped that public schools might have improved over the years, but I guess they have not. As far as computers go, high schools have some of the biggest idiots I have ever seen. Of course the same is true for most smaller government associations I have had to work with...
What is it about a 3D Workspace that is so appealing on a 2D Display. I understand how 3D plays a role in games that are meant to be immersive, it adds a great deal. However, when trying to take in most data on a screen, it is much easier to have everything presented orthogonal for best visibility anyway. Take for example MAME, you can rotate the angle however you
wish and draw a neat arcade machine model to draw the game onto. Nice eye candy, but when you want to play the game, you switch to make it match up to the screen. 3D UIs I don't see as solving any issues besides providing eye candy. In fact, without drastically differenet input/output devices, I would think navigating a 3D UI would be both more cumbersome to navigate and provide more ways in which things on the display could be obscured from view. I think the idea of 3D for everything hasn't really come about due to both performance and the fact that the benefits are dubious at best. 3D is great in games and engineering applications, but how well does it apply to everyday computing?
Does anyone know if this release supports YUV overlays with a Voodoo3? Cool to see that the
XRender support is there, but I am really intereseted in the status of the Xvideo stuff.
It will be interesting when this support gets folded into the toolkits, and maybe all the existing, ugly anti-aliasing and alpha blending hacks can go away in favor of this. Cannot wait for gtk, qt, evas, gdk-pixbuf, and eterm to support this natively. This stuff could also *greatly* improve the speed of nautilus and kde 2.1. Very good to see XFree advancing so nicely, getting the needed features to do any multimedia stuff on par with other OSes.
Binaries are important to maintain interest in a project, particularly large, long compiles. In my case I usually install as much as possible from source (for better compiler optimization). I distribute my project in source form only, but I try to make it so that it will compile as easily as possible. My system is such that binaries compiled on it will not work correctly with any stock linux install. This is the downside to binaries under linux. There are so many different, somewhat incompatible versions of many libraries (i.e. glibc) that binary distribution is difficult to pull off for everyone. The code base for open source projects are ever changing and evolving, and while this means the best possible product every step of the way, there is limited compatibility between any two given steps.
Software engineering is not going downhill. It is true that many many open source projects do not undergo sufficient testing, but the biggest ones do. But this is not the point I think he has completely off base..
His statement that 30-year old technology has no place in modern software engineering is a really stupid generalization. Akin to saying that wheels are stupid because they have been around so long with little different about them.
Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris demonstrate that the market is quite willing to work with UNIX systems, and with projects like GNOME and KDE, more and more of what he considers obscure and user unfriendly are hidden from view. That is not to say that it is to the point of hiding things as much as windows, but it is rapidly getting there.
For now, a clear niche for UNIX systems is for people who want more power and flexibility with their systems and know what they are doing. Windows UI does make things easier for the typical user, but it also restricts in many ways power users who want to do some really interesting stuff. NT/2000 go a way to correct this, but if you are UNIX savy, it is hard to give up that power and flexibility, and it is because of this that UNIX is still around today, it is a proven technology.