Trolltech is exploitive of Linux. They're providing QT to the KDE community so as to promote the sales of their development platform. While many people don't see this as a problem, I personally do.
You're confusing mutualism with parasitism. Of course Trolltech benefits from having KDE use their toolkit. They get free testing and bug reports from hundred of OSS devs. KDE benefits as well, because they get an excellent C++ toolkit without having to waste time developing it themselves. Given the complexity of something like Qt, this is a massive advantage for KDE.
The rest of the Linux world benefits from being able to develop high quality GPL applications based on Qt, and taking advantage of the improvements to cross-desktop projects.
Given that projects like OO and Mozilla depend on dual-licenses, is it conceivable that OO might ever actually use the native KDE toolkit?
OO has their own toolkit, and will probably never migrate to either GTK or Qt. That said, OO on Linux has a KDE "wrapper" around it, which makes it fit into a KDE environment well. However, I'm not sure if the widgets are being rendered by Qt/KDE, or if they are just styled to look like them. I can't see any differences to regular Qt/KDE widgets though, so I think Qt is actually doing the rendering.
If the developer version cost $700, how much was the consumer version of whatever this thing would become going to cost?
There were never any plans for a consumer version. As a developer, you're not buying the Greenphone to develop for some future iGreenPhone, you're buying it to develop for either your own device (before the hardware is ready) or for other open phones based on Qtopia.
Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight
I think you still don't understand. Developer platform doesn't mean "phone marketed towards the developer/geek market" it means "device that developers use to test their software on". It's really only that, and the lack of EDGE is not really an issue (unless the network speed is crucial to your testing).
Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux
Trolltech is hugely supportive of Linux (sponsoring developers to work on X, KDE, and freedesktop.org projects like harfbuzz), and the Greenphone wasn't a failure so finding a scapegoat isn't necessary.
Why does no one understand that the Greenphone was purely a developer platform?
It was never meant for consumers, and the fact that it works as a phone is purely secondary to its main function of providing a test bed for developing mobile phone applications for Trolltech's platform. Comparing it to consumer, mass market phones doesn't make any sense.
OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did.
The Greenphone didn't fail, because it was never meant to be anything but a development platform to fill the void while there was nothing else good out there. Now that there are other open phones, its job is done. Aside from the sensationalized headline, this really isn't news at all.
Computers are less forgiving of experimentation and absent-minded errors today. Forget to plug in the cooling fan on your 486? It might flake out once or twice a week, barely often enough to notice. Forget to plug in the cooling fan on your Athlon quad core? Time to buy a new processor.
Bad analogy. Any modern processor will clock itself down or shut off if it overheats. You can even remove the heatsink entirely while it's running and it won't damage anything (or at least, shouldn't).
And this is Microsoft's fault, or of the companies who create applications that think they have the go of the entire box?
It's mostly the application devs' fault. Not that who's fault it is makes one iota of difference. The end result is that it's incredibly annoying and I wouldn't want to use it. Just like no-one cares that lack of driver support on Linux is not really Linux's fault.
if you want something to surf the web and not look like a clown, get an iPhone.
The iPhone has a 320×480 resolution screen. The 810 has 800x480. Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably, so the iPhone is not even a contender.
And I like that it's not a phone, it means you're not locked into anything.
Well of course, with the qualifier of you having heard it, and online doesn't count, then that cuts out a lot of feedback. Doesn't mean there aren't tons of problems with Vista (I've had it installed since it was released, but it's completely unusable).
The amount of people I hear complaining about Vista is indeed great, and its NEVER about how bad this or that feature is. Its always about "I can't find Add/Remove programs anymore!!!!", or some such.
That's an awful lot you're lumping in with "some such".
Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME. Now people are coming from XP, which is decent, and even the average consumer doesn't like Vista, not just the geeks.
Now that the QT people have decided to do things their own way some of my C++ skills and all of my C++ code is useless in the KDE world.
None of your C++ skills are useless. Anything important you learned about C++ is still applicable when using Qt with C++. Think of Qt as a superset of the features available in C++ and the STL. You can still use all your old stl based code if you want, nothing is forcing you to abandon it. Qt simply provides an alternative that many people find better than the STL.
This is nothing like a Microsoft standards extend and extinguish tactic. It's just another library, like any other library you might use in your project. Your code will interoperate just as well with others whether you use Qt or not.
I don't really understand that point of view. If you're happy with the stl classes, then use them by all means. The point of the Q classes is that they are much more useful if you're building a modern GUI application. Using them doesn't make you incompatible with c++ code. As has been mentioned, the containers in Qt are compatible with the stl, and you can easily create QStrings from std::strings and vice versa.
So in your application you can use either (although I can't think of a reason to use the stl classes over the Qt ones), and if you're talking to a library, converting types is trivial. Qt is cross platform, so any Qt classes you write will work fine on any platform you want to deploy to. You won't have any advantages by choosing to use the stl classes.
While I'm no fan of the Gimp myself, your comparison is silly. If your tasks consist of image resizing and simple retouching, then any number of apps will do just fine. Heck, every second image viewer can do that kind of simple stuff. Paint.Net is pretty much what the name implies. An improved version of MS Paint. That makes it great for simple image operations, but it still doesn't have a tenth of the features of something like Gimp, or a 50th of the features of Photoshop.
You're saying your hammer is better for putting together your Ikea furniture than a sledgehammer. Well no kidding, but that doesn't mean the sledgehammer doesn't have its uses.
And you should add, any number of power management apps will handle all that for you automatically. For me, I use kpowersave, and it handles cpu frequency scaling and power profiles (performance/dynamic/energy saving) for me.
No, as has been pointed out, any servers with the volatile repository enabled would have the update months ago. And the installer asks to enable volatile for you, so that should be most servers with cluefull admins.
That's why I love it too. I really don't like the distributions where you get a big bunch of packages as a release, which you are then basically stuck with until the next release (at which point you have to upgrade and cross your fingers, or reinstall). Like Ubuntu, you get a whole ton of packages, and there are always a few that have a subtle bug. But since you're on one release, you don't get the fix until six months later (of course, you can install it separately, but it's a pain). With Debian, if an app is broken in some way, I get the fix as soon as that developer releases a new version, without affecting any other package.
And it's really not that complicated to use. Even things like nvidia drivers are just a m-a autoinstall nvidia away. Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually I find Debian makes things like that very simple and integrated.
I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
In the real world?? What, do you work in the twin towers? Fires in office buildings don't generally proceed far enough to make the whole building collapse. Passing on a safe just because there is some wildly unlikely sequence of events that would still destroy your documents isn't very logical.
Wrong. *I* was the one who mentioned the civil war in Afghanistan, and I mentioned that because of this lie of yours in particular:
Ah yes, you're right. I mistyped my reply, it should have said "You countered".
It's possible you were mistaken, but given that you followed that up by lecturing me about the details of the Afghan civil war, it's pretty clear you did know there was war in Afghanistan prior to US involvement.
The point was that the US did not invade Afghanistan to stop the war. They went there as revenge for 9/11 and to attempt to dethrone a government that supported terrorism. I'm not saying that's not a valid reason, but they definitely did not invade to bring peace to Afghanistan, which is what the original poster was claiming.
Wow did you ever not read the thread at all (it's doubly ironic that you then reply to another guy accusing him of not paying attention to the context of the discussion). The original poster claimed that the US only goes to war because it wants to stop war in other places. I called him on it, because that was not the reason for going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan. He countered that there actually was a civil war in Afghanistan (which, by the way, is still going on) and I said that was a ridiculous reason, since that war had been going on for decades.
If you had any reading comprehension skills, you would have noticed that I didn't criticize the US government for not aggressing earlier, I was merely pointing out that the original poster's claim that the US only goes to war to stop wars in other places is false. Whether or not the Afghanistan war was justified for other reasons is completely irrelevant.
Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war--in fact, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader of one of the warring factions, was killed by suicide bombers, two days before September 11 and almost a month before the US gave air support to Massoud's faction, the Northern Alliance, helping them drive out the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies.
Right... Of course you neglected to mention that that civil war had been going on since 1978. Funny how the US never had the urge to go stop it for the 25 years before 2001.
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Trolltech is exploitive of Linux. They're providing QT to the KDE community so as to promote the sales of their development platform. While many people don't see this as a problem, I personally do.
You're confusing mutualism with parasitism. Of course Trolltech benefits from having KDE use their toolkit. They get free testing and bug reports from hundred of OSS devs. KDE benefits as well, because they get an excellent C++ toolkit without having to waste time developing it themselves. Given the complexity of something like Qt, this is a massive advantage for KDE.
The rest of the Linux world benefits from being able to develop high quality GPL applications based on Qt, and taking advantage of the improvements to cross-desktop projects.
Given that projects like OO and Mozilla depend on dual-licenses, is it conceivable that OO might ever actually use the native KDE toolkit?
OO has their own toolkit, and will probably never migrate to either GTK or Qt. That said, OO on Linux has a KDE "wrapper" around it, which makes it fit into a KDE environment well. However, I'm not sure if the widgets are being rendered by Qt/KDE, or if they are just styled to look like them. I can't see any differences to regular Qt/KDE widgets though, so I think Qt is actually doing the rendering.
If the developer version cost $700, how much was the consumer version of whatever this thing would become going to cost?
There were never any plans for a consumer version. As a developer, you're not buying the Greenphone to develop for some future iGreenPhone, you're buying it to develop for either your own device (before the hardware is ready) or for other open phones based on Qtopia.
The link to the press release on the KDE myths page is broken, so here is an alternate one:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050524172943589
Name one developer who's going to spend lots of his own, personal cash on a phone that maxes out at ~38kbit/sec for data. I don't care HOW customizable it is... a phone that only supports GPRS is a paperweight
I think you still don't understand. Developer platform doesn't mean "phone marketed towards the developer/geek market" it means "device that developers use to test their software on". It's really only that, and the lack of EDGE is not really an issue (unless the network speed is crucial to your testing).
Of course, they'll blame its failure on Linux
Trolltech is hugely supportive of Linux (sponsoring developers to work on X, KDE, and freedesktop.org projects like harfbuzz), and the Greenphone wasn't a failure so finding a scapegoat isn't necessary.
This was never true, and is even less so now: http://kdemyths.urbanlizard.com/myth/60
Why does no one understand that the Greenphone was purely a developer platform?
It was never meant for consumers, and the fact that it works as a phone is purely secondary to its main function of providing a test bed for developing mobile phone applications for Trolltech's platform. Comparing it to consumer, mass market phones doesn't make any sense.
OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did.
The Greenphone didn't fail, because it was never meant to be anything but a development platform to fill the void while there was nothing else good out there. Now that there are other open phones, its job is done. Aside from the sensationalized headline, this really isn't news at all.
Computers are less forgiving of experimentation and absent-minded errors today. Forget to plug in the cooling fan on your 486? It might flake out once or twice a week, barely often enough to notice. Forget to plug in the cooling fan on your Athlon quad core? Time to buy a new processor.
Bad analogy. Any modern processor will clock itself down or shut off if it overheats. You can even remove the heatsink entirely while it's running and it won't damage anything (or at least, shouldn't).
And this is Microsoft's fault, or of the companies who create applications that think they have the go of the entire box?
It's mostly the application devs' fault. Not that who's fault it is makes one iota of difference. The end result is that it's incredibly annoying and I wouldn't want to use it.
Just like no-one cares that lack of driver support on Linux is not really Linux's fault.
Another good one is Sumatra http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
It's even smaller and faster than Foxit, and it's open source. Not as many features though, it's mostly just a viewer.
if you want something to surf the web and not look like a clown, get an iPhone.
The iPhone has a 320×480 resolution screen. The 810 has 800x480. Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably, so the iPhone is not even a contender.
And I like that it's not a phone, it means you're not locked into anything.
Well of course, with the qualifier of you having heard it, and online doesn't count, then that cuts out a lot of feedback. Doesn't mean there aren't tons of problems with Vista (I've had it installed since it was released, but it's completely unusable).
The amount of people I hear complaining about Vista is indeed great, and its NEVER about how bad this or that feature is. Its always about "I can't find Add/Remove programs anymore!!!!", or some such.
That's an awful lot you're lumping in with "some such".
Not quite. When XP came out, all the geeks thought it was terrible and wanted to use Windows 2000 instead, because chances are they were already using it. The people that didn't care about computers loved Windows XP, because they were coming from Windows 98/ME. Now people are coming from XP, which is decent, and even the average consumer doesn't like Vista, not just the geeks.
Now that the QT people have decided to do things their own way some of my C++ skills and all of my C++ code is useless in the KDE world.
None of your C++ skills are useless. Anything important you learned about C++ is still applicable when using Qt with C++. Think of Qt as a superset of the features available in C++ and the STL. You can still use all your old stl based code if you want, nothing is forcing you to abandon it. Qt simply provides an alternative that many people find better than the STL.
This is nothing like a Microsoft standards extend and extinguish tactic. It's just another library, like any other library you might use in your project. Your code will interoperate just as well with others whether you use Qt or not.
I don't really understand that point of view. If you're happy with the stl classes, then use them by all means. The point of the Q classes is that they are much more useful if you're building a modern GUI application. Using them doesn't make you incompatible with c++ code. As has been mentioned, the containers in Qt are compatible with the stl, and you can easily create QStrings from std::strings and vice versa.
So in your application you can use either (although I can't think of a reason to use the stl classes over the Qt ones), and if you're talking to a library, converting types is trivial. Qt is cross platform, so any Qt classes you write will work fine on any platform you want to deploy to. You won't have any advantages by choosing to use the stl classes.
While I'm no fan of the Gimp myself, your comparison is silly. If your tasks consist of image resizing and simple retouching, then any number of apps will do just fine. Heck, every second image viewer can do that kind of simple stuff. Paint.Net is pretty much what the name implies. An improved version of MS Paint. That makes it great for simple image operations, but it still doesn't have a tenth of the features of something like Gimp, or a 50th of the features of Photoshop.
You're saying your hammer is better for putting together your Ikea furniture than a sledgehammer. Well no kidding, but that doesn't mean the sledgehammer doesn't have its uses.
And you should add, any number of power management apps will handle all that for you automatically. For me, I use kpowersave, and it handles cpu frequency scaling and power profiles (performance/dynamic/energy saving) for me.
No, as has been pointed out, any servers with the volatile repository enabled would have the update months ago. And the installer asks to enable volatile for you, so that should be most servers with cluefull admins.
That's why I love it too. I really don't like the distributions where you get a big bunch of packages as a release, which you are then basically stuck with until the next release (at which point you have to upgrade and cross your fingers, or reinstall). Like Ubuntu, you get a whole ton of packages, and there are always a few that have a subtle bug. But since you're on one release, you don't get the fix until six months later (of course, you can install it separately, but it's a pain). With Debian, if an app is broken in some way, I get the fix as soon as that developer releases a new version, without affecting any other package.
And it's really not that complicated to use. Even things like nvidia drivers are just a m-a autoinstall nvidia away. Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually I find Debian makes things like that very simple and integrated.
I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
In the real world?? What, do you work in the twin towers? Fires in office buildings don't generally proceed far enough to make the whole building collapse. Passing on a safe just because there is some wildly unlikely sequence of events that would still destroy your documents isn't very logical.
Wrong. *I* was the one who mentioned the civil war in Afghanistan, and I mentioned that because of this lie of yours in particular:
Ah yes, you're right. I mistyped my reply, it should have said "You countered".
It's possible you were mistaken, but given that you followed that up by lecturing me about the details of the Afghan civil war, it's pretty clear you did know there was war in Afghanistan prior to US involvement.
The point was that the US did not invade Afghanistan to stop the war. They went there as revenge for 9/11 and to attempt to dethrone a government that supported terrorism. I'm not saying that's not a valid reason, but they definitely did not invade to bring peace to Afghanistan, which is what the original poster was claiming.
Uh, yeah I realize you're not the same person. And none of what I said about Afghanistan is a lie.
Wow did you ever not read the thread at all (it's doubly ironic that you then reply to another guy accusing him of not paying attention to the context of the discussion). The original poster claimed that the US only goes to war because it wants to stop war in other places. I called him on it, because that was not the reason for going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan. He countered that there actually was a civil war in Afghanistan (which, by the way, is still going on) and I said that was a ridiculous reason, since that war had been going on for decades.
If you had any reading comprehension skills, you would have noticed that I didn't criticize the US government for not aggressing earlier, I was merely pointing out that the original poster's claim that the US only goes to war to stop wars in other places is false. Whether or not the Afghanistan war was justified for other reasons is completely irrelevant.
Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war--in fact, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader of one of the warring factions, was killed by suicide bombers, two days before September 11 and almost a month before the US gave air support to Massoud's faction, the Northern Alliance, helping them drive out the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies.
Right... Of course you neglected to mention that that civil war had been going on since 1978. Funny how the US never had the urge to go stop it for the 25 years before 2001.