>> I disagree. Those that drive like hell or drive gas guzzlers know full well their gas consumption habits.
Sure, people that drive aggressively on purpose will probably know that it uses more gas, but the vast majority of people drive "normally" and yet could easily improve their gas mileage by 10-30% by changing their driving style (coasting in gear, constant consumption hills, driving the speed limit, etc).
I recently rented a Camry hybrid for a road trip. 1100 km, mostly highway driving. For the first part, I drove normally,without paying attention to the fuel consumption and used about 6.8 L/100km. Then I started paying attention and adjusting my driving style. By the end I'd brought my average down to 5.5L/100km, and over one 250km stretch where I was really paying attention, I used 5.2L/100km.
This car is rated at 34MPG (6.9L/100km) (highway) by the EPA 2008 measurements, and 38MPG by the 2007 standards. My normal driving was close to the 2008 measurements, and I was able to improve that by about 19%, and beat both official estimates of fuel mileage (42-45MPG).
[quote]So they either give up the firewall and open up, or kill the internet access entirely and cut themselves off from what has proven to be the single most important invention of recent years.[/quote]
You seem to think that the internet is a western thing. Well I've got news for you, China has the biggest group of internet users in the world (over 220 million) and if they cut off all outside access, they would still have an internal internet with a massive ammount of information on it. They don't need google or gmail or msn or any of the websites that we use from day to day, because they have their own equivalents (Baidu runs a lot of services).
Sure they would lose a lot of information, but they would still have access to an internet and all the communication benefits of that.
And where are the other choices? Was it really Java vs. C++, with no other options?
If you had bothered to read the next sentence.... Other languages have other problems as I mentioned. But feel free to suggest an alternative
You are stuck in the mindset where all aspects of an application need to be written in the same language.
No, but that only makes sense when there is some huge compelling advantage for using another language. Sure, for a web frontend use PHP/Java/C#/Whatever, or if some critical lib is only available to a specific language, then it is justified, but for the most part, additional languages only bring more hassle.
Your problem is that you've worked on some crappy C++ code using crappy class libraries and therefore are stuck in preconceptions like someone would be "doomed to use C++". Sure I could write some parts of the code in Python or whatever, but there wouldn't be any point. C++ is just as easy (again, with the right class libraries) and runs faster.
and with the benefit of 7 years of professional C++ development, I can say with a straight face that it is the wrong tool for every job.
Just goes to show that no matter how experienced you are, you still have things to learn.. I program in C++/Qt full time at work, and for my side business. I did some years of Java, and every time we eventually ran into performance problems. Not to mention terrible platform integration. So I use C++ with a good cross-platform class library (Qt). No performance problems, just as easy to program as Java (although eclipse is nicer than most C++ IDEs), cross-platform, and integrated much better into any platform than Java is.
C# is right out, since it's not cross-platform. Any scripting language is not suitable for large scale apps (and performance is a problem). C is way too low-level to be productive compared to OO languages.
You used C++ for the wrong jobs, or used it with the wrong class libraries (MFC for example). Sucks for you, but if you use the right tools it just can't be beaten.
MY GOD how painful it makes a lot of really trivial things. Even the nasty hack known as PHP starts looking well planned in this light.
It may be better than alernatives if you really need the performance and low-level capabilities, but if you don't (or only a small part of your project does), you're paying a huge price for wizard points you don't need.
Others have mentioned it, but it really comes down to what classes you use. Stay away from anything produced by microsoft for example (MFC is the devil), and the C++ standard libraries are also of very limited use in modern programs. Go for a complete class library like Qt, and you get a language that's very near as easy to use as C# with all the advantages of C++ (native speeds, cross platform).
>> the switches and knobs are there when you need them, invisible when you don't
Some of them are just plain missing (for example, resizing a window from somewhere that's not the border), some are there but so hidden that no normal user could ever find them (everything in gconf), and some require external tools (too much hassle for small things). Yes, everything can be accomplished in any of those systems, but that doesn't make it easy.
>> As an example, one can use OS X but never run fsck - if he/she wants to, it's a quick trip to/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
I've sure never run it on Linux either. Of course sometimes the system does it automatically, but I've never done it myself.
First, grammar checking and spellchecking are not the same thing
I know, but you were talking about the ability to integrate these types of system wide services.
I know for a fact that OpenOffice, for example, did not use the same spell checker as Firefox and spellchecking did not work at all in the terminal or in Kate.
That would be because they aren't taking advantage of the KDE spellchecker. It's a problem of libs. The capability is there, but the apps outside of KDE don't use it because they don't want to depend on kdelibs. Its the same on OSX though. I'm sure some third party apps (MS Office?, Openoffice) don't use the system spell checker, but instead bundle their own.
As for the terminal, that is not a textbox. I can't imagine why you would a spell checker in a terminal window... Kate has had spell checking for ages. Live spellchecking is not enabled by default because kate is a programmer's text editor, where spell checking really doesn't make sense, but the option is there.
Spellchecking is sure not universal now in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) because I'm looking right at it.
Yeah I don't know about Gnome since I don't use it. But in KDE apps it is universal.
>> Linux still uses the outmoded FHS at the front end
Why do you even care where your files are? At first it bothered me too that files for one app are in multiple folders, but then I realized that I shouldn't even concern myself with such trivialities. That's the computer's job. Keeping track of files is what computers are good at. There's no benefit to having them all in one place aside from some abstract concept of "cleanness" which doesn't even apply here.
>> Linux needs to stop preaching about free software and get back to work
Since when does "Linux" (whatever that is) preach about anything? You advocate popping up a EULA, which is way more annoying than anything that happens on Linux.
>> Users don't want to be rebuffed with the old 'that's the great thing about FOSS - if there's something you don't like, you fix it yourself' line
You need to get it in your mind that the Linux community is a business that is out to please you. They are only peripherally interested in your wishes. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, tough cookies. Help out, deal with it, or use a different OS.
I also think its funny that you like the cut down Gnome and OSX interfaces and yet demand that "every feature a user could possibly want" is included. If that happened those interfaces would be unusably cluttered.
Not really. Most apps read in config at the beginning and then look it up in RAM. It's not like the whole config file gets read in whenever the app requests a value (unless your config system is absolutely braindamaged).
So reading from sqlite will just be slower. Unless you have a truly massive config file you can't load into ram. But at that point you're most likely abusing the config file system and should be using a DB to store your data anyway (like sqlite).
And with sqlite you lose human readability without special tools, which you don't always have access to.
With KParts, the best they can do is add a standard grammar checking library and hope developers building apps for KDE will incorporate it in the next version of that app.
KDE has had system wide spell checking since the 3.x days. In every text box. And it has nothing to do with kparts.
I believe the main difference is the integration that you state, and this enabled the whole desktop to be built with those gadgets/plasmoids/widgets/etc. So the desktop interface (menu, taskbar, system tray, etc etc) and the plasmoids are the same thing and that enables you to make much more integrated stuff. All the other "gadget" systems are not integrated with the rest of the system, they're just living in their own world separate from the rest of the desktop.
I think the ability to create native plasmoids is also unique. When your taskbar is a plasmoid, you don't really want it all to be running in JS or something.
Well its not that bad.. Sure making your own document class is pretty much impossible if you have a life, but using existing ones is pretty easy. Go to the conference you want to submit to, download their latex template and put your content into their sample file. That's all there is to it.
But I really only use latex for the stuff where exact formatting is critical and a template exists. Sure there are tools that let you use Latex for presentations, but it doesn't seem worth it for a presentation where the format is pretty much free form. You just end up with boring cookie cutter presentations.
Thats the thing, I'm not really doing anything. I just have it on a partition to test software.
I don't run anything but a browser and the standard stuff. I don't do any development on it. No antivirus, because its a waste of time if you're careful.
And yet the hard drive churns for ages after startup and everything is just sluggish. Maybe its a driver problem. I dunno. But its not very useful in its current state. I'll revisit it when I get a new computer.
>> Yes it eats more memory. SuperFetch converts all of your available free memory into better program loading times. These pages are marked so that they can be disposed of very quickly but when viewing a memory map it appears as if memory usage has skyrocketed.
I know the theory, but it doesn't work in practice (at least not on my machine). When the system uses so much ram that you're hitting swap, you lose. Whether that's superfetch or something else, I really don't care. I just know that XP uses about 200, while Vista uses about 500-600 on boot, and the Vista install is brand new. And when I open programs that RAM is not freed like the theory says. The system just ends up swapping like crazy, which slows everything down to unbearable speeds and eats my laptop battery.
Sure I only have 1GB of RAM. But that's plenty for XP and plenty for Linux, so I'm not inclined to spend money on hardware to run an OS with zero advantages.
I was leafing through the local newspaper and saw a dell flyer where they prominently displayed a star inset proclaiming that one could get a Free Downgrade to XP!
I thought it was kind of funny that a downgrade to an officially obsolete OS was a big selling feature, bigger even than the actual specs of the machines.
I'm pretty sure you could add plasmoids to the task bar. I can't be 100% sure about 4.0.0, but I know that by some 4.0.x release you could do it. The process wasn't very intuitive though. You couldn't drag from the desktop to the taskbar, you could only drag directly from the add widgets dialog.
>> but to say that KDE4.0.0 was as configurable as the 3.5.9 branch is a lie.
>> But KDE broke their consistent streak with KDE 4.
Whaa? Your example was about keyboard shortcuts. Well those sure haven't changed in KDE4. Some other stuff changed, but I don't think any KDE3 user would have trouble navigating in KDE4 (minus the buggyness of 4.0, I'm talking about the design).
>> For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself.
No. Support for icons on the background has been removed. Icons can only live in the folderview widget.
>> Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life.
Really? Can you point me towards a test? This is the first I've heard of this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the Acer Aspire One at 329 is pretty damn close. I have a 701 from last fall, but the bigger screens of the new gen are very tempting...
Well since most of the new netbooks have significantly bigger screens than the 701, that's not really a problem anymore.
>> I disagree. Those that drive like hell or drive gas guzzlers know full well their gas consumption habits.
Sure, people that drive aggressively on purpose will probably know that it uses more gas, but the vast majority of people drive "normally" and yet could easily improve their gas mileage by 10-30% by changing their driving style (coasting in gear, constant consumption hills, driving the speed limit, etc).
I recently rented a Camry hybrid for a road trip. 1100 km, mostly highway driving. For the first part, I drove normally,without paying attention to the fuel consumption and used about 6.8 L/100km.
Then I started paying attention and adjusting my driving style. By the end I'd brought my average down to 5.5L/100km, and over one 250km stretch where I was really paying attention, I used 5.2L/100km.
This car is rated at 34MPG (6.9L/100km) (highway) by the EPA 2008 measurements, and 38MPG by the 2007 standards. My normal driving was close to the 2008 measurements, and I was able to improve that by about 19%, and beat both official estimates of fuel mileage (42-45MPG).
[quote]So they either give up the firewall and open up, or kill the internet access entirely and cut themselves off from what has proven to be the single most important invention of recent years.[/quote]
You seem to think that the internet is a western thing. Well I've got news for you, China has the biggest group of internet users in the world (over 220 million) and if they cut off all outside access, they would still have an internal internet with a massive ammount of information on it. They don't need google or gmail or msn or any of the websites that we use from day to day, because they have their own equivalents (Baidu runs a lot of services).
Sure they would lose a lot of information, but they would still have access to an internet and all the communication benefits of that.
And where are the other choices? Was it really Java vs. C++, with no other options?
If you had bothered to read the next sentence.... Other languages have other problems as I mentioned. But feel free to suggest an alternative
You are stuck in the mindset where all aspects of an application need to be written in the same language.
No, but that only makes sense when there is some huge compelling advantage for using another language. Sure, for a web frontend use PHP/Java/C#/Whatever, or if some critical lib is only available to a specific language, then it is justified, but for the most part, additional languages only bring more hassle.
Your problem is that you've worked on some crappy C++ code using crappy class libraries and therefore are stuck in preconceptions like someone would be "doomed to use C++". Sure I could write some parts of the code in Python or whatever, but there wouldn't be any point. C++ is just as easy (again, with the right class libraries) and runs faster.
and with the benefit of 7 years of professional C++ development, I can say with a straight face that it is the wrong tool for every job.
Just goes to show that no matter how experienced you are, you still have things to learn.. I program in C++/Qt full time at work, and for my side business. I did some years of Java, and every time we eventually ran into performance problems. Not to mention terrible platform integration. So I use C++ with a good cross-platform class library (Qt). No performance problems, just as easy to program as Java (although eclipse is nicer than most C++ IDEs), cross-platform, and integrated much better into any platform than Java is.
C# is right out, since it's not cross-platform. Any scripting language is not suitable for large scale apps (and performance is a problem). C is way too low-level to be productive compared to OO languages.
You used C++ for the wrong jobs, or used it with the wrong class libraries (MFC for example). Sucks for you, but if you use the right tools it just can't be beaten.
MY GOD how painful it makes a lot of really trivial things. Even the nasty hack known as PHP starts looking well planned in this light.
It may be better than alernatives if you really need the performance and low-level capabilities, but if you don't (or only a small part of your project does), you're paying a huge price for wizard points you don't need.
Others have mentioned it, but it really comes down to what classes you use. Stay away from anything produced by microsoft for example (MFC is the devil), and the C++ standard libraries are also of very limited use in modern programs. Go for a complete class library like Qt, and you get a language that's very near as easy to use as C# with all the advantages of C++ (native speeds, cross platform).
>> the switches and knobs are there when you need them, invisible when you don't
Some of them are just plain missing (for example, resizing a window from somewhere that's not the border), some are there but so hidden that no normal user could ever find them (everything in gconf), and some require external tools (too much hassle for small things). Yes, everything can be accomplished in any of those systems, but that doesn't make it easy.
>> As an example, one can use OS X but never run fsck - if he/she wants to, it's a quick trip to /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
I've sure never run it on Linux either. Of course sometimes the system does it automatically, but I've never done it myself.
First, grammar checking and spellchecking are not the same thing
I know, but you were talking about the ability to integrate these types of system wide services.
I know for a fact that OpenOffice, for example, did not use the same spell checker as Firefox and spellchecking did not work at all in the terminal or in Kate.
That would be because they aren't taking advantage of the KDE spellchecker. It's a problem of libs. The capability is there, but the apps outside of KDE don't use it because they don't want to depend on kdelibs. Its the same on OSX though. I'm sure some third party apps (MS Office?, Openoffice) don't use the system spell checker, but instead bundle their own.
As for the terminal, that is not a textbox. I can't imagine why you would a spell checker in a terminal window... Kate has had spell checking for ages. Live spellchecking is not enabled by default because kate is a programmer's text editor, where spell checking really doesn't make sense, but the option is there.
Spellchecking is sure not universal now in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) because I'm looking right at it.
Yeah I don't know about Gnome since I don't use it. But in KDE apps it is universal.
>> Linux still uses the outmoded FHS at the front end
Why do you even care where your files are? At first it bothered me too that files for one app are in multiple folders, but then I realized that I shouldn't even concern myself with such trivialities. That's the computer's job. Keeping track of files is what computers are good at. There's no benefit to having them all in one place aside from some abstract concept of "cleanness" which doesn't even apply here.
>> Linux needs to stop preaching about free software and get back to work
Since when does "Linux" (whatever that is) preach about anything? You advocate popping up a EULA, which is way more annoying than anything that happens on Linux.
>> Users don't want to be rebuffed with the old 'that's the great thing about FOSS - if there's something you don't like, you fix it yourself' line
You need to get it in your mind that the Linux community is a business that is out to please you. They are only peripherally interested in your wishes. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, tough cookies. Help out, deal with it, or use a different OS.
I also think its funny that you like the cut down Gnome and OSX interfaces and yet demand that "every feature a user could possibly want" is included. If that happened those interfaces would be unusably cluttered.
>> So there's a big win on scaling.
Not really. Most apps read in config at the beginning and then look it up in RAM. It's not like the whole config file gets read in whenever the app requests a value (unless your config system is absolutely braindamaged).
So reading from sqlite will just be slower. Unless you have a truly massive config file you can't load into ram. But at that point you're most likely abusing the config file system and should be using a DB to store your data anyway (like sqlite).
And with sqlite you lose human readability without special tools, which you don't always have access to.
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it.
That makes sense. Just like no businesses would ever use Windows because Microsoft controls it.
Trolltech never controlled KDE and Nokia can't either. Same as Novell can't control Gnome.
With KParts, the best they can do is add a standard grammar checking library and hope developers building apps for KDE will incorporate it in the next version of that app.
KDE has had system wide spell checking since the 3.x days. In every text box. And it has nothing to do with kparts.
I believe the main difference is the integration that you state, and this enabled the whole desktop to be built with those gadgets/plasmoids/widgets/etc. So the desktop interface (menu, taskbar, system tray, etc etc) and the plasmoids are the same thing and that enables you to make much more integrated stuff. All the other "gadget" systems are not integrated with the rest of the system, they're just living in their own world separate from the rest of the desktop.
I think the ability to create native plasmoids is also unique. When your taskbar is a plasmoid, you don't really want it all to be running in JS or something.
Well its not that bad.. Sure making your own document class is pretty much impossible if you have a life, but using existing ones is pretty easy. Go to the conference you want to submit to, download their latex template and put your content into their sample file. That's all there is to it.
But I really only use latex for the stuff where exact formatting is critical and a template exists. Sure there are tools that let you use Latex for presentations, but it doesn't seem worth it for a presentation where the format is pretty much free form. You just end up with boring cookie cutter presentations.
Well what's the replacement? Word/Writer are garbage for writing research papers or theses, so what else is there?
Reporting from the other end, Victoria BC, I can also confirm that you're wrong.
I think they gather in moderate climates :)
Thats the thing, I'm not really doing anything. I just have it on a partition to test software.
I don't run anything but a browser and the standard stuff. I don't do any development on it. No antivirus, because its a waste of time if you're careful.
And yet the hard drive churns for ages after startup and everything is just sluggish.
Maybe its a driver problem. I dunno. But its not very useful in its current state. I'll revisit it when I get a new computer.
>> Yes it eats more memory. SuperFetch converts all of your available free memory into better program loading times. These pages are marked so that they can be disposed of very quickly but when viewing a memory map it appears as if memory usage has skyrocketed.
I know the theory, but it doesn't work in practice (at least not on my machine). When the system uses so much ram that you're hitting swap, you lose. Whether that's superfetch or something else, I really don't care. I just know that XP uses about 200, while Vista uses about 500-600 on boot, and the Vista install is brand new. And when I open programs that RAM is not freed like the theory says. The system just ends up swapping like crazy, which slows everything down to unbearable speeds and eats my laptop battery.
Sure I only have 1GB of RAM. But that's plenty for XP and plenty for Linux, so I'm not inclined to spend money on hardware to run an OS with zero advantages.
I was leafing through the local newspaper and saw a dell flyer where they prominently displayed a star inset proclaiming that one could get a Free Downgrade to XP!
I thought it was kind of funny that a downgrade to an officially obsolete OS was a big selling feature, bigger even than the actual specs of the machines.
You probably have an outdated build.
I'm pretty sure you could add plasmoids to the task bar. I can't be 100% sure about 4.0.0, but I know that by some 4.0.x release you could do it. The process wasn't very intuitive though. You couldn't drag from the desktop to the taskbar, you could only drag directly from the add widgets dialog.
>> but to say that KDE4.0.0 was as configurable as the 3.5.9 branch is a lie.
No one said that.
Severe lack of understanding. xmonad != kde
Kwin can be compared to xmonad. You can use xmonad with KDE.
>> But KDE broke their consistent streak with KDE 4.
Whaa? Your example was about keyboard shortcuts. Well those sure haven't changed in KDE4. Some other stuff changed, but I don't think any KDE3 user would have trouble navigating in KDE4 (minus the buggyness of 4.0, I'm talking about the design).
>> For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself.
No. Support for icons on the background has been removed. Icons can only live in the folderview widget.
>> Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life.
Really? Can you point me towards a test? This is the first I've heard of this issue.