He was always talking about how SUN funded all these usability studies on Gnome and basically neudered it. They basically LCD'd (lowest common denominator, not liquid crystal display) the whole environment.
Good on them. GNOME 1.4 was a mess, sorry, but it was. Did you actually read those usability studies? One of the participants actually laughed out loud when they saw the choices available for a clock applet: "Clock", "Another Clock", "JDBC Binary Clock", "AfterStep Clock".
4 clocks! The mind boggles. They didn't "neuter" it, they brought it back under control and introduced some sanity into it.
This is part of the reason that KDE looks like crap under RedHat -- since all the cool stuff was taken out of Gnome, and RedHat wanted Gnome and KDE to look very similar, guess what happened to all the KDE features... *poof* gone.
That's nonsense. Name me features that were removed. No, making the default browser Mozilla instead of Konqueror is not "removing features", as far as the end user is concerned, it's adding them.
It really seems like KDE is doing the right thing..
Right with regards to what? Don't get me wrong, KDE is doing a fine job in providing a featureful desktop, but loading up on the features and preferences is not the right way to go for most users if you ask me. See the new improved and cleaned up control center? What, pray tell, is the difference between:
"Theme Manager", "Style", "Icons", "Colors", and "Window Decorations".
OK, so the last 3 are fairly obvious, but what do the other two do then? I've used KDE dammit, and I can't even remember. I think one of them is buttons/controls theme, but I don't really recall, and it's hardly obvious is it.
Yawn. I know it's fashionable to claim that developers and engineers have no sense of aesthetics, can't do good interface design, have no sense of form factor.
I'm bored of it. It's clearly garbage. There are lots of things in the world, designed by "engineers" and "developers" that are well designed and thought out, from the perspective of the user. The idea that you need two different people, one to do the UI and one to do the code, is just, well, so so wrong. There are some beautiful cars out there, but the design is very much constrained by what is an efficient, aerodynamic design etc.
The fact is, that "open source developers who don't get usability" is just a stereotype. It's about as relevant as "all Mac users are elitist snobs". Traditionally open source developers haven't thought much about usability, but with the recent pushes in that area that's completely changing. Often now when I browse mailing list archives, the lists are full of quality discussions on how to make the best interface. The developers themselves are doing this, and sometimes the results are inspired. Stuff like HIGs are very useful for this, because it provides valuable guidance. The same people can do both things, and do them well.
They think and know too much about *how* the system is *implemented* rather than how it will be *used* - which is a very different thing. They tend to be function oriented rather than task oriented.
Please explain this. I have no idea what function and task orientation is. I know that some people are good at writing software, and think through how it will be used as well as how it will work. I know others aren't so good at it. I know pidgeon-holing people like that doesn't make sense.
You see, you can't separate implementation and interface. It just doesn't work. Witness the various ideas that Eugenia has over at OSNews. Some of them are good ideas, that should be implemented. A lot of them are stuff that simply doesn't make sense implementation wise (why exactly should we embed icons into the binary directly again?), or haven't been thought through: appfolders for instance always leave me with sticky questions nobody wants to answer, but she demands them all the same.
So, people are equally guilty of this, both "interaction designers" who basically invent a user interface based on often a rather vague set of ideas but don't give any thought to whether it's actually implementable, and then the developers who just implement whatever seems technically right and don't bother considering UI issues.
On the plus side, having UI design guidelines is a good start and at least it gives something that can serve as a basis for discussion.
Right, absolutely. That's an area that IMHO KDE has been lagging behind, the KDE Style Guides, other than being very hard to find, don't make things as clear as the Gnome HIG does, so discussion on kde-usability seems to be to be often quite free floating, whereas stuff on gnome-usability is more, is this HIG compliant as well as "how well does this work". Things get done quicker that way.
In about 10-15 years, the cycle will probably start again, taking us another step further from the days of monolithic systems and proprietry hardware/os/support lock-in (which is where we were at before the Attack of the Killer Micros, young'uns). It's all good.
Hmm. What exactly would come after Linux anyway? You have open hardware, open software..... where do you go next?
The thing that pushes ppl to Linux and Open Source is the price
That's helping in business, but as home users all have a copy anyway (came with their computer) and there is a lot of piracy, upgrades for free etc, price isn't it for home users. There are lots of things that pull people onto Linux - many people actually think it's better. No, really.
They're failing at #1, and as far a I know, #2 would be illegal - it's basically exactly what they were found guilty of in court already.
Other than the fact that the legality or not of it almost certainly wouldn't concern them in the slightest, I'm still struggling to see how the XBox is supposed to morph into this mystic Hub Of Power.
So let's say they devote some R&D dollars to adding whizzy home entertainment system features to the XBox, playing MP3s, interactivity and so on. Let's say they try and build a living room platform (which incidentally is in fact already supplied by the likes of Sky/FreeView/Cable at least in the UK), and so take control of.... something. Our eyeballs.
That's an incredibly risky proposition! Not only would they be going into an area already dominated (in europe anyway) by the digital TV companies, it'd also be the kind of thing that's very hard to extract money from. Hardware is much harder to make money on than software, whereas with software once the R&D is done it's pure profit basically, with hardware that isn't the case. In the meantime of course, while they were adding all this stuff in, Sony and Nintendo would be making a better games console, so when the next gen consoles came out, people would have a choice between:
a) A kickass games console with bleeding edge graphics... or
b) A good games console with some rather cheesy home entertainment stuff.
Hmmm.
No, I think the explanation is far simpler, they want to own the games console industry, and they intend to do that by dumping money into it, until they have simply overtaken their competitors or Sony/Nintendo drop the ball, just like with Office and Windows. The games console industry is a big one, and it's made up of proprietary platforms.
So, what do you think would happen if the XBox got 60% of the market, and the remaining 40% was split two ways between the competition. Quite a few games companies simply wouldn't bother releasing for all 3 platforms. In turn, more games for the Xbox means more customers, which bends the market even more. This is exactly what happened with operating systems in Windows vs MacOS, and could probably happen again with XBox vs Playstation vs GameCube.
A monopoly on the games console industry would be incredibly tough to crack, esp if MS used OEM style tactics on the game developers "You get a big 'discount' on the xbox SDK if you only develop games for us". You'd end up with a seemingly unbreakable grip on a very lucrative industry. Why not? They've got nothing to lose.
If they are both graph based streaming systems though, how exactly does that work? Do you have GST Elements that fork the audio off into MAS, where it joins up with another graph? I think GStreamer has some great potential but obviously it's an in process thing, so an audio server to go with it would be great, but looking at the website it seems there is a lot of feature overlap.
Personally I suspect there's not a great deal of point in making icons vector: 128x128x32 with a decent scaling algorithm (and an optional set of pre-scaled images at smaller sizes) seems to cover pretty much everything.
Covers everything at this time. Max resolutions have gone up year on year, but most people don't use the full capabilities of their card/monitor because the screen elements become too small. So having a resolution independant desktop would be a good way of solving that issue (though obviously you still get these issues with the web).
So, this stuff about Mozilla native SVG may seem offtopic, but it's really not, in a way: does anyone know if the library used for the SVG icons has any utility for Mozilla SVG or other open source browser-native SVG projects?
Not really. A better fit would be Xr - librsvg does the rendering but Mozilla needs to do it itself for good integration. Using Xr however in place of libart would provide a better backend.
One of the big reasons I like OSX (and I do not own a Mac, FYI) are the scalable vector icons
Bzzt, wrong. MacOS does not have any SVG or vector icon capability. It uses scalable bitmaps, which is nice, but they can't go any bigger than 256x256. That means, no resolution independance for you - ie in a true res independant desktop doubling the resolution just makes things sharper, as opposed to smaller.
Note that this implementation probably won't do MacOS style fast zooming (not that it's all that useful anyway). For that I think we have to wait for XSVG, which actually integrates with the X server and can offer hardware accelerated SVG rendering (note that librsvg is faster than libpng in some cases).
Having the same capability with something as lowly as desktop icon is amazing! The next logical step is UI widgets and other elements of the desktop.
GTK already supports SVG themes, but I think a bit more work is required to make them really usable and realistic.
Having said all this, their service is occasionally completely shit, connecting at a snails pace and dropping you into limbo usually in the middle of a fraught deathmatch.
Hmmm. When we used AOL (because they were the only company offering flat rate dialup with our cable provider in the UK) I was just getting in to Linux and so ended up learning quite a bit about the way they operate. It's interesting you mention deathmatches, because I found the latency to be so high games against friends were nearly unplayable. A bit of poking around showed that all traffic, apparently regardless of where it actually went to, was routed via New York.
Rather irritatingly, they also insist on using their own proprietary dialup protocol, meaning that you have to install their own software (if you're on Windows) which of course proceeds to take over your computer. In fact, installing AOL was the last straw for one of my Windows installation, it completely trashed it and I had to reinstall. Needless to say, although the prices were impressive, the ease of use was not.
Erm, fonts != web rendering technology. If it's broke in Gecko [mozilla.org] it's broke in Gecko, and having the right fonts won't make any difference. Or does he mean, "best viewed in Windows"?
I think he means font sizes. Windows and Linux interpret font sizes differently, which means that when web designers embed absolute font sizes, what looks good on windows just looks too small on Linux, and we have to zoom in to the page. So I think that's what they're talking about here.
As another user points out, the article offers so salient points regarding any actual new features or improvements, just a general mish-mash.
Er, because it's not done yet, and Ximian don't want a load of ignorant slashdotters arguing about it before it's even out?
I get so annoyed by people writing pretentious twaddle
There will be a new file picker in GTK2.4 guaranteed.
I'm not surprised Ximian want to keep a lid on it. Keeping us in suspense is a good way to get good marketing if the end result is good (and i'd bet anything it will be), and in the meantime they avoid flames.
Competition bracketed by standards. There are some posts saying that eurgh all gtk apps suck. Personally I think peoples attitudes will change once GTK2 apps become the norm (my desktop is mostly gtk2 but it's also mostly development software).
Anyway, users shouldn't be able to tell the difference between them. Redhat started it with BlueCurve, now there is also Geramik, it can only go forward. So, now there is unified icon themes, soon you'll have to look carefully to tell which widget engine an app is using if you use a unified theme.
Really what's next is for Qt and GTK to get standardised theming plugins, so a theme can be written once and then used for both Qt and GTK, but I dunno if that'll happen anytime soon.
However, it is not just the fair use rights, it is the problem that for DRM to work, you got to allow a content producer, that is, a cartel in reality, to control everything from production, to the senses of the end user. It is insufficient to control e.g. the soundcard, because you can always record something as the sound propagates through the air.
Yes and no. The harder it gets to copy things, the fewer people will do it. I suppose you could argue that p2p networks mean only one person has to crack it for everybody to get it, but all they have to do then is crack down on the p2p networks as well. Gnutella may be undestroyable in theory, but if you killed router.limewire.com, it'd be forced underground even more, and Gnutella is hardly user friendly at best.
However, what it means if this cartel can control all speech, is that freedom of expression is gone. That means end of democracy, and say hello to totalitarian rule.
I don't equate free spech with content protection. Copying something for no cost != free speech imo. You can still say whatever you like.
But, I'd much rather come up with some alternative before seeing a total system collapse. But it is clear that we would have to do it...
Cocoa code can be recompiled for GNUStep [gnustep.org], which is fully open-source.
Cocoa contains many, many proprietary extensions to OpenSTEP. I guess the GNUStep people could constantly play catchup a la Wine, doesn't mean it's easy.
I think you are mixing up two different things, the fact that software is open source, and the fact that the coding is done for a given API. There are many open source project that are targeted for the Win32 API.
Sure. I'm just pointing out that to actually target the full community, it'd make sense to use portable APIs. Just a minor niggle.
The fact that darwin does not run on your hardware is irrelevant. The fact that can't or don't want to use the code that is open sourced does not change its value.
Well, I'd say the value of some code is determined by how useful it is. If I gave you an old Lada as a gift, maybe you'd be pleased with the act of generosity, but you probably wouldn't drive it. I'm not saying Darwin is an old Lada, just pointing out that gifts are generally appreciated more if they're actually useful.
If safari is such a poor browser, why would like the source code? Or do you mean that because the browser is of low quality it should be open sourced?
No, maybe I didn't make myself clear. I said it doesn't contain any totally radical features that mean Apple would lose significant IP by open sourcing it, and also that because it's tied to MacOS anyway, open sourcing it wouldn't lose them any customers or anything. Safari isn't enough of a reason to actually buy a Mac, so what did they have to lose? They'd have gained manpower if anything. But they didn't *shrug*
If when apple will be using current BSD code and won't give back its improving, then complaining will be justified.
Good point I guess. I haven't followed it closely.
The element that will probably be used first by Linux systems is rendez-vous. Whenever the other technologies will be adopted is an open question.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about Rendezvous. As for the others, well NetSprockets/OpenPlay is abandoned you realise? Not sure what CDSA is. QuickTime I'm not sure about, some say it's open, some say it's closed. It's certainly owned and controlled by Apple, and despite the fact that it can use open codecs, none of Apples content actually does. So I'm split on that one.
First, you don't mean "apps written for Linux," you mean "apps written for POSIX."
No, I do mean apps written for Linux. Gabber can be run on MacOS X just fine, you just need to fink the gnome libs (or this was true at one point). So even though Gabber uses non-POSIX tech, it still works.
(You also don't mean "MacOS", which doesn't exist, nor "Mac OS", but "Mac OS X").
That's pretty pedantic. I say Windows, Linux, MacOS because that's what they are. Context is used in the English language for a reason.
And if you write an app "for Mac OS X" that is also written for POSIX
No, an app written for MacOS X uses way more APIs than what are defined in POSIX. That's fine. Unfortunately those APIs are proprietary, almost completely so. That means apps that are actually written for MacOS, as opposed to unix apps that happen to run on it, aren't portable, unless you can point me to portable versions of CoreAudio, IOKit, Cocoa, Carbon etc.
You're complaining that PART of Mac OS X is proprietary.
Yeah I am, because it's the parts that all the apps use.
Does anybody else think that sounds really dull? There are plenty of humans that suck at writing good stories, although these techniques might help make a world more realistic, storytellers are still going to have to exert some control over the plot.
It sounds like the sort of thing Cyc would be useful for, in terms of common sense understanding of the effects actions have on the plots
Hmmm, this is where the whole argument gets into the realms of philosophy. After all, just what is real? If the "replicant" is truly identical to the original, then logically it must be as real as the original. Therefore if one is destroyed as the other is "created" and the two are truly identical, then no-one will be able to tell the difference, even the person being "teleported" in the first place.
That assumes that there is no component to a sentient being that we cannot presently measure. If you believe in the soul, then clearly that isn't the case.
I read an interesting theory some time ago, which stated that the mind/soul is a separate thing from the body. How exactly does the interface work? It said that the mind could influence quantum probabilities. The Russians did experiments in ESP (apparently) that showed that certain gifted individuals could control the rate of decay of a small particle of a radioactive material. The larger the particle, the harder it became for them to control. They "controlled" it by watching a counter with the rate on, and attempting to make it move faster or slower.
Inside the neurons in our brain, there is a column of something, I forget what. Anyway, it is at the level where quantum probabilities (?) affect it. The theory goes that the mind controls the body by controlling/influencing the probabilities at the neuron level, acting as a kind of giant control panel.
This theory is of course difficult if not impossible to test, but it begs the question - is it possible to interrupt that connection?
Also, it should be noted that Apple will find any alternatives necessary to avoid DRM.
How do you know that?
So far, Apples "anti-DRM" stance has consisted of some PR statements and not being gung-ho about integrating it. I've yet to see a hard "just say no" stance. Indeed, if it really is just a social problem, then why does the iPod make it difficult to copy music from it to iTunes? Surely that's a useful feature for customers to have - but they don't make it easy.
When Apple do more than simply tell their customers what they want to hear, then I'll be impressed. Until then, it seems very much that Apple say one thing, then go and do whatever makes sense for them to do as a corporation, which is exactly what I'd expect.
Unless of course you don't have a problem with DRM.
I don't.
Yeah, content protection really sucks, and the loss of fair use rights is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, for all the flag waving over anti-DRM for content, I have yet to see people come up with a compelling economic system that lets people release their content for free, yet still get rewarded for it.
A variant of the gift economy is the closest I've seen so far, but most people seem to be more interested in making a new, more elite p2p network than actually attempting to address the fundamental problems.
So until we can show that we have a credible alternative, I'm not going to argue with DRM advocates. After all, 99% of people aren't interested in high-falutin moral arguments about fair use rights, they want to steal music and films. If DRM stops them screwing up the system totally while we work on an alternative where DRM isn't necessary, then bring it on I say. Better that than a total system collapse.
Most importantly, this will continue to add new developers to open source movements, and that can't be bad.
Unfortunately, those open source developers will almost certainly end up writing Cocoa IRC clients or something - ie software that can only be used on a proprietary platform. This whole story is here because most free software is portable, it's based entirely on open standards and free APIs. MacOS apps don't, so it's no different from people writing open source Windows software - nice, but not all that useful to people outside that platform.
Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so.
You're easily impressed then. Darwin was mostly already open source, and has such poor hardware support it's nearly useless outside of the Mac. They were legally obligated to give back the KHTML improvements - yet Safari itself is not open source, despite it being a merely average web browser in terms of features and standards support. It's MacOS only anyway, so it's not like they'd have lost anything. Their contributions to FreeBSD have been in the order of a few trivial patches and some test suites according to Jordan Hubbard who seems to consider the positive marketing as their biggest contribution.
Meanwhile, companies like Redhat, Ximian and the rest GPL everything and still make money and grow. Yes yes, I'm not "expecting" or "demanding" Apple to open source anything, I'm pointing out that their contributions are nothing special.
Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.
So far I don't know of any Linux developers that have been hired by them. There were some FreeBSD developers (at least one of whom had to ask for an interview), and a Mozilla hacker (which is cross platform). In fact, I heard (dunno if it's true) that Jobs originally asked Linus to work on OS X, and he told them to piss off. Urban myth perhaps.
But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.
What, pray tell, have they returned that they developed themselves outside of Darwin, which as I've already pointed out, is a nice gesture but ultimately useless. Chess.app?
It's a funny kind of "synergy" where apps written for Linux will work pretty well on MacOS, but it's actually utterly impossible to do the reverse with a Wine style/scale reverse engineering project.
Sorry, but this is not "co-operation" by any stretch of the imagination. Linux apps will work on Windows too, sure it's not integrated, but so what? It's still a one way flow.
Nonetheless, all I expect to see in this thread are posts praising Apple for oooh bundling an X11 server.
Actually, if anything Linux is the biggest threat to Apple. Dennis E Powell, not one to mince his words when it comes to desktop Linux, recently claimed that the from the preview he'd seen of Ximian Desktop 2, it was the slickest, most polished desktop he'd ever used - including MacOS. Exagguration? Maybe so. Nonetheless, the moment Desktop Linux gets better than what Apple can produce (and it will), they'll find themselves struggling to keep their customer base.
After all, I always thought they were supposed to be selling machines to grannies and non-technical arty folks: not the kind of people who need an integrated X server, no? So clearly the unix-head market is quite a large segment of their customer base, if not the majority.
I would venture to guess that there will be significant forking over time.
Linux is already forked like a fjord. The various flavours of the gazillion and one shared libraries cause serious headaches, and some people (at least at redhat) appear to think that RPM "solves" packaging, because each distro is in fact an independant and different operating system, despite them sharing 99.9999999% of the code.
Ah, it's just a rant. Hopefully at some point Linux the platform will get some semblance of stability, probably once it's caught up somewhat with Windows and major releases occur less often.
This makes me wonder.... why bother with the Make-Work of moving to Linux in the first place? Why no keep working on the existing tuned kernels of AIX, IRIX, Tru64, etc?
Because impressively big though these companies are, the rest of the world is bigger, and they know that they can't match the speed and innovation that's coming out of linux. They just don't have several hundred kernel engineers working on it (I bet).
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Good on them. GNOME 1.4 was a mess, sorry, but it was. Did you actually read those usability studies? One of the participants actually laughed out loud when they saw the choices available for a clock applet: "Clock", "Another Clock", "JDBC Binary Clock", "AfterStep Clock".
4 clocks! The mind boggles. They didn't "neuter" it, they brought it back under control and introduced some sanity into it.
This is part of the reason that KDE looks like crap under RedHat -- since all the cool stuff was taken out of Gnome, and RedHat wanted Gnome and KDE to look very similar, guess what happened to all the KDE features... *poof* gone.
That's nonsense. Name me features that were removed. No, making the default browser Mozilla instead of Konqueror is not "removing features", as far as the end user is concerned, it's adding them.
It really seems like KDE is doing the right thing..
Right with regards to what? Don't get me wrong, KDE is doing a fine job in providing a featureful desktop, but loading up on the features and preferences is not the right way to go for most users if you ask me. See the new improved and cleaned up control center? What, pray tell, is the difference between:
"Theme Manager", "Style", "Icons", "Colors", and "Window Decorations".
OK, so the last 3 are fairly obvious, but what do the other two do then? I've used KDE dammit, and I can't even remember. I think one of them is buttons/controls theme, but I don't really recall, and it's hardly obvious is it.
I'm bored of it. It's clearly garbage. There are lots of things in the world, designed by "engineers" and "developers" that are well designed and thought out, from the perspective of the user. The idea that you need two different people, one to do the UI and one to do the code, is just, well, so so wrong. There are some beautiful cars out there, but the design is very much constrained by what is an efficient, aerodynamic design etc.
The fact is, that "open source developers who don't get usability" is just a stereotype. It's about as relevant as "all Mac users are elitist snobs". Traditionally open source developers haven't thought much about usability, but with the recent pushes in that area that's completely changing. Often now when I browse mailing list archives, the lists are full of quality discussions on how to make the best interface. The developers themselves are doing this, and sometimes the results are inspired. Stuff like HIGs are very useful for this, because it provides valuable guidance. The same people can do both things, and do them well.
They think and know too much about *how* the system is *implemented* rather than how it will be *used* - which is a very different thing. They tend to be function oriented rather than task oriented.
Please explain this. I have no idea what function and task orientation is. I know that some people are good at writing software, and think through how it will be used as well as how it will work. I know others aren't so good at it. I know pidgeon-holing people like that doesn't make sense.
You see, you can't separate implementation and interface. It just doesn't work. Witness the various ideas that Eugenia has over at OSNews. Some of them are good ideas, that should be implemented. A lot of them are stuff that simply doesn't make sense implementation wise (why exactly should we embed icons into the binary directly again?), or haven't been thought through: appfolders for instance always leave me with sticky questions nobody wants to answer, but she demands them all the same.
So, people are equally guilty of this, both "interaction designers" who basically invent a user interface based on often a rather vague set of ideas but don't give any thought to whether it's actually implementable, and then the developers who just implement whatever seems technically right and don't bother considering UI issues.
On the plus side, having UI design guidelines is a good start and at least it gives something that can serve as a basis for discussion.
Right, absolutely. That's an area that IMHO KDE has been lagging behind, the KDE Style Guides, other than being very hard to find, don't make things as clear as the Gnome HIG does, so discussion on kde-usability seems to be to be often quite free floating, whereas stuff on gnome-usability is more, is this HIG compliant as well as "how well does this work". Things get done quicker that way.
Hmm. What exactly would come after Linux anyway? You have open hardware, open software..... where do you go next?
That's helping in business, but as home users all have a copy anyway (came with their computer) and there is a lot of piracy, upgrades for free etc, price isn't it for home users. There are lots of things that pull people onto Linux - many people actually think it's better. No, really.
Other than the fact that the legality or not of it almost certainly wouldn't concern them in the slightest, I'm still struggling to see how the XBox is supposed to morph into this mystic Hub Of Power.
So let's say they devote some R&D dollars to adding whizzy home entertainment system features to the XBox, playing MP3s, interactivity and so on. Let's say they try and build a living room platform (which incidentally is in fact already supplied by the likes of Sky/FreeView/Cable at least in the UK), and so take control of .... something. Our eyeballs.
That's an incredibly risky proposition! Not only would they be going into an area already dominated (in europe anyway) by the digital TV companies, it'd also be the kind of thing that's very hard to extract money from. Hardware is much harder to make money on than software, whereas with software once the R&D is done it's pure profit basically, with hardware that isn't the case. In the meantime of course, while they were adding all this stuff in, Sony and Nintendo would be making a better games console, so when the next gen consoles came out, people would have a choice between:
a) A kickass games console with bleeding edge graphics ... or
b) A good games console with some rather cheesy home entertainment stuff.
Hmmm.
No, I think the explanation is far simpler, they want to own the games console industry, and they intend to do that by dumping money into it, until they have simply overtaken their competitors or Sony/Nintendo drop the ball, just like with Office and Windows. The games console industry is a big one, and it's made up of proprietary platforms.
So, what do you think would happen if the XBox got 60% of the market, and the remaining 40% was split two ways between the competition. Quite a few games companies simply wouldn't bother releasing for all 3 platforms. In turn, more games for the Xbox means more customers, which bends the market even more. This is exactly what happened with operating systems in Windows vs MacOS, and could probably happen again with XBox vs Playstation vs GameCube.
A monopoly on the games console industry would be incredibly tough to crack, esp if MS used OEM style tactics on the game developers "You get a big 'discount' on the xbox SDK if you only develop games for us". You'd end up with a seemingly unbreakable grip on a very lucrative industry. Why not? They've got nothing to lose.
If they are both graph based streaming systems though, how exactly does that work? Do you have GST Elements that fork the audio off into MAS, where it joins up with another graph? I think GStreamer has some great potential but obviously it's an in process thing, so an audio server to go with it would be great, but looking at the website it seems there is a lot of feature overlap.
Covers everything at this time. Max resolutions have gone up year on year, but most people don't use the full capabilities of their card/monitor because the screen elements become too small. So having a resolution independant desktop would be a good way of solving that issue (though obviously you still get these issues with the web).
Not really. A better fit would be Xr - librsvg does the rendering but Mozilla needs to do it itself for good integration. Using Xr however in place of libart would provide a better backend.
How does librsvg compare to ksvg? Which is faster, more compliant, more powerful etc?
Bzzt, wrong. MacOS does not have any SVG or vector icon capability. It uses scalable bitmaps, which is nice, but they can't go any bigger than 256x256. That means, no resolution independance for you - ie in a true res independant desktop doubling the resolution just makes things sharper, as opposed to smaller.
Note that this implementation probably won't do MacOS style fast zooming (not that it's all that useful anyway). For that I think we have to wait for XSVG, which actually integrates with the X server and can offer hardware accelerated SVG rendering (note that librsvg is faster than libpng in some cases).
Having the same capability with something as lowly as desktop icon is amazing! The next logical step is UI widgets and other elements of the desktop.
GTK already supports SVG themes, but I think a bit more work is required to make them really usable and realistic.
They are working on adapting the Wine code for the user32 and common controls libraries, so they'll probably have a gui soon enough.
Hmmm. When we used AOL (because they were the only company offering flat rate dialup with our cable provider in the UK) I was just getting in to Linux and so ended up learning quite a bit about the way they operate. It's interesting you mention deathmatches, because I found the latency to be so high games against friends were nearly unplayable. A bit of poking around showed that all traffic, apparently regardless of where it actually went to, was routed via New York.
Rather irritatingly, they also insist on using their own proprietary dialup protocol, meaning that you have to install their own software (if you're on Windows) which of course proceeds to take over your computer. In fact, installing AOL was the last straw for one of my Windows installation, it completely trashed it and I had to reinstall. Needless to say, although the prices were impressive, the ease of use was not.
I think he means font sizes. Windows and Linux interpret font sizes differently, which means that when web designers embed absolute font sizes, what looks good on windows just looks too small on Linux, and we have to zoom in to the page. So I think that's what they're talking about here.
As another user points out, the article offers so salient points regarding any actual new features or improvements, just a general mish-mash.
Er, because it's not done yet, and Ximian don't want a load of ignorant slashdotters arguing about it before it's even out?
I get so annoyed by people writing pretentious twaddle
Me too :)
I'm not surprised Ximian want to keep a lid on it. Keeping us in suspense is a good way to get good marketing if the end result is good (and i'd bet anything it will be), and in the meantime they avoid flames.
Competition bracketed by standards. There are some posts saying that eurgh all gtk apps suck. Personally I think peoples attitudes will change once GTK2 apps become the norm (my desktop is mostly gtk2 but it's also mostly development software).
Anyway, users shouldn't be able to tell the difference between them. Redhat started it with BlueCurve, now there is also Geramik, it can only go forward. So, now there is unified icon themes, soon you'll have to look carefully to tell which widget engine an app is using if you use a unified theme.
Really what's next is for Qt and GTK to get standardised theming plugins, so a theme can be written once and then used for both Qt and GTK, but I dunno if that'll happen anytime soon.
Yes and no. The harder it gets to copy things, the fewer people will do it. I suppose you could argue that p2p networks mean only one person has to crack it for everybody to get it, but all they have to do then is crack down on the p2p networks as well. Gnutella may be undestroyable in theory, but if you killed router.limewire.com, it'd be forced underground even more, and Gnutella is hardly user friendly at best.
However, what it means if this cartel can control all speech, is that freedom of expression is gone. That means end of democracy, and say hello to totalitarian rule.
I don't equate free spech with content protection. Copying something for no cost != free speech imo. You can still say whatever you like.
But, I'd much rather come up with some alternative before seeing a total system collapse. But it is clear that we would have to do it...
Yeah :( I wish I had time.......
Cocoa contains many, many proprietary extensions to OpenSTEP. I guess the GNUStep people could constantly play catchup a la Wine, doesn't mean it's easy.
I think you are mixing up two different things, the fact that software is open source, and the fact that the coding is done for a given API. There are many open source project that are targeted for the Win32 API.
Sure. I'm just pointing out that to actually target the full community, it'd make sense to use portable APIs. Just a minor niggle.
The fact that darwin does not run on your hardware is irrelevant. The fact that can't or don't want to use the code that is open sourced does not change its value.
Well, I'd say the value of some code is determined by how useful it is. If I gave you an old Lada as a gift, maybe you'd be pleased with the act of generosity, but you probably wouldn't drive it. I'm not saying Darwin is an old Lada, just pointing out that gifts are generally appreciated more if they're actually useful.
If safari is such a poor browser, why would like the source code? Or do you mean that because the browser is of low quality it should be open sourced?
No, maybe I didn't make myself clear. I said it doesn't contain any totally radical features that mean Apple would lose significant IP by open sourcing it, and also that because it's tied to MacOS anyway, open sourcing it wouldn't lose them any customers or anything. Safari isn't enough of a reason to actually buy a Mac, so what did they have to lose? They'd have gained manpower if anything. But they didn't *shrug*
If when apple will be using current BSD code and won't give back its improving, then complaining will be justified.
Good point I guess. I haven't followed it closely.
The element that will probably be used first by Linux systems is rendez-vous. Whenever the other technologies will be adopted is an open question.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about Rendezvous. As for the others, well NetSprockets/OpenPlay is abandoned you realise? Not sure what CDSA is. QuickTime I'm not sure about, some say it's open, some say it's closed. It's certainly owned and controlled by Apple, and despite the fact that it can use open codecs, none of Apples content actually does. So I'm split on that one.
Except.... yes
First, you don't mean "apps written for Linux," you mean "apps written for POSIX."
No, I do mean apps written for Linux. Gabber can be run on MacOS X just fine, you just need to fink the gnome libs (or this was true at one point). So even though Gabber uses non-POSIX tech, it still works.
(You also don't mean "MacOS", which doesn't exist, nor "Mac OS", but "Mac OS X").
That's pretty pedantic. I say Windows, Linux, MacOS because that's what they are. Context is used in the English language for a reason.
And if you write an app "for Mac OS X" that is also written for POSIX
No, an app written for MacOS X uses way more APIs than what are defined in POSIX. That's fine. Unfortunately those APIs are proprietary, almost completely so. That means apps that are actually written for MacOS, as opposed to unix apps that happen to run on it, aren't portable, unless you can point me to portable versions of CoreAudio, IOKit, Cocoa, Carbon etc.
You're complaining that PART of Mac OS X is proprietary.
Yeah I am, because it's the parts that all the apps use.
It sounds like the sort of thing Cyc would be useful for, in terms of common sense understanding of the effects actions have on the plots
That assumes that there is no component to a sentient being that we cannot presently measure. If you believe in the soul, then clearly that isn't the case.
I read an interesting theory some time ago, which stated that the mind/soul is a separate thing from the body. How exactly does the interface work? It said that the mind could influence quantum probabilities. The Russians did experiments in ESP (apparently) that showed that certain gifted individuals could control the rate of decay of a small particle of a radioactive material. The larger the particle, the harder it became for them to control. They "controlled" it by watching a counter with the rate on, and attempting to make it move faster or slower.
Inside the neurons in our brain, there is a column of something, I forget what. Anyway, it is at the level where quantum probabilities (?) affect it. The theory goes that the mind controls the body by controlling/influencing the probabilities at the neuron level, acting as a kind of giant control panel.
This theory is of course difficult if not impossible to test, but it begs the question - is it possible to interrupt that connection?
How do you know that?
So far, Apples "anti-DRM" stance has consisted of some PR statements and not being gung-ho about integrating it. I've yet to see a hard "just say no" stance. Indeed, if it really is just a social problem, then why does the iPod make it difficult to copy music from it to iTunes? Surely that's a useful feature for customers to have - but they don't make it easy.
When Apple do more than simply tell their customers what they want to hear, then I'll be impressed. Until then, it seems very much that Apple say one thing, then go and do whatever makes sense for them to do as a corporation, which is exactly what I'd expect.
I don't.
Yeah, content protection really sucks, and the loss of fair use rights is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, for all the flag waving over anti-DRM for content, I have yet to see people come up with a compelling economic system that lets people release their content for free, yet still get rewarded for it.
A variant of the gift economy is the closest I've seen so far, but most people seem to be more interested in making a new, more elite p2p network than actually attempting to address the fundamental problems.
So until we can show that we have a credible alternative, I'm not going to argue with DRM advocates. After all, 99% of people aren't interested in high-falutin moral arguments about fair use rights, they want to steal music and films. If DRM stops them screwing up the system totally while we work on an alternative where DRM isn't necessary, then bring it on I say. Better that than a total system collapse.
Unfortunately, those open source developers will almost certainly end up writing Cocoa IRC clients or something - ie software that can only be used on a proprietary platform. This whole story is here because most free software is portable, it's based entirely on open standards and free APIs. MacOS apps don't, so it's no different from people writing open source Windows software - nice, but not all that useful to people outside that platform.
Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so.
You're easily impressed then. Darwin was mostly already open source, and has such poor hardware support it's nearly useless outside of the Mac. They were legally obligated to give back the KHTML improvements - yet Safari itself is not open source, despite it being a merely average web browser in terms of features and standards support. It's MacOS only anyway, so it's not like they'd have lost anything. Their contributions to FreeBSD have been in the order of a few trivial patches and some test suites according to Jordan Hubbard who seems to consider the positive marketing as their biggest contribution.
Meanwhile, companies like Redhat, Ximian and the rest GPL everything and still make money and grow. Yes yes, I'm not "expecting" or "demanding" Apple to open source anything, I'm pointing out that their contributions are nothing special.
Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.
So far I don't know of any Linux developers that have been hired by them. There were some FreeBSD developers (at least one of whom had to ask for an interview), and a Mozilla hacker (which is cross platform). In fact, I heard (dunno if it's true) that Jobs originally asked Linus to work on OS X, and he told them to piss off. Urban myth perhaps.
But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.
What, pray tell, have they returned that they developed themselves outside of Darwin, which as I've already pointed out, is a nice gesture but ultimately useless. Chess.app?
That's the sticking point really isn't it.
It's a funny kind of "synergy" where apps written for Linux will work pretty well on MacOS, but it's actually utterly impossible to do the reverse with a Wine style/scale reverse engineering project.
Sorry, but this is not "co-operation" by any stretch of the imagination. Linux apps will work on Windows too, sure it's not integrated, but so what? It's still a one way flow.
Nonetheless, all I expect to see in this thread are posts praising Apple for oooh bundling an X11 server.
Actually, if anything Linux is the biggest threat to Apple. Dennis E Powell, not one to mince his words when it comes to desktop Linux, recently claimed that the from the preview he'd seen of Ximian Desktop 2, it was the slickest, most polished desktop he'd ever used - including MacOS. Exagguration? Maybe so. Nonetheless, the moment Desktop Linux gets better than what Apple can produce (and it will), they'll find themselves struggling to keep their customer base.
After all, I always thought they were supposed to be selling machines to grannies and non-technical arty folks: not the kind of people who need an integrated X server, no? So clearly the unix-head market is quite a large segment of their customer base, if not the majority.
Linux is already forked like a fjord. The various flavours of the gazillion and one shared libraries cause serious headaches, and some people (at least at redhat) appear to think that RPM "solves" packaging, because each distro is in fact an independant and different operating system, despite them sharing 99.9999999% of the code.
Ah, it's just a rant. Hopefully at some point Linux the platform will get some semblance of stability, probably once it's caught up somewhat with Windows and major releases occur less often.
This makes me wonder.... why bother with the Make-Work of moving to Linux in the first place? Why no keep working on the existing tuned kernels of AIX, IRIX, Tru64, etc?
Because impressively big though these companies are, the rest of the world is bigger, and they know that they can't match the speed and innovation that's coming out of linux. They just don't have several hundred kernel engineers working on it (I bet).