KDE/Gnome + Linux is pretty much "ready for the desktop". Many home users need a browser and a email client and that's about it.
I've said it many times before, and I'm sure I'll say it many more times, but the worst thing to happen to desktop Linux was to have two major desktop environments. If Qt had been, say LGPL, and Gnome would have never come about, things would be a lot different today. You could have a real product that ISVs could target.
But as we have it today, you have a billion distros with KDE and Gnome sharing the desktop linux market, and freedesktop.org and the Portland project trying to address some of the interop issues, but it's a little late. Time doesn't stand still just because it's open source. Vista is just going to further the distance between desktop Linux and windows. The crucial time was between when XP was released and now.
Think of something like BeOS, but with the linux kernel. I wouldn't be surprised if 5-7 years from now, KDE and Gnome are largely forgotten, and someone has put a really cohesive desktop operating system on top of the linux kernel.
Carmack is really good as a person who pushes teh technology.
As a game developer, though, it's just not there. anytime I hear about an id game now, I just wait until someone brings out a truly great game using the engine that Carmack has developed.
Yes, I'm surprised that they thought nostalgia would make Doom3 a hit. In fact, there was supposedly quite a bit of internal turmoil regarding on whether to even do a Doom3. I can't find the link right now because I originally got it off of Brian Hook's web site forums, but apparently one of the long-time co-owner artists got fired from id and is now suing id. This might have had something to do with a buyout from Activision, but like I said, I can't find the link right now.
In any case, it seems that Id really needs a big hit in the next 4-5 years to stay relevant, unless Carmack and company are happy doing engines and tech demos. I wonder if they could pull off a planetside (FPS/MMOG). But let's hope that they're not thinking about another corridor based FPS.
It's not 1994 anymore when Carmack was the God of software rasterization.
Are you sure you're not on a handy little LAN...:)
No, he's a college kid. He's in for a rude awakening when he gets out into the real world with a 40 ms ping. Somehow, I don't feel bad for him.
In any case, I've found BF2 to have really good netcode and totally playable up to a 100ms ping or so.
And speaking of BF2, that new Quake: Enemy Territory looks like a BF2 clone, but with spiffier graphics.
Re:For those that like the best of both worlds
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
That idea has been thrown around for quite a while, and I'm sure Bram would have liked to have done it, but the Vim codebase has become a tangled mess of #ifdef OBSCURE_PLATFORM because of said obscure platform's broken compilers and/or standard c libraries.
But I think it has been somewhat done with a project called Yziz (or something to that effect). I believe it has been made into a Kpart and is somewhat usable in Kdevelop.
I can relate to that. A guy at work was hacking some code using a version of vi for OS/2. I was like WTF is up with that? I started playing around with it after hours and at first it was frustrating, but these days I feel handicapped if I don't have a vi plugin for an IDE. And Vim is always there for quick edits and reading text files.
Wow, just a few minutes ago I was wondering when Vim 7 was going to be released because I wanted to make some improvements to a Haskell plugin that seems a bit dated.
Great work Bram and the crew, and congratulations on getting hired at the big G.
It's nice that they've made this move, but I don't see how this really changes much. The server side guys never had a problem with downloading Java. I can only assume that this is a move for the desktop.
The problem (as I see it), is that it's too late for any kind of java desktop resurgence. How come Sun never produced any kind of Java Gnome/Gtk+ apps? They do employee Gnome contributors and Gnome is their desktop. Oh right....Swing is enough for everyone,*rollseyes*. Maybe four years ago if they had gotten behind Java gtk+, and made this move things would be different, but much of the open source desktop developers have moved on to Ruby, Python, and Mono. And there's still a lot of development done in C/C++. Even on the server side, many people are moving to LAMP+Ruby.
So my question is what is Sun's reasoning for doing it now?
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
As an added bonus, I'm sure your manly 7lb laptop is always handy for beating your wife with.
And I'm sure your dainty Mac laptop is handy for your wife to beat you with.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
It's ok if you are unable to pick up 7 lbs. We'll understand...and snicker.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
And the Dells come with a free forklift to carry them around! They're super-awesome!
It's 7 lbs or so. But if you're too much of a wuss to carry that then yeah you might want an apple or maybe a PDA would be more your style. It must be embarrassing for you to be that weak.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
And I'll bet that Inspiron is bulky and heavy.
Nope, not at all. But if you're a little girl that needs something around 4 lbs then it's not for you.
Apple is interested in making sleek laptops, not portables
Sleek?...oh, ok. that's part of the reality distortion field.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
...or the high-end laptop market
Except they don't have high-end video cards. I've got a Nvidia 7800 in my Inspiron 9300 and I only buy laptops these days. Maybe one day Apple will offer me what I want.
Look, I'm as keen to recycle as the next guy, but since when did government become the solution to all problems? Here's a radical, way-far-out-there idea: if you want the battery industry to change, refuse to purchase devices that are non-recyclable! Nothing stirs an industry quite so quickly -- or so efficiently -- as a consumer revolt. We get greener products, the industry adapts to deliver what we want, and there's no intrusive government leaning over somebody's shoulder telling them what to do. What an elegant solution! It's a pity the knee-jerk reaction these days -- regardless of what continent or island group you're on -- is to scream "Here's a problem! We must demand that government do more to fix it!"
Because the eco-nazi, nanny-statists will have none of it. You are just a drone that needs to be dictated to.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
..those of us who have a reason to use it will reap the benefits. Yes, Virginia, there are some. Battlefield 2, for example.
And unfortunately, you're stuck with an underpowered graphics card. I'll pay the premium for a cohesive Unix desktop, but if Apple is not going to give me a little bit more GPU choice, then I'll just stick with running windows and linux at the same time on the same machine, or remote my Kanotix laptop that lives in the basement.
We ship hardware with our code, so open source has allowed us to not pay a per-box fee to Microsoft or someone else. Our code isn't open source though.
I hope we're making headway towards "web 3.0" because although AJAX is nice for document-centric pages with some app functionality, it's still HTML underneath and you can dress up a pig, but....
AJAX is like a house of cards, and when a browser vendor screws up on a revision it'll all come tumbling down. Div tricks are nice and all, and I expect that there will be a couple javascript frameworks that rise above the rest, but if I'm going to do an app in a browser then I'll just bypass all those headaches and use Flash.
Once WPF/E makes it into the vast majority of browsers, things are going to change.
When was the last time M$ actually innovated something? It's been a while.
When was the last time _anybody_ innovated. OSX? Nope. Linux, and the rest of the 35 year-old Unixes? Nope. BeOS was probably the closest thing we've had to innovation in 20 years or so.
For once, this guy is actually making sense
Dvorak is a moron, and your "for once" comment shows that you're just a slashborg drone.
In any case, we heard all of this 5 years ago when XP was coming out. Desktop Linux has failed and OSX is still stuck in niche, locked-into-proprietary-hardware land.
The out-of-the-box Squeak environment is just horrible. You can get freetype and enhanced look-n-feel packages to make it look "ok". The problem is with the whole "this is for kids education" attitude that Alan Kay and some other Smalltalkers bring to Squeak.
Another problem I see is that the UI is sluggish even on fast machines (if you don't do wire-frame window move mode). That's because the Squeak developers want it highly portable and only want to rely on the ability of the host OS to display a bitmap. With the coming (and already here to a certain extent) GPU accelerated desktops, it's going to make the Squeak UI look even more antiquated. It's windows-only, but Dolphin Smalltalk is an example of a slick Smalltalk environment.
Since Croquet is opengl-accelerated, I wish they would just fork the Squeak UI and make it look somewhat reasonable. I think one of the core Croquet developers is actually working on a new UI paradigm called Tweak.
The Russians and Americans already satellited this ages ago. Well, this is the ESA, so what do you expect, but maybe next time around we can get a bot to drill into the ice of Europa (ESA, Europa...huh).
But I'm sure the enviro-nazis will be gleefully saying "see, see, you stupid non phds, this is what earth will become unless we all go back to hunters and gathers"
On a side note, and for a real country that knows how to explore space (USA), how is VGER and Pioneer doing? Do they still call home?
P.S. yeah, this was a rip on euroweenies. tit for tat.
Thanks for the response Rich. I've playing around with Clean (a pure functional language) lately, and I'm waiting for the "uber-cool" VS2005 (they've got a VS2003) Haskell plugin. And even though I'm just a math (open up 300 tabs from wikipedia about functional/math) fanboy these days, I have seen some nice human reasoning arguments for functional languages.
That said (besides hacking Ruby), I have two side interests. One is deployment and one is the psychology of computer programming. The deployment aspect I'm sure you can understand, but I think the psychology of how programmers reason in various turing-complete syntaxes is vastly under-studied.
A nice response without OSS fanboyism handwaving. I'll concur that there are more likely more competent eyes on the code than competent eyes on IE at Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
KDE/Gnome + Linux is pretty much "ready for the desktop". Many home users need a browser and a email client and that's about it.
I've said it many times before, and I'm sure I'll say it many more times, but the worst thing to happen to desktop Linux was to have two major desktop environments. If Qt had been, say LGPL, and Gnome would have never come about, things would be a lot different today. You could have a real product that ISVs could target.
But as we have it today, you have a billion distros with KDE and Gnome sharing the desktop linux market, and freedesktop.org and the Portland project trying to address some of the interop issues, but it's a little late. Time doesn't stand still just because it's open source. Vista is just going to further the distance between desktop Linux and windows. The crucial time was between when XP was released and now.
Think of something like BeOS, but with the linux kernel. I wouldn't be surprised if 5-7 years from now, KDE and Gnome are largely forgotten, and someone has put a really cohesive desktop operating system on top of the linux kernel.
Carmack is really good as a person who pushes teh technology.
As a game developer, though, it's just not there. anytime I hear about an id game now, I just wait until someone brings out a truly great game using the engine that Carmack has developed.
Yes, I'm surprised that they thought nostalgia would make Doom3 a hit. In fact, there was supposedly quite a bit of internal turmoil regarding on whether to even do a Doom3. I can't find the link right now because I originally got it off of Brian Hook's web site forums, but apparently one of the long-time co-owner artists got fired from id and is now suing id. This might have had something to do with a buyout from Activision, but like I said, I can't find the link right now.
In any case, it seems that Id really needs a big hit in the next 4-5 years to stay relevant, unless Carmack and company are happy doing engines and tech demos. I wonder if they could pull off a planetside (FPS/MMOG). But let's hope that they're not thinking about another corridor based FPS.
It's not 1994 anymore when Carmack was the God of software rasterization.
Are you sure you're not on a handy little LAN... :)
No, he's a college kid. He's in for a rude awakening when he gets out into the real world with a 40 ms ping. Somehow, I don't feel bad for him.
In any case, I've found BF2 to have really good netcode and totally playable up to a 100ms ping or so.
And speaking of BF2, that new Quake: Enemy Territory looks like a BF2 clone, but with spiffier graphics.
That idea has been thrown around for quite a while, and I'm sure Bram would have liked to have done it, but the Vim codebase has become a tangled mess of #ifdef OBSCURE_PLATFORM because of said obscure platform's broken compilers and/or standard c libraries.
But I think it has been somewhat done with a project called Yziz (or something to that effect). I believe it has been made into a Kpart and is somewhat usable in Kdevelop.
I can relate to that. A guy at work was hacking some code using a version of vi for OS/2. I was like WTF is up with that? I started playing around with it after hours and at first it was frustrating, but these days I feel handicapped if I don't have a vi plugin for an IDE. And Vim is always there for quick edits and reading text files.
Here is a post I made that gives some links to keyswapping programs. Yes, ESC sucks and that's why I swap it with Caps Lock.
There's viemu for VS2005/VS2003 and viPlugin for Eclipse.
Also, if you're learning Vim and start liking it I would recommend keytweak on windows and xmodemap on Unix for swapping Caps Lock and Esc.
Wow, just a few minutes ago I was wondering when Vim 7 was going to be released because I wanted to make some improvements to a Haskell plugin that seems a bit dated.
Great work Bram and the crew, and congratulations on getting hired at the big G.
Fred, not really when it comes to the reality distortion field crowd.
It's nice that they've made this move, but I don't see how this really changes much. The server side guys never had a problem with downloading Java. I can only assume that this is a move for the desktop.
The problem (as I see it), is that it's too late for any kind of java desktop resurgence. How come Sun never produced any kind of Java Gnome/Gtk+ apps? They do employee Gnome contributors and Gnome is their desktop. Oh right....Swing is enough for everyone,*rollseyes*. Maybe four years ago if they had gotten behind Java gtk+, and made this move things would be different, but much of the open source desktop developers have moved on to Ruby, Python, and Mono. And there's still a lot of development done in C/C++. Even on the server side, many people are moving to LAMP+Ruby.
So my question is what is Sun's reasoning for doing it now?
As an added bonus, I'm sure your manly 7lb laptop is always handy for beating your wife with.
And I'm sure your dainty Mac laptop is handy for your wife to beat you with.
It's ok if you are unable to pick up 7 lbs. We'll understand...and snicker.
And the Dells come with a free forklift to carry them around! They're super-awesome!
It's 7 lbs or so. But if you're too much of a wuss to carry that then yeah you might want an apple or maybe a PDA would be more your style. It must be embarrassing for you to be that weak.
And I'll bet that Inspiron is bulky and heavy.
Nope, not at all. But if you're a little girl that needs something around 4 lbs then it's not for you.
Apple is interested in making sleek laptops, not portables
Sleek?...oh, ok. that's part of the reality distortion field.
...or the high-end laptop market
Except they don't have high-end video cards. I've got a Nvidia 7800 in my Inspiron 9300 and I only buy laptops these days. Maybe one day Apple will offer me what I want.
Look, I'm as keen to recycle as the next guy, but since when did government become the solution to all problems? Here's a radical, way-far-out-there idea: if you want the battery industry to change, refuse to purchase devices that are non-recyclable! Nothing stirs an industry quite so quickly -- or so efficiently -- as a consumer revolt. We get greener products, the industry adapts to deliver what we want, and there's no intrusive government leaning over somebody's shoulder telling them what to do. What an elegant solution! It's a pity the knee-jerk reaction these days -- regardless of what continent or island group you're on -- is to scream "Here's a problem! We must demand that government do more to fix it!"
Because the eco-nazi, nanny-statists will have none of it. You are just a drone that needs to be dictated to.
..those of us who have a reason to use it will reap the benefits. Yes, Virginia, there are some. Battlefield 2, for example.
And unfortunately, you're stuck with an underpowered graphics card. I'll pay the premium for a cohesive Unix desktop, but if Apple is not going to give me a little bit more GPU choice, then I'll just stick with running windows and linux at the same time on the same machine, or remote my Kanotix laptop that lives in the basement.
We ship hardware with our code, so open source has allowed us to not pay a per-box fee to Microsoft or someone else. Our code isn't open source though.
You're confused. Flash and WPF/E are for applications, not document-centric websites.
Flash is fine for games, for grown up stuff its garbage.
AJAX is monkey feces for grown-up applications.
I hope we're making headway towards "web 3.0" because although AJAX is nice for document-centric pages with some app functionality, it's still HTML underneath and you can dress up a pig, but....
AJAX is like a house of cards, and when a browser vendor screws up on a revision it'll all come tumbling down. Div tricks are nice and all, and I expect that there will be a couple javascript frameworks that rise above the rest, but if I'm going to do an app in a browser then I'll just bypass all those headaches and use Flash.
Once WPF/E makes it into the vast majority of browsers, things are going to change.
When was the last time M$ actually innovated something? It's been a while.
When was the last time _anybody_ innovated. OSX? Nope. Linux, and the rest of the 35 year-old Unixes? Nope. BeOS was probably the closest thing we've had to innovation in 20 years or so.
For once, this guy is actually making sense
Dvorak is a moron, and your "for once" comment shows that you're just a slashborg drone.
In any case, we heard all of this 5 years ago when XP was coming out. Desktop Linux has failed and OSX is still stuck in niche, locked-into-proprietary-hardware land.
The out-of-the-box Squeak environment is just horrible. You can get freetype and enhanced look-n-feel packages to make it look "ok". The problem is with the whole "this is for kids education" attitude that Alan Kay and some other Smalltalkers bring to Squeak.
Another problem I see is that the UI is sluggish even on fast machines (if you don't do wire-frame window move mode). That's because the Squeak developers want it highly portable and only want to rely on the ability of the host OS to display a bitmap. With the coming (and already here to a certain extent) GPU accelerated desktops, it's going to make the Squeak UI look even more antiquated. It's windows-only, but Dolphin Smalltalk is an example of a slick Smalltalk environment.
Since Croquet is opengl-accelerated, I wish they would just fork the Squeak UI and make it look somewhat reasonable. I think one of the core Croquet developers is actually working on a new UI paradigm called Tweak.
The Russians and Americans already satellited this ages ago. Well, this is the ESA, so what do you expect, but maybe next time around we can get a bot to drill into the ice of Europa (ESA, Europa...huh).
But I'm sure the enviro-nazis will be gleefully saying "see, see, you stupid non phds, this is what earth will become unless we all go back to hunters and gathers"
On a side note, and for a real country that knows how to explore space (USA), how is VGER and Pioneer doing? Do they still call home?
P.S. yeah, this was a rip on euroweenies. tit for tat.
Thanks for the response Rich. I've playing around with Clean (a pure functional language) lately, and I'm waiting for the "uber-cool" VS2005 (they've got a VS2003) Haskell plugin. And even though I'm just a math (open up 300 tabs from wikipedia about functional/math) fanboy these days, I have seen some nice human reasoning arguments for functional languages.
That said (besides hacking Ruby), I have two side interests. One is deployment and one is the psychology of computer programming. The deployment aspect I'm sure you can understand, but I think the psychology of how programmers reason in various turing-complete syntaxes is vastly under-studied.
A nice response without OSS fanboyism handwaving. I'll concur that there are more likely more competent eyes on the code than competent eyes on IE at Microsoft.