Once, I booted WinXP for a couple of hours to do one specific thing. I didn't use a firewall because it was only for a couple of hours. Before I shut down, my machine had Blaster!
Two days ago, I installed a small XP partition in preperation for a LAN party. My system already seems to be infected with something that hijacks Google's links.
That's the thing! Its perfectly possible to run a Linux desktop and only occasionally use a different toolkit. But its nearly impossible to do the same for Windows. What do you use for an office suite? In KDE, I can use KOffice, which handles my light document needs just fine. In GNOME, I can use AbiWord and Gnumeric. In Windows, you have to use either MS Office (which uses a different toolkit than the rest of Windows) or OpenOffice (which also uses a different toolkit). What do you use for an IDE? If you use Visual Studio, like most people, than you're using the.NET toolkit, which is different from there rest of Windows. What do you use for a media player? If you use Windows Media Player, than while it does use the regular Windows toolkit, it looks completely different from a regular Windows app, and draws its own buttons and whatnot.
Well hell, my KDE apps go "File View... Help" too. That doesn't make them look like Windows apps. My point is that WMP, by default anyway, uses completely different seperators, buttons, scrollbars, sliders, etc, than a normal Windows app. It doesn't even have a menu until you move your mouse towards where the menu should be, and one appears. That doesn't exactly strike me as usable.
Actually, 64-bit CPUs have no advantage in handling floating-point numbers. All current CPUs handle use long-double floating point units internally, which are 80-bits. The '64' refers to the width of the integer unit and the size of the memory bus.
AMD is also in the act of outsourcing it's IT staff to India. While Intel undoubtedly does the same, AMD's action is more recent and this sort of thing shouldn't be rewarded. ----------- So? Unless you have some evidence that the cost of outsourcing the IT staff (in terms of service) is greater than the benefit (money saved for AMD), then I should reward AMD for this. That means that they can deliver better processors for less money.
The CPU market is fairly competitive these days. Under those circumstances, outsourcing is just another business decision, and if it results in a net monetary benefit for the company, than it should be rewarded as a good business decision.
What PC's are you working with? I've got three windows machines at home, and all three of them have something working improperly. One has networking issues, another has random glitches (checked for hardware issues, there are none), and another refuses to use DMA on the hard drive (even though Linux uses it just fine).
So yeah, Windows brings a constant. A constant source of problems, that is...
OpenOffice and KOffice exist seperately for the same reason MS Office and Apple Works exist. One is complex and feature-packed, but heavy and bloated. The other is lightweight and well-integrated into the desktop. OpenOffice and KOffice also have totally different document models. OpenOffice uses the (IMHO very shitty) MS Office model. KOffice uses a frame-based model.
The agro business is also one of the stupidest, most heavily subsidized, inefficient industries in the United States! There is a reason why we have a free market rather than a planned one.
Its interesting how people ar deriding this sort of "look-based" unification. The truth is that "look-based" unification has worked just fine for Microsoft. I use a mostly KDE desktop, and only once in a while do I have to start a GTK app. The same thing is probably true for GNOME people --- they only have to start a non-GNOME app on occasion. If you use MS Office, you're automatically using at least two toolkits on a Windows desktop. Windows has many toolkits that major apps use on a regular basis. Its nearly impossible to run a normal Windows desktop without regularly encountering at least a few.
Now, why do Windows users think their desktop is so unified, when in practice, *NIX desktops are really more unified? Because Windows toolkits look kinda the same! Windows's "unified look and feel" is based entirely on unification of themes, rather than on any real technical unification.
Qt, GTK, Gtk2, Tk, Mozilla, and other applications, then I'll take notice.
Going forward, GTK and Qt are the only widget sets that matter. Who uses Tk apps on the desktop? And why use Mozilla when there is Galeon or Epiphany? OpenOffice is moving to a toolkit-independent framework, so it too will be able to use GTK or Qt in the future. As long as there is integration with those two, you've got your 90% "good-enough" solution.
the reason why they have the market share is because of the unification present(at least in appearance... ---------- Are we talking about the same Windows? Where Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, and MS Office all use a different toolkit, and Windows Media Player looks nothing like a regular Windows app?
I'm sitting at a KDE desktop, and the only time I have to use an app with a different toolkit is when transferring songs to my iPod (gtkpod). Of course, to do the same in Windows, I have to add another look-and-feel too, either MusicMatch, EphPod, or iTunes, none of which look like Windows apps!
I'm AIM'ing my brother right now from my laptop. Its actually really nice, since if you see a cool website, you can just send a link, instead of running upstairs and showing it to him on his computer.
What IM is really useful for, however, is keeping in touch with people long-distance. IM has a relaxed, conversational quality that you can't get from a phone call. With the phone, there is pressure to finish the call quickly, and it is something that you do on special occasions. With IM, you can just say hi, or share a random funny thought, without wasting anyone's time.
Yeah, the iRiver is pretty svelte too. But it just came out recently, so I hadn't noted it. Its still about 1/6 of an inch thicker, which is noticable. Still, it seems pretty pocketable.
As for the looks, "badass" doesn't really do it for me. The iPod is beautiful because it is so clean and simple. Elegant is the appropriate word.
The Karma is only shorter than the iPod. Its wider and thicker. Its also got a larger overall volume. Thickness and width are a lot more important in pocketability than height. Pockets are generally pretty deep, but they have limited width and length.
My iPod is svelte enough to not be noticible even in my size 32 khakis. The Neuros would not be.
guess why Sun prefers Gnome over KDE for Solaris? ----------- Actuall, according to Sun's own statements, Sun chose GNOME over KDE for a few reasons, none of them licensing related:
1) GNOME's architecture is more traditional. It uses CORBA, for example, instead of using its own mechanism (DCOP).
2) GNOME uses C, while KDE uses C++. It was only recently that KDE compiled with Sun's Forte C++ compiler. If the KDE libraries were compiled with GCC, then you couldn't use Sun's pro-leve development tools to build apps, because those use Forte. Sun developers were also much more comfortable with C rather than KDE's C++.
3) GNOME didn't have an HIG when Sun came onboard, so Sun had a major hand in building GNOME 2.x's UI. Meanwhile, KDE was pretty well-solidified by the time Sun came along.
Never have they said that licensing had anything to do with the choice. Indeed, no commercial developer has ever said they chose GTK/GNOME over Qt/KDE because of licensing issues.
It may be good over the long-long term for the global system as a whole, but it puts the screws to people in ways that economists cannot even imagine as they sit in their ivory towers. ------- What puts the screws in individuals is bad government policies. Its criminal that in this country we don't have things like universal healthcare. Our health care among inner city populations is closer to that of developing countries than those of industrialized countries! But don't blame the economists for that. Their goal is to make the overall economy as big as possible. Its up to the government to allocate the resulting dollars fairly to individuals. You'd probably be surprised to learn that another thing that economists broadly agree on is that the wealth distribution in this country needs to be more equitable.
Besides, we don't have unfettered free trade. ----- No we don't. We need to get rid of more tarrifs and stupid job-protection laws.
We have an oligarchy of politicians and CEOs. ------ Those have nothing to do with free trade.
Just look at Walmart's "advertise homegrown, sell foreign slavegoods" campaign. ------- If Walmart makes more profit by importing their products, than they should do that. What you don't seem to understand is that doing that will cause job losses in whatever industry produces those goods Walmart no longer buys, but will cause job gains due to the extra money Walmart has to spend. If they are paying their CEO more money instead of investing it in workers and their business, than that's the government's job to tax that CEO's earnings and distribute it equitably.
I have no idea how you can say that the poor have more stuff than they used to, unless you believe --------- Those are the numbers. People have more real GDP than they used to. Where are the numbers to back up your claim?
What's more insidious about the path we're on is that at every step individual freedoms are lost. -------- What does that have to do with free trade?
The viability of small business is destroyed by globalization. --------- So? Small businesses often are not efficient. I don't know if you get the idea of economic efficiency. When you are inefficient, you are using more resources than you have to for a given amount of production. If a bigger business can produce more for less, why shouldn't it? That brings more money into the economy. Again, its the government's job to make sure that money gets spread around fairly, striking a favorable balance between total economic growth and equitable distribution.
The codec is called just "Vorbis." Its hosted at vorbis.com and referred to that way in the release notes. Personally, I think Vorbis sounds pretty cool and audio-y.
The iPod is not DRM'ed for MP3s. And for AACs, I don't think its DRM'ed either, but rather, the DRM is in iTunes.
The iPod is just a firewire harddrive that plays whatever files it find in its iTunesDB. I don't really see how they could even do any DRM with that setup.
IMO, the Neuros is much better then the iPod. Is cheaper and the battery replacement is from $0 - $12 depending on if it is in warranty or not, which is much cheaper then Apple's $50 or so. --------- It's also very large. My iPod slips discretely into my pocket, while the Nomad Zen (which is smaller than the Neuros by a good bit) makes an uncomfortable bulge. The Rio Karma is similarly unpocketable, because it is wider and thicker than the iPod. And I refuse to wear cargo pants!
As for price, the iPod is well worth it. When I bougt my iPod, the only other choice was really the Nomad Zen, and it was $50 less for 5 more GB. Not really a big enough savings to outweigh the build-quality and size of the iPod in my opinion. And even if you have to replace your battery every 18 months (the vast majority of people don't have to do so, however) that's a cost of about $33 a year. Hardly a burdensome expense for a several-hundred-dollar device.
You're both wrong:) The first and second generation iPods were li-poly. They had problems with these, so they moved to lithium-ion batteries in the third generation iPod. The battery life went down from 10 hours to 8 hours in the process.
"but most software gets posted online in the form of GPL'd code with limited instructions on how to compile the work." ---------- You have to realize that in Linux, there is a seperation between software developers and distribution developers. Software developers make the code and release it on their website. They're good at making software, so that's what they concentrate on. Distro developers package software correctly and integrate it into their distribution. That's what they're good at. If you try to install software from source, then you're looney. When I want to install software, its a matter of "apt-get foo" and a link to foo shows up in my kmenu. Or, if I'm GUI inclined, I start up Synaptic (or soon, Kapture, yay!) and just double-click on the name of the application. Both are infinately easier than fussing around with InstallShield.
The problem is that some obscure software does not get packaged in a repository. This problem is almost non-existant in distributions with huge repositories like Debian. Certainly, anything the average user needs is in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Once, I booted WinXP for a couple of hours to do one specific thing. I didn't use a firewall because it was only for a couple of hours. Before I shut down, my machine had Blaster!
Two days ago, I installed a small XP partition in preperation for a LAN party. My system already seems to be infected with something that hijacks Google's links.
That's the thing! Its perfectly possible to run a Linux desktop and only occasionally use a different toolkit. But its nearly impossible to do the same for Windows. What do you use for an office suite? In KDE, I can use KOffice, which handles my light document needs just fine. In GNOME, I can use AbiWord and Gnumeric. In Windows, you have to use either MS Office (which uses a different toolkit than the rest of Windows) or OpenOffice (which also uses a different toolkit). What do you use for an IDE? If you use Visual Studio, like most people, than you're using the .NET toolkit, which is different from there rest of Windows. What do you use for a media player? If you use Windows Media Player, than while it does use the regular Windows toolkit, it looks completely different from a regular Windows app, and draws its own buttons and whatnot.
Well hell, my KDE apps go "File View ... Help" too. That doesn't make them look like Windows apps. My point is that WMP, by default anyway, uses completely different seperators, buttons, scrollbars, sliders, etc, than a normal Windows app. It doesn't even have a menu until you move your mouse towards where the menu should be, and one appears. That doesn't exactly strike me as usable.
Actually, 64-bit CPUs have no advantage in handling floating-point numbers. All current CPUs handle use long-double floating point units internally, which are 80-bits. The '64' refers to the width of the integer unit and the size of the memory bus.
AMD is also in the act of outsourcing it's IT staff to India. While Intel undoubtedly does the same, AMD's action is more recent and this sort of thing shouldn't be rewarded.
-----------
So? Unless you have some evidence that the cost of outsourcing the IT staff (in terms of service) is greater than the benefit (money saved for AMD), then I should reward AMD for this. That means that they can deliver better processors for less money.
The CPU market is fairly competitive these days. Under those circumstances, outsourcing is just another business decision, and if it results in a net monetary benefit for the company, than it should be rewarded as a good business decision.
What PC's are you working with? I've got three windows machines at home, and all three of them have something working improperly. One has networking issues, another has random glitches (checked for hardware issues, there are none), and another refuses to use DMA on the hard drive (even though Linux uses it just fine).
So yeah, Windows brings a constant. A constant source of problems, that is...
OpenOffice and KOffice exist seperately for the same reason MS Office and Apple Works exist. One is complex and feature-packed, but heavy and bloated. The other is lightweight and well-integrated into the desktop. OpenOffice and KOffice also have totally different document models. OpenOffice uses the (IMHO very shitty) MS Office model. KOffice uses a frame-based model.
The agro business is also one of the stupidest, most heavily subsidized, inefficient industries in the United States! There is a reason why we have a free market rather than a planned one.
Its interesting how people ar deriding this sort of "look-based" unification. The truth is that "look-based" unification has worked just fine for Microsoft. I use a mostly KDE desktop, and only once in a while do I have to start a GTK app. The same thing is probably true for GNOME people --- they only have to start a non-GNOME app on occasion. If you use MS Office, you're automatically using at least two toolkits on a Windows desktop. Windows has many toolkits that major apps use on a regular basis. Its nearly impossible to run a normal Windows desktop without regularly encountering at least a few.
Now, why do Windows users think their desktop is so unified, when in practice, *NIX desktops are really more unified? Because Windows toolkits look kinda the same! Windows's "unified look and feel" is based entirely on unification of themes, rather than on any real technical unification.
Qt, GTK, Gtk2, Tk, Mozilla, and other applications, then I'll take notice.
Going forward, GTK and Qt are the only widget sets that matter. Who uses Tk apps on the desktop? And why use Mozilla when there is Galeon or Epiphany? OpenOffice is moving to a toolkit-independent framework, so it too will be able to use GTK or Qt in the future. As long as there is integration with those two, you've got your 90% "good-enough" solution.
There is a program called gtk-theme-switch. It'll let you change GTK+ themes and fonts without gnome-control-center.
the reason why they have the market share is because of the unification present(at least in appearance. ..
----------
Are we talking about the same Windows? Where Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, and MS Office all use a different toolkit, and Windows Media Player looks nothing like a regular Windows app?
I'm sitting at a KDE desktop, and the only time I have to use an app with a different toolkit is when transferring songs to my iPod (gtkpod). Of course, to do the same in Windows, I have to add another look-and-feel too, either MusicMatch, EphPod, or iTunes, none of which look like Windows apps!
The Zen and the iPod are the same size? What are you smoking?
The iPod is 6.1 x 1.6 x 10.4 (cm) and 158g
The Zen is 7.6 x 2.5 x 11.2 (cm) and 268g
That's a volume of 101.54cm^2 vs 212.8cm^2. That's twice as large, and nearly twice as heavy!
I'm AIM'ing my brother right now from my laptop. Its actually really nice, since if you see a cool website, you can just send a link, instead of running upstairs and showing it to him on his computer.
What IM is really useful for, however, is keeping in touch with people long-distance. IM has a relaxed, conversational quality that you can't get from a phone call. With the phone, there is pressure to finish the call quickly, and it is something that you do on special occasions. With IM, you can just say hi, or share a random funny thought, without wasting anyone's time.
Hopefully, it starts a trend where hardware companies stop violating copyright laws because they think no-one will notice!
Yeah, the iRiver is pretty svelte too. But it just came out recently, so I hadn't noted it. Its still about 1/6 of an inch thicker, which is noticable. Still, it seems pretty pocketable.
As for the looks, "badass" doesn't really do it for me. The iPod is beautiful because it is so clean and simple. Elegant is the appropriate word.
The Karma is only shorter than the iPod. Its wider and thicker. Its also got a larger overall volume. Thickness and width are a lot more important in pocketability than height. Pockets are generally pretty deep, but they have limited width and length.
My iPod is svelte enough to not be noticible even in my size 32 khakis. The Neuros would not be.
guess why Sun prefers Gnome over KDE for Solaris?
-----------
Actuall, according to Sun's own statements, Sun chose GNOME over KDE for a few reasons, none of them licensing related:
1) GNOME's architecture is more traditional. It uses CORBA, for example, instead of using its own mechanism (DCOP).
2) GNOME uses C, while KDE uses C++. It was only recently that KDE compiled with Sun's Forte C++ compiler. If the KDE libraries were compiled with GCC, then you couldn't use Sun's pro-leve development tools to build apps, because those use Forte. Sun developers were also much more comfortable with C rather than KDE's C++.
3) GNOME didn't have an HIG when Sun came onboard, so Sun had a major hand in building GNOME 2.x's UI. Meanwhile, KDE was pretty well-solidified by the time Sun came along.
Never have they said that licensing had anything to do with the choice. Indeed, no commercial developer has ever said they chose GTK/GNOME over Qt/KDE because of licensing issues.
It may be good over the long-long term for the global system as a whole, but it puts the screws to people in ways that economists cannot even imagine as they sit in their ivory towers.
-------
What puts the screws in individuals is bad government policies. Its criminal that in this country we don't have things like universal healthcare. Our health care among inner city populations is closer to that of developing countries than those of industrialized countries! But don't blame the economists for that. Their goal is to make the overall economy as big as possible. Its up to the government to allocate the resulting dollars fairly to individuals. You'd probably be surprised to learn that another thing that economists broadly agree on is that the wealth distribution in this country needs to be more equitable.
Besides, we don't have unfettered free trade.
-----
No we don't. We need to get rid of more tarrifs and stupid job-protection laws.
We have an oligarchy of politicians and CEOs.
------
Those have nothing to do with free trade.
Just look at Walmart's "advertise homegrown, sell foreign slavegoods" campaign.
-------
If Walmart makes more profit by importing their products, than they should do that. What you don't seem to understand is that doing that will cause job losses in whatever industry produces those goods Walmart no longer buys, but will cause job gains due to the extra money Walmart has to spend. If they are paying their CEO more money instead of investing it in workers and their business, than that's the government's job to tax that CEO's earnings and distribute it equitably.
I have no idea how you can say that the poor have more stuff than they used to, unless you believe
---------
Those are the numbers. People have more real GDP than they used to. Where are the numbers to back up your claim?
What's more insidious about the path we're on is that at every step individual freedoms are lost.
--------
What does that have to do with free trade?
The viability of small business is destroyed by globalization.
---------
So? Small businesses often are not efficient. I don't know if you get the idea of economic efficiency. When you are inefficient, you are using more resources than you have to for a given amount of production. If a bigger business can produce more for less, why shouldn't it? That brings more money into the economy. Again, its the government's job to make sure that money gets spread around fairly, striking a favorable balance between total economic growth and equitable distribution.
The codec is called just "Vorbis." Its hosted at vorbis.com and referred to that way in the release notes. Personally, I think Vorbis sounds pretty cool and audio-y.
The iPod is not DRM'ed for MP3s. And for AACs, I don't think its DRM'ed either, but rather, the DRM is in iTunes.
The iPod is just a firewire harddrive that plays whatever files it find in its iTunesDB. I don't really see how they could even do any DRM with that setup.
IMO, the Neuros is much better then the iPod. Is cheaper and the battery replacement is from $0 - $12 depending on if it is in warranty or not, which is much cheaper then Apple's $50 or so.
---------
It's also very large. My iPod slips discretely into my pocket, while the Nomad Zen (which is smaller than the Neuros by a good bit) makes an uncomfortable bulge. The Rio Karma is similarly unpocketable, because it is wider and thicker than the iPod. And I refuse to wear cargo pants!
As for price, the iPod is well worth it. When I bougt my iPod, the only other choice was really the Nomad Zen, and it was $50 less for 5 more GB. Not really a big enough savings to outweigh the build-quality and size of the iPod in my opinion. And even if you have to replace your battery every 18 months (the vast majority of people don't have to do so, however) that's a cost of about $33 a year. Hardly a burdensome expense for a several-hundred-dollar device.
Not the 3rd-gen iPods. They use regular li-ion batteries.
You're both wrong :) The first and second generation iPods were li-poly. They had problems with these, so they moved to lithium-ion batteries in the third generation iPod. The battery life went down from 10 hours to 8 hours in the process.
"but most software gets posted online in the form of GPL'd code with limited instructions on how to compile the work."
----------
You have to realize that in Linux, there is a seperation between software developers and distribution developers. Software developers make the code and release it on their website. They're good at making software, so that's what they concentrate on. Distro developers package software correctly and integrate it into their distribution. That's what they're good at. If you try to install software from source, then you're looney. When I want to install software, its a matter of "apt-get foo" and a link to foo shows up in my kmenu. Or, if I'm GUI inclined, I start up Synaptic (or soon, Kapture, yay!) and just double-click on the name of the application. Both are infinately easier than fussing around with InstallShield.
The problem is that some obscure software does not get packaged in a repository. This problem is almost non-existant in distributions with huge repositories like Debian. Certainly, anything the average user needs is in there.