A cursory glance at this [eclipse.org] suggests that on Linux it is implemented with Motif, not GTK. SWT on Linux is implemented on GTK. I didn't even realize there was a Motif port. Even Swing is moving towards adopting GTK look & feels.
TK: That's the default GUI toolkit for Python, you know. Which amounts to nothing. All the Python apps that people use (eg: RedHat's system tools) use PyGTK. PyGTK and PyQt are quickly supplanting Tk as the default Python toolkit.
So yeah, Windows has multiple toolkits too, but at least they look and feel more similar to each other. Well, so what you're aruging for is not toolkit unification (which is impossible), but Look & Feel unification.
And at least with that there's clear winner (.NET, and then Avalon [stupid on MS's part, but whatever]) -- one recommended toolkit, If there is a clear winner, then how come nothing uses it? Very few apps on the average desktop use.NET. Most use the common controls, and Office uses it's own toolkit. From the point of view of the user, having an "official" toolkit means nothing when Office uses a different toolkit from the rest of their apps.
If either GTK or QT was the one standard I'd be happy. Again, what does a standard mean if not even Microsoft follows it? Windows.Forms 1.0 might be standard now, but it'll be replaced by Windows.Forms 2.0 when Longhorn comes out. You'll still have lot's of legacy.NET 1.0 and Win32 Common Controls apps on your desktop, and Office will still use it's own toolkit. You want a standard? Fine: Qt is the standard toolkit. Happy now? Because that has as much meaning as saying that.NET 1.0 is the "standard toolkit" on Windows.
First, CDE, GnuStep, Swing, TK, etc, aren't serious competitors, very few people use them. Most of them exist on Windows too, but they're niche tere too. For all intents and purposes, X has two toolkits --- GTK and Qt. Everything else is legacy stuff. That's really no different than on Windows, where you've got multiple toolkits (XP common controls,.NET, Office, etc).
IMHO terrorisim mostly happenes in western comntries not because of chaos and unstability, but because very specific interests are suverely threatened by other peoples freedoms. That's idealistic bullshit. There are people who are threatened by other peoples' freedoms, no doubt, but you don't recruit that kind of support just from envy. Look at it logically: Israel is a bitter enemy of the Muslim world. Every year, we give billions of dollars in aid to Israel, a number totally out of proportion with the relative wealth of the country. We also sell them a whole lot of weapons, the same weapons they use on the Palestinians. Now, if people who support Palestine decide to attack is, is it because they hate our freedom? Is that the simplist explanation, or one contrived for political convenience? No! The simplest explanation is that they hate us because we support their enemy! I mean, seriously, did the IRA attack Great Britain because they hated the British's parliamentary democracy? Of course not! Whatever the reasons behind terrorism, that doesn't change the fact that terrorism is wrong. However, we have to understand the real reasons, we cannot just subscribe to what is ideologically convenient, because not understanding your enemy can be fatal.
Also, you missed my point about where terrorism happens. The attacks of terrorism may occur in western countries (though, as often as not, they occur in other countries --- consider the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia). However, training of terrorists is not easily accomplished in a developed country. It's best accomplished where there is no government to see them, and no government control --- places like Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.
In that way, the threat of freedom in Iraq has forced a refocus. Freedom in Iraq isn't a threat for the terrorists. It's an opportunity. Under Saddam, terrorist operations were severely limited. Why? A dictator's only goal is to stay in power. The terrorists hated Saddam for being secular, and he had to supress them because they could be a threat to his rule. With Saddam gone, you're just left with a weak democratic government in Iraq. That means that terrorists can operate with greater freedom, since law and order has broken down.
Also, I should point out that 90% of the fighting in Iraq is against insurgents, not terrorists. An insurgent is a very different thing --- if somebody came and invaded the United States, you'd be an insurget too. Indeed, that's the founding principle of the 2nd amendment.
Also, "imposing" freedom on another country that isn't free isn't so anti libertarian, that would be like saying someone could "impose" freedom of speech. Interventionist wars in other countries is anti-libertarian. It goes against the principles outlined by the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson once said:
"I do not believe war the most certain means of enforcing principles. Those peaceable coercions which are in the power of every nation, if undertaken in concert and in time of peace, are more likely to produce the desired effect."
If freedom is a principle we desire to enforce on the world, then war isn't the way to do it.
and government regulations that remove direct accountability from the consumer decision. If you're talking about lawsuits, I should point out that the cost of insurance for doctors in 2003 was $6.3bn. That means that payouts were some number less than that, because the insurance companies are still in business. The total cost of healthcare was $1.6tn. That means the cost of lawsuits was 0.39% of the total cost of healthcare. we pay 100% more for healthcare than the Canadians --- where does the other 99.61% come from?
Bush really pisses me off on this account because he's pulling a complete diversionary tactic --- 0.39% is a trivial sum, and the lawsuit issue is a total red herring.
Also, I think the tax reality is that the government won't just get the money elsewhere, because they're already trying to
Simple example. There are two types of people: A, who always vote for Kerry, and B, who always vote for Bush. If there are equal numbers of A and B people, and you do a random poll, you'll find out that 50% of the population supports each candidate.
However, consider what question this poll answers: "what candidate does the population as a whole prefer." That's not the question we want to ask. We want to know "what percentage of the votes will each candidate get?" Here is where the correction comes in --- the pool of voters is known not to be a random subset of the population. Voting is strongly correlated with particular demographic properties. In our previous example, if group A is young people, and only votes 50% of the time, and group B is old people and votes 75% of the time, then our election will turn out a landslide victory for Bush (60% to 40%), even though support among the population is about even.
So in order to accurately estimate who will win, you've got to make some estimates about what percentage of each demographic will make it to the polls. If you then sample support for each candidate in each demographic, you can come up with some (statistically sound), numbers. Now, while these numbers may be statistically sound, how accurate they are depends on how accurate your estimates of the turnout demographics is.
As a libertarian, Bush really isn't my favorite - but I just can't see why so many people hate him that badly! As a libertarian-leaning liberal, and mostly an economic conservative, and let me explain why I hate bush.
the simple fact is that Bush moved the front lines on the war on terror out of here and over there. That's presuming that Iraq has anything to do with the war on terror. Afghanistan did, and Saudia Arabia or Sudan would, but Iraq didn't. And the war on terror doesn't have a front-line. Analogizing like that is misleading. Attacking Iraq, even though the terrorists weren't plotting there, doesn't at all prevent them from attacking us. Indeed, no amount of toppling governments furthers the war on terror, because by definition terrorism is a guerilla movement.
As a student of history, I also have to say that the idea that democracy in Iraq (if it is even possible in the next few decades) will stem terrorism is silly. Terrorism thrives under chaos, in places where law and order are weak. That's why places like Sudan, northern Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc, are hotbeds of terrorism. It's just naive to think that a weak, fledling democracy in Iraq is a worse environment for terrorism than a scrict, secular dictator.
As commander and chief, I really thought he did his job, or atleast made more than a half ass try. You do or you do not. There is no try. Seriously, though, the way I see it, there were two possible reasons why Iraq could be justified. Had Iraq had WMD, and attack was imminent, then it could have been justified. Had Iraq been harboring significant terrorist elements, then it could have been justified. Since neither of these panned out, Bush had to fall back to "well, Saddam was a bad guy and we freed the people of Iraq." Well, that's not a very libertarian (or conservative) justification. Indeed, that sounds like something hippy liberals would say...
I thought it could have been a lot worse and that he really softened the damage. It really was worse than it needed to be. We've had worse recessions in the last half-century, yet we haven't had such a large net-loss of jobs. The recession, I can understand, that's out of Bush's control. But given how mild the recession was (by Bush's own claims), the job numbers are really out of line.
Also, he hasn't paid any attention to the soaring costs of healthcare, something many economists are citing as something that could significantly impair our economy. The US, as a whole, spends 13.6% of it's GDP on healthcare. This is way out of line with the 6-7% most European countries spend on healthcare. We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare, even though our system is really not very good. Clearly, something needs to be looked at, but he's totally ignoring it.
Finally, between sales, property, income, and other misc taxes - the avg person pays up to 40% of their life without even knowing it There are two problems here. First, the "less taxes at any cost" isn't an idea supportable by modern economics. Lowering taxes is generally a good idea, but if it comes at the cost, for example, of 13.6% of GDP being spent on healthcare, then it's not a net benefit to the economy. That's really the primary reason why I'm a libertarian-leaning liberal and not a libertarian --- they're too ideological about their economic policy and not rational and scientific. They haven't managed to integrate the last 50 years advancements in economic understanding into their positions.
Beyond that, Bush is still a crappy candidate with respect to cutting taxes. State and local taxes have skyrocketed as a result of reduced federal support. Unless your income is way out of line with the value of your home, this means that much of your federal tax cut was wiped out by increases in other taxes. The lesson here is that you cannot cut taxes without cutting the government machinery that depends on it. The government won't just shrink when given less money --- they'll just get the
Well, that's a seperate concern. The concern I was addressing was whether it was a good idea to integrate something like this into core system code --- whether or not it was like integrating a web browser into the OS. Now, yes, it would be preferable if KIO were implemented below the *NIX file API, but the problem is that KDE is a cross-platform desktop, while very few platforms support this sort of functionality. In order to keep KDE consistent across *NIX'es, they'd have to implement this on HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, *BSD, as well as Linux. That's not really practical for them, especially considering they don't even have the source to all the platforms KDE supports.
I'm not talking about the BSD ftp program Windows uses. I'm talking about the FTP support in internet explorer that's phenomenally slow even over a high-bandwidth link.
Well, you learn something new ever day. I'm surprised, though, why doesn't anybody actually use this functionality? Why don't they have protocol handlers for more protocols?
Well, I'm a KDE user, but KDE and Windows aren't exactly good examples of UI design. GNOME did something bad in that it took a lot of power and configurability out of the system (that they didn't need to), but in terms of interface design, GNOME is quite good. What the GNOME folks don't yet seem to realize is that you can have an elegant UI, and lot's of configurability too. MacOS classic, for example, while it was simple, also had lot's of "extensions" power-users could use to configure stuff to their liking.
Monikers don't appear to do the same thing. For example, I can't find any directory listing functions in the Moniker API. Could you implement KIO's ability to browse SSH accounts using the Moniker API?
In any case, it's not the access that's in question here. It's the fact that all KDE apps use KIO, so your entire desktop is network transparent. Most Windows apps don't appear to use the Moniker API to access files, so you can't just open a remote ssh directory in MS Word and expect it to work.
1) Visual consistency. Within KDE, I only use KDE apps, and in GNOME, I only use GNOME apps. As a result, all my apps look the same. They theme the same, use the same color scheme, etc. This is not true in Windows. The major Microsoft apps use different toolkits, so Visual Studio.NET doesn't look like Internet Explorer, and neither look like Office XP.
2) UI simplicity. In GNOME, the UI is very simple and streamlined. This is a direct result of the MacOS-influenced GNOME HIG. For example, Epiphany has 8 toolbar buttons and 5 entries on it's main context menu. Internet Explorer has well over a dozen toolbar buttons, and something like 18 entries in it's main context menu. Large toolbars and context menus are examples of bad UI design, because they prevent users from relying on muscle memory to access elements --- they have to do linear scans through the entries.
3) Consistency of menus. GNOME and KDE apps have very consistent menus. GNOME apps (mostly) put preferences under "edit->preferences" while KDE apps put preferences under "settings." In Windows, the major Microsoft apps differ quit significantly. In Visual Studio, in particular, configuration is spread out over several dialogs in different places.
I'm not talking about the OS itself. I'm talking about the desktop environments. GNOME applications are very internally consistent, as are KDE applications. GNOME apps may not be consistent with KDE apps, but people don't usually use an eclectic mix of the two. Instead, they use mostly apps from one desktop, with maybe one or two apps from the other DE. This is really no different than dealing with the occasional "unusual" app in Windows, like Winzip, Media Player, RealPlayer, EphPod, iTunes, etc.
Most people agree that the Mac Classic HIG is an example of excellent UI design. It might not suit the tastes of some *NIX users, but it's quality is widely accepted in the user interface design community.
I've been through some KDE code myself (not Konqueror, though, but the code in question is in KIO, not konqueror), and the code quality is very good. It's not as good as Qt, which is pristine as the virgin snow, but pretty good nonetheless.
No, but being about to type sftp:// into a browser does make KDE more network-transparent than OS X, which was the point of the article! God, I like OS X myself (like Classic even more), but the special moron task force of the Mac user community is really out in force today!
Um, you *can* use the browser from within the KDE file dialog. Eg, if you want to open something from your ssh account, you just enter "fish://myself@somesite.com", and it'll open up the remote directory as a directory in the file dialog.
That's not really the same thing. KIO protocol handlers allow KDE apps to understand new types of filesystems. So you can define a module that allows any KDE app to transparently have access to a "gmail drive." Can you do that in Windows, without any changes to applications?
Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go. Window's FTP functionality barely works. Meanwhile, I regularly use KDE's network transparency to work with my university account over SSH. I can just save directly to a virtual SSH drive, instead of saving on disk, then transferring, or e-mailing it to myself or whatever.
It's really not anything like integrating a web-browser into the OS. One of the jobs of an OS is to provide applications with access to files. KIO is just a generalization of this idea, allowing apps to access files stored in many sorts of locations, instead of just on the local disk. It's not fundementally different than something like NFS, or even the VFS, which allows apps to treat files on a hard-drive the same way as files on a cd-rom.
Um, What're you talking about? The thing described in the article has nothing to do with figuring out what application to use to open up a file. It has to do with network transparency in the user-interface. Eg: I can't open up MS Word and save a document directly to a SSH account, but I can do that in KWord. Neither OS X nor Windows have this very useful feature.
it's ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows. Maybe compared to OS X, but certainly not in comparison to Windows. Both GNOME and KDE are more consistent than either OS X or Windows, and in terms of usability, GNOME is fairly close to OS X. There is a reason for this --- GNOME emulates the MacOS classic HIG. In terms of usability, GNOME is far superior to Windows.
You think Apple or Microsoft innovates? What is OS X? A slightly tweeked NeXTStep? That's *it*. There is absolutely nothing innovative in the Microsoft platform. It's all reimplementations of 1980's technology. The only thing remotely innovative is the.NET CLR, and it's language interoperation, and it wasn't even a Microsoft invention! It was developed at Colusa software, which was later bought out by Microsoft.
In an industry where the behemoths have stopped innovating (witness the dramatic scaling back of Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and HP Labs), open source software isn't going to present any impedence to innovation at all.
Bush has come out and said that we shouldn't fight it:
Bush (Dayton, Ohio, May 4, 2004): We care about outsourcing in America. We want people working here. But the wrong policy would have been, let's go through economic isolationist policy, let's wall us off from the world.
His economic advisor has also come out in favor of it. Of course, he is 100% correct on this issue, but it is a bit of a flip-flop from his previous position of pushing the steel tariff.
IIRC, the STL uses a mix of quick, merge, and insertion sort depending on the size of the data. This gives it about a 50% advantage over the C library sort. What accounts for the rest of the difference is the exceedingly slow indirect call the C qsort() has to do.
Because it's politically convenient. We should not be surprised when politicians say things that are politically convenient. Bush does it all the time --- he opposed free trade early in his presidency by imposing that steel tariff now says that we shouldn't fight outsourcing.
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A cursory glance at this [eclipse.org] suggests that on Linux it is implemented with Motif, not GTK.
.NET. Most use the common controls, and Office uses it's own toolkit. From the point of view of the user, having an "official" toolkit means nothing when Office uses a different toolkit from the rest of their apps.
.NET 1.0 and Win32 Common Controls apps on your desktop, and Office will still use it's own toolkit. You want a standard? Fine: Qt is the standard toolkit. Happy now? Because that has as much meaning as saying that .NET 1.0 is the "standard toolkit" on Windows.
SWT on Linux is implemented on GTK. I didn't even realize there was a Motif port. Even Swing is moving towards adopting GTK look & feels.
TK: That's the default GUI toolkit for Python, you know.
Which amounts to nothing. All the Python apps that people use (eg: RedHat's system tools) use PyGTK. PyGTK and PyQt are quickly supplanting Tk as the default Python toolkit.
So yeah, Windows has multiple toolkits too, but at least they look and feel more similar to each other.
Well, so what you're aruging for is not toolkit unification (which is impossible), but Look & Feel unification.
And at least with that there's clear winner (.NET, and then Avalon [stupid on MS's part, but whatever]) -- one recommended toolkit,
If there is a clear winner, then how come nothing uses it? Very few apps on the average desktop use
If either GTK or QT was the one standard I'd be happy.
Again, what does a standard mean if not even Microsoft follows it? Windows.Forms 1.0 might be standard now, but it'll be replaced by Windows.Forms 2.0 when Longhorn comes out. You'll still have lot's of legacy
First, CDE, GnuStep, Swing, TK, etc, aren't serious competitors, very few people use them. Most of them exist on Windows too, but they're niche tere too. For all intents and purposes, X has two toolkits --- GTK and Qt. Everything else is legacy stuff. That's really no different than on Windows, where you've got multiple toolkits (XP common controls, .NET, Office, etc).
IMHO terrorisim mostly happenes in western comntries not because of chaos and unstability, but because very specific interests are suverely threatened by other peoples freedoms.
That's idealistic bullshit. There are people who are threatened by other peoples' freedoms, no doubt, but you don't recruit that kind of support just from envy. Look at it logically: Israel is a bitter enemy of the Muslim world. Every year, we give billions of dollars in aid to Israel, a number totally out of proportion with the relative wealth of the country. We also sell them a whole lot of weapons, the same weapons they use on the Palestinians. Now, if people who support Palestine decide to attack is, is it because they hate our freedom? Is that the simplist explanation, or one contrived for political convenience? No! The simplest explanation is that they hate us because we support their enemy! I mean, seriously, did the IRA attack Great Britain because they hated the British's parliamentary democracy? Of course not!
Whatever the reasons behind terrorism, that doesn't change the fact that terrorism is wrong. However, we have to understand the real reasons, we cannot just subscribe to what is ideologically convenient, because not understanding your enemy can be fatal.
Also, you missed my point about where terrorism happens. The attacks of terrorism may occur in western countries (though, as often as not, they occur in other countries --- consider the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia). However, training of terrorists is not easily accomplished in a developed country. It's best accomplished where there is no government to see them, and no government control --- places like Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.
In that way, the threat of freedom in Iraq has forced a refocus.
Freedom in Iraq isn't a threat for the terrorists. It's an opportunity. Under Saddam, terrorist operations were severely limited. Why? A dictator's only goal is to stay in power. The terrorists hated Saddam for being secular, and he had to supress them because they could be a threat to his rule. With Saddam gone, you're just left with a weak democratic government in Iraq. That means that terrorists can operate with greater freedom, since law and order has broken down.
Also, I should point out that 90% of the fighting in Iraq is against insurgents, not terrorists. An insurgent is a very different thing --- if somebody came and invaded the United States, you'd be an insurget too. Indeed, that's the founding principle of the 2nd amendment.
Also, "imposing" freedom on another country that isn't free isn't so anti libertarian, that would be like saying someone could "impose" freedom of speech.
Interventionist wars in other countries is anti-libertarian. It goes against the principles outlined by the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson once said:
"I do not believe war the most certain means of enforcing principles. Those peaceable coercions which are in the power of every nation, if undertaken in concert and in time of peace, are more likely to produce the desired effect."
If freedom is a principle we desire to enforce on the world, then war isn't the way to do it.
and government regulations that remove direct accountability from the consumer decision.
If you're talking about lawsuits, I should point out that the cost of insurance for doctors in 2003 was $6.3bn. That means that payouts were some number less than that, because the insurance companies are still in business. The total cost of healthcare was $1.6tn. That means the cost of lawsuits was 0.39% of the total cost of healthcare. we pay 100% more for healthcare than the Canadians --- where does the other 99.61% come from?
Bush really pisses me off on this account because he's pulling a complete diversionary tactic --- 0.39% is a trivial sum, and the lawsuit issue is a total red herring.
Also, I think the tax reality is that the government won't just get the money elsewhere, because they're already trying to
It comes down to what question the poll answers:
Simple example. There are two types of people: A, who always vote for Kerry, and B, who always vote for Bush. If there are equal numbers of A and B people, and you do a random poll, you'll find out that 50% of the population supports each candidate.
However, consider what question this poll answers: "what candidate does the population as a whole prefer." That's not the question we want to ask. We want to know "what percentage of the votes will each candidate get?" Here is where the correction comes in --- the pool of voters is known not to be a random subset of the population. Voting is strongly correlated with particular demographic properties. In our previous example, if group A is young people, and only votes 50% of the time, and group B is old people and votes 75% of the time, then our election will turn out a landslide victory for Bush (60% to 40%), even though support among the population is about even.
So in order to accurately estimate who will win, you've got to make some estimates about what percentage of each demographic will make it to the polls. If you then sample support for each candidate in each demographic, you can come up with some (statistically sound), numbers. Now, while these numbers may be statistically sound, how accurate they are depends on how accurate your estimates of the turnout demographics is.
As a libertarian, Bush really isn't my favorite - but I just can't see why so many people hate him that badly!
As a libertarian-leaning liberal, and mostly an economic conservative, and let me explain why I hate bush.
the simple fact is that Bush moved the front lines on the war on terror out of here and over there.
That's presuming that Iraq has anything to do with the war on terror. Afghanistan did, and Saudia Arabia or Sudan would, but Iraq didn't. And the war on terror doesn't have a front-line. Analogizing like that is misleading. Attacking Iraq, even though the terrorists weren't plotting there, doesn't at all prevent them from attacking us. Indeed, no amount of toppling governments furthers the war on terror, because by definition terrorism is a guerilla movement.
As a student of history, I also have to say that the idea that democracy in Iraq (if it is even possible in the next few decades) will stem terrorism is silly. Terrorism thrives under chaos, in places where law and order are weak. That's why places like Sudan, northern Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc, are hotbeds of terrorism. It's just naive to think that a weak, fledling democracy in Iraq is a worse environment for terrorism than a scrict, secular dictator.
As commander and chief, I really thought he did his job, or atleast made more than a half ass try.
You do or you do not. There is no try. Seriously, though, the way I see it, there were two possible reasons why Iraq could be justified. Had Iraq had WMD, and attack was imminent, then it could have been justified. Had Iraq been harboring significant terrorist elements, then it could have been justified. Since neither of these panned out, Bush had to fall back to "well, Saddam was a bad guy and we freed the people of Iraq." Well, that's not a very libertarian (or conservative) justification. Indeed, that sounds like something hippy liberals would say...
I thought it could have been a lot worse and that he really softened the damage.
It really was worse than it needed to be. We've had worse recessions in the last half-century, yet we haven't had such a large net-loss of jobs. The recession, I can understand, that's out of Bush's control. But given how mild the recession was (by Bush's own claims), the job numbers are really out of line.
Also, he hasn't paid any attention to the soaring costs of healthcare, something many economists are citing as something that could significantly impair our economy. The US, as a whole, spends 13.6% of it's GDP on healthcare. This is way out of line with the 6-7% most European countries spend on healthcare. We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare, even though our system is really not very good. Clearly, something needs to be looked at, but he's totally ignoring it.
Finally, between sales, property, income, and other misc taxes - the avg person pays up to 40% of their life without even knowing it
There are two problems here. First, the "less taxes at any cost" isn't an idea supportable by modern economics. Lowering taxes is generally a good idea, but if it comes at the cost, for example, of 13.6% of GDP being spent on healthcare, then it's not a net benefit to the economy. That's really the primary reason why I'm a libertarian-leaning liberal and not a libertarian --- they're too ideological about their economic policy and not rational and scientific. They haven't managed to integrate the last 50 years advancements in economic understanding into their positions.
Beyond that, Bush is still a crappy candidate with respect to cutting taxes. State and local taxes have skyrocketed as a result of reduced federal support. Unless your income is way out of line with the value of your home, this means that much of your federal tax cut was wiped out by increases in other taxes. The lesson here is that you cannot cut taxes without cutting the government machinery that depends on it. The government won't just shrink when given less money --- they'll just get the
Well, that's a seperate concern. The concern I was addressing was whether it was a good idea to integrate something like this into core system code --- whether or not it was like integrating a web browser into the OS. Now, yes, it would be preferable if KIO were implemented below the *NIX file API, but the problem is that KDE is a cross-platform desktop, while very few platforms support this sort of functionality. In order to keep KDE consistent across *NIX'es, they'd have to implement this on HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, *BSD, as well as Linux. That's not really practical for them, especially considering they don't even have the source to all the platforms KDE supports.
I'm not talking about the BSD ftp program Windows uses. I'm talking about the FTP support in internet explorer that's phenomenally slow even over a high-bandwidth link.
Well, you learn something new ever day. I'm surprised, though, why doesn't anybody actually use this functionality? Why don't they have protocol handlers for more protocols?
Well, I'm a KDE user, but KDE and Windows aren't exactly good examples of UI design. GNOME did something bad in that it took a lot of power and configurability out of the system (that they didn't need to), but in terms of interface design, GNOME is quite good. What the GNOME folks don't yet seem to realize is that you can have an elegant UI, and lot's of configurability too. MacOS classic, for example, while it was simple, also had lot's of "extensions" power-users could use to configure stuff to their liking.
Monikers don't appear to do the same thing. For example, I can't find any directory listing functions in the Moniker API. Could you implement KIO's ability to browse SSH accounts using the Moniker API?
In any case, it's not the access that's in question here. It's the fact that all KDE apps use KIO, so your entire desktop is network transparent. Most Windows apps don't appear to use the Moniker API to access files, so you can't just open a remote ssh directory in MS Word and expect it to work.
Better than Windows? Sure.
1) Visual consistency. Within KDE, I only use KDE apps, and in GNOME, I only use GNOME apps. As a result, all my apps look the same. They theme the same, use the same color scheme, etc. This is not true in Windows. The major Microsoft apps use different toolkits, so Visual Studio.NET doesn't look like Internet Explorer, and neither look like Office XP.
2) UI simplicity. In GNOME, the UI is very simple and streamlined. This is a direct result of the MacOS-influenced GNOME HIG. For example, Epiphany has 8 toolbar buttons and 5 entries on it's main context menu. Internet Explorer has well over a dozen toolbar buttons, and something like 18 entries in it's main context menu. Large toolbars and context menus are examples of bad UI design, because they prevent users from relying on muscle memory to access elements --- they have to do linear scans through the entries.
3) Consistency of menus. GNOME and KDE apps have very consistent menus. GNOME apps (mostly) put preferences under "edit->preferences" while KDE apps put preferences under "settings." In Windows, the major Microsoft apps differ quit significantly. In Visual Studio, in particular, configuration is spread out over several dialogs in different places.
I'm not talking about the OS itself. I'm talking about the desktop environments. GNOME applications are very internally consistent, as are KDE applications. GNOME apps may not be consistent with KDE apps, but people don't usually use an eclectic mix of the two. Instead, they use mostly apps from one desktop, with maybe one or two apps from the other DE. This is really no different than dealing with the occasional "unusual" app in Windows, like Winzip, Media Player, RealPlayer, EphPod, iTunes, etc.
Most people agree that the Mac Classic HIG is an example of excellent UI design. It might not suit the tastes of some *NIX users, but it's quality is widely accepted in the user interface design community.
I've been through some KDE code myself (not Konqueror, though, but the code in question is in KIO, not konqueror), and the code quality is very good. It's not as good as Qt, which is pristine as the virgin snow, but pretty good nonetheless.
No, but being about to type sftp:// into a browser does make KDE more network-transparent than OS X, which was the point of the article! God, I like OS X myself (like Classic even more), but the special moron task force of the Mac user community is really out in force today!
Um, you *can* use the browser from within the KDE file dialog. Eg, if you want to open something from your ssh account, you just enter "fish://myself@somesite.com", and it'll open up the remote directory as a directory in the file dialog.
That's not really the same thing. KIO protocol handlers allow KDE apps to understand new types of filesystems. So you can define a module that allows any KDE app to transparently have access to a "gmail drive." Can you do that in Windows, without any changes to applications?
Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go. Window's FTP functionality barely works. Meanwhile, I regularly use KDE's network transparency to work with my university account over SSH. I can just save directly to a virtual SSH drive, instead of saving on disk, then transferring, or e-mailing it to myself or whatever.
It's really not anything like integrating a web-browser into the OS. One of the jobs of an OS is to provide applications with access to files. KIO is just a generalization of this idea, allowing apps to access files stored in many sorts of locations, instead of just on the local disk. It's not fundementally different than something like NFS, or even the VFS, which allows apps to treat files on a hard-drive the same way as files on a cd-rom.
Um, What're you talking about? The thing described in the article has nothing to do with figuring out what application to use to open up a file. It has to do with network transparency in the user-interface. Eg: I can't open up MS Word and save a document directly to a SSH account, but I can do that in KWord. Neither OS X nor Windows have this very useful feature.
it's ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows.
Maybe compared to OS X, but certainly not in comparison to Windows. Both GNOME and KDE are more consistent than either OS X or Windows, and in terms of usability, GNOME is fairly close to OS X. There is a reason for this --- GNOME emulates the MacOS classic HIG. In terms of usability, GNOME is far superior to Windows.
You think Apple or Microsoft innovates? What is OS X? A slightly tweeked NeXTStep? That's *it*. There is absolutely nothing innovative in the Microsoft platform. It's all reimplementations of 1980's technology. The only thing remotely innovative is the .NET CLR, and it's language interoperation, and it wasn't even a Microsoft invention! It was developed at Colusa software, which was later bought out by Microsoft.
In an industry where the behemoths have stopped innovating (witness the dramatic scaling back of Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and HP Labs), open source software isn't going to present any impedence to innovation at all.
Bush has come out and said that we shouldn't fight it:
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Bush (Dayton, Ohio, May 4, 2004): We care about outsourcing in America. We want people working here. But the wrong policy would have been, let's go through economic isolationist policy, let's wall us off from the world
His economic advisor has also come out in favor of it. Of course, he is 100% correct on this issue, but it is a bit of a flip-flop from his previous position of pushing the steel tariff.
IIRC, the STL uses a mix of quick, merge, and insertion sort depending on the size of the data. This gives it about a 50% advantage over the C library sort. What accounts for the rest of the difference is the exceedingly slow indirect call the C qsort() has to do.
Because it's politically convenient. We should not be surprised when politicians say things that are politically convenient. Bush does it all the time --- he opposed free trade early in his presidency by imposing that steel tariff now says that we shouldn't fight outsourcing.