Eh? I'm just talking about how the city is organized. Its streets are much smaller and more compact than those in Atlanta. DC as a whole does suck, although I'd put it above Atlanta, simply because it doesn't seem so desolate, and the air isn't any worse.
Eh? I live in the middle of the city (Georgia Tech). I've seen most of Atlanta. Its still a parking lot around here. All the streets are three or four lanes wide, all the buildings are spread far apart, etc. The core of the city has less than a million people, but is 137 square miles in size! If you take a look at DC or Boston, you'll see that everything is nice and close together, with tiny little streets. Much more asthetic that way if you ask me.
That's a bit to naive. A country's culture transcends a specific generation. Remember, each generation is around to teach the next. As such, we do have a shared history, and more importantly, we have shared attitudes that tend to influence our actions, causing us to repeat that history.
Consider this: The years of Andrew Jackson and his successors imparted a sort of "wild-west" element to the American psyche. An intensely independent, "pull your self up by your bootstraps", "worship the average man" streak that is a part of American society to this very day. To believe that we are free from the actions of our fathers, and the behaviors that caused them to act as they did, is foolish.
I dunno. I grew up in Virginia. As a kid, we spent a lot of time learning about native Americans, but kinda glazed over all the genocide. We never learned about the various dictators we propped up over the years. A lot of the people I meet seem to have the "we can do no wrong" attitude, and an intense sense of moral superiority.
Well, Atlanta has the advantage of having been burned down during the civil war, and really only built up in the last century or so, so its more like Seattle (beautiful city, btw) than New York. However, the fact remains that these "driver friendly" cities are very unasthetic. The roads are enormous, walking anywhere is downright dangerous, and there is concrete as far as the eye can see. I much prefer the more compact European cities, because unlike the compact American cities (cough, DC), they actually do public transportation right.
The thing is that human beings don't care about decency or morality or ethics. We, as a whole, care about material goods more than anything else. Machiavelli once said something along the lines of: "its better to kill a someone's father than to take his family's land, because he'll remember the latter much longer than he rememberes the former." It is, unfortunately, very true.
The best we can do is understand this aspect of our characters --- the fact that we are basically monkeys easily amused with shiny objects --- and do the best we can within the confinues of our nature.
I assume that you're from the other side of the pond, so I've got a question for you. Have Europeans accepted the poor things their countries did in the past? I don't ask if they dwell on them, I just ask if they understand what happened? Here in the US, we seem to have a serious "we are infallible" complex. Its as if slavery, manifest destiny, the propping up of petty dictators, etc, all never happened...
I dunno about the other bits, but I can vouch for the sprawl one. Have you ever been to Atlanta? The city, which was designed to be driver-friendly, is ONE GIANT PARKING LOT. Seriously, you have have WalMarts with football-field sized parking slots out front. And back. And on the sides. Now, because land is so cheap, giant parking lots are probably more cost-effective, but it does make the city look like a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
IMHO, the Europeans built their cities right. Paris is half the land area of Atlanta, and utterly undrivable. However, that doesn't mean much, because there are close to 400 metro stations in the cities, plus another 150 RER stations for the suburbs. Washington DC is almost as compact (and nearly as undrivable), but its subway pales in comparison.
I don't know. Nearly everything I've ever wanted has been in Debian's repositories. Some software might need a special installer, but GNOME and KDE, which are in pretty much every repository, does not.
At a technical level, a directory is just another document. At a conceptual level, its not unusual for a viewer to embed management capabilities. Take acdsee, for example.
Konqueror isn't an internet browser or a file browser. Its a document viewer. Thus, it views all sorts of documents, from directories on the hard drive to PDF documents to media files. Since KDE's architecture is network-transparent, web-pages are just more documents Konqueror can view.
If you're talking about redraw speed, then yeah, it is. If you're talking about application startup, the probably not. The redraw is more a fault of GTK+ than GNOME, though.
Use a distro with a proper package manager. There are no excuses for compiling from source and then bitching about it. SuSE, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, and EVEN SLACKWARE, have package managers these days. I just installed GNOME 2.6 to try it out. Thanks to the 2+MB/sec download from ftp.us.debian.org, it took less time to install than it did to read the article.
Interesting comparison. Andrew Tannenbaum made a similar one in "Modern Operating Systems." He pointed out that while a program may have fewer overall components then, say, an aircraft carrier, it is in many ways much more complex because of how all the parts interact. The specific example he used is the fact that the guy designing toilets for the aircraft carrier doesn't need to know anything about the radar system, while a guy designing one part of a program often needs to keep many things about the other parts in mind.
That doesn't make any sense. Novell is competing against Microsoft, so the MS toolkit(s) aren't a choice for them. Besides, Qt is better than anything MS has yet to release. Even the.NET toolkit is stone-age compared to Qt. Its not font-sensitive, it doesn't have a layout manager, etc. So MS won't have a toolkit competitive with Qt until the next iteration of the.NET toolkit, which is slated to have these features, comes out with Longhorn.
Eh? Remember, Novell bought SuSE too, and were originally planning on buying them first.
And its stupid to bring up the Canopy Group ties. Canopy Group invested in TrollTech back when Caldera decided to use Qt in their Linux installer. Caldera at the time was under different management, and was a good company that did a lot to help desktop Linux. For example, Caldera had one of the first GUI Linux installers on the market, which attracted a lot of attention.
GCC has had a stable binary C++ ABI for awhile now. In fact, its the same stable binary C++ ABI Intel C++ uses. So the ABI bit is an old argument. While C++ suffers from the FBC problem, Trolltech is careful about hitting that problem in Qt. Thus, Qt has remained binary compatible throughout the whole 3.x series, which is nearly three years old at this point.
No. Its just a developer license. You pay TrollTech for one license for each developer you've got working with Qt. The binaries themselves are free to redistribute.
Not that there is really a Linux shareware market now, but this would be pretty effective in stopping one from appearing. What's stopping a shareware market from appearing is OpenSource, not Qt licenses.
Because Qt is a better, faster, and more well-documented toolkit than GTK+? Its got many more commercial users (including a lot of big-name companies) and a dedicated team of full-time developers.
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Eh? I'm just talking about how the city is organized. Its streets are much smaller and more compact than those in Atlanta. DC as a whole does suck, although I'd put it above Atlanta, simply because it doesn't seem so desolate, and the air isn't any worse.
Eh? I live in the middle of the city (Georgia Tech). I've seen most of Atlanta. Its still a parking lot around here. All the streets are three or four lanes wide, all the buildings are spread far apart, etc. The core of the city has less than a million people, but is 137 square miles in size! If you take a look at DC or Boston, you'll see that everything is nice and close together, with tiny little streets. Much more asthetic that way if you ask me.
That's a bit to naive. A country's culture transcends a specific generation. Remember, each generation is around to teach the next. As such, we do have a shared history, and more importantly, we have shared attitudes that tend to influence our actions, causing us to repeat that history.
Consider this: The years of Andrew Jackson and his successors imparted a sort of "wild-west" element to the American psyche. An intensely independent, "pull your self up by your bootstraps", "worship the average man" streak that is a part of American society to this very day. To believe that we are free from the actions of our fathers, and the behaviors that caused them to act as they did, is foolish.
I dunno. I grew up in Virginia. As a kid, we spent a lot of time learning about native Americans, but kinda glazed over all the genocide. We never learned about the various dictators we propped up over the years. A lot of the people I meet seem to have the "we can do no wrong" attitude, and an intense sense of moral superiority.
Well, Atlanta has the advantage of having been burned down during the civil war, and really only built up in the last century or so, so its more like Seattle (beautiful city, btw) than New York. However, the fact remains that these "driver friendly" cities are very unasthetic. The roads are enormous, walking anywhere is downright dangerous, and there is concrete as far as the eye can see. I much prefer the more compact European cities, because unlike the compact American cities (cough, DC), they actually do public transportation right.
The thing is that human beings don't care about decency or morality or ethics. We, as a whole, care about material goods more than anything else. Machiavelli once said something along the lines of: "its better to kill a someone's father than to take his family's land, because he'll remember the latter much longer than he rememberes the former." It is, unfortunately, very true.
The best we can do is understand this aspect of our characters --- the fact that we are basically monkeys easily amused with shiny objects --- and do the best we can within the confinues of our nature.
I assume that you're from the other side of the pond, so I've got a question for you. Have Europeans accepted the poor things their countries did in the past? I don't ask if they dwell on them, I just ask if they understand what happened? Here in the US, we seem to have a serious "we are infallible" complex. Its as if slavery, manifest destiny, the propping up of petty dictators, etc, all never happened...
I dunno about the other bits, but I can vouch for the sprawl one. Have you ever been to Atlanta? The city, which was designed to be driver-friendly, is ONE GIANT PARKING LOT. Seriously, you have have WalMarts with football-field sized parking slots out front. And back. And on the sides. Now, because land is so cheap, giant parking lots are probably more cost-effective, but it does make the city look like a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
IMHO, the Europeans built their cities right. Paris is half the land area of Atlanta, and utterly undrivable. However, that doesn't mean much, because there are close to 400 metro stations in the cities, plus another 150 RER stations for the suburbs. Washington DC is almost as compact (and nearly as undrivable), but its subway pales in comparison.
Dude. Your web-page is so cool looking.
I don't know. Nearly everything I've ever wanted has been in Debian's repositories. Some software might need a special installer, but GNOME and KDE, which are in pretty much every repository, does not.
At a technical level, a directory is just another document. At a conceptual level, its not unusual for a viewer to embed management capabilities. Take acdsee, for example.
Konqueror isn't an internet browser or a file browser. Its a document viewer. Thus, it views all sorts of documents, from directories on the hard drive to PDF documents to media files. Since KDE's architecture is network-transparent, web-pages are just more documents Konqueror can view.
If you're talking about redraw speed, then yeah, it is. If you're talking about application startup, the probably not. The redraw is more a fault of GTK+ than GNOME, though.
Correction. GNOME 2.6 is already in experimental. And on my harddrive, for that matter ;)
Use a distro with a proper package manager. There are no excuses for compiling from source and then bitching about it. SuSE, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, and EVEN SLACKWARE, have package managers these days. I just installed GNOME 2.6 to try it out. Thanks to the 2+MB/sec download from ftp.us.debian.org, it took less time to install than it did to read the article.
Interesting comparison. Andrew Tannenbaum made a similar one in "Modern Operating Systems." He pointed out that while a program may have fewer overall components then, say, an aircraft carrier, it is in many ways much more complex because of how all the parts interact. The specific example he used is the fact that the guy designing toilets for the aircraft carrier doesn't need to know anything about the radar system, while a guy designing one part of a program often needs to keep many things about the other parts in mind.
And we're back to the point about how diamonds are just status symbols.
That doesn't make any sense. Novell is competing against Microsoft, so the MS toolkit(s) aren't a choice for them. Besides, Qt is better than anything MS has yet to release. Even the .NET toolkit is stone-age compared to Qt. Its not font-sensitive, it doesn't have a layout manager, etc. So MS won't have a toolkit competitive with Qt until the next iteration of the .NET toolkit, which is slated to have these features, comes out with Longhorn.
I guess that makes sense, actually. I hadn't considered that aspect of it. I'm still a bit wary of it, but you do have a point...
Eh? Remember, Novell bought SuSE too, and were originally planning on buying them first.
And its stupid to bring up the Canopy Group ties. Canopy Group invested in TrollTech back when Caldera decided to use Qt in their Linux installer. Caldera at the time was under different management, and was a good company that did a lot to help desktop Linux. For example, Caldera had one of the first GUI Linux installers on the market, which attracted a lot of attention.
GCC has had a stable binary C++ ABI for awhile now. In fact, its the same stable binary C++ ABI Intel C++ uses. So the ABI bit is an old argument. While C++ suffers from the FBC problem, Trolltech is careful about hitting that problem in Qt. Thus, Qt has remained binary compatible throughout the whole 3.x series, which is nearly three years old at this point.
No. Its just a developer license. You pay TrollTech for one license for each developer you've got working with Qt. The binaries themselves are free to redistribute.
Ironic, that a GPL'ed toolkit should be considered inappropriate for basic foundations of Linux software...
Not that there is really a Linux shareware market now, but this would be pretty effective in stopping one from appearing.
What's stopping a shareware market from appearing is OpenSource, not Qt licenses.
Because Qt is a better, faster, and more well-documented toolkit than GTK+? Its got many more commercial users (including a lot of big-name companies) and a dedicated team of full-time developers.