"I tried out some of the JavaScript code they are offering. It is a nice library of functions for web application development."
Really good stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, well. Slashdot is based in what people thinks it's informative or not, but if people can't tell if something is informative or not, then moderation isn't useful.
I think nautilus is pretty good, but for some reason I'm not very fond of using it. It seems to get in my way, and I don't like that feeling, but I do believe you when you say that I can change settings to fix it for my tastes.
In my case it's not the file manager, but the file chooser. Gnome developers decided to develop the GTK file chooser. That's nice, but gnome has many other needs that gtk doesn't. Using the file chooser is PAINFUL. You just have the name, and the "modified" field and a list of favourite locations. You can't even order things by SIZE.
You don't have different "views" at all in fact. You can't get a view where all the images are show a small thumbnail instead of a meaningless icon. You have to select EVERY file to get a preview at one side - try that in/usr/share/pixmaps or a directory with your digital camera photos, it's really "fun" and "usable". And the image formats that will be previewed are the ones supported by the pixbuf GTK plugins: only the formats in in/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.x.0/loaders/*. Forget about things that have sense, for example video thumbnails, something that has a LOT of sense if you're going to open a video file in a video editing program.
The funny thing is that nautilus can do all what your need and will give you even thumbnails of videos and even of some.swfs with totem-gstreamer + libswf but the decided to go with this completely useless file selector. Compare it with the KDE file selector, where I even can watch the video. Great things like kparts make the desktop feel different. That image is from a page I wrote about "why KDE rocks"
Re:That's all well and good...
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The real problem is it's slow... even in comparison to Gnome.
I just don't believe that anymore. Gnome has become a memory and CPU pig: There're reasons why gnome 2.13 has so many performance improvements. KDE used to be a memory pig, but then gnome catched up and their memory usage went trough the roof. By the way, porting applications to QT4 (no functionality) improves the memory usage percentages with double-digit numbers, so there's a chance that KDE 4 eats less memory
The top post also asked "I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to". I wish to know that aswell. KDE is actively developing KDE 4 but Gnome 3 doesn't exist at all today. Some Gnome developers seem to think that gnome 3 shouldn't be developed because gnome 2 is already feature complete and that doing small improvements which don't break compatibility it's a beter option. That sounds good, but I'd say it looks scary: KDE people is actively developing a KDE version which will rock in many ways and Gnome doesn't seem to have nothing to compete against it, except that Fedora now includes mono and more C# apps can be developed. Noveel seem to be the one place where cool things are being done with gnome.
Many of the design decisions taken in dragonflybsd are similar than those from linux, so I don't really see the design "magic" that doesn't allows linux to scale "without corporate support". Sure, dragonfly looks good (it still has a LOT of work to do) but is not that linux sucks in this field.
Linux was redesigned from the ground up to scale well to huge multiprocessor systems. This is why it has been able to go from being not 100% optimal with 4 cpus to scale properly to 512-cpu SGI machines in a single development release cycle.
It's not just corporate support what allowed this - many years ago people suggested that linux should fight scalability going the "solaris way", but linus & other people didn't like that way at all. Can you explain what radical design concepts are going to allow dragonfly to behave so much better than linux and/or solaris in 512-cpu machines? (yes, I know that dragonfly is also targetting to become a "clustered os")
and many of those things like GLX (what allows to use opengl in X environments) was done by SGI. There's a list of OSS projects at the SGI site
There's a LOT of SGI people around the linux kernel (and not just for XFS) for example. Things like the numa-aware slab allocator, cpusets, or the swap migration (new in 2.6.16) or other tons of scalability improvements that I can't remember habe been done by SGI people. If SGI loses, Linux loses a bit of horsepower.
When I say "centralized" I mean "people doesn't send messages one to eacha other, but through servers". The servers can log what you say regardless of it's one or two hundred servers
I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.
Oooh! Mozilla eats 400 MB of RAM after using it for a few weeks! This is obviously a common case, I guess that firefox isn't going beyond of the 10% share because of that
For a look at what is being done about memory leaks, read this article
No kidding, this article is also from a well-know firefox developer, they're fixing lots of memory leaks.
Apparently the top poster is one of those people who lovse to get karma for apparently-insightful articles. "Cyricz said that firefox developers don't care about memory leaks!". I mean, who wouldn't believe someone who says that a software developer don't want to fix a serious bug in his software?
I wonder what paragraph is the "most telling". The one where the firefox developer says that memory leaks are something normal? I'm running firefox in a 512 MB machine and I have never seen firefox eat 400 MB, right now it's eating 48 MB of RAM and that looks fine to me, specially when they're improving and fixing leaks on each release. I know opera is more resource-friendly....but then, opera is far from being as featureful (call me when opera can be as configurable as firefox + thousand of extensions) so I don't really see it as an alternative, just like IE.
Firefox developers are working hard to beat Microsoft. Maybe I should remember that if Microsoft controls the web browser market it controls a big part of the internet. The firefox developers are working hard to fight that - and they're fixing memory leaks on the way.
well a basic difference between email and IM is that you can still send email while the other user is offline, though I like that Skype buffers up messages you type and sends to the recipient when they come online
Jabber allows you to store messages offline. Those messages could be very well well-formatted messages which are sent to a different app but downloaded through your IM connection including files
Imagine the implications for OSS developers: instead of a mailing list (the equivalent to a IRC "channel", except that IM servers doesn't seem to store channel data when you're offline) you send IM messages. If the developer is online, you can start a IM conversation - or even a VoIP conversation - which makes discussions much faster. Imagine some developers trying to patch a security vulnerability.
If the developer is offline, the messages are stored in the server and will be pushed to your IM client (which will pass them to a special MUA-like gui)
Of course that would mean you've to unify both protocols: POP3/SMTP/IMAP and jabber. I gues you could implement email as a jabber extension. Jabber sucks quite a bit (It's amazing the amount of XML crap that you need to say "hi" to somebody, it's overbloated protocol) but it'd work.
Surprise, IM networks are centralized (that is, all what you say goes through a central server, there're chances that IM networks have been grepping into conversations for ej: conversations about people trying to convince people to go to another IM network). In fact, even IRC is centralized. Do you want security? Use end-to-end encryption.
Notice that unifying email and IM DOES have a lot of sense. IM and email are the SAME THING (send text and ocasinally some files), except that IM is instantaneous and email isn't. But there's no reason why you couldn't add a jabber extension which allows you to receive emails, your jabber client would just move them to a MUA. Email is just a particular case of the idea behind IM.
notice that in windows, graphical apps use much less mem than in linux - not because they're any better, but because the graphic subsystem is in kernel space and the memory used in the graphics subsystem is accounted as such.
Is not that there's not a perfect tool, the problem is that it's a problem which is impossible to solve properly as I see it
Take a shared library. For whatever reason, process 1 uses only the first half of the library. Thanks to demand-loading, only that half is loaded in mem, and that's what accounts as RSS for that process, say 10 MB.
Now a process 2 is launched and it uses the other half of the library. Now, all the library is loading in memory, and even if the first process is not using and has not requested to use the second half, its RSS will grown because somebody else use other parts of the library.
I don't think it's something you can or want to "solve": That's a consequence of the design ideas behind shared libraries. Deal with it.
As far as I know, this is not a windows vulnerability. Users are just stupid and will open any executable with the word "kamasutra" in it. Make it a.desktop file and you have the equivalent linux virus...
You've to admit it, "internet explorer" is a good name. "Firefox" sounds like.....huh.....nothing.
We need a internet-related name: "mozilla www explorer"....whatever. "firefox" is a stupid name.
And then, the firefox installer could include some tweaks, like for example tweak the registry to start firefox when you double click in the blue e or something if you set firefox as default browser...
Firefox is _the_ reason why many pages work today with other browser others than iE. Plus, if microsoft controls the browser market, it controls a big part of the internet. RSS? standars? CSS? We need firefox to keep microsoft away from controlling people like they've done in the desktop market....
You might understand it that way, but you'd be wrong. All Wine does is implement the published API of Windows using Linux commands. Absolutely no reverse engineering is done
Let me doubt that - there's many "hidden functionality" in windows (ie: bugs created in windows 95 and that apps started to use and need it to work reliably and that they were kept because of compatibility reasons. Remember all those 0x0000blah numbers in Windows\system.ini? Each 0x0000blah number activates a special hack neccesary to keep the apps named before the number working. I doubt they documented that part )
Some of those benchmarks are not good because wine is good, but because the underlying platform is good - ej virus scanning, I guess that those are good because linux I/O subsystem is good (unless the guy who did the benchmark didn't told the antivirus to scan the same amount of files)
Then there's basic stuff that you can't explain - why the "CPU speed" benchmark is better under wine? A CPU test will, uh, do things with the CPU, it will be CPU bound and the windows api shouldn't involved in that code path.
Also notice that wine doesn't implement the win32 API completely. How you know that, say, "Game 2 - Adventure - Low Detail" tried to detect the card's features and since wine doesn't implement everything the game reduced the game quality to match the capabilities detected under wine? I say this because wine doesn't looks that good in the Quake, UT2004 and GL benchmarks
Anyway, I do not care how fast wine is. I care about API compliance. This is 2006, Microsoft has rewritten half of the OS with longhorn and I continue without being able to run many windows apps created years ago. Wine is far from being a true windows replacement for windows apps today....
Slashdot Mirror
"I tried out some of the JavaScript code they are offering. It is a nice library of functions for web application development."
Really good stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, well. Slashdot is based in what people thinks it's informative or not, but if people can't tell if something is informative or not, then moderation isn't useful.
More hardware, more options. Especially if you talk price-matching, we know MacBooks aren't exactly cheap.
Yeah, that's why Dell is near backrupt. x86 home-made computers are definitively taking the market.
I think nautilus is pretty good, but for some reason I'm not very fond of using it. It seems to get in my way, and I don't like that feeling, but I do believe you when you say that I can change settings to fix it for my tastes.
/usr/share/pixmaps or a directory with your digital camera photos, it's really "fun" and "usable". And the image formats that will be previewed are the ones supported by the pixbuf GTK plugins: only the formats in in /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.x.0/loaders/*. Forget about things that have sense, for example video thumbnails, something that has a LOT of sense if you're going to open a video file in a video editing program.
.swfs with totem-gstreamer + libswf but the decided to go with this completely useless file selector. Compare it with the KDE file selector, where I even can watch the video. Great things like kparts make the desktop feel different. That image is from a page I wrote about "why KDE rocks"
In my case it's not the file manager, but the file chooser. Gnome developers decided to develop the GTK file chooser. That's nice, but gnome has many other needs that gtk doesn't. Using the file chooser is PAINFUL. You just have the name, and the "modified" field and a list of favourite locations. You can't even order things by SIZE.
You don't have different "views" at all in fact. You can't get a view where all the images are show a small thumbnail instead of a meaningless icon. You have to select EVERY file to get a preview at one side - try that in
The funny thing is that nautilus can do all what your need and will give you even thumbnails of videos and even of some
The real problem is it's slow ... even in comparison to Gnome.
I just don't believe that anymore. Gnome has become a memory and CPU pig: There're reasons why gnome 2.13 has so many performance improvements. KDE used to be a memory pig, but then gnome catched up and their memory usage went trough the roof. By the way, porting applications to QT4 (no functionality) improves the memory usage percentages with double-digit numbers, so there's a chance that KDE 4 eats less memory
The top post also asked "I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to". I wish to know that aswell. KDE is actively developing KDE 4 but Gnome 3 doesn't exist at all today. Some Gnome developers seem to think that gnome 3 shouldn't be developed because gnome 2 is already feature complete and that doing small improvements which don't break compatibility it's a beter option. That sounds good, but I'd say it looks scary: KDE people is actively developing a KDE version which will rock in many ways and Gnome doesn't seem to have nothing to compete against it, except that Fedora now includes mono and more C# apps can be developed. Noveel seem to be the one place where cool things are being done with gnome.
Maybe you missed the "re" in "redesign"? ;)
Many of the design decisions taken in dragonflybsd are similar than those from linux, so I don't really see the design "magic" that doesn't allows linux to scale "without corporate support". Sure, dragonfly looks good (it still has a LOT of work to do) but is not that linux sucks in this field.
Linux was redesigned from the ground up to scale well to huge multiprocessor systems. This is why it has been able to go from being not 100% optimal with 4 cpus to scale properly to 512-cpu SGI machines in a single development release cycle.
It's not just corporate support what allowed this - many years ago people suggested that linux should fight scalability going the "solaris way", but linus & other people didn't like that way at all. Can you explain what radical design concepts are going to allow dragonfly to behave so much better than linux and/or solaris in 512-cpu machines? (yes, I know that dragonfly is also targetting to become a "clustered os")
and many of those things like GLX (what allows to use opengl in X environments) was done by SGI. There's a list of OSS projects at the SGI site
There's a LOT of SGI people around the linux kernel (and not just for XFS) for example. Things like the numa-aware slab allocator, cpusets, or the swap migration (new in 2.6.16) or other tons of scalability improvements that I can't remember habe been done by SGI people. If SGI loses, Linux loses a bit of horsepower.
Ring Ring: i want extensions for my browser, not a cross-platform development platform - I'd use XUL for that
Well, I just opened more than 60 tabs (with linky) and closed them and the RSS is 69, so duh..
When I say "centralized" I mean "people doesn't send messages one to eacha other, but through servers". The servers can log what you say regardless of it's one or two hundred servers
I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.
Oooh! Mozilla eats 400 MB of RAM after using it for a few weeks! This is obviously a common case, I guess that firefox isn't going beyond of the 10% share because of that
For a look at what is being done about memory leaks, read this article
No kidding, this article is also from a well-know firefox developer, they're fixing lots of memory leaks.
Apparently the top poster is one of those people who lovse to get karma for apparently-insightful articles. "Cyricz said that firefox developers don't care about memory leaks!". I mean, who wouldn't believe someone who says that a software developer don't want to fix a serious bug in his software?
I wonder what paragraph is the "most telling". The one where the firefox developer says that memory leaks are something normal? I'm running firefox in a 512 MB machine and I have never seen firefox eat 400 MB, right now it's eating 48 MB of RAM and that looks fine to me, specially when they're improving and fixing leaks on each release. I know opera is more resource-friendly....but then, opera is far from being as featureful (call me when opera can be as configurable as firefox + thousand of extensions) so I don't really see it as an alternative, just like IE.
Firefox developers are working hard to beat Microsoft. Maybe I should remember that if Microsoft controls the web browser market it controls a big part of the internet. The firefox developers are working hard to fight that - and they're fixing memory leaks on the way.
well a basic difference between email and IM is that you can still send email while the other user is offline, though I like that Skype buffers up messages you type and sends to the recipient when they come online
Jabber allows you to store messages offline. Those messages could be very well well-formatted messages which are sent to a different app but downloaded through your IM connection including files
Imagine the implications for OSS developers: instead of a mailing list (the equivalent to a IRC "channel", except that IM servers doesn't seem to store channel data when you're offline) you send IM messages. If the developer is online, you can start a IM conversation - or even a VoIP conversation - which makes discussions much faster. Imagine some developers trying to patch a security vulnerability.
If the developer is offline, the messages are stored in the server and will be pushed to your IM client (which will pass them to a special MUA-like gui)
Of course that would mean you've to unify both protocols: POP3/SMTP/IMAP and jabber. I gues you could implement email as a jabber extension. Jabber sucks quite a bit (It's amazing the amount of XML crap that you need to say "hi" to somebody, it's overbloated protocol) but it'd work.
Surprise, IM networks are centralized (that is, all what you say goes through a central server, there're chances that IM networks have been grepping into conversations for ej: conversations about people trying to convince people to go to another IM network). In fact, even IRC is centralized. Do you want security? Use end-to-end encryption.
Notice that unifying email and IM DOES have a lot of sense. IM and email are the SAME THING (send text and ocasinally some files), except that IM is instantaneous and email isn't. But there's no reason why you couldn't add a jabber extension which allows you to receive emails, your jabber client would just move them to a MUA. Email is just a particular case of the idea behind IM.
notice that in windows, graphical apps use much less mem than in linux - not because they're any better, but because the graphic subsystem is in kernel space and the memory used in the graphics subsystem is accounted as such.
Is not that there's not a perfect tool, the problem is that it's a problem which is impossible to solve properly as I see it
Take a shared library. For whatever reason, process 1 uses only the first half of the library. Thanks to demand-loading, only that half is loaded in mem, and that's what accounts as RSS for that process, say 10 MB.
Now a process 2 is launched and it uses the other half of the library. Now, all the library is loading in memory, and even if the first process is not using and has not requested to use the second half, its RSS will grown because somebody else use other parts of the library.
I don't think it's something you can or want to "solve": That's a consequence of the design ideas behind shared libraries. Deal with it.
Well, libraries are shared, sure. But libraries can be bloated.
I mean, it's nice that people explains that all that memory that processes use is shared between processes, but the linux desktop platform couplement (kernel libc Xorg qt libkde app) is far from being perfect. Just take a look at the upcoming gnome 2.6.14: Too many performance improvements in the sahred libraries, right?
As far as I know, this is not a windows vulnerability. Users are just stupid and will open any executable with the word "kamasutra" in it. Make it a .desktop file and you have the equivalent linux virus...
You've to admit it, "internet explorer" is a good name. "Firefox" sounds like.....huh.....nothing.
We need a internet-related name: "mozilla www explorer"....whatever. "firefox" is a stupid name.
And then, the firefox installer could include some tweaks, like for example tweak the registry to start firefox when you double click in the blue e or something if you set firefox as default browser...
are you serious?
Firefox is _the_ reason why many pages work today with other browser others than iE. Plus, if microsoft controls the browser market, it controls a big part of the internet. RSS? standars? CSS? We need firefox to keep microsoft away from controlling people like they've done in the desktop market....
Firefox is quite near of passing it, however
8 0 for the bug
I mean, this looks much better than IE
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2894
what does Google plan to do that Ubuntu isn't already doing?
Make linux a real desktop OS?
Seriously....
You might understand it that way, but you'd be wrong. All Wine does is implement the published API of Windows using Linux commands. Absolutely no reverse engineering is done
Let me doubt that - there's many "hidden functionality" in windows (ie: bugs created in windows 95 and that apps started to use and need it to work reliably and that they were kept because of compatibility reasons. Remember all those 0x0000blah numbers in Windows\system.ini? Each 0x0000blah number activates a special hack neccesary to keep the apps named before the number working. I doubt they documented that part )
Some of those benchmarks are not good because wine is good, but because the underlying platform is good - ej virus scanning, I guess that those are good because linux I/O subsystem is good (unless the guy who did the benchmark didn't told the antivirus to scan the same amount of files)
Then there's basic stuff that you can't explain - why the "CPU speed" benchmark is better under wine? A CPU test will, uh, do things with the CPU, it will be CPU bound and the windows api shouldn't involved in that code path.
Also notice that wine doesn't implement the win32 API completely. How you know that, say, "Game 2 - Adventure - Low Detail" tried to detect the card's features and since wine doesn't implement everything the game reduced the game quality to match the capabilities detected under wine? I say this because wine doesn't looks that good in the Quake, UT2004 and GL benchmarks
Anyway, I do not care how fast wine is. I care about API compliance. This is 2006, Microsoft has rewritten half of the OS with longhorn and I continue without being able to run many windows apps created years ago. Wine is far from being a true windows replacement for windows apps today....
Shame that you don't require the same for presidents and congressmen! (Patriot Act, DRM, software patents, Iraq, Lewinsky)