The first principle of programming is accuracy. Case sensitivity probably wasn't a deliberate conscious decision, but merely a side effect of this principle. That the language designers should incorporate a mechanism to aid in inaccuracy never occurred to them.
My advice: get over it. If you can't even handle the minimal accuracy that case sensitivity demands, then perhaps programming is not for you.
Saying, "But XXXX did that in 199x too" is a waste of time.
What is a waste of time is trying to convince us that you're unbiased and impartial. If an action committed by the Republicans TODAY is wrong, then the same action committed by the Democrats YESTERDAY was equally as wrong. The passage of time does not offer absolution.
The reason that talking about the past is not a waste of time is because if an action was acceptable in the past then it is still acceptable today. The current crop of disaffected whiners don't care whether what the Republicans are doing is right or wrong, they only care that it isn't the Democrats doing it.
Frankly, I've never had the problem. My desktop system doesn't move. Because of the rubber feet, I have to physically pick it up and move it out to gain access to those ports. So I never fiddle with them.
My laptop is a slightly different story. Though I have never done it, I can see the need to swap out mice and keyboards. My particular laptop has PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports (along with USB). These PS/2 ports ARE hot-swappable! A hotkey switches back to the touchpad, and I remove the PS/2 mouse, plug in another, and hotkey back. Simple. So it's not a problem.
Okay, let me put this another way. If a few people need the technology, why must it be forced on everyone? To take an example, some people have a need for hot-swappable hard drives. So where are all the slashdot posts lambasting systems that don't have it?
The grandparent post said "A lot is wrong with PS/2". But there is very little wrong with PS/2 besides the fact that it is *perceived* as old technology. The age of a technology is irrelevant. PS/2 might not meet the needs of some people, but most people could care less.
There are current problems with USB keyboards under Linux and BSD *TODAY*! I have one currently shipping Linux distro (less than six months old) that cannot boot and install when only a USB keyboard is present. Frankly, USB is still too new to abandon PS/2 completely. Let's make USB as completely universal, stable and supported as PS/2, before we burn our bridges behind us.
I'm not seeing them at all. This is under the IE that comes with WindowsXP (home or pro). Seen the lack of PNGs on at least five systems. No special fiddling with any settings that I am aware of.
I used to be able to see PNGs under Win98 and 2K with whatever the IE they had was. But something's changed under either WinXP, or the IE that comes with it. The area where the PNG is shows empty. No "broken image" icon, no frame, no funny colors. Just blank.
Or am I just using the wrong "kind" of PNG's on my site? I converted these from GIF to PNG with either Gimp or gif2png. I don't have any alpha transparency at all. See me site for example, home page has one PNG in upper right corner.
So? While this might be some minor concern for mice (switching to a digitizer tablet), it makes no sense for keyboards. Unless you're running a rack of headless servers. Most people aren't.
It is stupid to have a separate kind of port for each peripheral.
It is stupid to through away a 100% working solution for one that only works 99% of the time. Back when I had a USB mouse for a brief period of time, I had to frequently unplug/replug it in to get it to work. Some operating systems still don't support them.
PS/2 devices are not good at identifying themselves.
And USB devices do identify themselves. Unfortunately, they tend to leave it at that. "Hey, I'm a Dumbass 1987ZX4 with GPP! Why are you having problems with me? Surely I'm in your voluminous database of devices! No need to ask if I'm a mouse, keyboard, printer, camera or framjit, just look me up! You say that I was released on the market AFTER you installed your OS? Sounds like a personal problem buddy!"
I have encountered more than one "standard" USB device that did not behave as standard. On my mom's computer, for example, every single USB thumb drive used on it needed to have a driver installed before they were recognized as standard Mass Storage devices. I've seen this once with a mouse.
Well, they used to support at least flat images. Now IExploder won't show any PNGs at all! It's decreased in functionality. Microsoft certainly knows how to display PNGs, because you right-click on the blank spots, and the Image Viewer shows them fine.
Absolutely! We have dozens of old Sparc 5's at work, left over from an upgrade to Ultra 10's. There's nothing wrong with them, the work fine. Very well built machines. We've been giving them away to employees, and many have taken them up on the offer.
They've been going for about $20 in the used equipment shops. Well worth it if you want a reliable, solid and quiet home gateway/firewall.
Working in a packing shed. 115 degrees fahrenheit outside. Steel building didn't keep out the heat, but it did manage to prevent air circulation. Tomatoes were washed at one end of the line, jacking up the humidity level to absurd levels. The work itself was incredibly rote. I stacked boxes 10 to 16 hours a day. When I went home at night, in my sleep I would try to stack my pillow all night long.
No, that was NOT the worst working environment. I was lucky. I was on the packing end. It was the pickers who had the worst lot. They're out in the fields by five AM, but only have to work until noon. Why? Because they would get heatstroke if it were any longer. Seven hours bent over double picking tomatoes in the heat, standing in the mud. It took them a good five minutes at the end of the row to stand back up straight.
They were out their with their entire family, kids and all, picking to survive. Technically they were being paid fairly good piece wages. But their "undocumented" status or ignorance of the law and language, left them open to be exploited by labor contractors.
Never bitch about your job or working conditions, because there's always someone who would gladly trade places with you.
The day I can go to a website, download a file to my desktop, double-click it and have it install -- consistently and every time -- is the day I say it's ready.
Take a closer look at what is happening here. The user downloads an executable file. Does it contain a virus or trojan? There's no way to tell because there's no system in place to verify the integrity of the file. We can't check the signature in the package. We're getting it from an unknown source. Next, what components is it installing? Again, there's no way to know. It will probably overwrite existing components, and may break existing hardware. That's because there's no concept of dependencies in the Windows world. The software has to ship with every possible dependency. It must make several broad assumptions after that. Finally, it installs its files to numerous locations. These aren't necessarily standard locations, and some of them can be chosen by the user. I've had more than one instance where trying to install an upgrade to an application failed, because I didn't install the original app to the default location. Then there's the whole problem of uninstalling the software...
We have several points of failure here. All of them occur so frequently that Windows users assume that they are the normal state of things. But they are not the normal state for Linux, BSD or other package based UNIX systems. Packages solve all of the problems above.
We CAN have packages that you double click on and which install automatically. Heck, we've got them now for most distros! It's a reliable method that is easy to use.
The problem comes when you have software not "ported" over to your distros packaging scheme. The user is unable to download any random trojan and expect it to reliably trash their system. I'm not being terribly facetious when I use the words "trojan" and "trash", because all software that isn't in a signed package is untrusted software. I'm not really sure making untrusted software easy to install is a good thing.
So what do the third party commercial applications do? They either create their own packages, or they write their own installation scripts. Both have successfully been done.
Packages are a better system than self-installing executable. In every way. They're not harder to use, just different.
Yeah, you're probably right. Most people will gladly give up their rights for the chance to vote for someone with nice hair.
But there will still remain some of us who will refuse to give in. For five minutes, we will stand free! Because in five minutes the tanks will roll over us. And the people will cheer for there will be none left to disturb their semiconscious.
I'm a "natural rights" guy. I believe in unalienable natural rights. But the world doesn't work that way, and I know it. The world works on the principle of "might makes right." All rights are based on might in reality. Your right to free speech, no matter how unalienable, means nothing if a 300 pound thug is sitting on your chest wrapping your head in duct tape so you can't speak.
The entire history of political freedom has been the gradual re-organization of society to apportion "might" to the "meek", so that right perceived as unalienable are backed by sufficient might to legitimize them. In feudal Europe the peasants did not have the right of free speech because all might was held by the nobility. But this might has been diluted and dispersed over time. Today we have freedom of speech, not because it's undeniably ours, but because our current political systems gives us a measure of "might" at the voting booth. There's nothing stopping the government from removing the right of free speech, except our voting might. And that voting might is backed only by our collective force (we outnumber the government).
Which is why the second ammendment is the ultimate right. It is the final check and balance against the government. It is a statement saying "we the people can replace our government if necessary." Let's say in two years that Bush or Dean or Kerry or whoever is president decides to abolish free speech. The supreme court rolls over. Congress plays along. The states desirous of highway funds accept it. We attempt to vote the bastards out, but they ignore it. What recourse do we have in this extreme situation? None other than the fact that we still possess firearms.
If you had said Linux is not ready for the average Joe Consumer purchasing their first computer at Best Buy, you might have a leg to stand on. But it most certainly *is* ready for the desktop. You can't make the claim that just because it doesn't run every single Windows application out there, that it isn't ready, because Mac OSX doesn't either, and no one with more than two brain cells would claim OSX isn't ready for the desktop.
I could be wrong though. I don't use Linux. I use FreeBSD. But considering that the GUI/desktop portion is exactly identical to Linux, I don't think I am. I use FreeBSD/XFree86/KDE on my desktop at work and at home, including a laptop. I still have a Windows partition, but that's ONLY for the use of ONE highly specialized program. Everything else is native FreeBSD. Web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, digital cameras, photo processing, music, etc, etc. There's no common task you can do on your desktop that I can't do on mine, and just as easily.
What's holding Linux and BSD back is not the desktop. That battle has been won. What's missing is easy to perform system administration. But for many systems, that's not too far off. It was actually easier to install and configure FreeBSD on my laptop than it was to do the same with WinXP.
Aaah! So it will NOT work perfectly for every consumer every time. Heck, even for Windows users it won't work perfectly every time, considering the sorry state of Media Player...
One difference is that no one seems to write Qt-only applications
You mean like Opera? Or Adobe Photoshop Album? Or LinCVS? Or QCAD?
A lot of people write Qt-only applications. I'm one of them (QBrew). But since the KDE libraries are so excellent, if you're not worried about Windows support, using KDE is a no-brainer. Instead of calling it kdelibs, they should call it qt++.
"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I've never heard of this format, but it must simply be awesome if it's universally supported by every browser on every operating system. Heck, I've even had MP3 audio files that wouldn't play, so it must simply be amazing if it's perfect.
I'm using FreeBSD with Konqueror. And no plugins. Will this work for me? Or will I have to do all of the horribly complicated things to get the Flash plugin to work under Linux emulation mode? Maybe it uses Java. Does it use Java? If so, how can it play perfectly if I have Java disabled?
Of course, I know the real answer. They're phrase "every consumer" means only those consumers running Windows, and possibly Mac. So what happens for the rest of us? Will these render these sites unusable, because there's no way to get past the requirement to view the advertisement? I'm thinking of all those sites that are completely and utterly inaccessible without flash.
p.s. No, I'm not going to switch to Windows, Mac or Linux just to see some ads. No site is worth that much. Ditto for switching to anything else.
If Mozilla is more a GNOME app than a KDE app (which is a silly distinction to make on the face of it) then Opera must be more of a KDE app!
p.s. Sorry about mistaking Gaim as a GNOME app. It's getting hard to tell what's what anymore. After hearing reports of efforts to make GNU Emacs a GNOME application, I'm thoroughly confused by what "GNOME" even means.
Are you trying to troll here or something? Any idiot can instantly see that Knome is much easier to use and more intuitive than GDE! Knome with it's window manager, panel, root menu and icons on the desktop doesn't look anything at all like Windows, where as GDE with its window manager, panel, root menu and icons on the desktop is clearly trying to make a Windows clone.
That's the next step for GNOME as well! Of the apps you mention, only Gaim is a truly native GNOME application. AbiWord and Gimp are next closest, since though they can built for GNOME, they can also be built standalone (which is typical for Gimp).
Mozilla certainly isn't GNOME by a long shot, though there are GNOME browers that use the Mozilla core. And OpenOffice? Why do the GNOME guys keep saying it's a GNOME app? It clearly is not! Just because it's soon to be gnomified is meaningless, because it's soon to be qt-ified as well.
Actually, GTK+ was written specifically for Gimp. GNOME took GTK+ and added existing libraries, write a few others, and bundled them all together into base for a desktop.
The problem isn't political, but rather methodology. KDE started with a comprehensive and well designed toolkit, and their later libraries followed its model closely. GNOME started with distinct libraries and toolkits, and wrapped them up in an umbrella project. They're two different but valid ways of organizing the projects. But that said, I think the KDE way works much better for larger projects.
I really wouldn't call my post a rant, and it wasn't an opinion so much as a personal preference.
The Mac doesn't meet my needs, in the same way that instamatic cameras don't. They're great for most people, but not me.
The Mac was the first computer (that I am aware of) where you couldn't manually eject the floppy. When I first encountered it I was dumbstruck. I knew the reason it was there, and the damage it would prevent. It really was (is) a good idea.
The point and click didn't bother me. After all, I had already used the Xerox GUI. What bothered me more than anything else was the lack of a floppy eject button. You had to ask the GUI to eject the floppy for you. In an emergency there was a pin hole. My first day of using one, I managed to crash the system, with my floppy still stuck inside, and no paperclip in sight.
What the Mac introduced first was the notion that the user should not be in control of the computer. That has always annoyed me whenever I see in Mac, Windows or the "newbie" Linux distros.
The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry.
And the traditional workstation never needed 4 gigabytes of memory. So why the poo-pooing of that limit?
Slashdot Mirror
The first principle of programming is accuracy. Case sensitivity probably wasn't a deliberate conscious decision, but merely a side effect of this principle. That the language designers should incorporate a mechanism to aid in inaccuracy never occurred to them.
My advice: get over it. If you can't even handle the minimal accuracy that case sensitivity demands, then perhaps programming is not for you.
Saying, "But XXXX did that in 199x too" is a waste of time.
What is a waste of time is trying to convince us that you're unbiased and impartial. If an action committed by the Republicans TODAY is wrong, then the same action committed by the Democrats YESTERDAY was equally as wrong. The passage of time does not offer absolution.
The reason that talking about the past is not a waste of time is because if an action was acceptable in the past then it is still acceptable today. The current crop of disaffected whiners don't care whether what the Republicans are doing is right or wrong, they only care that it isn't the Democrats doing it.
Frankly, I've never had the problem. My desktop system doesn't move. Because of the rubber feet, I have to physically pick it up and move it out to gain access to those ports. So I never fiddle with them.
My laptop is a slightly different story. Though I have never done it, I can see the need to swap out mice and keyboards. My particular laptop has PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports (along with USB). These PS/2 ports ARE hot-swappable! A hotkey switches back to the touchpad, and I remove the PS/2 mouse, plug in another, and hotkey back. Simple. So it's not a problem.
Okay, let me put this another way. If a few people need the technology, why must it be forced on everyone? To take an example, some people have a need for hot-swappable hard drives. So where are all the slashdot posts lambasting systems that don't have it?
The grandparent post said "A lot is wrong with PS/2". But there is very little wrong with PS/2 besides the fact that it is *perceived* as old technology. The age of a technology is irrelevant. PS/2 might not meet the needs of some people, but most people could care less.
There are current problems with USB keyboards under Linux and BSD *TODAY*! I have one currently shipping Linux distro (less than six months old) that cannot boot and install when only a USB keyboard is present. Frankly, USB is still too new to abandon PS/2 completely. Let's make USB as completely universal, stable and supported as PS/2, before we burn our bridges behind us.
I'm not seeing them at all. This is under the IE that comes with WindowsXP (home or pro). Seen the lack of PNGs on at least five systems. No special fiddling with any settings that I am aware of.
I used to be able to see PNGs under Win98 and 2K with whatever the IE they had was. But something's changed under either WinXP, or the IE that comes with it. The area where the PNG is shows empty. No "broken image" icon, no frame, no funny colors. Just blank.
Or am I just using the wrong "kind" of PNG's on my site? I converted these from GIF to PNG with either Gimp or gif2png. I don't have any alpha transparency at all. See me site for example, home page has one PNG in upper right corner.
PS/2 is not hotpluggable.
So? While this might be some minor concern for mice (switching to a digitizer tablet), it makes no sense for keyboards. Unless you're running a rack of headless servers. Most people aren't.
It is stupid to have a separate kind of port for each peripheral.
It is stupid to through away a 100% working solution for one that only works 99% of the time. Back when I had a USB mouse for a brief period of time, I had to frequently unplug/replug it in to get it to work. Some operating systems still don't support them.
PS/2 devices are not good at identifying themselves.
And USB devices do identify themselves. Unfortunately, they tend to leave it at that. "Hey, I'm a Dumbass 1987ZX4 with GPP! Why are you having problems with me? Surely I'm in your voluminous database of devices! No need to ask if I'm a mouse, keyboard, printer, camera or framjit, just look me up! You say that I was released on the market AFTER you installed your OS? Sounds like a personal problem buddy!"
I have encountered more than one "standard" USB device that did not behave as standard. On my mom's computer, for example, every single USB thumb drive used on it needed to have a driver installed before they were recognized as standard Mass Storage devices. I've seen this once with a mouse.
Well, they used to support at least flat images. Now IExploder won't show any PNGs at all! It's decreased in functionality. Microsoft certainly knows how to display PNGs, because you right-click on the blank spots, and the Image Viewer shows them fine.
At least issue a plugin!
Absolutely! We have dozens of old Sparc 5's at work, left over from an upgrade to Ultra 10's. There's nothing wrong with them, the work fine. Very well built machines. We've been giving them away to employees, and many have taken them up on the offer.
They've been going for about $20 in the used equipment shops. Well worth it if you want a reliable, solid and quiet home gateway/firewall.
Working in a packing shed. 115 degrees fahrenheit outside. Steel building didn't keep out the heat, but it did manage to prevent air circulation. Tomatoes were washed at one end of the line, jacking up the humidity level to absurd levels. The work itself was incredibly rote. I stacked boxes 10 to 16 hours a day. When I went home at night, in my sleep I would try to stack my pillow all night long.
No, that was NOT the worst working environment. I was lucky. I was on the packing end. It was the pickers who had the worst lot. They're out in the fields by five AM, but only have to work until noon. Why? Because they would get heatstroke if it were any longer. Seven hours bent over double picking tomatoes in the heat, standing in the mud. It took them a good five minutes at the end of the row to stand back up straight.
They were out their with their entire family, kids and all, picking to survive. Technically they were being paid fairly good piece wages. But their "undocumented" status or ignorance of the law and language, left them open to be exploited by labor contractors.
Never bitch about your job or working conditions, because there's always someone who would gladly trade places with you.
The day I can go to a website, download a file to my desktop, double-click it and have it install -- consistently and every time -- is the day I say it's ready.
Take a closer look at what is happening here. The user downloads an executable file. Does it contain a virus or trojan? There's no way to tell because there's no system in place to verify the integrity of the file. We can't check the signature in the package. We're getting it from an unknown source. Next, what components is it installing? Again, there's no way to know. It will probably overwrite existing components, and may break existing hardware. That's because there's no concept of dependencies in the Windows world. The software has to ship with every possible dependency. It must make several broad assumptions after that. Finally, it installs its files to numerous locations. These aren't necessarily standard locations, and some of them can be chosen by the user. I've had more than one instance where trying to install an upgrade to an application failed, because I didn't install the original app to the default location. Then there's the whole problem of uninstalling the software...
We have several points of failure here. All of them occur so frequently that Windows users assume that they are the normal state of things. But they are not the normal state for Linux, BSD or other package based UNIX systems. Packages solve all of the problems above.
We CAN have packages that you double click on and which install automatically. Heck, we've got them now for most distros! It's a reliable method that is easy to use.
The problem comes when you have software not "ported" over to your distros packaging scheme. The user is unable to download any random trojan and expect it to reliably trash their system. I'm not being terribly facetious when I use the words "trojan" and "trash", because all software that isn't in a signed package is untrusted software. I'm not really sure making untrusted software easy to install is a good thing.
So what do the third party commercial applications do? They either create their own packages, or they write their own installation scripts. Both have successfully been done.
Packages are a better system than self-installing executable. In every way. They're not harder to use, just different.
Yeah, you're probably right. Most people will gladly give up their rights for the chance to vote for someone with nice hair.
But there will still remain some of us who will refuse to give in. For five minutes, we will stand free! Because in five minutes the tanks will roll over us. And the people will cheer for there will be none left to disturb their semiconscious.
I'm a "natural rights" guy. I believe in unalienable natural rights. But the world doesn't work that way, and I know it. The world works on the principle of "might makes right." All rights are based on might in reality. Your right to free speech, no matter how unalienable, means nothing if a 300 pound thug is sitting on your chest wrapping your head in duct tape so you can't speak.
The entire history of political freedom has been the gradual re-organization of society to apportion "might" to the "meek", so that right perceived as unalienable are backed by sufficient might to legitimize them. In feudal Europe the peasants did not have the right of free speech because all might was held by the nobility. But this might has been diluted and dispersed over time. Today we have freedom of speech, not because it's undeniably ours, but because our current political systems gives us a measure of "might" at the voting booth. There's nothing stopping the government from removing the right of free speech, except our voting might. And that voting might is backed only by our collective force (we outnumber the government).
Which is why the second ammendment is the ultimate right. It is the final check and balance against the government. It is a statement saying "we the people can replace our government if necessary." Let's say in two years that Bush or Dean or Kerry or whoever is president decides to abolish free speech. The supreme court rolls over. Congress plays along. The states desirous of highway funds accept it. We attempt to vote the bastards out, but they ignore it. What recourse do we have in this extreme situation? None other than the fact that we still possess firearms.
If you had said Linux is not ready for the average Joe Consumer purchasing their first computer at Best Buy, you might have a leg to stand on. But it most certainly *is* ready for the desktop. You can't make the claim that just because it doesn't run every single Windows application out there, that it isn't ready, because Mac OSX doesn't either, and no one with more than two brain cells would claim OSX isn't ready for the desktop.
I could be wrong though. I don't use Linux. I use FreeBSD. But considering that the GUI/desktop portion is exactly identical to Linux, I don't think I am. I use FreeBSD/XFree86/KDE on my desktop at work and at home, including a laptop. I still have a Windows partition, but that's ONLY for the use of ONE highly specialized program. Everything else is native FreeBSD. Web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, digital cameras, photo processing, music, etc, etc. There's no common task you can do on your desktop that I can't do on mine, and just as easily.
What's holding Linux and BSD back is not the desktop. That battle has been won. What's missing is easy to perform system administration. But for many systems, that's not too far off. It was actually easier to install and configure FreeBSD on my laptop than it was to do the same with WinXP.
Requires Windows Media Player plus some plugins.
Aaah! So it will NOT work perfectly for every consumer every time. Heck, even for Windows users it won't work perfectly every time, considering the sorry state of Media Player...
One difference is that no one seems to write Qt-only applications
You mean like Opera? Or Adobe Photoshop Album? Or LinCVS? Or QCAD?
A lot of people write Qt-only applications. I'm one of them (QBrew). But since the KDE libraries are so excellent, if you're not worried about Windows support, using KDE is a no-brainer. Instead of calling it kdelibs, they should call it qt++.
"The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
I've never heard of this format, but it must simply be awesome if it's universally supported by every browser on every operating system. Heck, I've even had MP3 audio files that wouldn't play, so it must simply be amazing if it's perfect.
I'm using FreeBSD with Konqueror. And no plugins. Will this work for me? Or will I have to do all of the horribly complicated things to get the Flash plugin to work under Linux emulation mode? Maybe it uses Java. Does it use Java? If so, how can it play perfectly if I have Java disabled?
Of course, I know the real answer. They're phrase "every consumer" means only those consumers running Windows, and possibly Mac. So what happens for the rest of us? Will these render these sites unusable, because there's no way to get past the requirement to view the advertisement? I'm thinking of all those sites that are completely and utterly inaccessible without flash.
p.s. No, I'm not going to switch to Windows, Mac or Linux just to see some ads. No site is worth that much. Ditto for switching to anything else.
If Mozilla is more a GNOME app than a KDE app (which is a silly distinction to make on the face of it) then Opera must be more of a KDE app!
p.s. Sorry about mistaking Gaim as a GNOME app. It's getting hard to tell what's what anymore. After hearing reports of efforts to make GNU Emacs a GNOME application, I'm thoroughly confused by what "GNOME" even means.
Are you trying to troll here or something? Any idiot can instantly see that Knome is much easier to use and more intuitive than GDE! Knome with it's window manager, panel, root menu and icons on the desktop doesn't look anything at all like Windows, where as GDE with its window manager, panel, root menu and icons on the desktop is clearly trying to make a Windows clone.
That's the next step for GNOME as well! Of the apps you mention, only Gaim is a truly native GNOME application. AbiWord and Gimp are next closest, since though they can built for GNOME, they can also be built standalone (which is typical for Gimp).
Mozilla certainly isn't GNOME by a long shot, though there are GNOME browers that use the Mozilla core. And OpenOffice? Why do the GNOME guys keep saying it's a GNOME app? It clearly is not! Just because it's soon to be gnomified is meaningless, because it's soon to be qt-ified as well.
Actually, GTK+ was written specifically for Gimp. GNOME took GTK+ and added existing libraries, write a few others, and bundled them all together into base for a desktop.
The problem isn't political, but rather methodology. KDE started with a comprehensive and well designed toolkit, and their later libraries followed its model closely. GNOME started with distinct libraries and toolkits, and wrapped them up in an umbrella project. They're two different but valid ways of organizing the projects. But that said, I think the KDE way works much better for larger projects.
If it were the other desktop, that would gnot be the correct spelling.
I really wouldn't call my post a rant, and it wasn't an opinion so much as a personal preference.
The Mac doesn't meet my needs, in the same way that instamatic cameras don't. They're great for most people, but not me.
The Mac was the first computer (that I am aware of) where you couldn't manually eject the floppy. When I first encountered it I was dumbstruck. I knew the reason it was there, and the damage it would prevent. It really was (is) a good idea.
The point and click didn't bother me. After all, I had already used the Xerox GUI. What bothered me more than anything else was the lack of a floppy eject button. You had to ask the GUI to eject the floppy for you. In an emergency there was a pin hole. My first day of using one, I managed to crash the system, with my floppy still stuck inside, and no paperclip in sight.
What the Mac introduced first was the notion that the user should not be in control of the computer. That has always annoyed me whenever I see in Mac, Windows or the "newbie" Linux distros.
The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry.
And the traditional workstation never needed 4 gigabytes of memory. So why the poo-pooing of that limit?
That's local storage. Think about where this is going to be used.