They chose KHTML because they could understand the code. It would have taken them longer to get to grips with Gecko (because it's big and beautiful!) and do the hacks they wanted to do to make it work with Quartz natively rather than through the abstraction layers in Gecko which allow it to be ported to so many platforms. Whilst this is great for porters, it does increase the size of the code, whereas Apple probably wanted something tighter.
There are just as many non-compliant apps for Windows as there are for open source systems. You ought to see some of the crap people put up with in free utilities and things.
Ximian's apps aren't commercial, for the most part they sell support packages and their code is still available under the GPL.
The licensing argument is still very much a valid one, however. I heard that the only reason Sun's Java Desktop is built on GNOME and GTK is because they were scared of QT's licensing costs. The rumor is they even considered buying out TrollTech and releasing QT under the LGPL, but sadly no. Sun's work on moving StarOffice/OpenOffice to a more sane toolkit will be to GTK rather than QT for the same reasons.
Then comes this arrogant troll, named Miguel. He writes to the town's newspaper (Slashdot.org) about the evils of KDE. He claims that KDE is dependent on Qt and that Qt is EVIL. It is EVIL because it is not GPL. It is EVIL because it can take over the desktop just like MICROSOFT. And we know how EVIL MICROSOFT is, right? REALLY EVIL.
Well it seems that although QT is now GPL'd, licensing for the commercial version still has a lot to do with this debate. Read the article.
"A GNOME spreedsheet you want Miguel? Don't worry. The way things are looking, I can hack one out in a few days. We will borrow from X, Y, and Z projects since they have most of the functionality we need. It will be a matter of fitting them all together."
Go ahead and accuse GNOME of borrowing things - but just remember KDE picked the existing off-the-shelf commercial QT toolkit (then licensed under the QPL which is incompatible with the GPL) when they began their project.
Just what is wrong with this approach? KDE decided to write KHTML instead of using Gecko, whilst GNOME is now going to use Gecko as their primary HTML layout engine in the DE. Which is better? I'd say Gecko is much more standards compliant than KHTML, even with the latest patches. The point is that for really huge projects like a HTML layout engine, you need huge resources. A lot of KDE developers work on KHTML when if they'd used Gecko, they could be working on far more interesting things.
Also, surely it's better than free software projects share code. So many people are put off GNU/Linux & BSD by the fact there are 500 different text editors and not one of them works properly (except vi;)). Ringfencing code is not something anyone should be doing.
As for the interface sucking... GNOME has that completely covered. In the time I watched over GNOME, it changed fundamental parts of its interface no less than, I'd say, 5+ times. _Nothing_ adheres to the recommended style-guide which was there from pretty much day one. And _nothing_ still does adhere to it, except perhaps projects which should almost not be considered seperate from GNOME.
Have you ever actually used GNOME? All the control panels, Nautilus, Epiphany, Evolution, Gnumeric, GIMP (v2+), Gaim and more now obey the HIG. KDE has changed their metaphors just as many times as GNOME, too. Whatever happened to the taskbar stuck to one side of the screen? KControl and Konqueror have had their menus and sections reorganised several times. So what?
Integration of GNOME software is nil.
Wrong again. GNOME applications use FreeDesktop's drag-and-drop specification (which works 95% of the time in the apps that I use), and there is the bonobo component model which works very nicely and is in many respects technically superior to KParts.
In conclusion, GNOME is a failure. GNOME's goal was a desktop for *ix that grandma could use. As someone else recommended.. try Ximian "they have it all worked out." Which is very much the point--to fill Miguel's wallet (reality hurts, boys and girls).
No, that was never GNOME's goal. GNOME's original goal was to create a desktop without the QPL/QT licensing issues that KDE had. Now that KDE no longer has these issues (for the most part), it is chugging along nicely as a good large free software project. Very few free software projects have definite roadmaps or even definite goals. As for Ximian/Novell/RedHat/Sun, their commercial support of GNOME makes it better, not worse. Their code is still available under the GPL and you can quite happily acquire it and use it and hack it without stuffing anyones' wallet.
I would imagine that the hot air produced by their speeches would have more of an effect than their travel to and from the conference itself. Certainly contributes to global warming...
I wonder what the other 20% are doing that OO.org can't handle? Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something? Access databases that don't translate well across to other platforms? Access databases that can't be replicated in Adabas? Someone should ask them, and perhaps address their problems. After all I think that migration of 80% of 5000 desktops could yield some pretty good HCI and functional testing if they (especially as a government agency) are prepared to tell the open source community what issues they have with the product.
Another release... another total failure to fix the desktop. Sigh. I'd use KDE if they'd just fix a few things. Honest. Such as:
Get rid of the random bolded fonts everywhere. I hate bold text. It's distracting and not needed at all. Take a look at the taskbar. The tabs in KSpread. Is there any way to remove the bold? No...
Cut down settings bloat. Why do applications have a Settings menu at all? Shouldn't all Settings be in the Preferences dialog, which could be put under the Edit or Tools menu?
Cut down settings bloat (again). Half the options in KControl should be automatic or are useless. There's so much that could be done to improve its structure too. Witness people getting confused over the difference between Themes, Styles, Colours and Appearance. I still do.
Cut down the context menus. They're still too big, although I have to give the KDE people credit for trimming them in Konqueror. They're still not small enough, however. Make them context sensitive. Hide advanced options in a submenu. Something, anything! Please!
Cook up a better theme. Is it really impossible to port Ximian's Industrial style over to KDE? Or does QT simply not allow for things like borders between toolbars? If not, why not?
Fix Konqueror. It's interface is horrendous. Considering it's the application I would spend most time in and almost always have one open (web browsing and file management take up maybe a third of my computer time in total), looking at its menus, toolbars, and that horrid tabbed-icon-thing-on-the-right, I don't think I could cope. Last time I tried to turn them off I couldn't find the right settings...
Dump Trolltech. Please fork QT and make it a properly opensource project rather than a GPL-behind-closed-doors project as it is at the moment. I wish someone (like Sun) would buy Trolltech and relicense QT under the LGPL or the BSD license instead. It would encourage small commercial developers, at least a little.
I REALLY want to use KDE. But until these problems are addressed I feel I cannot. Maybe someone should do an XFCE to KDE, create a slimline desktop based on QT and kparts, with a less bloated file manager and better human interface rules. Ah, my kingdom for KFCE...
I, for one, am glad they're admitting that KOffice is simply not mature enough for prime-time. No offense to the KOffice developers, I'm sure they are all far better programmers than I am and I'm sure they work hard on their project - but every time I use the suite it seems to crash for various reasons, which is not a good thing if I'm trying to work on a document and haven't been saving it every five minutes.
Maybe in a few years KOffice will be more mature and then all the KDE people can use it, but until then OpenOffice with tighter KDE integration seems like a fairly good idea. I don't care whether they recode the whole interface in QT or not, but maybe a Ximian-like tweaking to integrate the suite with KDE's VFS, printing system and open/save dialogs plus some KDE-ish toolbar buttons (it already can take on QT's colourscheme IIRC) would be more-or-less sufficent. If they want to take it further, of course, then that'd be even better.
Not really, since you can get ntfs.sys off the NTFS drive using the Linux-NTFS ReadOnly driver. It's quite likely that a system will have ntfs.sys somewhere on it if it contains NTFS formatted drives!
The games don't take 90 minutes to play, more like 10 minutes. Basically it's all a matter of strategy, you're the manager, not one of the players. You decide what players to put in different positions (attacker, midfielder, defender, goalkeeper), what substitutions to make, what style of play you want, and when not playing, you buy and sell players, train them, manage club finances etc.
It's quite addictive, even for someone like me who isn't a massive football (soccer) fan.
A friend of mine recently got a job at GCHQ, which is a bit like the British version of the NSA. You ought to see the number of forms he has to fill in... background info, more personal details than you can possibly imagine, and they're going to background check all of it. He put me down as a character reference, I might end up writing an essay about how trustworthy he is and getting inteviewed myself, and I'm not even the one applying for the frickin job!
Are you kidding? My AMD K6-2 500MHz with 192MB RAM positively flies with WinXP. It's MUCH faster than when it ran Win98. I was surprised, admittedly, but rather pleased!
I notice that Anandtech describe an 800MHz machine as "chugging along". Hardly. One of my older machines is an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird machine with 256MB RAM and a 40GB disk. It runs GNOME and WinXP without any problems and continues to be extremely responsive and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of tasks I throw at it (except Games).
The same is true for budget chips - if you want a machine to go online, to do Word Processing, play a few older games or whatever, these chips are perfect. Putting together a full-blown capable system for $400, or buying secondhand, is a great way for people to get in to computing who couldn't otherwise afford it. Getting them on the bandwagon is the important thing, and whilst the hardware is so far ahead of the majority of software (at least until Longhorn comes out...) getting more people using computers in their homes is a really good idea.
I don't think per-site patches are any way to fix a site with bad HTML and JavaScript. Mozilla follows the standards, adding a custom patch just for hotmail.com would be a bit silly. Before long we'd have a patch for every non-conformant site on the Internet.
Finally they're getting the message about poorly written voting software. In an critical areas like this proper software engineering techniques should be applied lavishly. It seems Diebold in particular has forgotten how to write secure software, or more likely never knew. For example, why couldn't a voting machine do what airplanes do, and have several separate machines processing the same input data, with software written by several different organisations?
Just what's so wrong with GTK2 anyway? IBM are big Gnome sponsors and endorsers, so it's much more likely the SWT toolkit that Eclipse uses for its GUI will stay with GTK rather than switch to QT.
What makes you think all Chinese are communists? That's like saying all Germans were Nazis during WWII, which is very very far from the truth. The problem in totalitarian regimes is that you're not allowed to say anything substantial against the government... but it's not illegal to think it (well, not yet anyway).
You used to be able to get these, actually. I ran my 6V DC speakers off a jack in a free expansion slot for years... it was just a small PCB that connected to a molex inside the machine and had a transformer plus extra resistors/capacitors on it.
The problem is, I guess, that because so many devices use different voltages, and draw different amounts of power, it might be difficult to provision for every possible device, and you might need a huge PSU. I am not sure whether a normal PSU would be able to supply the PC, my TFT, scanner, PDA cradle and printer without some extra wattage.
That's just freakish. What kind of strange electrician would put 10 outlets in a closet? Maybe they were running short on funds and got the engineering department to do it?
Not right. Freeware just means "costs nothing", and says nothing about the license or opensourceness. Internet Explorer is freeware but it's not exactly open sourced! The GPL by definition enforces open source. Although this source code can be used to keep GPL projects free (as in cost), many GPL'd software products are also sold.
Don't underestimate the number of users who've obtained the IDE from other sources, such as prepackaged with a Linux distribution, from a cover CD on a magazine, redistributed and installed by their network administrator, or downloaded it from somewhere else online. All these show up as one download, but thousands more may be using these single downloads.
I'd recommend trying to get the GCJ-compiled, or trying it yourself (since I see you're a Gentoo user). You'll find it's significantly faster than the Java version, although obviously it's never going to be as fast as vim, and by definition IDEs tend to be quite bulky. Thing is, when I'm trying to remember why I decided to use a certain design pattern in a web application with 50+ classes, Eclipse just seems easier.
Sure vim + command line is a powerful solution (find | grep | sed | sort), but the visual thinker in me just cries out for more. If we're using object orientation which is a fundamentally right-brained paradigm IMHO, a GUI is rather useful. If you want to use your left brain, C and vim do rather well.
Slashdot Mirror
They chose KHTML because they could understand the code. It would have taken them longer to get to grips with Gecko (because it's big and beautiful!) and do the hacks they wanted to do to make it work with Quartz natively rather than through the abstraction layers in Gecko which allow it to be ported to so many platforms. Whilst this is great for porters, it does increase the size of the code, whereas Apple probably wanted something tighter.
There are just as many non-compliant apps for Windows as there are for open source systems. You ought to see some of the crap people put up with in free utilities and things.
Ximian's apps aren't commercial, for the most part they sell support packages and their code is still available under the GPL.
The licensing argument is still very much a valid one, however. I heard that the only reason Sun's Java Desktop is built on GNOME and GTK is because they were scared of QT's licensing costs. The rumor is they even considered buying out TrollTech and releasing QT under the LGPL, but sadly no. Sun's work on moving StarOffice/OpenOffice to a more sane toolkit will be to GTK rather than QT for the same reasons.
Just what is wrong with this approach? KDE decided to write KHTML instead of using Gecko, whilst GNOME is now going to use Gecko as their primary HTML layout engine in the DE. Which is better? I'd say Gecko is much more standards compliant than KHTML, even with the latest patches. The point is that for really huge projects like a HTML layout engine, you need huge resources. A lot of KDE developers work on KHTML when if they'd used Gecko, they could be working on far more interesting things.
Also, surely it's better than free software projects share code. So many people are put off GNU/Linux & BSD by the fact there are 500 different text editors and not one of them works properly (except vi
In conclusion, you're a troll. Have a nice day.
I would imagine that the hot air produced by their speeches would have more of an effect than their travel to and from the conference itself. Certainly contributes to global warming...
ISS? Their sites are based on the space station now?! I had heard it was running the mythical WinNT4 SP6...
I wonder what the other 20% are doing that OO.org can't handle? Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something? Access databases that don't translate well across to other platforms? Access databases that can't be replicated in Adabas? Someone should ask them, and perhaps address their problems. After all I think that migration of 80% of 5000 desktops could yield some pretty good HCI and functional testing if they (especially as a government agency) are prepared to tell the open source community what issues they have with the product.
- Get rid of the random bolded fonts everywhere. I hate bold text. It's distracting and not needed at all. Take a look at the taskbar. The tabs in KSpread. Is there any way to remove the bold? No...
- Cut down settings bloat. Why do applications have a Settings menu at all? Shouldn't all Settings be in the Preferences dialog, which could be put under the Edit or Tools menu?
- Cut down settings bloat (again). Half the options in KControl should be automatic or are useless. There's so much that could be done to improve its structure too. Witness people getting confused over the difference between Themes, Styles, Colours and Appearance. I still do.
- Cut down the context menus. They're still too big, although I have to give the KDE people credit for trimming them in Konqueror. They're still not small enough, however. Make them context sensitive. Hide advanced options in a submenu. Something, anything! Please!
- Cook up a better theme. Is it really impossible to port Ximian's Industrial style over to KDE? Or does QT simply not allow for things like borders between toolbars? If not, why not?
- Fix Konqueror. It's interface is horrendous. Considering it's the application I would spend most time in and almost always have one open (web browsing and file management take up maybe a third of my computer time in total), looking at its menus, toolbars, and that horrid tabbed-icon-thing-on-the-right, I don't think I could cope. Last time I tried to turn them off I couldn't find the right settings...
- Dump Trolltech. Please fork QT and make it a properly opensource project rather than a GPL-behind-closed-doors project as it is at the moment. I wish someone (like Sun) would buy Trolltech and relicense QT under the LGPL or the BSD license instead. It would encourage small commercial developers, at least a little.
I REALLY want to use KDE. But until these problems are addressed I feel I cannot. Maybe someone should do an XFCE to KDE, create a slimline desktop based on QT and kparts, with a less bloated file manager and better human interface rules. Ah, my kingdom for KFCE...I, for one, am glad they're admitting that KOffice is simply not mature enough for prime-time. No offense to the KOffice developers, I'm sure they are all far better programmers than I am and I'm sure they work hard on their project - but every time I use the suite it seems to crash for various reasons, which is not a good thing if I'm trying to work on a document and haven't been saving it every five minutes.
Maybe in a few years KOffice will be more mature and then all the KDE people can use it, but until then OpenOffice with tighter KDE integration seems like a fairly good idea. I don't care whether they recode the whole interface in QT or not, but maybe a Ximian-like tweaking to integrate the suite with KDE's VFS, printing system and open/save dialogs plus some KDE-ish toolbar buttons (it already can take on QT's colourscheme IIRC) would be more-or-less sufficent. If they want to take it further, of course, then that'd be even better.
Not really, since you can get ntfs.sys off the NTFS drive using the Linux-NTFS ReadOnly driver. It's quite likely that a system will have ntfs.sys somewhere on it if it contains NTFS formatted drives!
The games don't take 90 minutes to play, more like 10 minutes. Basically it's all a matter of strategy, you're the manager, not one of the players. You decide what players to put in different positions (attacker, midfielder, defender, goalkeeper), what substitutions to make, what style of play you want, and when not playing, you buy and sell players, train them, manage club finances etc.
It's quite addictive, even for someone like me who isn't a massive football (soccer) fan.
A friend of mine recently got a job at GCHQ, which is a bit like the British version of the NSA. You ought to see the number of forms he has to fill in... background info, more personal details than you can possibly imagine, and they're going to background check all of it. He put me down as a character reference, I might end up writing an essay about how trustworthy he is and getting inteviewed myself, and I'm not even the one applying for the frickin job!
Are you kidding? My AMD K6-2 500MHz with 192MB RAM positively flies with WinXP. It's MUCH faster than when it ran Win98. I was surprised, admittedly, but rather pleased!
I notice that Anandtech describe an 800MHz machine as "chugging along". Hardly. One of my older machines is an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird machine with 256MB RAM and a 40GB disk. It runs GNOME and WinXP without any problems and continues to be extremely responsive and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of tasks I throw at it (except Games).
The same is true for budget chips - if you want a machine to go online, to do Word Processing, play a few older games or whatever, these chips are perfect. Putting together a full-blown capable system for $400, or buying secondhand, is a great way for people to get in to computing who couldn't otherwise afford it. Getting them on the bandwagon is the important thing, and whilst the hardware is so far ahead of the majority of software (at least until Longhorn comes out...) getting more people using computers in their homes is a really good idea.
I don't think per-site patches are any way to fix a site with bad HTML and JavaScript. Mozilla follows the standards, adding a custom patch just for hotmail.com would be a bit silly. Before long we'd have a patch for every non-conformant site on the Internet.
Finally they're getting the message about poorly written voting software. In an critical areas like this proper software engineering techniques should be applied lavishly. It seems Diebold in particular has forgotten how to write secure software, or more likely never knew. For example, why couldn't a voting machine do what airplanes do, and have several separate machines processing the same input data, with software written by several different organisations?
You mean like this? It's likely to be stable long before Longhorn is released, too.
IBM better not forget to pay SCO their $45,809,664!!
Just what's so wrong with GTK2 anyway? IBM are big Gnome sponsors and endorsers, so it's much more likely the SWT toolkit that Eclipse uses for its GUI will stay with GTK rather than switch to QT.
What makes you think all Chinese are communists? That's like saying all Germans were Nazis during WWII, which is very very far from the truth. The problem in totalitarian regimes is that you're not allowed to say anything substantial against the government... but it's not illegal to think it (well, not yet anyway).
You used to be able to get these, actually. I ran my 6V DC speakers off a jack in a free expansion slot for years... it was just a small PCB that connected to a molex inside the machine and had a transformer plus extra resistors/capacitors on it.
The problem is, I guess, that because so many devices use different voltages, and draw different amounts of power, it might be difficult to provision for every possible device, and you might need a huge PSU. I am not sure whether a normal PSU would be able to supply the PC, my TFT, scanner, PDA cradle and printer without some extra wattage.
That's just freakish. What kind of strange electrician would put 10 outlets in a closet? Maybe they were running short on funds and got the engineering department to do it?
Not right. Freeware just means "costs nothing", and says nothing about the license or opensourceness. Internet Explorer is freeware but it's not exactly open sourced! The GPL by definition enforces open source. Although this source code can be used to keep GPL projects free (as in cost), many GPL'd software products are also sold.
Don't underestimate the number of users who've obtained the IDE from other sources, such as prepackaged with a Linux distribution, from a cover CD on a magazine, redistributed and installed by their network administrator, or downloaded it from somewhere else online. All these show up as one download, but thousands more may be using these single downloads.
I'd recommend trying to get the GCJ-compiled, or trying it yourself (since I see you're a Gentoo user). You'll find it's significantly faster than the Java version, although obviously it's never going to be as fast as vim, and by definition IDEs tend to be quite bulky. Thing is, when I'm trying to remember why I decided to use a certain design pattern in a web application with 50+ classes, Eclipse just seems easier.
Sure vim + command line is a powerful solution (find | grep | sed | sort), but the visual thinker in me just cries out for more. If we're using object orientation which is a fundamentally right-brained paradigm IMHO, a GUI is rather useful. If you want to use your left brain, C and vim do rather well.