And I can not believe people are arguing like you do anymore either.
Both Gnome and KDE have developed a lot further, a lot faster than they would had without a competitor to inspire. Also, two (or, really, dozens) of desktop projects means a lot more experimental ground gets covered, unearthing a lot more good design practices than if we had one desktop only.
The most important counter argument, however, is simply "Who gets to decide what desktop to use, and how do you propose to enforce it?". Do you really, seriously, believe that it would be possible to actually pick one (Gnome, say), and have all the KDE developers quietly erase their KDE and Qt-related libs and tools from their systems? Do you really think all XFCe users will happily accept not getting their lightweight DE anymore, and install KDE or Gnome in its place?
And if you can't actually enforce sticking to one desktop, and one desktop only, then all you manage to accomplish is creating more bad feelings and acrimony between projects, ending up with less unification, not more.
Yep. Sort of what I meant, but I managed to muddle it up when writing the comment; it's not like I (or anyone else) does a whole lot of revision or factchecking on their/. comments...
IANANSBIPTBOATL (I Am Not A NeuroScientist, But I Pretend To Be One At The Lab), but another possible risk I see is regarding neuronal damage from overexposure to signal substances. You already see this in the Hippocampus during high-stress events, when the inhibitory loop downregulating the Amygdala gives up and allows flooding the Hippocampus with neurotransmitters. This damages, even kills, cells in this area (and is likely to be part of the reason you get memory lapses around traumatic events). With bigger, faster cells with more connections, I would guess the activation threshold for damaging levels of the signal substance (acetyl cholin?) will be substantially lower.
So, tongue.in-cheek, you may get people able to learn very fast, but you better not upset them, or they will forget all recent experiences.
Windows.Forms have absolutely nothing to do with supporting Gnome app development. Being 100% compatible with the Windows.Net API:s is not a requirement either - after all, you won't have the Gnome environment available on a Windows machine anyways, so why worry about compatibility issues, right?
Yep, PyGTK is very nice. So is Perl-GTK2/Perl-Gnome. And, yes, from what I've heard, so is GTK#. All three work. And at least Perl-GTK2 is part of the upcoming "official bindings" release, which should ensure you can write stuff and expect it to work for any Gnome user.
One way to deal with it is simply to move to a different continent. Worked for me - I get no support calls at all. Of course, now I have to learn Japanese, but it's a small price to pay:)
Firefox has the User Agent Switcher extension. By default, you can look like IE6, Netscape 4.8 and Opera 7.11, and you can add any user agent strings you want (in my case I added "Mozilla/1.5 [en] (Linux; U)" to access my bank, which is a bit slow in approving the newest browser versions).
Yep, they are cleanable, but it is still hard on them. It's generally not the first or second or even third incident that kills them, but eventually you will get enough damage on the metal tracer layers inside that it is effectively destroyed.
I'd really like to see a solution with a sealed rubber/plastic layer beneath the keys themselves. The keypress detection is inductive, so you could make a design that allows the keys to travel freely but still has no risk of allowing liquids (or breadcrumbs, ramen, hair, dust and what have you) inside.
The Model M was/is an absolutely great keyboard. Almost indestructible - well, apart from a fatal weakness regarding hot coffee, which killed the last two I had. Great key "feel"; never any doubt on wether you managed to hit the key or not, or if you did or did not hit another key at the same time. The noise can be more than a little distracting, though.
In fact, make a slightly more silent, liquid-proof version (with Swedish layout), and I'll be first in line to get one.
Regulation stifles innovation. Imagine there was a regulation that said all medicines needed to be at least X safe. Both farmaceutical companies and Uni researchers are screwed. Being held liable for how safe your pharmaceuticals are would ruin everybody. That's just one example of a regulation that would mess everything up, but just about anything would be terrible. Keep it free.
--
I basically agree that regulation would not be a good thing in this field. Just wanted to point out that this argument is not a good one.
There are, in fact, excellent reasons to regulate software for safety reasons in some fields; medicine and process control are two of the obvious ones. The problem is that unlike pharmaceuticals, for instance, software is not in fact one field, and so you can not regulate it as if it was.
Software is a medical technology (and should be regulated as such); it is a accounting mechanism (and should be regulated as such); it is a childrens toy; it is a power plant safety implementation; it is an artists tool. Software is by its very nature everything to everybody. You can't regulate it as software.
What you can (and probably should) do is to regulate its use in any of these fields as that field seees fit (or not regulate at all, as the case may be). When it is to be used in medicine, regulate it as a medical technology. When it is used for process control, demand the same the same level of testing and validation as you do of the pressure valves and pipe fittings.
So, yes, regulation of software is not only necessary, it is a benefit. Trying to regulate all software just as software, on the other hand, is a nonstarter.
Anyone wanna bet we'll be seeing a Knome 4.0 release rather than a Gnome 4.0 and KDE 4.0?
Won't happen. Many of the basic differences between the projects aren't one of degrees, where you can find a middle ground. For toolkit, for example, you would need to choose between GTK and Qt - there is no average or middle ground there. Had either been significantly better than the other, it would have been easier, but, flame wars aside, both are mature, complete toolkits.
And whichever way you choose, you loose most - if not all - of the people who enjoy working with the other toolkit, leaving the community just as split as before. In fact, you end up worse, due to buildup of hard feelings and bruised egos from the unifying attempt.
No, the right way is through freedesktop.org - define standards that any desktop should adhere to and infrastructure technologies they should support, and let people go wild with their projects. Sort of like defining an open document format rather than standardizing on one, and only one, word processor.
Hm, that's even weirder, then. Is it compulsory for a party to have primaries run by the states - can't they just run primaries themselves if they want? Is it compulsory for _all_ parties that want to have primaries, not just the two big ones? Or are only some parties allowed to have state-supported primaries - and in that case, based on what criteria?
From the outside, it seems the system is rife with jusrisdictional and definitional issues.
Um, a bit confused, here. Political parties are private organizations in the US as well, right? Doesn't that mean they can choose their candidate in pretty much any way they damn well please? Primaries, mail-in ballots, an all-night draw poker game among all interested candidates, or simply drawing a name out of a hat? I mean, a party can just declare a candidate by fiat, without having to even pretend choosing among a pool of willing people, right?
Now, I understand why you suggest adding rules for this. But first, telling organizations that by their very nature have _very_ different views on precisely things like elections how they should do them feels...iffy. Say a party has an internal rule that whomever is the party chairman will also be the candidate (as is the case in all larger Swedish political parties). It works for them. If you don't like it, you vote for another party. Why should a law be passed to forbid them of doing that? Same thing here: if a party wants to have different days, and the majority of members are fine with it, let them. If a majority actually feels it is a problem, they can presumably change the rules internally, switch to another party or create a new party with the intention of replacing the old one.
Second, I doubt you can write any clear rules that will not penalize some parties. Say you have a rule that primaries must be held at the same day in all states. Then how about parties that are too small to have the resources to do so? Or even too small to ever want or need to hold primaries in all states at all? You will start to need a bunch of qualifiers to the rules, and probably start to classify parties according to size. And if you want to only regulate primaries, you will have a hopeless time defining primaries so they neither penalize other party systems, nor give openings to redefine the process so the rules no longer apply when they should.
There is room for both open and closed software in this world.
Yes there is. That does not mean that the choice is value neutral, however.
The licensing of the relevant code is a part of the feature set just as much as the checklist items for the hardware is. It is another item that the customer needs to evaluate and contrast with competing offerings.
This is why the anguished cries of some manufacturers against governments requiring open source rings so hollow. Just as a customer can require for instance Word file import capability, or three year installation and upgrade support, they can require open source compatible licensing. It is another feature that may carry more or less importance depending on the customer.
So, if someone says they will not consider hardware without open source drivers, that just means they, for various reasons, value the feature of open source relatively highly, and are ready to pick another supplier to get the feature they want. Note that it really is not just about whether open source or proprietary software is better; the licensing is in itself one (sometimes major) factor in determining the "betterness" of a piece of software.
Ah, but he talks about animation - not family entertainment, not amusement parks, not television programming. In the field of animation, it has been quite some time since Disney last did anything worthwile.
That said, in animation, I would put at least Studio Ghibli right up there with Pixar as well.
MS doesn't rename stuff into local languages - most companies don't. It's called "Windows", "Word" and so on. And no, no matter what happens with "Windows" in the US, in other countries they have their trademark solid, and rightly so.
It's bit like trying to trademark the word "Petrol" for a combustion engine based car. It's simple a common word when used in certain context.
And in most countries you could probably do that without any trouble. English is not "special". Just as an example, "Windows" is trademarked in Sweden, by Microsoft. Just like you could trademark "Fonster" for something computer-related in the US.
I can't speak for other languages, but in Sweden, at least, we translate it. Where you have a "window" with a "button", we have a "fonster" with a "knapp".
So, yes, "Windows" really is a non-word, and it rightly becomes a big, relevant problem for Lindows.
To turn it around, assume a product (a window cleaning agent, say) from Sweden named, exotically, "Fonster". Then some other company releases _their window cleaning compound and names it "Fonsder". Would it not be reasonable - and quite easy - for an american court to find that "Fonsder" was unacceptably close to "Fonster" and that they did attempt to ride on the coattails of the first company's brand penetration?
...it is a much easier issue. If it's a non-english speaking country, there is nothing generic about the words "Windows", "Word" and so on. Lindows is pretty clearly infringing in those cases.
Choosing a name that will get you on the losing side of a trademark disupte, guaranteed, strikes me as a pretty shortsighted thing to do.
Shouldn't Google take precautions to make sure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands?
No, they should not. They are not in a position to know what _is_ sensitive - and to whom. They can reasonably only assume that anything reachable with an ordinary, polite spider is meant to be accessible to the world at large. If you feel certain information should not be made accessible, bring it up with those actually making it accessible, not with those just indexing it once it is.
Shooting the messenger is not just pointless, it is counterproductive.
Oh great - add my desktop environment, but remove my ability to write anything:)
Hope Gnoppix will mature soon. Has anybody good experiences with Morphix? Not sure I want to go to all that hassle without knowing if/how well it will work.
Slashdot Mirror
You have Anjuta (anjuta.sourceforge.net).
And I can not believe people are arguing like you do anymore either.
Both Gnome and KDE have developed a lot further, a lot faster than they would had without a competitor to inspire. Also, two (or, really, dozens) of desktop projects means a lot more experimental ground gets covered, unearthing a lot more good design practices than if we had one desktop only.
The most important counter argument, however, is simply "Who gets to decide what desktop to use, and how do you propose to enforce it?". Do you really, seriously, believe that it would be possible to actually pick one (Gnome, say), and have all the KDE developers quietly erase their KDE and Qt-related libs and tools from their systems? Do you really think all XFCe users will happily accept not getting their lightweight DE anymore, and install KDE or Gnome in its place?
And if you can't actually enforce sticking to one desktop, and one desktop only, then all you manage to accomplish is creating more bad feelings and acrimony between projects, ending up with less unification, not more.
The US IS the world leader in non-military research and development (among other things).
Not per capita, it isn't. It's high on the list (third or fourth), but is not the country with the highest R&D spending.
Yep. Sort of what I meant, but I managed to muddle it up when writing the comment; it's not like I (or anyone else) does a whole lot of revision or factchecking on their /. comments...
IANANSBIPTBOATL (I Am Not A NeuroScientist, But I Pretend To Be One At The Lab), but another possible risk I see is regarding neuronal damage from overexposure to signal substances. You already see this in the Hippocampus during high-stress events, when the inhibitory loop downregulating the Amygdala gives up and allows flooding the Hippocampus with neurotransmitters. This damages, even kills, cells in this area (and is likely to be part of the reason you get memory lapses around traumatic events). With bigger, faster cells with more connections, I would guess the activation threshold for damaging levels of the signal substance (acetyl cholin?) will be substantially lower.
So, tongue.in-cheek, you may get people able to learn very fast, but you better not upset them, or they will forget all recent experiences.
Windows.Forms have absolutely nothing to do with supporting Gnome app development. Being 100% compatible with the Windows .Net API:s is not a requirement either - after all, you won't have the Gnome environment available on a Windows machine anyways, so why worry about compatibility issues, right?
Yep, PyGTK is very nice. So is Perl-GTK2/Perl-Gnome. And, yes, from what I've heard, so is GTK#. All three work. And at least Perl-GTK2 is part of the upcoming "official bindings" release, which should ensure you can write stuff and expect it to work for any Gnome user.
One way to deal with it is simply to move to a different continent. Worked for me - I get no support calls at all. Of course, now I have to learn Japanese, but it's a small price to pay :)
Firefox has the User Agent Switcher extension. By default, you can look like IE6, Netscape 4.8 and Opera 7.11, and you can add any user agent strings you want (in my case I added "Mozilla/1.5 [en] (Linux; U)" to access my bank, which is a bit slow in approving the newest browser versions).
Yep, they are cleanable, but it is still hard on them. It's generally not the first or second or even third incident that kills them, but eventually you will get enough damage on the metal tracer layers inside that it is effectively destroyed.
I'd really like to see a solution with a sealed rubber/plastic layer beneath the keys themselves. The keypress detection is inductive, so you could make a design that allows the keys to travel freely but still has no risk of allowing liquids (or breadcrumbs, ramen, hair, dust and what have you) inside.
The Model M was/is an absolutely great keyboard. Almost indestructible - well, apart from a fatal weakness regarding hot coffee, which killed the last two I had. Great key "feel"; never any doubt on wether you managed to hit the key or not, or if you did or did not hit another key at the same time. The noise can be more than a little distracting, though.
In fact, make a slightly more silent, liquid-proof version (with Swedish layout), and I'll be first in line to get one.
Regulation stifles innovation. Imagine there was a regulation that said all medicines needed to be at least X safe. Both farmaceutical companies and Uni researchers are screwed. Being held liable for how safe your pharmaceuticals are would ruin everybody. That's just one example of a regulation that would mess everything up, but just about anything would be terrible. Keep it free.
--
I basically agree that regulation would not be a good thing in this field. Just wanted to point out that this argument is not a good one.
There are, in fact, excellent reasons to regulate software for safety reasons in some fields; medicine and process control are two of the obvious ones. The problem is that unlike pharmaceuticals, for instance, software is not in fact one field, and so you can not regulate it as if it was.
Software is a medical technology (and should be regulated as such); it is a accounting mechanism (and should be regulated as such); it is a childrens toy; it is a power plant safety implementation; it is an artists tool. Software is by its very nature everything to everybody. You can't regulate it as software.
What you can (and probably should) do is to regulate its use in any of these fields as that field seees fit (or not regulate at all, as the case may be). When it is to be used in medicine, regulate it as a medical technology. When it is used for process control, demand the same the same level of testing and validation as you do of the pressure valves and pipe fittings.
So, yes, regulation of software is not only necessary, it is a benefit. Trying to regulate all software just as software, on the other hand, is a nonstarter.
Anyone wanna bet we'll be seeing a Knome 4.0 release rather than a Gnome 4.0 and KDE 4.0?
Won't happen. Many of the basic differences between the projects aren't one of degrees, where you can find a middle ground. For toolkit, for example, you would need to choose between GTK and Qt - there is no average or middle ground there. Had either been significantly better than the other, it would have been easier, but, flame wars aside, both are mature, complete toolkits.
And whichever way you choose, you loose most - if not all - of the people who enjoy working with the other toolkit, leaving the community just as split as before. In fact, you end up worse, due to buildup of hard feelings and bruised egos from the unifying attempt.
No, the right way is through freedesktop.org - define standards that any desktop should adhere to and infrastructure technologies they should support, and let people go wild with their projects. Sort of like defining an open document format rather than standardizing on one, and only one, word processor.
Works perfectly for me...
Maybe you have disabled JavaScript or something like that?
Hm, that's even weirder, then. Is it compulsory for a party to have primaries run by the states - can't they just run primaries themselves if they want? Is it compulsory for _all_ parties that want to have primaries, not just the two big ones? Or are only some parties allowed to have state-supported primaries - and in that case, based on what criteria?
From the outside, it seems the system is rife with jusrisdictional and definitional issues.
Um, a bit confused, here. Political parties are private organizations in the US as well, right? Doesn't that mean they can choose their candidate in pretty much any way they damn well please? Primaries, mail-in ballots, an all-night draw poker game among all interested candidates, or simply drawing a name out of a hat? I mean, a party can just declare a candidate by fiat, without having to even pretend choosing among a pool of willing people, right?
...iffy. Say a party has an internal rule that whomever is the party chairman will also be the candidate (as is the case in all larger Swedish political parties). It works for them. If you don't like it, you vote for another party. Why should a law be passed to forbid them of doing that? Same thing here: if a party wants to have different days, and the majority of members are fine with it, let them. If a majority actually feels it is a problem, they can presumably change the rules internally, switch to another party or create a new party with the intention of replacing the old one.
Now, I understand why you suggest adding rules for this. But first, telling organizations that by their very nature have _very_ different views on precisely things like elections how they should do them feels
Second, I doubt you can write any clear rules that will not penalize some parties. Say you have a rule that primaries must be held at the same day in all states. Then how about parties that are too small to have the resources to do so? Or even too small to ever want or need to hold primaries in all states at all? You will start to need a bunch of qualifiers to the rules, and probably start to classify parties according to size. And if you want to only regulate primaries, you will have a hopeless time defining primaries so they neither penalize other party systems, nor give openings to redefine the process so the rules no longer apply when they should.
There is room for both open and closed software in this world.
Yes there is. That does not mean that the choice is value neutral, however.
The licensing of the relevant code is a part of the feature set just as much as the checklist items for the hardware is. It is another item that the customer needs to evaluate and contrast with competing offerings.
This is why the anguished cries of some manufacturers against governments requiring open source rings so hollow. Just as a customer can require for instance Word file import capability, or three year installation and upgrade support, they can require open source compatible licensing. It is another feature that may carry more or less importance depending on the customer.
So, if someone says they will not consider hardware without open source drivers, that just means they, for various reasons, value the feature of open source relatively highly, and are ready to pick another supplier to get the feature they want. Note that it really is not just about whether open source or proprietary software is better; the licensing is in itself one (sometimes major) factor in determining the "betterness" of a piece of software.
Ah, but he talks about animation - not family entertainment, not amusement parks, not television programming. In the field of animation, it has been quite some time since Disney last did anything worthwile.
That said, in animation, I would put at least Studio Ghibli right up there with Pixar as well.
So you're saying Sun is in violation of the GPL by distributing GNOME for use on Solaris?
No. The core Gnome libraries (including GTK) are licensed as LGPL, which allows for this case. That particular issue is a red herring.
MS doesn't rename stuff into local languages - most companies don't. It's called "Windows", "Word" and so on. And no, no matter what happens with "Windows" in the US, in other countries they have their trademark solid, and rightly so.
It's bit like trying to trademark the word "Petrol" for a combustion engine based car. It's simple a common word when used in certain context.
And in most countries you could probably do that without any trouble. English is not "special". Just as an example, "Windows" is trademarked in Sweden, by Microsoft. Just like you could trademark "Fonster" for something computer-related in the US.
I can't speak for other languages, but in Sweden, at least, we translate it. Where you have a "window" with a "button", we have a "fonster" with a "knapp".
So, yes, "Windows" really is a non-word, and it rightly becomes a big, relevant problem for Lindows.
To turn it around, assume a product (a window cleaning agent, say) from Sweden named, exotically, "Fonster". Then some other company releases _their window cleaning compound and names it "Fonsder". Would it not be reasonable - and quite easy - for an american court to find that "Fonsder" was unacceptably close to "Fonster" and that they did attempt to ride on the coattails of the first company's brand penetration?
...it is a much easier issue. If it's a non-english speaking country, there is nothing generic about the words "Windows", "Word" and so on. Lindows is pretty clearly infringing in those cases.
Choosing a name that will get you on the losing side of a trademark disupte, guaranteed, strikes me as a pretty shortsighted thing to do.
Shouldn't Google take precautions to make sure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands?
No, they should not. They are not in a position to know what _is_ sensitive - and to whom. They can reasonably only assume that anything reachable with an ordinary, polite spider is meant to be accessible to the world at large. If you feel certain information should not be made accessible, bring it up with those actually making it accessible, not with those just indexing it once it is.
Shooting the messenger is not just pointless, it is counterproductive.
Oh great - add my desktop environment, but remove my ability to write anything :)
Hope Gnoppix will mature soon. Has anybody good experiences with Morphix? Not sure I want to go to all that hassle without knowing if/how well it will work.
Is Gnome included? What version?