The reality is that the closer you are to the money, the more you'll make. It doesn't make sense, but that's just how it works out. The sales guy couldn't be an engineer, but the engineer could do the sales guy's job. Yet the sales guy is closer to the money so he makes more. I don't get it either, but that's how it works. Once you realize that most of the people in this world are morons the fact of the matter stops bothering you.
I really don't understand why these companies insist on changing from a Per-Socket to a Per-Core pricing scheme.
For years everything was single cores, and every 18 months the performance has doubled and the number of cores stayed the same. Yet licensing was still done per socket.
Now that the performance per-core is coming closer to a brick wall (per-core performance has gotten better over the years, but it's not doubling every 18 months anymore) the only way the chip makers can keep improving performance to pack more cores onto the die. How is the situation today different than it was 5 years ago when dual core processors took off? It reeks a lot of "dying-business-model-must-squeeze-every-penny-while-we-still-can".
When you ask the root servers (such as a.root-servers.net) for "what is IP for www.google.com", it will respond "go ask a.gtld-servers.net". (each domain has a different server, for instance www.google.co.uk will send you to ns1.nic.uk). Asking a.gtld-servers.net will respond "go ask ns1.google.com", which will then respond with the IP of the domain, which is your answer. The chain could go further if you had "some.very.long.string.of.dots.google.com" and if each one of those nested subdomains were delegated to another DNS server (and were not contained in the zone file for "google.com").
If the answer is already cached by the DNS server and it is still within the TTL, it will just respond with the IP.
This is how a DNS caching resolver does it, your workstation is going to be configured with one of these caching resolvers. When you ask a caching resolver, it will do all these things in the background on these server, and just return the client the final answer
I know you're being cynical, but I'd mod you up if I had the points. He lost his finger to a saw. They're designed to cut things. If you use it incorrectly you will get hurt. He got hurt.
The thing is, Ryobi probably has sold tens of thousands of this model of saw, and a very very very small number of people (
You're assuming that before Firefox came around, IE was the only browser...
If I had to choose between developing for exclusively IE, or exclusively for every-other-browser-that's-not-IE, I'd choose the latter. The choice has nothing to do with web standards or open source, or whatever other buzzword that is out there, IE is just harder to develop for. It's that simple.
The reason why so many push for getting rid of IE is because the browser itself sucks. Microsoft isn't improving it fast enough, or in the right places. Web developers want to get rid of it.
Most JS has to be written twice in order to work with IE, and getting CSS styled pages to render correctly in IE takes a whole lot more work. IE has too many rendering quirk that don't exist in other browsers - margins where there shouldn't any, flat out rendering the incorrect number of pixels in padding and margins in some cases. And the tools for IE aren't where they need to be, so fixing it is a game of whack-a-mole. Best day for the web is the day IE dies.
During that Christmas sale (in December), when they had 75% off 5 different games every day, I went just went nuts, like a kid in a candy store. I believe the total damage was around 15 new games in December, some of them in package deals.
I still haven't played everything, but I bought games I might have previously considered just getting from some other source. $10 for a full-featured game that I'm somewhat interested in? Sure thing! If it sucks, it's only $10, I waste more money going to the movie theaters. If it's good, good, the developers some money so they'll keep producing good games I'll buy. At the very least, I feel like I got my money's worth.
I'm a lot more hesitant buying new releases at $50 a pop (still aren't $60 yet on the PC), but I'll drop $10 on a 6 month old release on sale, in a heartbeat.
Most of the code I call "crappy code" is stuff I'm asked to look at because somebody found a reproducible defect, I look at the code, blink twice, and wonder how we haven't had a "oops, all of our data is gone" scenario yet. Fortunately I keep daily backups around...
And, of course, when I ask the original developer to "fix it", they can't seem to figure it out, even when giving step-by-step instructions how to reproduce the defect, over, and over, and over, and over.
I've looked at some of these CGI apps "web developers" put out, and I wonder if they have any brain cells between their two ears. Just using some sort of MVC architecture would be a good start to fixing 99% of the problems I see with shitty web code, and at least keep things somewhat more organized (if only just slightly)
You're a sysadmin, and you're running Debian almost exclusively. You have a large number of automation scripts that you use to do your job (security updates, auditing, provisioning, general maintenance, etc). All of them are expecting to run on Debian, because all you run is Debian. So you, as a sysadmin, decide you want to use ZFS somewhere.
You have a few options:
1) Run Solaris
2) Run some derivative of BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc)
3) Run Debian w/ ZFS in Fuse
4) Run Debian kFreeBSD
Options 1 and 2 will most likely require you to tweak or rewrite a lot of your scripts. I shouldn't need to explain why option 3 is a bad idea. Since you're working with Debian userland, going with option 4 seems like it would be the path of least resistance. Seems pretty useful.
Sometimes virtualization makes sense for an app where you don't really know exactly what the usage requirements are going to be. You know at first, your app not going to need a full machine to run. So you wrap it in a VM, and throw it onto a shared server. But you think, in the future, you're going to need to scale up to bigger and better hardware. But you're not sure.
If the app is already contained in a VM, it's trivial to just move it from Server A to a Bigger Server B if you need more power. The process takes no longer than it would take you to reboot the machine - sync up disk image (as much as possible), power off machine, finish syncing disk image, power on machine on new hardware. Doing this without virtualization would not be so trivial, and would force you to reinstall the app from scratch.
If the time comes that an app outgrows it's virtual server environment and needs dedicated hardware, again, it's fairly trivial to just copy the disk image onto a disk partition, boot off a rescue disk to repair any driver/hardware incompatibilities between virtual machine and the real hardware, and then simply start up the new machine. Doing this again, would require reinstalling from scratch.
Of course, some things are trivial to move, so it might not make sense to virtualize those things. But other could take a good number of man-hours to install, configure, import data, etc. You probably only want to do this once.
Also, when keeping everything separate, you don't need to worry about things where updating App A on this server, which has new version of dependency X, if app B if going to be affected by this. If everything is separate, you don't need to worry about some future new dependency of your app will break another dependency on another unrelated app.
It's not the end-all-be-all of solutions, but it definitely makes sense in a lot of situations. Throwing more hardware at the problem to make it go away is fairly cheap, and usually much cheaper than paying people people to try and fix interoperability issues between unrelated pieces of software.
I installed the latest version of OO.org on this computer (I didn't have any office suite installed) just to see. In your very specific example, it imported fine.
In the import menu, I had to right click the last column (the ID number) and choose "Text" instead of "Standard" import.
Seems like it works fine, as it kept my numbers in-tact. I don't think it's unrealistic for a computer to think that last column is supposed to be handled as number and not a data string. What it did do, was set the cell data to '0023456789, which escapes the first zero so it is not represented as a number.
That said, I think it did the wrong think in terms of formatting that column after the import. If I try to add another row, say the number 0123456789, it treats it like a number, not text. I have to manually right click the column and change the formatting (again) to be text after I import the data if I want to add more data rows.
It saved it out fine, although it put quotes around all my data columns. I had to change the filter settings to get it to save without the quotes.
It does work, if you put a little elbow grease into it, but it's not as intuitive as it could be. Since none of the office suites seem to "get it right", it seems that most people are contempt with this behavior.
You could always try opening a bug report to OO.org and see if they'll fix these usability issues (which, to me at least, are somewhat valid). Good luck trying to get MS to do the same with Excel (I don't know if Excel has the same problem).
No, they'd still be 1.1TB disks because how many bytes a platter can store is completely independent to the sector size.
I can't help that people are too stupid to understand the difference between GB and GiB. Blame Windows for using the incorrect SI notation.
There is a standard. K means one thousand (1000). Not 1024 because it's a computer. Data transfer is measured in thousands of bytes as well (not 1024 of bytes), and they use KB/MB/GB.
The only thing inconsistent is how RAM manufactures report the numbers (they use MB and GB to represent numbers in powers of 2), but nobody complains because it's in their favor), and the notation Windows uses to report data (they should be using KiB/MiB/GiB, not KB/MB/GB).
Hard disks have *always* been measured in powers of 10. Nothing changed except people who don't care about this stuff and just want to go on AOL started using computers, and then noticed how everything didn't match up because they can't understand how binary notation works.
When troubleshooting somebody, it's easier to say "copy paste these commands in" then to try to explain how to change the settings in a GUI app.
Your example talks about fixing buggy ndis drivers. If you were running an Atheros chipset or similar for your wireless, there would be no issue. Blame the wireless card manufactures for not making Linux drivers. Or buy a supported wireless card.
I will give you that, wireless support is the *one thing* that doesn't work well. And in 99% of the cases, it's due to buggy drivers. Using a supported card fixes all those issues, however. I know it seems like a cop-out to say "it's not us, it's them", but it really isn't the Linux developer's fault in this case.
When they're able to make disks ~10% bigger just by switching to the larger sector size, I couldn't care less about this "wasted" space.
You have a 1TB drive. Because of this change, they can fit 1.1TB of data onto the same size platter. So it would take ~28 million files worst-case scenario in this hypothetical situation before the 1.1TB drive would have less usable space.
Of course, they like nice round numbers, so what it really means is they can make drives cheaper and faster. In the long run the consumer will win (there is enough competition where you shouldn't need to worry about price fixing). I like it.
I don't know how true or accurate this statement is, but Adobe claims no hardware acceleration on Linux is due to lack of standard API.
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.
Either Adobe is full of it (which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest), or somebody better start cracking that egg.
I think the key to remember is not you may not be able to do it on linux (because you clearly can do hardware accelerated video decoding), but that the tools *may* not be developer friendly enough for them to attempt to support it.
I'd be interested to know from somebody who's done video and/or graphics related development on both sides to see how accurate/true this statement might be.
As the previous posted said, use Flash 10.1. The hardware acceleration makes a huge difference. Before using the "beta" version Flash was practically unusable.
I have a Atom 330 with nVidia ION as well, and it can decode 720p H.264 video just fine (about 10-20% CPU usage in media player classic, or 30-40% with Flash). Haven't tried 1080p, but I'd suspect it works okay too. I'm using Win7, but I'd suspect that shouldn't make a difference.
I'm sure the fact that while one went to a high school, which is run like a prison, and one is either semi-independant/going to college/working at a job has nothing to do with the dramatic difference in maturity levels.
When you treat people like adults, they act like adults.
17 vs 19 barrier is more of an environmental change than anything. In reality, there is no reason why people can't mature faster, it's just that we treat them like they're kids until they're 18, and POOF, all of a sudden you're an adult now and have to act like one, so people are forced to change.
The maturity difference is nothing short of arbitrary. They don't act mature because we don't want them to be mature.
"The built-in InnoDB storage engine distributed with MySQL is licensed to end users exclusively by Sun/MySQL under contract with Innobase as part of the MySQL database server (both Enterprise and Community editions) under the GNU Public License (GPL) V2. The InnoDB Plugin is also available, from this website, in open source under GPL V2 terms."
So I can download the plugin directly from the InnoDB website, under the GPLv2 terms (as long as I also adhere the GPL). They also mention they license it to Sun under the GPL.
"Innobase Oy provides InnoDB exclusively to Sun/MySQL, which distributes and supports InnoDB within its product offerings. InnoDB is included under the open source GNU Public License (GPL) V2 in the MySQL Enterprise Server and is suitable for a broad range of users. The MySQL Community Edition, which is likewise is available in open source under the terms of the GPLv2, also includes InnoDB."
So I can download MySQL Community Edition from Sun, under the terms of the GPLv2, and use it, under the terms of GPLv2.
I'm not missing anything. Both InnoDB and InnoDB Plugin is GPLed. You can fork it. Please read it again.
Buy a nice monitor and flip it 90 degrees.
I agree, widescreen monitors are not any better for coding. However, a good sized widesceen monitor flipped 90 degree IS very nice for that purpose..
Most decent monitors come with a VESA compliant mount, so if they don't come with a rotatable stand, you can at least get an after-market stand.... or buy one that's height adjustable/rotatable.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is that the closer you are to the money, the more you'll make. It doesn't make sense, but that's just how it works out. The sales guy couldn't be an engineer, but the engineer could do the sales guy's job. Yet the sales guy is closer to the money so he makes more. I don't get it either, but that's how it works. Once you realize that most of the people in this world are morons the fact of the matter stops bothering you.
I really don't understand why these companies insist on changing from a Per-Socket to a Per-Core pricing scheme.
For years everything was single cores, and every 18 months the performance has doubled and the number of cores stayed the same. Yet licensing was still done per socket.
Now that the performance per-core is coming closer to a brick wall (per-core performance has gotten better over the years, but it's not doubling every 18 months anymore) the only way the chip makers can keep improving performance to pack more cores onto the die. How is the situation today different than it was 5 years ago when dual core processors took off? It reeks a lot of "dying-business-model-must-squeeze-every-penny-while-we-still-can".
One small correction:
When you ask the root servers (such as a.root-servers.net) for "what is IP for www.google.com", it will respond "go ask a.gtld-servers.net". (each domain has a different server, for instance www.google.co.uk will send you to ns1.nic.uk). Asking a.gtld-servers.net will respond "go ask ns1.google.com", which will then respond with the IP of the domain, which is your answer. The chain could go further if you had "some.very.long.string.of.dots.google.com" and if each one of those nested subdomains were delegated to another DNS server (and were not contained in the zone file for "google.com").
If the answer is already cached by the DNS server and it is still within the TTL, it will just respond with the IP.
This is how a DNS caching resolver does it, your workstation is going to be configured with one of these caching resolvers. When you ask a caching resolver, it will do all these things in the background on these server, and just return the client the final answer
I know you're being cynical, but I'd mod you up if I had the points. He lost his finger to a saw. They're designed to cut things. If you use it incorrectly you will get hurt. He got hurt.
The thing is, Ryobi probably has sold tens of thousands of this model of saw, and a very very very small number of people (
You're assuming that before Firefox came around, IE was the only browser... If I had to choose between developing for exclusively IE, or exclusively for every-other-browser-that's-not-IE, I'd choose the latter. The choice has nothing to do with web standards or open source, or whatever other buzzword that is out there, IE is just harder to develop for. It's that simple.
The reason why so many push for getting rid of IE is because the browser itself sucks. Microsoft isn't improving it fast enough, or in the right places. Web developers want to get rid of it.
Most JS has to be written twice in order to work with IE, and getting CSS styled pages to render correctly in IE takes a whole lot more work. IE has too many rendering quirk that don't exist in other browsers - margins where there shouldn't any, flat out rendering the incorrect number of pixels in padding and margins in some cases. And the tools for IE aren't where they need to be, so fixing it is a game of whack-a-mole. Best day for the web is the day IE dies.
No shit.
During that Christmas sale (in December), when they had 75% off 5 different games every day, I went just went nuts, like a kid in a candy store. I believe the total damage was around 15 new games in December, some of them in package deals.
I still haven't played everything, but I bought games I might have previously considered just getting from some other source. $10 for a full-featured game that I'm somewhat interested in? Sure thing! If it sucks, it's only $10, I waste more money going to the movie theaters. If it's good, good, the developers some money so they'll keep producing good games I'll buy. At the very least, I feel like I got my money's worth.
I'm a lot more hesitant buying new releases at $50 a pop (still aren't $60 yet on the PC), but I'll drop $10 on a 6 month old release on sale, in a heartbeat.
I'd mod you up if I had points.
Most of the code I call "crappy code" is stuff I'm asked to look at because somebody found a reproducible defect, I look at the code, blink twice, and wonder how we haven't had a "oops, all of our data is gone" scenario yet. Fortunately I keep daily backups around...
And, of course, when I ask the original developer to "fix it", they can't seem to figure it out, even when giving step-by-step instructions how to reproduce the defect, over, and over, and over, and over.
I've looked at some of these CGI apps "web developers" put out, and I wonder if they have any brain cells between their two ears. Just using some sort of MVC architecture would be a good start to fixing 99% of the problems I see with shitty web code, and at least keep things somewhat more organized (if only just slightly)
The studio was in Australia, but if you look at their LinkedIn pages, you'll see the CEO and this Mike Turner guy are both from the US.
I don't think these guys moved to Ireland because they moved their Australian studio.
I can see a really good usage case for this.
You're a sysadmin, and you're running Debian almost exclusively. You have a large number of automation scripts that you use to do your job (security updates, auditing, provisioning, general maintenance, etc). All of them are expecting to run on Debian, because all you run is Debian. So you, as a sysadmin, decide you want to use ZFS somewhere.
You have a few options:
1) Run Solaris
2) Run some derivative of BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc)
3) Run Debian w/ ZFS in Fuse
4) Run Debian kFreeBSD
Options 1 and 2 will most likely require you to tweak or rewrite a lot of your scripts. I shouldn't need to explain why option 3 is a bad idea. Since you're working with Debian userland, going with option 4 seems like it would be the path of least resistance. Seems pretty useful.
Sometimes virtualization makes sense for an app where you don't really know exactly what the usage requirements are going to be. You know at first, your app not going to need a full machine to run. So you wrap it in a VM, and throw it onto a shared server. But you think, in the future, you're going to need to scale up to bigger and better hardware. But you're not sure.
If the app is already contained in a VM, it's trivial to just move it from Server A to a Bigger Server B if you need more power. The process takes no longer than it would take you to reboot the machine - sync up disk image (as much as possible), power off machine, finish syncing disk image, power on machine on new hardware. Doing this without virtualization would not be so trivial, and would force you to reinstall the app from scratch.
If the time comes that an app outgrows it's virtual server environment and needs dedicated hardware, again, it's fairly trivial to just copy the disk image onto a disk partition, boot off a rescue disk to repair any driver/hardware incompatibilities between virtual machine and the real hardware, and then simply start up the new machine. Doing this again, would require reinstalling from scratch.
Of course, some things are trivial to move, so it might not make sense to virtualize those things. But other could take a good number of man-hours to install, configure, import data, etc. You probably only want to do this once.
Also, when keeping everything separate, you don't need to worry about things where updating App A on this server, which has new version of dependency X, if app B if going to be affected by this. If everything is separate, you don't need to worry about some future new dependency of your app will break another dependency on another unrelated app.
It's not the end-all-be-all of solutions, but it definitely makes sense in a lot of situations. Throwing more hardware at the problem to make it go away is fairly cheap, and usually much cheaper than paying people people to try and fix interoperability issues between unrelated pieces of software.
I installed the latest version of OO.org on this computer (I didn't have any office suite installed) just to see. In your very specific example, it imported fine.
In the import menu, I had to right click the last column (the ID number) and choose "Text" instead of "Standard" import.
Seems like it works fine, as it kept my numbers in-tact. I don't think it's unrealistic for a computer to think that last column is supposed to be handled as number and not a data string. What it did do, was set the cell data to '0023456789, which escapes the first zero so it is not represented as a number.
That said, I think it did the wrong think in terms of formatting that column after the import. If I try to add another row, say the number 0123456789, it treats it like a number, not text. I have to manually right click the column and change the formatting (again) to be text after I import the data if I want to add more data rows.
It saved it out fine, although it put quotes around all my data columns. I had to change the filter settings to get it to save without the quotes.
It does work, if you put a little elbow grease into it, but it's not as intuitive as it could be. Since none of the office suites seem to "get it right", it seems that most people are contempt with this behavior.
You could always try opening a bug report to OO.org and see if they'll fix these usability issues (which, to me at least, are somewhat valid). Good luck trying to get MS to do the same with Excel (I don't know if Excel has the same problem).
OS coders aren't the ones filing class action lawsuits.
No, they'd still be 1.1TB disks because how many bytes a platter can store is completely independent to the sector size.
I can't help that people are too stupid to understand the difference between GB and GiB. Blame Windows for using the incorrect SI notation.
There is a standard. K means one thousand (1000). Not 1024 because it's a computer. Data transfer is measured in thousands of bytes as well (not 1024 of bytes), and they use KB/MB/GB.
The only thing inconsistent is how RAM manufactures report the numbers (they use MB and GB to represent numbers in powers of 2), but nobody complains because it's in their favor), and the notation Windows uses to report data (they should be using KiB/MiB/GiB, not KB/MB/GB).
Hard disks have *always* been measured in powers of 10. Nothing changed except people who don't care about this stuff and just want to go on AOL started using computers, and then noticed how everything didn't match up because they can't understand how binary notation works.
When troubleshooting somebody, it's easier to say "copy paste these commands in" then to try to explain how to change the settings in a GUI app.
Your example talks about fixing buggy ndis drivers. If you were running an Atheros chipset or similar for your wireless, there would be no issue. Blame the wireless card manufactures for not making Linux drivers. Or buy a supported wireless card.
I will give you that, wireless support is the *one thing* that doesn't work well. And in 99% of the cases, it's due to buggy drivers. Using a supported card fixes all those issues, however. I know it seems like a cop-out to say "it's not us, it's them", but it really isn't the Linux developer's fault in this case.
When they're able to make disks ~10% bigger just by switching to the larger sector size, I couldn't care less about this "wasted" space. You have a 1TB drive. Because of this change, they can fit 1.1TB of data onto the same size platter. So it would take ~28 million files worst-case scenario in this hypothetical situation before the 1.1TB drive would have less usable space. Of course, they like nice round numbers, so what it really means is they can make drives cheaper and faster. In the long run the consumer will win (there is enough competition where you shouldn't need to worry about price fixing). I like it.
I don't know how true or accurate this statement is, but Adobe claims no hardware acceleration on Linux is due to lack of standard API.
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration_02.html
Either Adobe is full of it (which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest), or somebody better start cracking that egg.
I think the key to remember is not you may not be able to do it on linux (because you clearly can do hardware accelerated video decoding), but that the tools *may* not be developer friendly enough for them to attempt to support it.
I'd be interested to know from somebody who's done video and/or graphics related development on both sides to see how accurate/true this statement might be.
As the previous posted said, use Flash 10.1. The hardware acceleration makes a huge difference. Before using the "beta" version Flash was practically unusable.
I have a Atom 330 with nVidia ION as well, and it can decode 720p H.264 video just fine (about 10-20% CPU usage in media player classic, or 30-40% with Flash). Haven't tried 1080p, but I'd suspect it works okay too. I'm using Win7, but I'd suspect that shouldn't make a difference.
I'm posting this from my (new) HP Mini 311, and I can assure you, my left/right mouse buttons are below the touchpad.
I'm sure the fact that while one went to a high school, which is run like a prison, and one is either semi-independant/going to college/working at a job has nothing to do with the dramatic difference in maturity levels.
When you treat people like adults, they act like adults.
17 vs 19 barrier is more of an environmental change than anything. In reality, there is no reason why people can't mature faster, it's just that we treat them like they're kids until they're 18, and POOF, all of a sudden you're an adult now and have to act like one, so people are forced to change.
The maturity difference is nothing short of arbitrary. They don't act mature because we don't want them to be mature.
Reread it again. It's GPL.
InnoDB plugin:
And I quote:
"The built-in InnoDB storage engine distributed with MySQL is licensed to end users exclusively by Sun/MySQL under contract with Innobase as part of the MySQL database server (both Enterprise and Community editions) under the GNU Public License (GPL) V2. The InnoDB Plugin is also available, from this website, in open source under GPL V2 terms."
So I can download the plugin directly from the InnoDB website, under the GPLv2 terms (as long as I also adhere the GPL). They also mention they license it to Sun under the GPL.
InnoDB:
http://www.innodb.com/products/innodb/license/
"Innobase Oy provides InnoDB exclusively to Sun/MySQL, which distributes and supports InnoDB within its product offerings. InnoDB is included under the open source GNU Public License (GPL) V2 in the MySQL Enterprise Server and is suitable for a broad range of users. The MySQL Community Edition, which is likewise is available in open source under the terms of the GPLv2, also includes InnoDB."
So I can download MySQL Community Edition from Sun, under the terms of the GPLv2, and use it, under the terms of GPLv2.
I'm not missing anything. Both InnoDB and InnoDB Plugin is GPLed. You can fork it. Please read it again.
Oracle owns the InnoDB engine. That could REALLY gum up the idea of forking.
InnoDB is GPL
Buy a nice monitor and flip it 90 degrees. I agree, widescreen monitors are not any better for coding. However, a good sized widesceen monitor flipped 90 degree IS very nice for that purpose.. Most decent monitors come with a VESA compliant mount, so if they don't come with a rotatable stand, you can at least get an after-market stand.... or buy one that's height adjustable/rotatable.
Gnome isn't NEARLY as guilty.
Compare http://projects.gnome.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNOME_applications to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_KDE_applications
It's knot even a kompetition!
Doesn't work in FF 3.5.5 (WinXP) either. I think it just doesn't work in Firefox.