However, C# is so MS tainted that people do forget it's an OS
Given that the posting said "I'm really hoping Gnome chooses c# as their new development language. Havoc Pennington is a fawking genius.", I think that's really implausible.
solution in this instance. But there is still a tendency to mod down anything which goes against the current/. groupthink.
There is no "group think" on Slashdot--there are too many groups. Individual groups may have "group think", but those groups that are most trigger happy with moderation don't belong to the OSS community, they belong to communities of threatened commercial platforms.
OSS advocates will generally not mod you down for saying that Windows does something better, they'll just tell you outright that they think that you are a moron and may proceed with some technical points to back up their claims.
Also being someone who programs for a living and enjoys their time at home I'm not really inclined to help an OS project.
You would help OSS projects simply by using them instead of buying the commercial stuff. And if you also send in the occasional bug report or feature request, you are a gold-level contributor.
Apart from in the field of enterprise computing I don't think planning on a long term strat is that great
It matters far more for desktop and home computing. You have to go out and buy new word processing software, new graphics software, etc. ever couple of years because you support companies that profit from (gratuitous) change--the same change that makes your life more difficult.
and at the moment I use prop products simply because there is no adequate open source alternative.
I frankly doubt that that's true. Maybe you don't know how to use the open source alternative and don't want to spend the time to change how you are working, but there is very little that can't be accomplished as efficiently or more efficiently with OSS than with proprietary software at this point.
Oh, lawyers will get involved:) Patents and stuff will be the next area of dotNet portability. Microsoft so far has let it slide, but is that because law is slow or because they intend to let it go?
Because of the large amount of fear of Microsoft that exists, this has been extensively examined by lots of people, including the Mono developers and their lawyers, and the conclusion seems to be that Microsoft simply does not have any patents that generally read on these kinds of implementations. So, the answer is: it's neither of the two choices you give.
Furthermore, Microsoft has publicly stated that it is their intention that people can implement ECMA C# (which includes a lot of.NET libraries) freely.
Cloning an API / programming langauge is one area that Microsoft seems mixed on. Didn't they start to challenge Samba? But WINE has gone untouched? Good to see we are fighting the good fight.
I wouldn't put it in such dramatic or general terms. I don't know what Microsoft did with Samba, but each such issue needs to be taken on a case by case basis. And even in cases where a company like Microsoft has a valid patent claim, people can almost always work around it (you may notice that Samba is still here).
C# is simply a decent language and runtime that has an open standard and has received extensive legal scrutiny. Using it for some philosophical reason would be the wrong motivation.
Microsoft's legal basis to complain would be, basically, that they are Microsoft.
Microsoft has engaged in all sorts of questionable business practices, but they have used the legal system to intimidate other companies comparatively rarely. Usually, Microsoft has been at the receiving end of such threats and lawsuits, for example from Apple or Sun.
So, going by their corporate history, Microsoft seems less likely to send legal nastygrams than other companies. The Microsoft way would be to change.NET incompatibly and make Portable.NET run poorly on PPC.
Anything which may be considered a controversial opinion (i.e. one which doesn't bow down to open source) is immediately modded as flamebait as no one will actually defend open source with arguments.
That's completely backwards. C# (in the form of Mono and Portable.NET) represents open source here and Java represents the proprietary solution.
Likewise, postings critical of Apple's GUI and window system, both of which are proprietary, often get modded down. As far as I can tell, postings critical of X11 get modded down much less, even though X11 represents the open source solution. I suspect that X11 users are secure enough about the future of their platform that they are willing to debate, rather than suppress, criticism, while users of those other platforms are worried about their futures.
I'm a pragmatist more interested in creating products than living to some moral standard.
People who advocate open source solutions are pragmatists--they simply are pragmatists with longer time horizons (and probably much more experience) than you. You see, they have lived through a couple of generations of operating systems and languages, and they know the kind of havoc proprietary solutions can wreak on their business.
Or do you seriously think that companies like IBM, Novell, or McDonalds are adopting open source models because of some "moral standard"? They do it because it is good for business and because it works.
people do not agree with the statement, and it is a touchy subject (for some) and is therefore flaimbait.
Let's call a spade a spade: people who are heavily personally invested in some platform and fear for its long-term viability get really zealous about it. On Slashdot, that shows up as a reflex to moderate down anything that state preferences, problems, or issues that may go against that platform. And these people firmly believe that they are right: it's a kind of group think.
There isn't much that can be done about it, it's just a fact of life. People do the same thing in the real world.
You may notice that, while debate between Linux, Windows, and X11 users may get heated, they generally don't mod each other down that much. While those users may dislike each others platforms and vehemently disagree, they are secure enough about the future of their platform that they don't have to resort to suppressing statements they don't like.
Open Source is not about free for these guys, it is increasing becoming a corporate game (Novell and IBM) with big profits.
It is about "free", as in "freedom": without the free and open source licenses that this software comes under, companies like Novell, IBM, etc. could never cooperate on these kinds of projects--by the time their lawyers have worked out their IP agreements, the market opportunities have evaporated. It is the freedom guaranteed by free software licenses that allows big companies to cooperate. The fact that they also don't have to pay licensing fees is related, but it isn't the deciding factor: everybody knows that free software still has non-zero cost of ownership (and companies like Microsoft are just stating the obvious when they point that out).
Like it or not, don't ignore C# / dotNet. It likely has more users than Sun got in 10 years,
I suspect it's not up to Java levels yet. But it will be: C# offers exactly what Sun/Java lacks: the freedom to do with it whatever you want, and the freedom for big companies to contribute to the same piece of software without getting lawyers involved and without having one contributor benefit disproportionately.
Keep in mind that Microsoft is a big organization, and while it is pretty clear that there must be people at Microsoft who are deliberately misstating the facts, there are probably also lots of people who genuinely believe that Windows is, in fact, better and cheaper.
What do you think the alternative is to off-shoring? If US companies don't off-shore to India, do you think Indians will just sit around, twiddle their thumbs, and keep buying expensive US-made products? Not on your life: they'll build highly competitive domestic industries, with their entire staff based in India, using cheap labor, completely beyond US regulations, taxation, or control. They'll import less from the US and export more to the US and offer cut-throat competition to US companies in other markets. The consequence will be many US companies going out of business entirely. Numerous examples show that countries can go from wastelands to economic powerhouses in a few decades, and India is ahead of the pack already.
Besides, I also don't see any justification for calling these jobs "American jobs" in the first place. Just because the US happens to have been able to build a large industrial base when other nations were in shambles doesn't mean that that kind of extraordinary situation is a God-given right. Postwar US economic success was a lucky, but temporary, windfall. Americans, like the rest of the world, have to learn to live with real, tough competition from other nations and the real possibility of economic disaster--the US has no more found a "magic formula" for wealth than any other nation, even though many US politicians arrogantly proclaim otherwise.
Furthermore, it was primarily the US that dragged other nations kicking and screaming into the current system of globalization and the US has benefitted, and continues to benefit, handsomely from that system. Outsourcing is, in effect, at the very core of why the US wanted globalization in the first place: you get economic efficiencies from comparative advantage. It makes no sense to come back and complain about that the system is doing what it was designed to do now that it is actually starting to work as desired and as expected.
Actual time it takes to render a collection of 2D primitives.
Ahh. that's because of the superior hardware.:-)
Or maybe just better Linux drivers and better configuration because Mac hardware is easier to target.
hey, can I start a microkernel flame war here? Is Linus or Tannenbaum reading?).
You can do whatever you like, but the market and the computer science research community already decided the issue 20 years ago, as well as the wisdom of PS/PDF-based window systems. Furthermore, Darwin isn't a microkernel anyway, and even if it was, its performance is close enough to other kernels not to say much about whether its design is good or bad.
Now, I don't see any need whatsoever with OS X. Linux doesn't bring anything to my Mac party now.
That wasn't what we were talking about. In any case, I'm happy to see that there is more choice in the market, and I'm even happier that I don't have to take some of those choices. As long as Apple doesn't try again to claim intellectual property ownership of all GUIs, they can do whatever they like.
Nothing is safe. You may get falsely accused of murder and be executed. Do you seriously worry about that?
If your project becomes popular (downloaded by thousands of users or more) and a corporate patent holder sees you as an obstacle or a competitor, the least he would be able to do is shut you down;
Once that happens, then you can start worrying about it. And the people that have to worry about it (e.g., the Mono project) will know that. Just like commercial developers, for that matter.
Do you have actual evidence that Linux/X11 provides things more efficiently than OS X, or is this wishful thinking?
I measured it. Don't get me wrong: OS X graphics is more than adequate for its purpose, but it isn't the speed daemon people seem to think it is.
And there is no technical reason why you should expect it to be--Apple doesn't have any technology that would allow them to get anything more out of the same graphics hardware than X11 or Windows. If anything, their architecture imposes additional overhead.
I know my "seat of the pants" feeling that I can't quantify is the total opposite: Linux/X11/KDE is a slow freaking pig on a wayyy faster computer than my OS X.
Comparisons across machines make little sense: your "way faster" PC may, for many reasons, have much slower graphics than your Macintosh.
But we don't have to compare across machines, since Linux runs on Macintosh hardware. From my iMac and my Powerbook, I can tell you that Linux+X11+Gnome is much more responsive on the same hardware than OS X.
OS X may feel more responsive in some specific cases (opaque moves and resizes) because of the way the system represents graphics, but you are paying a price for that and it doesn't really help in the general case.
Because selling something that doesn't exist means more of them are "available" on the market. This causes downward pressure on the stock.
I'm not sure what that "because" is in response to. The posting I was responding to defined "naked short selling" as a form of deliberate stock market manipulation. All I'm saying is that that doesn't have to be the case. I'm not saying that "naked short selling" is good, or that it should be permitted, simply that it doesn't have to involve an intent to manipulate. By analogy, not every fatal collision between a car and a pedestrian is vehicular homicide.
To everybody who thinks that this shows that good wins in the end and evil doesn't pay, keep in mind that Darl probably made more money in this little stunt in a few years than your average computer geek will make in his lifetime.
Justice won't be done until Darl is behind bars for stock manipulation and forced to give back the money he stole from investors. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen.
Naked short selling involves groups of people working together to manipulate the market by selling fictitious shares of stock in an effort to force a company's share price to go down. Not that I care.
As far as I can tell, naked short selling just means that you make a short sale but don't have the securities to back it up.
Market manipulation means that you deliberately try to affect the value of a price through your actions. Even if they are harmful to SCO's stock, I don't see why naked short sales of SCO necessarily represent an attempt to manipulate the market. In the case of SCO, it may just mean that people believe they know that it will go down further because of SCO's business practices (I sure am) and want to profit from their knowledge, but that they can't make a short sale any other way.
Eric Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use
No, that's not what he said; that statement is an oxymoron. If something self-replicates, its numbers necessarily grow exponentially until it hits resource constraints in the environment. There are no "nanomachines that self-replicate sub-exponentially".
What Drexler said that nanomachines that self-replicate are unlikely to ever enter widespread use, and therefore nanomachines will not replicate exponentially. Instead, they will be manufactured by desktop machines, according to him.
Traditionally, XFree86's backing store implementation has been so bad that using backing store actually slows things down if you're using a local machine.
Backing store always will always slow something down, either drawing itself (each drawing operation is carried out twice) or some window movements (as bits that are about to be clobbered need to be saved). I don't see that as a problem--that's the same tradeoff Macintosh makes: slower drawing in return for fewer redraws and smoother window moves.
Not sure whether the situation has improved -- I don't really want to deal with the increased memory requirements of backing store.
Neither do most people: they choose the occasional poor redraw (mostly due to bad toolkit design) over smoother redraws and more memory. Be glad that X11 gives you a choice--other platforms decide for you.
If you really want smooth moves, turn on backing store. That's, effectively, what Macintosh does.
But I disagree that things "jitter and blink". Even on my mid-range hardware with a fairly simple graphics card, and even using an application like Mozilla, whose redraw logic is horribly broken, there is no "jitter or blinking" when moving things around, even without backing store.
Things may "jitter or blink" if you are running on really slow hardware, or if you have an old graphics card installed. Of course, you can always turn off opaque moves/resizes on that kind of hardware.
That is, they seem slower because the way XFree86 does things (which, by the way, is being worked on extensively thanks to people like Keith Packard).
I'm not sure that this is really that much of a server issue. Some applications just are horribly bad at interacting with X11, often because they were originally written with Windows-like systems in mind. Mozilla, for example, is downright hostile to X11, and Qt and Gtk+ aren't really well-adapted to X11 either.
But, still, it all works well enough that people just don't worry about it. As a programmer, I may think that Mozilla and Qt's X11 interface sucks and that the people who wrote it didn't seem to know what they were doing, but as a user, I find it's good enough.
How can you take obvious evidence of people hating the bloat and how slow Gnome/KDE are becoming and say, "No, you're wrong."
I think those claims are unfounded.
I'm running Gnome 2.6 right now. On my mid-range PC with its 512M of memory, it is zippy and highly responsive, at least as good as Windows XP on the same hardware, but giving me more functionality. I'm also running the latest KDE on a 900MHz Duron laptop with 256M of memory--again, no problem. It's responsive and works well.
One can argue about whether Gnome or KDE are "well written" and whether they ought to use the kind of memory they use. I think they actually unnecessarily use many times the amount of memory and CPU they ought to use for the kind of functionality they provide. But it doesn't matter: they are more than fast enough even on hardware that's a few years old, and that is all that counts. And if you really want something leaner, Linux gives you dozens of choices.
KDE isn't "feature rich", it's a piece of badly-programmed bloatware. Even if you turned off all the "features", it's still more bloated,
What's your point? Enough people apparently like KDE and are willing to pay for the memory and CPU they need to. With Linux they get a choice. With Windows XP, you don't.
Furthermore, you implicitly equate KDE and the Windows GUI, but that is false. KDE has many features built in that the Windows XP GUI doesn't have, features that are costly to support.
Now also add Mozilla and a few others who can't just be a browser or whatever, they also have to have _yet_ _another_ set of their very own GUI widgets and bloated libraries.
And how is this different from Windows? There are dozens of different GUI toolkits in common use on Windows. In fact, many of them are the same GUI toolkits that are in common use on Linux. And commercial toolkit vendors for Windows add even more different GUI toolkits into the mix. The notion that applications on Windows (or Macintosh) use a single, consistent set of widgets is a myth.
Well, not to sound only negative, here's my constructive suggestion for the day: if you're going to advocate Linux, might as well get a profit out of it. Buy shares in some memory manufacturer;)
Operating systems and GUIs generally just fill whatever machine happens to be considered "standard" at a time. Linux is no exception. But it is different in two ways: first, it gives you a choice, and second, it does more with what it gets.
And yet, somehow all those "features" on Linux, end up using more memory and requiring more CPU speed than the Windows "bloat".
I frankly doubt that you even know how to make such a comparsion reliably: Linux and Windows tools account differently for memory, and they use different caching strategies at all levels.
So I guess the term for Linux is "feature-rich" but the equivalent term for Windows is "bloated".
No, they are not equivalent. First of all, Linux gives you a wide range of choices for the desktop. If you want a lean-and-mean desktop, you can use IceWM or XFCE. If you want a featureful one, you can use Gnome or KDE.
Now, you might be justified to refer to Gnome or KDE as "bloated", since they seem pretty big and have loats of features. Keep in mind, however, that both Gnome and KDE out of the box already have much more functionality than the Windows XP desktop and use less resources to implement that functionality.
Furthermore, because Linux users have a trivial choice among desktops (you can choose everything from an xterm to KDE in the login box) and since there are lots of Gnome and KDE users, apparently people like the features in those desktops; that makes Linux desktops "feature rich", rather than "bloated", because "bloat" refers to functionality that people don't actually want or need.
Systems that can fly with Win98 or WinNT are barely usable with newer Linux distros.
Yes: that is because the new Linux desktop support features that are completely lacking from Windows 98 or Windows NT, such as transparency, backing store and bitmap caching, antialiasing, and vector graphics-based themes. Those take tons of memory and CPU. Those features are there in the default installs because most people want them.
And Linux+X11 still provides those features more efficiently than Windows or Macintosh.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down.
Gnome 1.x, KDE 1.x, XFCE, CDE, and lots of other desktops run just fine on that kind of hardware.
My complaint is that it seems there aren't many window managers that are in a middle ground.
There are tons of window managers and desktops for Linux, catering to every need and foible; IceWM and XFCE 4.0 are both good choices for low-end machines. Furthermore, with 1GHz+ machines available for a couple of hundred dollars, you don't need to run that kind of hardware.
But if you like Windows 98, please feel free to go back to it. While many people are forced to use Windows, I'm betting you aren't forced to use Linux.
You're a bit confused, since you seem to be arguing against a point that I didn't make. I agree that software patents are bad and overall have a deleterious effect on open source software. But as an open source developer, the chances that I get sued and suffer ill consequences are just not something worth seriously worrying about.
Slashdot Mirror
However, C# is so MS tainted that people do forget it's an OS
/. groupthink.
Given that the posting said "I'm really hoping Gnome chooses c# as their new development language. Havoc Pennington is a fawking genius.", I think that's really implausible.
solution in this instance. But there is still a tendency to mod down anything which goes against the current
There is no "group think" on Slashdot--there are too many groups. Individual groups may have "group think", but those groups that are most trigger happy with moderation don't belong to the OSS community, they belong to communities of threatened commercial platforms.
OSS advocates will generally not mod you down for saying that Windows does something better, they'll just tell you outright that they think that you are a moron and may proceed with some technical points to back up their claims.
Also being someone who programs for a living and enjoys their time at home I'm not really inclined to help an OS project.
You would help OSS projects simply by using them instead of buying the commercial stuff. And if you also send in the occasional bug report or feature request, you are a gold-level contributor.
Apart from in the field of enterprise computing I don't think planning on a long term strat is that great
It matters far more for desktop and home computing. You have to go out and buy new word processing software, new graphics software, etc. ever couple of years because you support companies that profit from (gratuitous) change--the same change that makes your life more difficult.
and at the moment I use prop products simply because there is no adequate open source alternative.
I frankly doubt that that's true. Maybe you don't know how to use the open source alternative and don't want to spend the time to change how you are working, but there is very little that can't be accomplished as efficiently or more efficiently with OSS than with proprietary software at this point.
Oh, lawyers will get involved :) Patents and stuff will be the next area of dotNet portability. Microsoft so far has let it slide, but is that because law is slow or because they intend to let it go?
.NET libraries) freely.
Because of the large amount of fear of Microsoft that exists, this has been extensively examined by lots of people, including the Mono developers and their lawyers, and the conclusion seems to be that Microsoft simply does not have any patents that generally read on these kinds of implementations. So, the answer is: it's neither of the two choices you give.
Furthermore, Microsoft has publicly stated that it is their intention that people can implement ECMA C# (which includes a lot of
Cloning an API / programming langauge is one area that Microsoft seems mixed on. Didn't they start to challenge Samba? But WINE has gone untouched? Good to see we are fighting the good fight.
I wouldn't put it in such dramatic or general terms. I don't know what Microsoft did with Samba, but each such issue needs to be taken on a case by case basis. And even in cases where a company like Microsoft has a valid patent claim, people can almost always work around it (you may notice that Samba is still here).
C# is simply a decent language and runtime that has an open standard and has received extensive legal scrutiny. Using it for some philosophical reason would be the wrong motivation.
Microsoft's legal basis to complain would be, basically, that they are Microsoft.
.NET incompatibly and make Portable .NET run poorly on PPC.
Microsoft has engaged in all sorts of questionable business practices, but they have used the legal system to intimidate other companies comparatively rarely. Usually, Microsoft has been at the receiving end of such threats and lawsuits, for example from Apple or Sun.
So, going by their corporate history, Microsoft seems less likely to send legal nastygrams than other companies. The Microsoft way would be to change
Anything which may be considered a controversial opinion (i.e. one which doesn't bow down to open source) is immediately modded as flamebait as no one will actually defend open source with arguments.
.NET) represents open source here and Java represents the proprietary solution.
That's completely backwards. C# (in the form of Mono and Portable
Likewise, postings critical of Apple's GUI and window system, both of which are proprietary, often get modded down. As far as I can tell, postings critical of X11 get modded down much less, even though X11 represents the open source solution. I suspect that X11 users are secure enough about the future of their platform that they are willing to debate, rather than suppress, criticism, while users of those other platforms are worried about their futures.
I'm a pragmatist more interested in creating products than living to some moral standard.
People who advocate open source solutions are pragmatists--they simply are pragmatists with longer time horizons (and probably much more experience) than you. You see, they have lived through a couple of generations of operating systems and languages, and they know the kind of havoc proprietary solutions can wreak on their business.
Or do you seriously think that companies like IBM, Novell, or McDonalds are adopting open source models because of some "moral standard"? They do it because it is good for business and because it works.
people do not agree with the statement, and it is a touchy subject (for some) and is therefore flaimbait.
Let's call a spade a spade: people who are heavily personally invested in some platform and fear for its long-term viability get really zealous about it. On Slashdot, that shows up as a reflex to moderate down anything that state preferences, problems, or issues that may go against that platform. And these people firmly believe that they are right: it's a kind of group think.
There isn't much that can be done about it, it's just a fact of life. People do the same thing in the real world.
You may notice that, while debate between Linux, Windows, and X11 users may get heated, they generally don't mod each other down that much. While those users may dislike each others platforms and vehemently disagree, they are secure enough about the future of their platform that they don't have to resort to suppressing statements they don't like.
What legal basis would Microsoft's lawyers have to complain? C# and large parts of the libraries clearly are not Microsoft intellectual property.
Open Source is not about free for these guys, it is increasing becoming a corporate game (Novell and IBM) with big profits.
It is about "free", as in "freedom": without the free and open source licenses that this software comes under, companies like Novell, IBM, etc. could never cooperate on these kinds of projects--by the time their lawyers have worked out their IP agreements, the market opportunities have evaporated. It is the freedom guaranteed by free software licenses that allows big companies to cooperate. The fact that they also don't have to pay licensing fees is related, but it isn't the deciding factor: everybody knows that free software still has non-zero cost of ownership (and companies like Microsoft are just stating the obvious when they point that out).
Like it or not, don't ignore C# / dotNet. It likely has more users than Sun got in 10 years,
I suspect it's not up to Java levels yet. But it will be: C# offers exactly what Sun/Java lacks: the freedom to do with it whatever you want, and the freedom for big companies to contribute to the same piece of software without getting lawyers involved and without having one contributor benefit disproportionately.
Keep in mind that Microsoft is a big organization, and while it is pretty clear that there must be people at Microsoft who are deliberately misstating the facts, there are probably also lots of people who genuinely believe that Windows is, in fact, better and cheaper.
What do you think the alternative is to off-shoring? If US companies don't off-shore to India, do you think Indians will just sit around, twiddle their thumbs, and keep buying expensive US-made products? Not on your life: they'll build highly competitive domestic industries, with their entire staff based in India, using cheap labor, completely beyond US regulations, taxation, or control. They'll import less from the US and export more to the US and offer cut-throat competition to US companies in other markets. The consequence will be many US companies going out of business entirely. Numerous examples show that countries can go from wastelands to economic powerhouses in a few decades, and India is ahead of the pack already.
Besides, I also don't see any justification for calling these jobs "American jobs" in the first place. Just because the US happens to have been able to build a large industrial base when other nations were in shambles doesn't mean that that kind of extraordinary situation is a God-given right. Postwar US economic success was a lucky, but temporary, windfall. Americans, like the rest of the world, have to learn to live with real, tough competition from other nations and the real possibility of economic disaster--the US has no more found a "magic formula" for wealth than any other nation, even though many US politicians arrogantly proclaim otherwise.
Furthermore, it was primarily the US that dragged other nations kicking and screaming into the current system of globalization and the US has benefitted, and continues to benefit, handsomely from that system. Outsourcing is, in effect, at the very core of why the US wanted globalization in the first place: you get economic efficiencies from comparative advantage. It makes no sense to come back and complain about that the system is doing what it was designed to do now that it is actually starting to work as desired and as expected.
What actually was measured?
:-)
Actual time it takes to render a collection of 2D primitives.
Ahh. that's because of the superior hardware.
Or maybe just better Linux drivers and better configuration because Mac hardware is easier to target.
hey, can I start a microkernel flame war here? Is Linus or Tannenbaum reading?).
You can do whatever you like, but the market and the computer science research community already decided the issue 20 years ago, as well as the wisdom of PS/PDF-based window systems. Furthermore, Darwin isn't a microkernel anyway, and even if it was, its performance is close enough to other kernels not to say much about whether its design is good or bad.
Now, I don't see any need whatsoever with OS X. Linux doesn't bring anything to my Mac party now.
That wasn't what we were talking about. In any case, I'm happy to see that there is more choice in the market, and I'm even happier that I don't have to take some of those choices. As long as Apple doesn't try again to claim intellectual property ownership of all GUIs, they can do whatever they like.
If there are any in your neighborhood, it probably will--displaying nearby businesses by category is a standard function on car-navigation systems.
The illusion of being "safe" is not real.
Nothing is safe. You may get falsely accused of murder and be executed. Do you seriously worry about that?
If your project becomes popular (downloaded by thousands of users or more) and a corporate patent holder sees you as an obstacle or a competitor, the least he would be able to do is shut you down;
Once that happens, then you can start worrying about it. And the people that have to worry about it (e.g., the Mono project) will know that. Just like commercial developers, for that matter.
Do you have actual evidence that Linux/X11 provides things more efficiently than OS X, or is this wishful thinking?
I measured it. Don't get me wrong: OS X graphics is more than adequate for its purpose, but it isn't the speed daemon people seem to think it is.
And there is no technical reason why you should expect it to be--Apple doesn't have any technology that would allow them to get anything more out of the same graphics hardware than X11 or Windows. If anything, their architecture imposes additional overhead.
I know my "seat of the pants" feeling that I can't quantify is the total opposite: Linux/X11/KDE is a slow freaking pig on a wayyy faster computer than my OS X.
Comparisons across machines make little sense: your "way faster" PC may, for many reasons, have much slower graphics than your Macintosh.
But we don't have to compare across machines, since Linux runs on Macintosh hardware. From my iMac and my Powerbook, I can tell you that Linux+X11+Gnome is much more responsive on the same hardware than OS X.
OS X may feel more responsive in some specific cases (opaque moves and resizes) because of the way the system represents graphics, but you are paying a price for that and it doesn't really help in the general case.
Because selling something that doesn't exist means more of them are "available" on the market. This causes downward pressure on the stock.
I'm not sure what that "because" is in response to. The posting I was responding to defined "naked short selling" as a form of deliberate stock market manipulation. All I'm saying is that that doesn't have to be the case. I'm not saying that "naked short selling" is good, or that it should be permitted, simply that it doesn't have to involve an intent to manipulate. By analogy, not every fatal collision between a car and a pedestrian is vehicular homicide.
To everybody who thinks that this shows that good wins in the end and evil doesn't pay, keep in mind that Darl probably made more money in this little stunt in a few years than your average computer geek will make in his lifetime.
Justice won't be done until Darl is behind bars for stock manipulation and forced to give back the money he stole from investors. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen.
Naked short selling involves groups of people working together to manipulate the market by selling fictitious shares of stock in an effort to force a company's share price to go down. Not that I care.
As far as I can tell, naked short selling just means that you make a short sale but don't have the securities to back it up.
Market manipulation means that you deliberately try to affect the value of a price through your actions. Even if they are harmful to SCO's stock, I don't see why naked short sales of SCO necessarily represent an attempt to manipulate the market. In the case of SCO, it may just mean that people believe they know that it will go down further because of SCO's business practices (I sure am) and want to profit from their knowledge, but that they can't make a short sale any other way.
Eric Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use
No, that's not what he said; that statement is an oxymoron. If something self-replicates, its numbers necessarily grow exponentially until it hits resource constraints in the environment. There are no "nanomachines that self-replicate sub-exponentially".
What Drexler said that nanomachines that self-replicate are unlikely to ever enter widespread use, and therefore nanomachines will not replicate exponentially. Instead, they will be manufactured by desktop machines, according to him.
Traditionally, XFree86's backing store implementation has been so bad that using backing store actually slows things down if you're using a local machine.
Backing store always will always slow something down, either drawing itself (each drawing operation is carried out twice) or some window movements (as bits that are about to be clobbered need to be saved). I don't see that as a problem--that's the same tradeoff Macintosh makes: slower drawing in return for fewer redraws and smoother window moves.
Not sure whether the situation has improved -- I don't really want to deal with the increased memory requirements of backing store.
Neither do most people: they choose the occasional poor redraw (mostly due to bad toolkit design) over smoother redraws and more memory. Be glad that X11 gives you a choice--other platforms decide for you.
(That's partly why our pets seem so intelligent and humanlike.)
My pet human seems very humanlike, although it never struck me as very intelligent.
If you really want smooth moves, turn on backing store. That's, effectively, what Macintosh does.
But I disagree that things "jitter and blink". Even on my mid-range hardware with a fairly simple graphics card, and even using an application like Mozilla, whose redraw logic is horribly broken, there is no "jitter or blinking" when moving things around, even without backing store.
Things may "jitter or blink" if you are running on really slow hardware, or if you have an old graphics card installed. Of course, you can always turn off opaque moves/resizes on that kind of hardware.
That is, they seem slower because the way XFree86 does things (which, by the way, is being worked on extensively thanks to people like Keith Packard).
I'm not sure that this is really that much of a server issue. Some applications just are horribly bad at interacting with X11, often because they were originally written with Windows-like systems in mind. Mozilla, for example, is downright hostile to X11, and Qt and Gtk+ aren't really well-adapted to X11 either.
But, still, it all works well enough that people just don't worry about it. As a programmer, I may think that Mozilla and Qt's X11 interface sucks and that the people who wrote it didn't seem to know what they were doing, but as a user, I find it's good enough.
How can you take obvious evidence of people hating the bloat and how slow Gnome/KDE are becoming and say, "No, you're wrong."
I think those claims are unfounded.
I'm running Gnome 2.6 right now. On my mid-range PC with its 512M of memory, it is zippy and highly responsive, at least as good as Windows XP on the same hardware, but giving me more functionality. I'm also running the latest KDE on a 900MHz Duron laptop with 256M of memory--again, no problem. It's responsive and works well.
One can argue about whether Gnome or KDE are "well written" and whether they ought to use the kind of memory they use. I think they actually unnecessarily use many times the amount of memory and CPU they ought to use for the kind of functionality they provide. But it doesn't matter: they are more than fast enough even on hardware that's a few years old, and that is all that counts. And if you really want something leaner, Linux gives you dozens of choices.
KDE isn't "feature rich", it's a piece of badly-programmed bloatware. Even if you turned off all the "features", it's still more bloated,
;)
What's your point? Enough people apparently like KDE and are willing to pay for the memory and CPU they need to. With Linux they get a choice. With Windows XP, you don't.
Furthermore, you implicitly equate KDE and the Windows GUI, but that is false. KDE has many features built in that the Windows XP GUI doesn't have, features that are costly to support.
Now also add Mozilla and a few others who can't just be a browser or whatever, they also have to have _yet_ _another_ set of their very own GUI widgets and bloated libraries.
And how is this different from Windows? There are dozens of different GUI toolkits in common use on Windows. In fact, many of them are the same GUI toolkits that are in common use on Linux. And commercial toolkit vendors for Windows add even more different GUI toolkits into the mix. The notion that applications on Windows (or Macintosh) use a single, consistent set of widgets is a myth.
Well, not to sound only negative, here's my constructive suggestion for the day: if you're going to advocate Linux, might as well get a profit out of it. Buy shares in some memory manufacturer
Operating systems and GUIs generally just fill whatever machine happens to be considered "standard" at a time. Linux is no exception. But it is different in two ways: first, it gives you a choice, and second, it does more with what it gets.
And yet, somehow all those "features" on Linux, end up using more memory and requiring more CPU speed than the Windows "bloat".
I frankly doubt that you even know how to make such a comparsion reliably: Linux and Windows tools account differently for memory, and they use different caching strategies at all levels.
So I guess the term for Linux is "feature-rich" but the equivalent term for Windows is "bloated".
No, they are not equivalent. First of all, Linux gives you a wide range of choices for the desktop. If you want a lean-and-mean desktop, you can use IceWM or XFCE. If you want a featureful one, you can use Gnome or KDE.
Now, you might be justified to refer to Gnome or KDE as "bloated", since they seem pretty big and have loats of features. Keep in mind, however, that both Gnome and KDE out of the box already have much more functionality than the Windows XP desktop and use less resources to implement that functionality.
Furthermore, because Linux users have a trivial choice among desktops (you can choose everything from an xterm to KDE in the login box) and since there are lots of Gnome and KDE users, apparently people like the features in those desktops; that makes Linux desktops "feature rich", rather than "bloated", because "bloat" refers to functionality that people don't actually want or need.
Systems that can fly with Win98 or WinNT are barely usable with newer Linux distros.
Yes: that is because the new Linux desktop support features that are completely lacking from Windows 98 or Windows NT, such as transparency, backing store and bitmap caching, antialiasing, and vector graphics-based themes. Those take tons of memory and CPU. Those features are there in the default installs because most people want them.
And Linux+X11 still provides those features more efficiently than Windows or Macintosh.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down.
Gnome 1.x, KDE 1.x, XFCE, CDE, and lots of other desktops run just fine on that kind of hardware.
My complaint is that it seems there aren't many window managers that are in a middle ground.
There are tons of window managers and desktops for Linux, catering to every need and foible; IceWM and XFCE 4.0 are both good choices for low-end machines. Furthermore, with 1GHz+ machines available for a couple of hundred dollars, you don't need to run that kind of hardware.
But if you like Windows 98, please feel free to go back to it. While many people are forced to use Windows, I'm betting you aren't forced to use Linux.
You're a bit confused, since you seem to be arguing against a point that I didn't make. I agree that software patents are bad and overall have a deleterious effect on open source software. But as an open source developer, the chances that I get sued and suffer ill consequences are just not something worth seriously worrying about.