The definition of a monopoly is about how much of the market they have, not what alternatives there are. Remember MS was abusing its OS monopoly despite there being various, arguably superior, alternatives
I don't find that to be the case. While using Gtk+ in raw C is kind of cumbersome, Gtk+ has excellent C++, C#, and Python bindings.
It was originally a C toolkit and it shows. The Python bindings are an order of magnitude nicer than raw GTK+, but still not as nice as Qt's. Remember Qt is not only C++ but actually pushes that to the extent that it needs a separate preprocessor.
That's because Qt is a cross-platform library, while Gtk+ is a GUI toolkit. Why would I want to have a license-encumbered C++ wrapper around the native Linux APIs?
Maybe so you can make a crossplatform program? Portability is an advantage, really. Linux is unlikely to always be the best platform for you, and if you don't have to rewrite your program when you change it will be nice. And if your program would be GPL anyway it's not an encumberance.
"If they didn't want to unnecessarily split everyone, they would have given up on their abortion of a desktop environment as soon as the Qt licensing issues were resolved.
And if the KDS team hadn't wanted to unnecessaily split, they would have given up on their abortion of a desktop environment instead of just changing the licensing."
Gnome was started, after KDE existed, because of the licensing problem. (Without going into too much detail, Mattias (sp?) used Qt as the basis when starting KDE for the pragmatic reasons that it was free (beer) available and the best-looking toolkit for *nix. Qt was not Free (speech) so KDE was not a completely free desktop, and IIRC there were questions over the legality of linking GPLed kde programs and libraries against the non-gpl-compatiable Qt). So when the licensing issue was resolved (by Qt being released as GPL) it was Gnome's place to step down, not KDE. Maybe the license change would not have happened without Gnome, but Gnome had achieved this and should have stepped down, like Harmony did, and like the win32 port of Qt GPL probably will.
"At this point the Kool Desktop Environment project (KDE) was showing a lot of promise: a team of programmers started an effort to bring Unix to the desktop using the C++ based GUI toolkit. I mailed my friend Erik Troan suggesting him to include that code into the Red Hat distribution and I mailed Richard Stallman to let him know that this interesting project existed. KDE was licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL. I got a reply back from both Erik and Richard pointing out that KDE dependency on Qt resulted in a piece of non-free software. Qt did not end users the right to modify, redistribute nor distribute modifed copies of the code and violated the terms of the GNU GPL.
Being a free software entusiast, I contacted Troll Tech, the authors of Qt to propose an alternate licensing scheme for Qt that would still allow them to build a company while empowering users but got no reply. The Troll Tech FAQ at the time also contained significant errors regarding the GPL and ignored dual-licensing schemes. After a time out period, we decided to do something about this problem. Also discouraging was the fact that the KDE developers were not interested in resolving those issues as pointed out in their FAQ document and their mailing list policies.
We evaluated writing a free Qt replacement, but reimplementing an API would most likely result in less efficient software and would have taken too long to implement. GNUstep, Wine and LessTif were other projects that had attempted to reimplement a proprietary API and just had a limited success after a long development history."
KDE existed and was working. GNOME was started because of the licensing issues.
Functionally, they are very different in actual use. They may be similar in terms of what they can actually do, but with Qt you can do it a lot easier. And Qt has many things not included in GTK, like networking and multithreading bits.
Read some history. KDE had a working desktop environment up and running, then the GNOME project was started to create a replacement, *solely*, according to their statements, because of the licensing problems with kde. Gnome was always behind, it would always have made more sense (and indeed still does) for gnome to give up than KDE. Gnome started the whole desktop wars, not KDE.
The issues that were given as the reason for starting GNOME have been resolved. Qt is free, free like readline, freeer in the stallman sense than GTK is.
There's actually a good purpose for the User-Agent. It means sites can stop trying to send me that flash crap because I'm using links. More generally, it tells them not to sent plugin-requiring content unless the UA is Mozilla.
Say what you want, but seriously, nothing beats WMA on quality for really tiny files. Which is what I imagine you tend to put on these phones, given how little storage they have. Seriously, try getting a 3-minute song down to 1mb with any other codec and see if it's still listenable. Because with wma it is - just, but it is.
No, zip doesn't decrease the quality but it means it takes you time to decompress it. Bandwidth grows so much faster than CPU speed that you'll spend more time unflacing your music than you save on the bandwidth. Remember how people used to have compression on ppp links so their files would go that bit faster? And notice how no-one does that with DSL/cable because it's not worth it in terms of the amount of CPU you have to use? The same will be true of flac.
I think you're wrong. The industry doesn't want you making a copy for your car, they want you to buy another copy for that. And they'll try and make it so that that's what you do.
Don't get me wrong, I think mono is a great idea. But I'm worried about how closely tied it is to gnome. Not because of it taking over gnome, but because of it ignoring KDE. I think they should try and get more of the Qt stuff in there, Qt# at least should be in the standard mono dist. Otherwise you just split everyone.
Java is incredibly slow for GUI though. People will say I'm trolling but it's a fact. I'd say try WxWidgets. It's actually native on win32 now so good performance, looks reasonably good, and like Qt includes a few extras like some networking stuff.
It's not really STO because the passphrase is the key. The point is that someone else can use passphrase authentication and it doesn't mean they can break yours. With real STO, it would.
Exactly, it's the royalties that are the problem. But most of them are going to the middlemen rather than the artists. Bandwidth is a bit of a problem but not so much, torrent-type systems can solve it and it's getting cheaper all the time anyway. $14 a month for all the songs you want isn't going to happen while the music industry works the way it does. But it's possible, even with today's tech, and some day it will happen.
If you can see there is progress happening on the beta, and some prospect of eventually making it to 1.0, then that's fine. Xine and Gaim are good examples of this. But when they call it beta and just leave it like that, it's pure laziness.
Yeah, except for the two years you didn't just get 15 songs a month, you got maybe 100. How many songs you bought last month are you still listening to, yet alone two years ago? If it's more than about 3 you're showing your age.
Popular music deprecates (sp?) awfully fast. I would say that the long term value of iTunes is going to be pretty close to 0. Most of the albums that cost you $9.99 will be going for $2 off ebay, if you actually want to listen to them any more.
And using your method of counting, the value of a cinema ticket is zero.
Actually iTMS makes a pretty big profit. IIRC it's about $.08 per song. And bigger ones would be possible if it weren't for the RIAA etc. middlemen. The marginal cost for producing songs for download like this is *tiny*. If they use torrents or something, it becomes *zero*. Artists don't want much money, enough to live on is all they need because they don't expect to be able to do that. So $14 a month is doable. Very doable.
Why is it something private companies should be doing though? Wireless networks benefit the population at least as much as public roads do. Allowing everyone free access to the internet would be a great step forward.
As I'd suspected from personal experience, konqueror is far faster than gecko-based browsers for everything except scripts. If you're using KDE, try it. It's really much nicer to use too, imo.
Slashdot Mirror
Danish sounds pretty like German, especially in the south part of the country.
The definition of a monopoly is about how much of the market they have, not what alternatives there are. Remember MS was abusing its OS monopoly despite there being various, arguably superior, alternatives
It was originally a C toolkit and it shows. The Python bindings are an order of magnitude nicer than raw GTK+, but still not as nice as Qt's. Remember Qt is not only C++ but actually pushes that to the extent that it needs a separate preprocessor.
That's because Qt is a cross-platform library, while Gtk+ is a GUI toolkit. Why would I want to have a license-encumbered C++ wrapper around the native Linux APIs?
Maybe so you can make a crossplatform program? Portability is an advantage, really. Linux is unlikely to always be the best platform for you, and if you don't have to rewrite your program when you change it will be nice. And if your program would be GPL anyway it's not an encumberance.
And if the KDS team hadn't wanted to unnecessaily split, they would have given up on their abortion of a desktop environment instead of just changing the licensing."
Gnome was started, after KDE existed, because of the licensing problem. (Without going into too much detail, Mattias (sp?) used Qt as the basis when starting KDE for the pragmatic reasons that it was free (beer) available and the best-looking toolkit for *nix. Qt was not Free (speech) so KDE was not a completely free desktop, and IIRC there were questions over the legality of linking GPLed kde programs and libraries against the non-gpl-compatiable Qt). So when the licensing issue was resolved (by Qt being released as GPL) it was Gnome's place to step down, not KDE. Maybe the license change would not have happened without Gnome, but Gnome had achieved this and should have stepped down, like Harmony did, and like the win32 port of Qt GPL probably will.
"At this point the Kool Desktop Environment project (KDE) was showing a lot of promise: a team of programmers started an effort to bring Unix to the desktop using the C++ based GUI toolkit. I mailed my friend Erik Troan suggesting him to include that code into the Red Hat distribution and I mailed Richard Stallman to let him know that this interesting project existed. KDE was licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL. I got a reply back from both Erik and Richard pointing out that KDE dependency on Qt resulted in a piece of non-free software. Qt did not end users the right to modify, redistribute nor distribute modifed copies of the code and violated the terms of the GNU GPL.
Being a free software entusiast, I contacted Troll Tech, the authors of Qt to propose an alternate licensing scheme for Qt that would still allow them to build a company while empowering users but got no reply. The Troll Tech FAQ at the time also contained significant errors regarding the GPL and ignored dual-licensing schemes. After a time out period, we decided to do something about this problem. Also discouraging was the fact that the KDE developers were not interested in resolving those issues as pointed out in their FAQ document and their mailing list policies.
We evaluated writing a free Qt replacement, but reimplementing an API would most likely result in less efficient software and would have taken too long to implement. GNUstep, Wine and LessTif were other projects that had attempted to reimplement a proprietary API and just had a limited success after a long development history."
KDE existed and was working. GNOME was started because of the licensing issues.
Functionally, they are very different in actual use. They may be similar in terms of what they can actually do, but with Qt you can do it a lot easier. And Qt has many things not included in GTK, like networking and multithreading bits.
Read some history. KDE had a working desktop environment up and running, then the GNOME project was started to create a replacement, *solely*, according to their statements, because of the licensing problems with kde. Gnome was always behind, it would always have made more sense (and indeed still does) for gnome to give up than KDE. Gnome started the whole desktop wars, not KDE.
The issues that were given as the reason for starting GNOME have been resolved. Qt is free, free like readline, freeer in the stallman sense than GTK is.
There's actually a good purpose for the User-Agent. It means sites can stop trying to send me that flash crap because I'm using links. More generally, it tells them not to sent plugin-requiring content unless the UA is Mozilla.
Say what you want, but seriously, nothing beats WMA on quality for really tiny files. Which is what I imagine you tend to put on these phones, given how little storage they have. Seriously, try getting a 3-minute song down to 1mb with any other codec and see if it's still listenable. Because with wma it is - just, but it is.
He means it is the best language with a published ECMA specification. Perhaps he prefers java or something else that doesn't have a ECMA spec.
No, zip doesn't decrease the quality but it means it takes you time to decompress it. Bandwidth grows so much faster than CPU speed that you'll spend more time unflacing your music than you save on the bandwidth. Remember how people used to have compression on ppp links so their files would go that bit faster? And notice how no-one does that with DSL/cable because it's not worth it in terms of the amount of CPU you have to use? The same will be true of flac.
I think you're wrong. The industry doesn't want you making a copy for your car, they want you to buy another copy for that. And they'll try and make it so that that's what you do.
Don't get me wrong, I think mono is a great idea. But I'm worried about how closely tied it is to gnome. Not because of it taking over gnome, but because of it ignoring KDE. I think they should try and get more of the Qt stuff in there, Qt# at least should be in the standard mono dist. Otherwise you just split everyone.
Java is incredibly slow for GUI though. People will say I'm trolling but it's a fact. I'd say try WxWidgets. It's actually native on win32 now so good performance, looks reasonably good, and like Qt includes a few extras like some networking stuff.
My favourite Turing machine is the one implemented for Conway's life. I think that's pretty impressive.
It's not really STO because the passphrase is the key. The point is that someone else can use passphrase authentication and it doesn't mean they can break yours. With real STO, it would.
Natalie Portman. I mean, duh.
Exactly, it's the royalties that are the problem. But most of them are going to the middlemen rather than the artists. Bandwidth is a bit of a problem but not so much, torrent-type systems can solve it and it's getting cheaper all the time anyway. $14 a month for all the songs you want isn't going to happen while the music industry works the way it does. But it's possible, even with today's tech, and some day it will happen.
If you can see there is progress happening on the beta, and some prospect of eventually making it to 1.0, then that's fine. Xine and Gaim are good examples of this. But when they call it beta and just leave it like that, it's pure laziness.
Popular music deprecates (sp?) awfully fast. I would say that the long term value of iTunes is going to be pretty close to 0. Most of the albums that cost you $9.99 will be going for $2 off ebay, if you actually want to listen to them any more.
And using your method of counting, the value of a cinema ticket is zero.
Actually iTMS makes a pretty big profit. IIRC it's about $.08 per song. And bigger ones would be possible if it weren't for the RIAA etc. middlemen. The marginal cost for producing songs for download like this is *tiny*. If they use torrents or something, it becomes *zero*. Artists don't want much money, enough to live on is all they need because they don't expect to be able to do that. So $14 a month is doable. Very doable.
Why is it something private companies should be doing though? Wireless networks benefit the population at least as much as public roads do. Allowing everyone free access to the internet would be a great step forward.
There's a name we have for software which redirects you to their site when a url you type can't be found. We call it spyware.
As I'd suspected from personal experience, konqueror is far faster than gecko-based browsers for everything except scripts. If you're using KDE, try it. It's really much nicer to use too, imo.