From TFA.
Q: Overall, what percentage of NVIDIA's customers do you believe use Linux?
I don't know many concrete percentages. Highend workstation visualization is roughly half Linux, and Digital Content Creation (DCC) is largely Linux. NVIDIA Linux graphics powers a respectable portion of the 3D workstations. Our CUDA user base also has a large Linux contingent.
. and earlier:
Q: Is NVIDIA starting to see more interest in the driver from companies or publishers?
There has been, and continues to be, significant Linux workstation interest from a variety of workstation segments (e.g., Oil & Gas, Automotive, Film and Broadcast, etc). Workstation is where Linux has the most measurable business impact for NVIDIA.
In large multi-display installations Linux is very popular and offers several strong and distinct advantages over other operating systems.
CUDA on Linux receives huge interest from a variety of High Performance Computing (HPC) customers.
Linux on Tegra receives a lot of customer interest.
Linux on Ion also receives considerable interest.
It seems Linux use is very strong among high end commercial art creation, alongside the scientific/engineering and small form-factor computing areas.
I grew up on a farm and have killed and eaten many animals as a part of my daily life as a young man.
Around 20 years ago I stopped eating meat altogether after a fairly gruesome botched attempt at killing an animal. It left an indelible (inedible?) impression on me that I couldn't shake. My reasons for maintaining that vegetarianism however were manyfold.
1/ I've realised I simply don't need to eat meat to be healthy: I very rarely get sick and have am in very good physical condition.
2/ I found eating meat to be less metabolically efficient: I noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns and did not feel sluggish/tired after dinners.
3/ Eating meat is environmentally inefficient: Rather than cutting down trees to grow plants to grow grains to feed to cattle to form into meat, some of which will be eaten, just eat the plants directly. A huge portion of the world's C02 comes from cow 'emissions' meanwhile there is an increasingly lack of plant surface to transform this C02 back into oxygen.
4/ Meat now smells and (when accidentally eaten tastes) somehow rotten. It's just not something I would ever want to put in my mouth anymore than carpet or polystyrene. Meat is a dietary habit, cut with a kick of testosterone. You can get over it.
5/ Animal meat is absolutely murder, of course it is! It doesn't matter whether it's aware of it or not, whether it's feeling pain (almost all farm animals are utterly terrified just prior to death), it's murder to satisfy a dietary habit no matter which way you look at it.. When I was killing cows and pigs with a knife of a gun I was murdering them: killing them against their will.
6/ Eating meat is unncessary in my 21 century western dietary context: People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions. Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people. Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human. And what of the mythic Food Chain? If you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..)
7/ Meat from farms is, in general, far from a safe or remotely 'natural' product these days. In fact most meat from the U.S is banned here in Europe because it's so augmented with artificial hormones considered harmful to human bodies.
Look no further than http://flossmanuals.net. Check out the GNU/Linux Command Line manual, the new Ogg/Theora manual and also the "How To Bypass Internet Censorship" manuals for examples of what their platform is capable of (alongside a sense of the energy of the FM community).
Note there are three core publishing options: HTML, PDF and print-on-demand.
Regardless, I think the point of the original author's comments is that it wouldn't be "the community" that develops these app stores - or even the applications in them - so much as netbook/phone vendors and service providers.
Firstly I sincerely doubt they'll be running Debian Unstable on their phones..
Perhaps you haven't tried installing proprietary third party applications (like Skype, World of Goo, Adobe Acrobat) on a modern distribution of Linux (or used a modern distribution of Linux at all). From the user's perspective a.DEB for Ubuntu will install with as few clicks and fuss as a Windows.EXE or OS X.DMG, proprietary or otherwise, as long as it's for the particular distribution (think "OS") they're running.
Tales about people needing to touch the CLI to install software on a Linux distribution almost always refer to those people using unsupported repositories and developer dists of software (tarballs and SVN).
I don't use Insert or Del in Vim (other than SHIFT-INSERT for pasting from the buffer in:set paste mode) but I certainly do use those keys in other applications. Home and End I do use in Vim largely because i've always found $ and ^ a little inconvenient - habitually I seem to tend toward a single keypress over two despite perhaps requiring more hand movement overall.
Why not just get rid of that pesky last remaining mouse button while you're at it..
Insert, Del, Home and End are indispensible for me in my IDE (Vim) and my 3D authoring environment (Blender) alongwith several other applications I use most days. Function keys are very useful for mapping to function menus and switching consoles on a Linux system. Admittedly I rarely use all twelve..
People that suggest removing keys willy-nilly reveal themselves as heavy mouse users. In my experience the more events that are pushed onto the pointer, lest of all those that require two hands (like the Apple 'right click'), are RSI prone and functionally slower to work with. The lack of delete key on a Mac is very much an example of the direction not to go in, creating the need for an additional hand movement.
Since owning a Thinkpad I can work more comfortably for more time without feeling strain. This is due to the sanity of placing the 'nipple' in the middle of the keyboard (reducing hand movement) and a very well designed, robust keyboard with well sprung keys with plenty of travel.
While I haven't seen Apple laptops comprise a great proportion of machines at the FOSS conferences I've been to here in Europe, those I have seen are often running something other than OSX (if stickers and/or a peek at their WM is anything to go by). It's not so unimaginable that someone might choose to run something other than OSX on a Macbook especially if they have little need for proprietary software and prefer an OS tailored to their needs (or just don't like the design and feel of OSX altogether - some don't).
Regardless, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of X and T series Thinkpads but moreso netbooks at hacker and FLOSS meetings in the EU. I hear from friends that the build quality of their MacBooks is a bit disappointing. Perhaps this is a reason, among others.
Of course, the real discussion around including Mono by default is not about Tomboy. If they donâ(TM)t want of it, the debian-installer team just has to include GNote in the gnome-desktop task to get it by default instead of Tomboy; note that this is possible since I added an or dependency, precisely as you suggested. No, the applications that are going to make a difference are things like GNOME Do and F-Spot. If we want to include these cool applications that have no real alternative (even proprietary), this will include the Mono stack as well. And there are no stripped down C++ versions of those.
and..
The reason why Tomboy was not included in the default Lenny installation is not because of stupid software patents. If we gave a shit of inapplicable software patents, we wouldnâ(TM)t be shipping MP3 decoding software by default. If we gave a shit, we wouldnâ(TM)t ship Mono in main, regardless of what is in the default installation. We donâ(TM)t give a shit of where is Mono coming from, as long as it is free software. As Jo explained, we donâ(TM)t even give a shit of what Mono is, it just happens to be a dependency for Tomboy. No, the reason why Tomboy was not here by default is simply because its dependency stack was too big for some installation media. Now, the Debian Mono team managed to reduce a bit the installation size, and the availability of GNote as an alternative is giving a last-resort choice that will be much smaller.
Eastern European Countries have this problem. Home of Russian mafia expansion, home of corrupted and weak police forces, home of guys who make so little a couple hundred bucks in bribe works well, home of scammer's money laundry operations, etc.
Certainly there is plenty fo corruption in the Eastern European countries, however it's not like other countries are spared the same problems; American TV producers can't seem to get enough of the Good Cop / Bad Cop diametric, as though heaven and hell had a street address. Why is it popular? Because it's a hot topic: people know corruption in the police sector is rampant in America.
What of banks? You can almost be sure that banks in the West, now famous for their abusive secrecy and gambling, would not dare let their customers know the same thing was happening at an ATM near you.. Having lived in both 'sides' of Europe, I wish you luck with those Reagan-era East/West generalisations.
Sounds like you've never found an IDE that suits you. I've tried using the vim + gdb + strace type of development and gotten along just fine, but when you find a decent IDE with a good debugger, stack trace, good search facility, debug probe and a ton of other helpful tools it's hard to go back to messing around with lots of separate ones.
Vim with Exuberant CTags, GNU tools and a little self-education comprises a fully featured IDE.
The reason so many use and keep using Vim as an IDE, even for large projects is that they can roll together the toolchain - including debugger, profiler, code browser - and builders that suit them, in the way that suit them. Much of the time the people that complain that Vim cannot function as a full featured IDE seem unaware of Vim's shell interface (:!<program> <args> && <program2> <args> [..]) or its 'plugin' architecture, let alone tabs, split modes, keyword completion, folding or numerous other features typical of other IDEs.
A single terminal hosting Vim is enough to comfortably develop large projects in almost any popular language, covering coding, compiling, debugging and execution.
Having worked a lot with the awfully bloated and manifold XCode, the sprawling and mysterious Visual Studio and a little with the rather nice Code::Blocks it's clear that I have no reason to consider changing IDE, for the time being.
The author has a couple of fair points. Many others sound a little incredulous, perhaps lacking in education. Perhaps he hasn't tried Linux in a few years? Things do change fast..
He writes:
9.1 Slow (libraries) linker. Braindead slow linker. Intolerably slow linker. Win32 OpenOffice being run from Wine starts in a less time than native Linux OpenOffice.
Really? Windows must be pretty quick these days. Here I have, with OpenOffice3 on Debian Lenny and a dual core portable:
First run:
delire@devel:~$ time ooffice
real 0m3.816s
user 0m0.028s
sys 0m0.056s
Second run:
delire@devel:~$ time ooffice
real 0m0.564s
user 0m0.024s
sys 0m0.024s
He also wrote:
3.4 Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to a number of problems raised to the third power.
Different compilers.. does he mean differing versions of GCC/G++? I don't see how this can negatively impact application development - it doesn't even negatively impact distribution. In a collaborative context, development usually targets a single compiler to reduce headaches, just as on Windows or OS X..
Regarding the libraries: if you don't have the people resources to roll a package for a given distribution and don't want to hand over the source such that package maintainers can do it for you, you always have the (rightfully) unpopular but working option of statically linking and shipping in a tarball. Successful examples of this are: World Of Goo, Skype, Opera, Gizmo and seem to run on numerous modern GNU/Linux distributions without problems..
Last time I went to Europe, it seemed like Europe manages to be competitive economically by selling to Americans, catering to American tourists, and working for American-owned companies...?
As a European I must say this made me laugh. It's such a romance of some Americans that Europe is a theme-park of North American interest. That Europe is dependent on American trade before any other.
You are aware that there are a hell of a lot more European stomachs than North American? That the EU hosts the worlds most internationally active shipping ports? Europe invests heavily in itself and other countries wish to compete with the EU because of this..
To put it another way, if you think that catering to the American interest is what floats the EU economically you haven't been to Europe. Stick with San Francisco, it's as close as you'll get.
"As far as eye candy, KDE 4.1 looks simply stunning."
I look at this screenshot linked from the article however and I see a confusing mash-up of design agendas. Dolphin file manager looks drab and strangely cluttered with shallow implied 3D for tabs and other delimiters yet the OS X style scroll bars bulge out. What are those scrollbars supposed to be made of? Blown glass? Gel? The panel at the bottom caves in with greater depth than the background image.. The simulated lighting model they're using to shade elements come from all over the place. I can count about 3 contradicting implied directional lights, from the panel to the icons to the widgets themselves..
Other things confuse: What is that Logitech logo doing in the top-right corner? Those tiny minimise/maximise buttons look like they're from another universe entirely: not echoed in any other element on the desktop, lest of all the stripey title bar.
I'm not convinced much effort has been spent on making KDE look 'stunning'..
KDE was very tweakable last time I looked so I'm sure someone will come up with a unifying theme. Glad to hear stability and speed have been greatly improved.
If you want a laptop that runs Ubuntu perfectly you have to either:
[1] Do your research as to which laptops are known to run Ubuntu perfectly
or:
[2] Buy the laptop new with Ubuntu already installed on it, with a guarantee that all hardware should function as specified.
Out of interest, where on earth did you read that Ubuntu will always install perfectly on every laptop? If you didn't in fact read this, how did you come to expect it?
Ubuntu has a fantastic track-record of installation on $RANDOM_LAPTOP but it seems that you've exaggerated this success into a fairly lofty expectation in your own mind, somewhere along the way..
Visitors can peer at the ancient book, but only see two pages at a time.
Hard to believe that people could bear reading books that only explosed two pages at the same time. Thank heavens printing technology evolved such that books could finally be read in 4 dimensions.
If Jeremy is correct, then the author of Linux Haters has chosen what is possibly the least likely route to garnering interest from Linux developers. Which linux developer would consciously choose to read a blog that refers to them as a 'luser' incessantly from paragraph to paragraph.
The 'benchmark' OS he seems to use as the basis of the bulk of his criticisms is OSX, an OS I find really frustrating to use (and I use it fairly often these days). If I were to start an OSX Haters on this basis should I expect the Aqua and XCode authors to read it daily in the interests of improving all the braindead things about both those aspects of OSX? Didn't think so..
Maybe the guy just has a crippling case of Internet Rabies induced by deep boredom and Jeremy's simply being a little generous..
There are, afterall, blogs featuring meticulously prepared images of meals that people hated eating. Perhaps this blog is simply in the same vein; just another masochist whiling away the hours in public.
Looks like Brad is spinning things a bit. Further in the thread a 'Robert Peaslee' writes:
Hi Brad,
Your comments are kind of misguided. Linus can be quoted as saying: "my
responsibility is to do a good job. And not pander to the people who want to
turn security into a media circus." He was referring to individuals such as
yourself when making the circus comment, as your message was slightly
alarmist and dramatized.
Security is important, of course - but Linus'
opinions are
completely correct in terms of development of the Linux kernel. I
would
agree with you if security bugs were actually being hidden, but they aren't.
They just aren't given special treatment.
Not to drift too far offtopic either, but Apple's machines have been reasonably price-competitive ever since the Intel switch. Price out a machine with similar specs to a Macbook or Mac Pro from Dell.
I'm going to shamelessly reference another post of mine here, one that stood true months ago and still does now.
To be fair, the fact of the matter is that Apple's are more expensive in many cases. I really do get tired of hearing the myth that they are competitively priced. When has Apple ever said this? It is good example of a little too much Kool Aid I think. Here's an example:
I just specced a 2.4GHz, 200GB 7200RPM HDD, 2Gb RAM, 15.4" Thinkpad with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M graphics card and 9 Cell (7-8hour) battery on the official Thinkpad site at $1551.42.
The same spec'd machine on the Apple site - the lowest offering in the MacBook Pro range - comes to $1999.00, or $450 more expensive than the ThinkPad and it comes with a poorer graphics card (the NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GT).
When I bought my Thinkpad a few months ago it was the best 14.1" laptop in the market, with spec's that exceeded the top 17" MacBook Pro I configured (out of curiosity) on the Apple site while still being $1000 cheaper. It has excellent build quality, runs Linux very well and has the famously good Thinkpad keyboard: the fact it's less expensive than the MacBook Pro is not reflected in the quality of the hardware.. (another popular myth)
The reality is that Apple computers are made by Quanta computing, a company who manufacture around 60% of the world's portables: Apple hardware is no longer vastly unique. This doesn't at all have to be a bad thing: you're paying for a brand you like with the software you like.
In short, there's nothing at all wrong with being a fan of a particular technology company, a techno-patriot, but don't let it steer your experience of overt reality.
I work in a multi-OS educational environment and see the weaknesses of all popular OS's in a short-exposure, high-contact learning context. The one area OS X really falls down is in the area of file-system and application navigation. I often see a student coming from Windows become comfortable managing both their files and applications with Linux (GNOME or KDE) far faster than they do with the Finder/OS X interface. While perhaps being a tired metaphor, the application tray, where any application minimised or otherwise can always be found (regardless of virtual desktop) works: they have per-application visual contact with what is active in their desktop session, uncomplicated by a dock doubling as a menu of popular applications.
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
With cryptic commands like these just to get basic functionality how can anyone expect Normal Users to migrate to the platform? This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you let geeks design user interfaces!
Thankfully they have got rid of those absurd glass borders. On immediate appearance however I think it still looks pretty discontinuous and lost as an overall design.
Why such vast tracts of grey? In some of the screenshots on the PolishLinux site window elements are surrounded by entire football fields of grey nothingness.
Why the faded titles in the panel? What are they intended to signify?
Why are the minimise and maximise icons raised, tiny and 'stuck on' rather graphically integrated into the window title? Window barnacles? In some screenshots they look annoyingly small to be a mouse target, especially compared to the window title.
Why is the panel so g i g a n t i c? To show off the icon authors scalable icons in all their glory or is there a practical reason to swallow so much valuable realestate? I would certainly never want to see this on my laptop..
Such things make KDE4.1 look lacking in vision, despite so many improvements graphically and otherwise in other areas. Perhaps it's time to cave in and simply pay an accomplised designer to pull it all together. Alternatively, why not hand it over for critique to a master's degree design class?
But on Vista using IE7, this is very much not the case. Even if you completely pwn the browser, its running as a user process that has almost zero ability to write or read anywhere on the file system.
How then does a user of IE7 on this operating system - the owner of this completely pwn'd process - download files, save a browsing history or save bookmarks? To RAM? Do they "Accept or Deny?" on every visited website?
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA. Q: Overall, what percentage of NVIDIA's customers do you believe use Linux?
I don't know many concrete percentages. Highend workstation visualization is roughly half Linux, and Digital Content Creation (DCC) is largely Linux. NVIDIA Linux graphics powers a respectable portion of the 3D workstations. Our CUDA user base also has a large Linux contingent.
. and earlier:
Q: Is NVIDIA starting to see more interest in the driver from companies or publishers?
There has been, and continues to be, significant Linux workstation interest from a variety of workstation segments (e.g., Oil & Gas, Automotive, Film and Broadcast, etc). Workstation is where Linux has the most measurable business impact for NVIDIA.
In large multi-display installations Linux is very popular and offers several strong and distinct advantages over other operating systems.
CUDA on Linux receives huge interest from a variety of High Performance Computing (HPC) customers.
Linux on Tegra receives a lot of customer interest.
Linux on Ion also receives considerable interest.
It seems Linux use is very strong among high end commercial art creation, alongside the scientific/engineering and small form-factor computing areas.
I grew up on a farm and have killed and eaten many animals as a part of my daily life as a young man.
Around 20 years ago I stopped eating meat altogether after a fairly gruesome botched attempt at killing an animal. It left an indelible (inedible?) impression on me that I couldn't shake. My reasons for maintaining that vegetarianism however were manyfold.
1/ I've realised I simply don't need to eat meat to be healthy: I very rarely get sick and have am in very good physical condition.
2/ I found eating meat to be less metabolically efficient: I noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns and did not feel sluggish/tired after dinners.
3/ Eating meat is environmentally inefficient: Rather than cutting down trees to grow plants to grow grains to feed to cattle to form into meat, some of which will be eaten, just eat the plants directly. A huge portion of the world's C02 comes from cow 'emissions' meanwhile there is an increasingly lack of plant surface to transform this C02 back into oxygen.
4/ Meat now smells and (when accidentally eaten tastes) somehow rotten. It's just not something I would ever want to put in my mouth anymore than carpet or polystyrene. Meat is a dietary habit, cut with a kick of testosterone. You can get over it.
5/ Animal meat is absolutely murder, of course it is! It doesn't matter whether it's aware of it or not, whether it's feeling pain (almost all farm animals are utterly terrified just prior to death), it's murder to satisfy a dietary habit no matter which way you look at it.. When I was killing cows and pigs with a knife of a gun I was murdering them: killing them against their will.
6/ Eating meat is unncessary in my 21 century western dietary context: People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions. Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people. Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human. And what of the mythic Food Chain? If you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..)
7/ Meat from farms is, in general, far from a safe or remotely 'natural' product these days. In fact most meat from the U.S is banned here in Europe because it's so augmented with artificial hormones considered harmful to human bodies.
Look no further than http://flossmanuals.net. Check out the GNU/Linux Command Line manual, the new Ogg/Theora manual and also the "How To Bypass Internet Censorship" manuals for examples of what their platform is capable of (alongside a sense of the energy of the FM community).
Note there are three core publishing options: HTML, PDF and print-on-demand.
Joel Tenenbaum was a teenager at the time of his conviction, accused of downloading 7 songs from a file sharing network.
This bodes bad weather indeed. If money is what sustains the flesh, we have here a case of cannibalism.
(Somewhere, a barman in a life-jacket pours Scotch for a passenger while the cruiser sinks..)
Regardless, I think the point of the original author's comments is that it wouldn't be "the community" that develops these app stores - or even the applications in them - so much as netbook/phone vendors and service providers.
Firstly I sincerely doubt they'll be running Debian Unstable on their phones..
.DEB for Ubuntu will install with as few clicks and fuss as a Windows .EXE or OS X .DMG, proprietary or otherwise, as long as it's for the particular distribution (think "OS") they're running.
Perhaps you haven't tried installing proprietary third party applications (like Skype, World of Goo, Adobe Acrobat) on a modern distribution of Linux (or used a modern distribution of Linux at all). From the user's perspective a
Tales about people needing to touch the CLI to install software on a Linux distribution almost always refer to those people using unsupported repositories and developer dists of software (tarballs and SVN).
I don't use Insert or Del in Vim (other than SHIFT-INSERT for pasting from the buffer in :set paste mode) but I certainly do use those keys in other applications. Home and End I do use in Vim largely because i've always found $ and ^ a little inconvenient - habitually I seem to tend toward a single keypress over two despite perhaps requiring more hand movement overall.
Why not just get rid of that pesky last remaining mouse button while you're at it..
Insert, Del, Home and End are indispensible for me in my IDE (Vim) and my 3D authoring environment (Blender) alongwith several other applications I use most days. Function keys are very useful for mapping to function menus and switching consoles on a Linux system. Admittedly I rarely use all twelve..
People that suggest removing keys willy-nilly reveal themselves as heavy mouse users. In my experience the more events that are pushed onto the pointer, lest of all those that require two hands (like the Apple 'right click'), are RSI prone and functionally slower to work with. The lack of delete key on a Mac is very much an example of the direction not to go in, creating the need for an additional hand movement.
Since owning a Thinkpad I can work more comfortably for more time without feeling strain. This is due to the sanity of placing the 'nipple' in the middle of the keyboard (reducing hand movement) and a very well designed, robust keyboard with well sprung keys with plenty of travel.
While I haven't seen Apple laptops comprise a great proportion of machines at the FOSS conferences I've been to here in Europe, those I have seen are often running something other than OSX (if stickers and/or a peek at their WM is anything to go by). It's not so unimaginable that someone might choose to run something other than OSX on a Macbook especially if they have little need for proprietary software and prefer an OS tailored to their needs (or just don't like the design and feel of OSX altogether - some don't).
Regardless, in the last couple of years I've seen a lot of X and T series Thinkpads but moreso netbooks at hacker and FLOSS meetings in the EU. I hear from friends that the build quality of their MacBooks is a bit disappointing. Perhaps this is a reason, among others.
and..
Certainly there is plenty fo corruption in the Eastern European countries, however it's not like other countries are spared the same problems; American TV producers can't seem to get enough of the Good Cop / Bad Cop diametric, as though heaven and hell had a street address. Why is it popular? Because it's a hot topic: people know corruption in the police sector is rampant in America.
What of banks? You can almost be sure that banks in the West, now famous for their abusive secrecy and gambling, would not dare let their customers know the same thing was happening at an ATM near you.. Having lived in both 'sides' of Europe, I wish you luck with those Reagan-era East/West generalisations.
Vim with Exuberant CTags, GNU tools and a little self-education comprises a fully featured IDE.
The reason so many use and keep using Vim as an IDE, even for large projects is that they can roll together the toolchain - including debugger, profiler, code browser - and builders that suit them, in the way that suit them. Much of the time the people that complain that Vim cannot function as a full featured IDE seem unaware of Vim's shell interface (:!<program> <args> && <program2> <args> [..]) or its 'plugin' architecture, let alone tabs, split modes, keyword completion, folding or numerous other features typical of other IDEs.
A single terminal hosting Vim is enough to comfortably develop large projects in almost any popular language, covering coding, compiling, debugging and execution. Having worked a lot with the awfully bloated and manifold XCode, the sprawling and mysterious Visual Studio and a little with the rather nice Code::Blocks it's clear that I have no reason to consider changing IDE, for the time being.
He writes:
Really? Windows must be pretty quick these days. Here I have, with OpenOffice3 on Debian Lenny and a dual core portable:
First run:
delire@devel:~$ time ooffice
real 0m3.816s
user 0m0.028s
sys 0m0.056s
Second run:
delire@devel:~$ time ooffice
real 0m0.564s
user 0m0.024s
sys 0m0.024s
He also wrote:
Different compilers.. does he mean differing versions of GCC/G++? I don't see how this can negatively impact application development - it doesn't even negatively impact distribution. In a collaborative context, development usually targets a single compiler to reduce headaches, just as on Windows or OS X..
Regarding the libraries: if you don't have the people resources to roll a package for a given distribution and don't want to hand over the source such that package maintainers can do it for you, you always have the (rightfully) unpopular but working option of statically linking and shipping in a tarball. Successful examples of this are: World Of Goo, Skype, Opera, Gizmo and seem to run on numerous modern GNU/Linux distributions without problems..
Since when has there existed a reference standard for how people should live in their own homes? Who's home is it, his or the State's?
How many posts would it take for someone to use the word 'totalitarian', I wonder, were this story to have originated from a Communist country?
As a European I must say this made me laugh. It's such a romance of some Americans that Europe is a theme-park of North American interest. That Europe is dependent on American trade before any other.
You are aware that there are a hell of a lot more European stomachs than North American? That the EU hosts the worlds most internationally active shipping ports? Europe invests heavily in itself and other countries wish to compete with the EU because of this..
To put it another way, if you think that catering to the American interest is what floats the EU economically you haven't been to Europe. Stick with San Francisco, it's as close as you'll get.
I look at this screenshot linked from the article however and I see a confusing mash-up of design agendas. Dolphin file manager looks drab and strangely cluttered with shallow implied 3D for tabs and other delimiters yet the OS X style scroll bars bulge out. What are those scrollbars supposed to be made of? Blown glass? Gel? The panel at the bottom caves in with greater depth than the background image.. The simulated lighting model they're using to shade elements come from all over the place. I can count about 3 contradicting implied directional lights, from the panel to the icons to the widgets themselves..
Other things confuse: What is that Logitech logo doing in the top-right corner? Those tiny minimise/maximise buttons look like they're from another universe entirely: not echoed in any other element on the desktop, lest of all the stripey title bar.
I'm not convinced much effort has been spent on making KDE look 'stunning'..
KDE was very tweakable last time I looked so I'm sure someone will come up with a unifying theme. Glad to hear stability and speed have been greatly improved.
If you want a laptop that runs Ubuntu perfectly you have to either:
[1] Do your research as to which laptops are known to run Ubuntu perfectly
or:
[2] Buy the laptop new with Ubuntu already installed on it, with a guarantee that all hardware should function as specified.
Out of interest, where on earth did you read that Ubuntu will always install perfectly on every laptop? If you didn't in fact read this, how did you come to expect it?
Ubuntu has a fantastic track-record of installation on $RANDOM_LAPTOP but it seems that you've exaggerated this success into a fairly lofty expectation in your own mind, somewhere along the way..
Hard to believe that people could bear reading books that only explosed two pages at the same time. Thank heavens printing technology evolved such that books could finally be read in 4 dimensions.
Really makes you think, doesn't it..
If Jeremy is correct, then the author of Linux Haters has chosen what is possibly the least likely route to garnering interest from Linux developers. Which linux developer would consciously choose to read a blog that refers to them as a 'luser' incessantly from paragraph to paragraph.
The 'benchmark' OS he seems to use as the basis of the bulk of his criticisms is OSX, an OS I find really frustrating to use (and I use it fairly often these days). If I were to start an OSX Haters on this basis should I expect the Aqua and XCode authors to read it daily in the interests of improving all the braindead things about both those aspects of OSX? Didn't think so.. Maybe the guy just has a crippling case of Internet Rabies induced by deep boredom and Jeremy's simply being a little generous..
There are, afterall, blogs featuring meticulously prepared images of meals that people hated eating. Perhaps this blog is simply in the same vein; just another masochist whiling away the hours in public.
Must be a slow news day.
From here
I'm going to shamelessly reference another post of mine here, one that stood true months ago and still does now.
To be fair, the fact of the matter is that Apple's are more expensive in many cases. I really do get tired of hearing the myth that they are competitively priced. When has Apple ever said this? It is good example of a little too much Kool Aid I think. Here's an example:
I just specced a 2.4GHz, 200GB 7200RPM HDD, 2Gb RAM, 15.4" Thinkpad with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M graphics card and 9 Cell (7-8hour) battery on the official Thinkpad site at $1551.42.
The same spec'd machine on the Apple site - the lowest offering in the MacBook Pro range - comes to $1999.00, or $450 more expensive than the ThinkPad and it comes with a poorer graphics card (the NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GT).
When I bought my Thinkpad a few months ago it was the best 14.1" laptop in the market, with spec's that exceeded the top 17" MacBook Pro I configured (out of curiosity) on the Apple site while still being $1000 cheaper. It has excellent build quality, runs Linux very well and has the famously good Thinkpad keyboard: the fact it's less expensive than the MacBook Pro is not reflected in the quality of the hardware.. (another popular myth)
The reality is that Apple computers are made by Quanta computing, a company who manufacture around 60% of the world's portables: Apple hardware is no longer vastly unique. This doesn't at all have to be a bad thing: you're paying for a brand you like with the software you like.
In short, there's nothing at all wrong with being a fan of a particular technology company, a techno-patriot, but don't let it steer your experience of overt reality.
I work in a multi-OS educational environment and see the weaknesses of all popular OS's in a short-exposure, high-contact learning context. The one area OS X really falls down is in the area of file-system and application navigation. I often see a student coming from Windows become comfortable managing both their files and applications with Linux (GNOME or KDE) far faster than they do with the Finder/OS X interface. While perhaps being a tired metaphor, the application tray, where any application minimised or otherwise can always be found (regardless of virtual desktop) works: they have per-application visual contact with what is active in their desktop session, uncomplicated by a dock doubling as a menu of popular applications.
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
My 2 clicks.
Thankfully they have got rid of those absurd glass borders. On immediate appearance however I think it still looks pretty discontinuous and lost as an overall design.
Why such vast tracts of grey? In some of the screenshots on the PolishLinux site window elements are surrounded by entire football fields of grey nothingness.
Why the faded titles in the panel? What are they intended to signify?
Why are the minimise and maximise icons raised, tiny and 'stuck on' rather graphically integrated into the window title? Window barnacles? In some screenshots they look annoyingly small to be a mouse target, especially compared to the window title.
Why is the panel so g i g a n t i c? To show off the icon authors scalable icons in all their glory or is there a practical reason to swallow so much valuable realestate? I would certainly never want to see this on my laptop..
Such things make KDE4.1 look lacking in vision, despite so many improvements graphically and otherwise in other areas. Perhaps it's time to cave in and simply pay an accomplised designer to pull it all together. Alternatively, why not hand it over for critique to a master's degree design class?
Didn't think so..