I forget whether it's that KDE and GNOME use different protocols, but one understands the other's, or whether they're compatible protocols, but for all intents and purposes, they're common.
KDE versions older than 4.0 use DCOP, while Gnome in general uses DBUS. KDE 4.0 now uses DBUS as well.
The apps that self-update frequently on my computer are:
Google stuff
Adobe stuff (PhotoShop, Acrobat, etc) - please don't talk to me about GIMP, I need PhotoShop for professional reasons
Firefox
ATI drivers
Apple software (iTunes, Quicktime)
HP stuff (printer, scanner drivers)
Now, almost all of this has open source alternatives, or can be configured not to update, but IF these products were available in Linux, they would probably all have auto-update features (reference: Firefox).
Well, actually, most of those things already exist on Linux, and no, they don't have their own built-in autoupdating mechanisms, they leave that to the package manager, as they should.
In Linux:
Firefox - Does not update itself.
ATI drivers (including fglrx, the ones from ATI themselves) - Do not update themselves.
HP stuff (HPLIP, as provided by HP) - Does not update itself.
Acrobat - Haven't used it myself, but several other commenters have pointed out that it does not update itself.
Google stuff - I don't use any of it, so I don't know.
Photoshop and Apple anything - Doesn't exist natively.
I don't see this changing, because apps autoupdating themselves is a behaviour created by Windows* applications to fight a Windows* specific problem (the lack of a package manager), and this problem doesn't exist on Linux, thus there's no reason to waste time trying to solve it again.
* Mac OS probably has the same problem as Windows here, as it doesn't have a package manager either, but I haven't really used Mac OS at all, so I won't discuss it here.
No, you don't. Say a new version of Vim is released and I'm currently editing a file (with Vim, of course). I update my Vim install without closing my existing editor and the next time I edit a file, I get the new version instead of the old.
The only time you'd care about the time to compile something is if there's some specific feature that you want in the new version of something, and this isn't particularly common. Mind you, in this case, the rolling update method of Portage (ie, new releases of basically everything are available within a day or two) is still vastly superiour to the "update everything at once every 6 months" method of pretty much every other distro. because waiting a day or two + a few minutes (typical) or hours (big packages) is much preferable to waiting several months + a couple seconds.
That depends on what you mean by user friendliness. Generally people refer to user friendliness as a metric of how easy it is to learn how to use a program, and not how productive one will be with said program. The latter is often sacrificed for the former (because it's less work to remove a feature than to make it easy to learn), but it doesn't have to be.
User friendliness (aka usable by idiots) is a GOOD thing because it allows us to do what needs to be done, faster.
Now you're mixing the two up, assuming that making something easy to learn will instantly also make that program the most efficient way to get something done. This is an incorrect assumption. A program that is easy to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program being efficient imply that it is easy to use. Similarly, a program that is difficult to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program that is efficient mean that it is difficult to learn.
Obviously, making a program both easy to learn and efficient to use is the ideal. However, if you can actually figure out how to do so in any non-trivial case, you'll probably be able to retire by the time you're about 30.
For example, Notepad is a very easy to learn text editor. Notepad, however, is hideously inefficient for actually editing text with. In comparison, Vim is a difficult text editor to learn how to use, but once you know how to use it, you'll find yourself several orders of magnitude more efficient at editing text than someone who only uses Notepad. If you think that comparison is unfair, replace Notepad with your favourite word processor, but the large gap in efficiency does not change (though the ease of learning how to use it dips).
So yes, ease of learning is good, but efficiency of use is more important, especially for people who already know how to use the program. Unfortunately, ease of learning a program is more flashy and marketable than efficiency of use, and keeping in mind the quickest path to making something easier to use (removing features, as noted above), you can understand why people who already know how to use something really don't want developers to take the short road to making something easier to learn, as it gains the experienced user nothing, while possibly giving up feature(s) in return.
They have amazing translation and cross-cultural communication capabilities - just hand the notebook and your pen to the guy you are trying to get directions from, and he'll whip up a great little vector drawing in the local language to show you which turns to take.
It might be a vector graphic in his head, but I think that the device is only capable of raster graphics...
Monitors can already handle 2560x1600 fairly commonly...
I don't think the 30" LCDs that can handle 2560x1600 are as common as you think they are, especially given that they still cost over a thousand dollars. Most people would rather buy a laptop for half that (with some dinky and largely useless resolution like 1280x800). Though, I'm hardly one to talk, as I'm typing this reply on a 3200x1200 (dual 1600x1200 monitors) desktop, but that's definitely not the norm.
You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards
Last time I checked, none of these browsers are 100% compliant on most W3C standards.
Yeah, and nobody's perfect, so we should all be killed. Kidding aside, standards support is not a binary property, and I shouldn't have to point out that there's a world of difference between something that's 95% correct and something that's 5% correct.
IE7 is far more standards compliant than IE6, so I would think if you're truly worried about standards compliance in Internet Explorer, you'd welcome the upgrade.
...and 35% is a much greater percentage than 10%! IE7 is still much worse on standards than pretty much any other browser worth mentioning. The fact that IE7 still manages to be that much better than IE6 should simply give you an indication of how bad IE6 is (it's very very bad). So, while it would be nice if IE6 never existed and they skipped straight to IE7 in 2000 or so, that's not what happened, and now we're stuck with adding in a whole new host of workarounds for IE7, because it still doesn't render pages correctly a non-trivial amount of the time, provided that you want to support IE at all.
On the opposite end of the scale, I can develop a page in Konqueror (which is very standards compliant), and then check it in Firefox and Opera, and not end up needing to make any changes, because everything works the same. Checking in IE will almost certainly result in IE producing something largely wrong, but at least IE6 is a relatively known commodity, with a well known set of workarounds. IE7 on the other hand is still largely undiscovered. Given Microsoft's past and the fact that they have no reason to produce a browser that doesn't suck, don't be surprised when people treat a new release of IE with scorn.
Not supporting IE at all is, without a doubt, the easiest approach. Supporting IE6 but not IE7 is still easier than supporting both IE6 and IE7. Supporting IE7 but not IE6 probably won't be feasible for most people for several years yet.
Firefox is the closest, but Opera and Safari are in no way better than IE when it comes to implementing standards.
I don't really test in Opera, but limited experience shows that to compare it to IE is no less insulting than comparing Firefox to IE. Konqueror (and presumably Safari, given that it was forked from Konqueror (or rather, KHTML)) is generally better about standards than Firefox, and unquestionably better than IE. Firefox is compatible with more pages on the general Internet than Konqueror, because it tries to emulate a lot of IE quirkiness, but that doesn't push it any closer to following standards.
If you want superior how about instead of two buttons...
Two buttons? Three buttons is the absolute minimum, anything less is completely and utterly useless.
...you have a single large button and use the fact that your hands are sitting right there on the keyboard to mac use of the trackpad or keyboard chording to active a second button?
Kludges that make the mouse buttons keyboard buttons are just that -- kludges. The mouse buttons for the nipple are already perfectly accessable without taking your hands from the home row, and hitting the correct mouse buttons is trivially easy.
Calling the nipple "ridiculously superior" as you struggle to scroll is a joke.
Nipples aren't for scrolling, that's what the touchpad is for. Nipples are for pointing, for which they are indeed ridiculously superior. As for scrolling, you simply turn the entire touchpad into a scrolling device (both horizontal and vertical), and you can scroll with your thumb on the touchpad without taking your hands off of the home row.
Last I checked, they were phasing out the Flexview screens at about the same rate as their 4:3 screens. Supposedly their suppliers don't produce either anymore, so we're stuck with trashy widescreen monitors everywhere. I haven't been following it that closely though, as I've got a T60 with a 1400x1050 Flexview screen already.
480 mbit over gigabit ethernet? That's awful. I regularly see ~110 mbytes/s (= ~880 mbit) through HTTP via gigabit ethernet. I'd post the wget output, but the lameness filter doesn't seem to like that.
For convenience, we used a special case of the TSP, where all cities are considered to be in an NxN grid with uniform spacing (of 1 unit) and the cost to move from one city to another is the Euclidean distance between the two. This makes the optimal cost quite easy to calculate by hand, especially since it follows an obvious pattern (9.414, 16, 25,414, 36,...).
Someone should implement a genetic algorithm to find route. Input the points today, then come back tomorrow to see what it comes up with:)
Actually, we did exactly that in the AI class I took last semester. My GA implementation was still able to find optimal solutions for 49 cities (a 7x7 grid) in about 3 minutes fairly regularly.
As opposed to what? The only difference between 24-bit and 32-bit colour is nomenclature, 24-bit colour doesn't count the 8-bit alpha channel as colour, because it's not.
What, as a programmer, can I do with C++ that I can't do with, say, hand coded assembly? I mean, why do we need all this bloat, all this added complexity, all this cruft? I understand that C++ is portable, but so is hand coded assembly, that, too, has been ported to (for example) Windows. How much better off we programmers have become now that we have access to the multitude of non-standard development environments, libraries and tools?
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KDE versions older than 4.0 use DCOP, while Gnome in general uses DBUS. KDE 4.0 now uses DBUS as well.
Well, actually, most of those things already exist on Linux, and no, they don't have their own built-in autoupdating mechanisms, they leave that to the package manager, as they should.
In Linux:
I don't see this changing, because apps autoupdating themselves is a behaviour created by Windows* applications to fight a Windows* specific problem (the lack of a package manager), and this problem doesn't exist on Linux, thus there's no reason to waste time trying to solve it again.
* Mac OS probably has the same problem as Windows here, as it doesn't have a package manager either, but I haven't really used Mac OS at all, so I won't discuss it here.
I think Civilization IV already runs in Wine, or the current patches of Civ IV, at least.
No, you don't. Say a new version of Vim is released and I'm currently editing a file (with Vim, of course). I update my Vim install without closing my existing editor and the next time I edit a file, I get the new version instead of the old.
The only time you'd care about the time to compile something is if there's some specific feature that you want in the new version of something, and this isn't particularly common. Mind you, in this case, the rolling update method of Portage (ie, new releases of basically everything are available within a day or two) is still vastly superiour to the "update everything at once every 6 months" method of pretty much every other distro. because waiting a day or two + a few minutes (typical) or hours (big packages) is much preferable to waiting several months + a couple seconds.
That depends on what you mean by user friendliness. Generally people refer to user friendliness as a metric of how easy it is to learn how to use a program, and not how productive one will be with said program. The latter is often sacrificed for the former (because it's less work to remove a feature than to make it easy to learn), but it doesn't have to be.
Now you're mixing the two up, assuming that making something easy to learn will instantly also make that program the most efficient way to get something done. This is an incorrect assumption. A program that is easy to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program being efficient imply that it is easy to use. Similarly, a program that is difficult to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program that is efficient mean that it is difficult to learn.
Obviously, making a program both easy to learn and efficient to use is the ideal. However, if you can actually figure out how to do so in any non-trivial case, you'll probably be able to retire by the time you're about 30.
For example, Notepad is a very easy to learn text editor. Notepad, however, is hideously inefficient for actually editing text with. In comparison, Vim is a difficult text editor to learn how to use, but once you know how to use it, you'll find yourself several orders of magnitude more efficient at editing text than someone who only uses Notepad. If you think that comparison is unfair, replace Notepad with your favourite word processor, but the large gap in efficiency does not change (though the ease of learning how to use it dips).
So yes, ease of learning is good, but efficiency of use is more important, especially for people who already know how to use the program. Unfortunately, ease of learning a program is more flashy and marketable than efficiency of use, and keeping in mind the quickest path to making something easier to use (removing features, as noted above), you can understand why people who already know how to use something really don't want developers to take the short road to making something easier to learn, as it gains the experienced user nothing, while possibly giving up feature(s) in return.
Not really, you continue using your computer normally while it updates in the background or while you sleep, then it doesn't matter how long it takes.
Tip: add print.html to the end of any THG URL, and you can read the entire thing on one page. THG would be completely and utterly useless otherwise...
It might be a vector graphic in his head, but I think that the device is only capable of raster graphics...
Well of course they do, Linux runs on everything!
Almost, with a few exceptions, for example:
I don't think the 30" LCDs that can handle 2560x1600 are as common as you think they are, especially given that they still cost over a thousand dollars. Most people would rather buy a laptop for half that (with some dinky and largely useless resolution like 1280x800). Though, I'm hardly one to talk, as I'm typing this reply on a 3200x1200 (dual 1600x1200 monitors) desktop, but that's definitely not the norm.
For example?
Look up, I'm not the original poster, and I never said the touchpad should go away.
Yeah, and nobody's perfect, so we should all be killed. Kidding aside, standards support is not a binary property, and I shouldn't have to point out that there's a world of difference between something that's 95% correct and something that's 5% correct.
...and 35% is a much greater percentage than 10%! IE7 is still much worse on standards than pretty much any other browser worth mentioning. The fact that IE7 still manages to be that much better than IE6 should simply give you an indication of how bad IE6 is (it's very very bad). So, while it would be nice if IE6 never existed and they skipped straight to IE7 in 2000 or so, that's not what happened, and now we're stuck with adding in a whole new host of workarounds for IE7, because it still doesn't render pages correctly a non-trivial amount of the time, provided that you want to support IE at all.
On the opposite end of the scale, I can develop a page in Konqueror (which is very standards compliant), and then check it in Firefox and Opera, and not end up needing to make any changes, because everything works the same. Checking in IE will almost certainly result in IE producing something largely wrong, but at least IE6 is a relatively known commodity, with a well known set of workarounds. IE7 on the other hand is still largely undiscovered. Given Microsoft's past and the fact that they have no reason to produce a browser that doesn't suck, don't be surprised when people treat a new release of IE with scorn.
Not supporting IE at all is, without a doubt, the easiest approach. Supporting IE6 but not IE7 is still easier than supporting both IE6 and IE7. Supporting IE7 but not IE6 probably won't be feasible for most people for several years yet.
I don't really test in Opera, but limited experience shows that to compare it to IE is no less insulting than comparing Firefox to IE. Konqueror (and presumably Safari, given that it was forked from Konqueror (or rather, KHTML)) is generally better about standards than Firefox, and unquestionably better than IE. Firefox is compatible with more pages on the general Internet than Konqueror, because it tries to emulate a lot of IE quirkiness, but that doesn't push it any closer to following standards.
Two buttons? Three buttons is the absolute minimum, anything less is completely and utterly useless.
Kludges that make the mouse buttons keyboard buttons are just that -- kludges. The mouse buttons for the nipple are already perfectly accessable without taking your hands from the home row, and hitting the correct mouse buttons is trivially easy.
Nipples aren't for scrolling, that's what the touchpad is for. Nipples are for pointing, for which they are indeed ridiculously superior. As for scrolling, you simply turn the entire touchpad into a scrolling device (both horizontal and vertical), and you can scroll with your thumb on the touchpad without taking your hands off of the home row.
Both my T40 and T60 suspend to RAM without a hitch using Gentoo.
I hope not.
Last I checked, they were phasing out the Flexview screens at about the same rate as their 4:3 screens. Supposedly their suppliers don't produce either anymore, so we're stuck with trashy widescreen monitors everywhere. I haven't been following it that closely though, as I've got a T60 with a 1400x1050 Flexview screen already.
480 mbit over gigabit ethernet? That's awful. I regularly see ~110 mbytes/s (= ~880 mbit) through HTTP via gigabit ethernet. I'd post the wget output, but the lameness filter doesn't seem to like that.
For convenience, we used a special case of the TSP, where all cities are considered to be in an NxN grid with uniform spacing (of 1 unit) and the cost to move from one city to another is the Euclidean distance between the two. This makes the optimal cost quite easy to calculate by hand, especially since it follows an obvious pattern (9.414, 16, 25,414, 36, ...).
Actually, we did exactly that in the AI class I took last semester. My GA implementation was still able to find optimal solutions for 49 cities (a 7x7 grid) in about 3 minutes fairly regularly.
Well, they're making 15" T61p systems with 1920x1200 screens now, that would be a bit of an upgrade from 1280x800...
Unfortunately, they already added a Windows key starting with the T60. Probably the single biggest blunder made with the Thinkpad line yet.
As opposed to what? The only difference between 24-bit and 32-bit colour is nomenclature, 24-bit colour doesn't count the 8-bit alpha channel as colour, because it's not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-bit_colour
*gasp*
What, as a programmer, can I do with C++ that I can't do with, say, hand coded assembly? I mean, why do we need all this bloat, all this added complexity, all this cruft? I understand that C++ is portable, but so is hand coded assembly, that, too, has been ported to (for example) Windows. How much better off we programmers have become now that we have access to the multitude of non-standard development environments, libraries and tools?