Rather than magazines making lengthy arguments about when double digit and single digit growth rates occurred, what about making a graph and an extrapolation? They'd be a little more informative and easier to interpret, and would save the proverbial thousand words.
(I couldn't find any good, recent graphs of Firefox growth, otherwise I would have posted them myself.)
Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again.
You are mistaken. You can pull off tightly integrated backwards compatibility and still migrate to a new toolkit and language. Apple has demonstrated this.
What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? [...] anything else is really just a matter of preference.
KDE4 has specific goals, and one has to ask the question whether Qt and C++ are the best platforms to support those goals. I believe they aren't. But, of course, since most KDE programmers are heavily invested in Qt and C++, they wouldn't agree.
In the end, the market will decide. I suspect that around the time KDE4 comes out, you are going to see other mainstream Linux desktops that are more user friendly and easier to develop for.
You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it
Yes, that's another problem, and that's exactly the problem the LGPL was intended to address. Putting a GPL license on software that has less restrictive substitutes discourages its use. Most of the software I develop is open source, but I'd still have to pay for Qt if I ever only want to temporarily distribute a single copy in binary form only.
Yes, but they didn't catch on because the technology was cumbersome and inflexible. Sun just reimplemented the same toolkits and languages people had been using for a decade before, and that turned out to be a bad match for the web. Add poor browser integration, the fact that Sun never opened it up, numerous security problems in the Java runtime, garbage collection bugs, bloat, and sluggishness, and you can easily see why it didn't catch on.
AJAX, on the other hand, is or will be supported by every browser. It's lightweight, builds on HTML and JavaScript, and is a generation ahead of Java and Swing when it comes to GUIs.
Actually, Ajax is the name of two warriors in the Trojan wars. The name was then misappropriated for a floor cleaning product (heroic cleaning?), but I suppose as you demonstrate, people these days don't know their classics anymore.
If the term "Ajax" becomes associated with a dynamic web display technology, I think that's a step up from floor cleaning.
These kinds of problems happen from time to time: some particular combination of hardware and software will just be flaky, and if you change the OS, it all works. In my experience, it's more common to have problems with Windows that disappear when switching to Linux, but I have also (occasionally) seen the opposite.
Anecdotes like that tell you nothing about your expected TCO. Furthermore, while I sympathize with Mr. Morton's short term unhappiness, nothing supports his conclusion that there is some intrinsic flaw with Linux or that Windows TCO is lower. In fact, whatever reasons he had to choose Linux in the first place have not been invalidated by his experiences. If he thought Linux was the best choice before his string of bad luck, it still is.
People whinge about what stuff doesn't do, or does wrong, but they don't offer to help fix it. You don't need to be able to code to contribute to open source software, you just need to be able to clearly articulate the problems you're having, and what you'd like to see instead.
Generally, the fact that someone took the time to write to you, however briefly, is usually an indication that they actually want to use the software and that they generally like it, even if it sounds like "whining" to you; otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered in the first place.
When you get a bug report that's too short, you can just briefly respond "Thank you for your bug report. In order to help you, I need more information. Please supply..."
And if you get a lot of non-bug-reports that bother you, it's probably a problem with the documentation or the error messages. You may also want to include a FAQ in the documentation that talks about features that are frequently requested but which you won't provide.
I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be. If the system is properly designed, it has to rely on hardware to keep the keys necessary for decoding into audio secret. Software running on a general purpose computer would be able only to move around various encrypted forms of any protected data on the flash card. For example, software might obtain a device key from an audio player or sound card, transmit it to the flash card, and then be able to get all the bits for any audio file on the flash card, but only in a format readable to that audio player or sound card. The flash card itself would keep track of how many device keys have been used and would put a limit on that.
Moving the encrypted bits between the flash card and the output device can be done by an open source driver with no problems and without any loss of functionality.
Conversely, if any piece of software running on the PC is ever able to decode the contents of the flash device into a waveform, then the manufacturers have effectively lost because it is fairly easy to get keys and decryption algorithms from a binary-only driver.
Of course, the whole thing is stupid and won't work well anyway. Among other things, you can just transfer your entire DRM'ed music collection to your portable jukebox, plug its audio output into a line input for your PC, capture everything (over a few weeks). Existing audio software divides the input into songs for you, and putting the stuff into correspondence with your playlist is also a little Perl script (with some manual corrections).
In any case, if the manufacturers get the cryptography right, it will work no more poorly under Linux than it will under Windows. And if they get it wrong, it will work better under Linux than under Windows:-)
Teaching quality usually varies widely within each department, and that won't change--it's inherently unfixable. The reason is that you want excellent researchers for advanced courses, but they happen not to have either the time or inclination to become good classroom teachers (at least they are often still good mentors). The best a university can do is hire as many excellent educators for their introductory level courses. But that's a luxury universities usually can't afford either because universities get evaluated on measures like grant money per professor and publications per professor and everybody has to pull their weight.
In any case, sooner or later, you have to face the fact that you will have to learn from people who are not stellar educators, because you'll have to do the same in the real world. So, it's not even clear that it would be good if you went to a university where the teaching is uniformly good.
If quality of teaching is really important to you, then select your college accordingly; you will have to make tradeoffs--there are some colleges with uniformly high quality educators, but I guarantee you that they will not be the top research universities or big names. And if you blame your failure to complete an engineering degree on bad teaching, you really ought to look for a different field of study.
The problem here is "many patches being managed by a single person". This can be fixed very easily - allow more people to merge patches in the kernel instead of being just linus & andrew.
Well, yes. And the way to do that is to modularize the kernel much further than it is now.
With "encapsulation", bugs in a module will not affect other modules. Yes. So what? It's still a bug, and needs to be fixed.
But each module can be fixed on its own schedule, by its own maintainers, rather than having everybody wait until the next release.
This is an architectural problem, not a resource problem. There is no reason why the Linux kernel should require the baroque system of manual patches and updates that is currently in place. Instead, it should be composable at runtime out of many modules that are encapsulated enough and insulated enough from one another to be developed and updated independently.
Of course, you are right: Microsoft is indeed one of the most competently managed companies around. And that is exactly their problem.
Why is that a problem? Because their management, sales, and marketing are so good that their technology doesn't have to be. They can ship software with security holes, bugs, poor usability, and bad design, but the non-technical part of the company will somehow manage to still sell it and make a bundle on it.
Too bad it's not original. And if the LED lamp already costs nearly $1000, I don't want to know what the bunny costs.
Still, you can expect more wireless enabled lamps, lights, displays, and objects. But we'll probably have to wait for more inspired designers than this company before people will be willing to put them in their homes.
I think energy from fusion is a good thing, but it's naive to think that it will solve environmental or political problems.
What will happen is that people will come to expect what we now consider "abundant" energy from fusion, and they'll go to the limit using that as well, until they hit environmental and engineering limitations.
Environmental and other problems related to energy are psychological and social, and they don't have technological solutions. We need to be satisfied with less than pushing our energy generation capacity to its limits, and that's something we can do even today. In different words, conserve energy.
The Finder is most of the GUI that OS X has (all the rest is a bunch of applications).
OS X is in my oppinion way better than Windows or Linux or even BSD
I think OS X is better than Windows. It doesn't make much sense, though, to say that it's "better than Linux or even BSD". The proper comparison is to Gnome or KDE. And I don't think there is a clear winner among those.
I think what OS X mainly has going for it over Linux is hardware/software integration, and the fact that it comes with some very well-designed applications out of the box.
All true. But one step towards reversing this is to get the message out that DRM may violate the goals and purpose on which copyright law is based in the first place.
And, if we are lucky, the influence of TV news is waning as people move to blogs, podcasts, and online video.
Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.
The only "arrogance" that I see in this "debate" is Mossberg's. Google made available a high-quality web-based mail service based on AJAX and was the first to give users a gigabyte of space. The Gmail experience was closer to any desktop experience than any other webmail service. There were likely lots of usability experts and user testers involved in its development. And if it were for Yahoo! and Microsoft, we'd probably still limp along with 10Mbyte mailboxes and page redraws for each message view. And, yes, the Gmail experience is different from a desktop client. I fail to see how that "denies choice"--Mossberg always has the choice not to use it.
Apparently, Mossberg's 35 years at the WSJ have gone to his head and he has forgotten that he is a journalist, not a usability expert. It is supremely arrogant for someone with his background to make judgements about the usability or quality of applications. In fact, someone who actually knows about usability wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Fortunately, we all have a choice: we don't have to read the ill-informed drivel Mossberg publishes in the WSJ.
The Constitution does not endorse companies getting around the publishing and public domain requirements using "smarmy ways". Therefore, we, the people, get to decide what constitutes publishing. It is therefore constitutionally justifiable (and arguably necessary) to disallow DRM for any content that someone claims copyright on. What copyright holders argue or say about it only matters to the degree that they have a vote.
Mac users tend to be the most compulsive about their user interfaces, while Windows and Linux users are much more used to a mish-mash of UI paradigms.
Mac users have lived through OS9/OSX hybrid desktops, they accept OfficeX on a Mac desktop, they tolerate metal/gumdrop interfaces, and they don't even notice that Apple mixes gumdrop and Windows buttons in the same application. Compared to OSX, something like KDE is a lot more consistent. Mac users may be vocal about demanding consistency, but they are pretty tolerant about what they actually use--as long as it's been blessed by Apple.
What is it I need? A package manager that doesn't suck (Fink and Darwinports suck). A window system and web browser that aren't dog slow and enormously memory hungry. Desktop apps that don't go away sometimes for minutes spinning a little colored wheel. And for those UNIX apps, high-quality X11 support, rather than XDarwin.
OS X is a dog. It's a cute and friendly dog, and may be man's best companion, but it's still a dog. While it is nicer in some ways than Linux, it is worse in other ways, and I don't think it's the future of operating systems or "the world's most advances operating system" as Apple likes to call it.
If I write a memoir that reveals all sorts of sordid details about my life, I shouldn't be forced to publish it in order to stop someone else from publishing it.
There are laws to protect you from people stealing your data and publishing it, but that's not what copyright law is concerned with.
It's my work, I should be able to choose what to do with it.
A priori, your only choice about your work is whether you choose to communicate it to others or not. The notion that you get to control what other people do with your work has neither a sound basis in ethics, nor is it universally recognized. And, in fact, it is a fairly absurd consequence of copyright (and patents) that you get to control what other people do with ideas and works they developed independently.
In the US, we have chosen to recognize and enforce copyrights (after centuries of flaunting it) for a variety of practical and political reasons, but those are social and legal choices, not fundamental rights.
Copyright is a pretty clear deal: people publish content, they get certain guarantees from the government for a limited time, and then the content becomes public domain. The emphasis here is on "publish", that is "make public". Any form of DRM actually violates this deal: if a company uses technological measures to prevent copying, they should not also be able to claim copyright because, among other things, the content will never become public domain. In different words, using DRM violates the agreement and constitutional basis on which copyright is based in the first place.
So, the question to ask is not whether I should be able to play copyrighted content on my Linux computer. Rather, it is clear that we need to resolve the conflict between DRM and copyright law in a way that is constitutionally and socially acceptable. And the only way I see is to eliminate all copyright protection for content that prevents copying through technological measures, including DRM or use of proprietary formats.
I would like to see a formal usability evaluation comparing OS X to other GUIs. Even some Macintosh veterans have criticized the OS X GUI pretty strongly.
Personally, I don't see much of a difference between the major GUI environments (Windows, Gnome, KDE, and OS X) in terms of usability; familiarity seems to be a bigger issue.
KDE isn't just for browsing files, it is dozens of well-integrated applications. Porting KDE to the Mac makes lots of shareware applications obsolete and brings lots of new, mature applications to the Mac. And even KDE's file browser has a lot of nice features compared to Apple's.
The only limitation of this port is that it is based on X11; since Apple refuses to integrate X11 better into the Mac desktop environment, that's not a good solution for regular users. However, since the Qt toolkit underlying KDE has a native Mac version, we can expect a native port of KDE to follow fairly soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than magazines making lengthy arguments about when double digit and single digit growth rates occurred, what about making a graph and an extrapolation? They'd be a little more informative and easier to interpret, and would save the proverbial thousand words.
(I couldn't find any good, recent graphs of Firefox growth, otherwise I would have posted them myself.)
Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again.
You are mistaken. You can pull off tightly integrated backwards compatibility and still migrate to a new toolkit and language. Apple has demonstrated this.
What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? [...] anything else is really just a matter of preference.
KDE4 has specific goals, and one has to ask the question whether Qt and C++ are the best platforms to support those goals. I believe they aren't. But, of course, since most KDE programmers are heavily invested in Qt and C++, they wouldn't agree.
In the end, the market will decide. I suspect that around the time KDE4 comes out, you are going to see other mainstream Linux desktops that are more user friendly and easier to develop for.
You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it
Yes, that's another problem, and that's exactly the problem the LGPL was intended to address. Putting a GPL license on software that has less restrictive substitutes discourages its use. Most of the software I develop is open source, but I'd still have to pay for Qt if I ever only want to temporarily distribute a single copy in binary form only.
Yes, but they didn't catch on because the technology was cumbersome and inflexible. Sun just reimplemented the same toolkits and languages people had been using for a decade before, and that turned out to be a bad match for the web. Add poor browser integration, the fact that Sun never opened it up, numerous security problems in the Java runtime, garbage collection bugs, bloat, and sluggishness, and you can easily see why it didn't catch on.
AJAX, on the other hand, is or will be supported by every browser. It's lightweight, builds on HTML and JavaScript, and is a generation ahead of Java and Swing when it comes to GUIs.
AJAX is a floor cleaning product.
Actually, Ajax is the name of two warriors in the Trojan wars. The name was then misappropriated for a floor cleaning product (heroic cleaning?), but I suppose as you demonstrate, people these days don't know their classics anymore.
If the term "Ajax" becomes associated with a dynamic web display technology, I think that's a step up from floor cleaning.
AJAX appears to be the new Display Postscript...
If it's going to be a "radical change", why not change the toolkit and/or the programming language while they are at it?
These kinds of problems happen from time to time: some particular combination of hardware and software will just be flaky, and if you change the OS, it all works. In my experience, it's more common to have problems with Windows that disappear when switching to Linux, but I have also (occasionally) seen the opposite.
Anecdotes like that tell you nothing about your expected TCO. Furthermore, while I sympathize with Mr. Morton's short term unhappiness, nothing supports his conclusion that there is some intrinsic flaw with Linux or that Windows TCO is lower. In fact, whatever reasons he had to choose Linux in the first place have not been invalidated by his experiences. If he thought Linux was the best choice before his string of bad luck, it still is.
People whinge about what stuff doesn't do, or does wrong, but they don't offer to help fix it. You don't need to be able to code to contribute to open source software, you just need to be able to clearly articulate the problems you're having, and what you'd like to see instead.
..."
Generally, the fact that someone took the time to write to you, however briefly, is usually an indication that they actually want to use the software and that they generally like it, even if it sounds like "whining" to you; otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered in the first place.
When you get a bug report that's too short, you can just briefly respond "Thank you for your bug report. In order to help you, I need more information. Please supply
And if you get a lot of non-bug-reports that bother you, it's probably a problem with the documentation or the error messages. You may also want to include a FAQ in the documentation that talks about features that are frequently requested but which you won't provide.
There will never be a legal linux reader
:-)
I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be. If the system is properly designed, it has to rely on hardware to keep the keys necessary for decoding into audio secret. Software running on a general purpose computer would be able only to move around various encrypted forms of any protected data on the flash card. For example, software might obtain a device key from an audio player or sound card, transmit it to the flash card, and then be able to get all the bits for any audio file on the flash card, but only in a format readable to that audio player or sound card. The flash card itself would keep track of how many device keys have been used and would put a limit on that.
Moving the encrypted bits between the flash card and the output device can be done by an open source driver with no problems and without any loss of functionality.
Conversely, if any piece of software running on the PC is ever able to decode the contents of the flash device into a waveform, then the manufacturers have effectively lost because it is fairly easy to get keys and decryption algorithms from a binary-only driver.
Of course, the whole thing is stupid and won't work well anyway. Among other things, you can just transfer your entire DRM'ed music collection to your portable jukebox, plug its audio output into a line input for your PC, capture everything (over a few weeks). Existing audio software divides the input into songs for you, and putting the stuff into correspondence with your playlist is also a little Perl script (with some manual corrections).
In any case, if the manufacturers get the cryptography right, it will work no more poorly under Linux than it will under Windows. And if they get it wrong, it will work better under Linux than under Windows
Teaching quality usually varies widely within each department, and that won't change--it's inherently unfixable. The reason is that you want excellent researchers for advanced courses, but they happen not to have either the time or inclination to become good classroom teachers (at least they are often still good mentors). The best a university can do is hire as many excellent educators for their introductory level courses. But that's a luxury universities usually can't afford either because universities get evaluated on measures like grant money per professor and publications per professor and everybody has to pull their weight.
In any case, sooner or later, you have to face the fact that you will have to learn from people who are not stellar educators, because you'll have to do the same in the real world. So, it's not even clear that it would be good if you went to a university where the teaching is uniformly good.
If quality of teaching is really important to you, then select your college accordingly; you will have to make tradeoffs--there are some colleges with uniformly high quality educators, but I guarantee you that they will not be the top research universities or big names. And if you blame your failure to complete an engineering degree on bad teaching, you really ought to look for a different field of study.
The problem here is "many patches being managed by a single person". This can be fixed very easily - allow more people to merge patches in the kernel instead of being just linus & andrew.
Well, yes. And the way to do that is to modularize the kernel much further than it is now.
With "encapsulation", bugs in a module will not affect other modules. Yes. So what? It's still a bug, and needs to be fixed.
But each module can be fixed on its own schedule, by its own maintainers, rather than having everybody wait until the next release.
This is an architectural problem, not a resource problem. There is no reason why the Linux kernel should require the baroque system of manual patches and updates that is currently in place. Instead, it should be composable at runtime out of many modules that are encapsulated enough and insulated enough from one another to be developed and updated independently.
Of course, you are right: Microsoft is indeed one of the most competently managed companies around. And that is exactly their problem.
Why is that a problem? Because their management, sales, and marketing are so good that their technology doesn't have to be. They can ship software with security holes, bugs, poor usability, and bad design, but the non-technical part of the company will somehow manage to still sell it and make a bundle on it.
Too bad it's not original. And if the LED lamp already costs nearly $1000, I don't want to know what the bunny costs.
Still, you can expect more wireless enabled lamps, lights, displays, and objects. But we'll probably have to wait for more inspired designers than this company before people will be willing to put them in their homes.
I think energy from fusion is a good thing, but it's naive to think that it will solve environmental or political problems.
What will happen is that people will come to expect what we now consider "abundant" energy from fusion, and they'll go to the limit using that as well, until they hit environmental and engineering limitations.
Environmental and other problems related to energy are psychological and social, and they don't have technological solutions. We need to be satisfied with less than pushing our energy generation capacity to its limits, and that's something we can do even today. In different words, conserve energy.
OS X is great apart from the Finder,
The Finder is most of the GUI that OS X has (all the rest is a bunch of applications).
OS X is in my oppinion way better than Windows or Linux or even BSD
I think OS X is better than Windows. It doesn't make much sense, though, to say that it's "better than Linux or even BSD". The proper comparison is to Gnome or KDE. And I don't think there is a clear winner among those.
I think what OS X mainly has going for it over Linux is hardware/software integration, and the fact that it comes with some very well-designed applications out of the box.
All true. But one step towards reversing this is to get the message out that DRM may violate the goals and purpose on which copyright law is based in the first place.
And, if we are lucky, the influence of TV news is waning as people move to blogs, podcasts, and online video.
Google's engineers have decreed that familiar email practices are no longer useful, and have substituted approaches they prefer, arrogantly denying users any choice.
The only "arrogance" that I see in this "debate" is Mossberg's. Google made available a high-quality web-based mail service based on AJAX and was the first to give users a gigabyte of space. The Gmail experience was closer to any desktop experience than any other webmail service. There were likely lots of usability experts and user testers involved in its development. And if it were for Yahoo! and Microsoft, we'd probably still limp along with 10Mbyte mailboxes and page redraws for each message view. And, yes, the Gmail experience is different from a desktop client. I fail to see how that "denies choice"--Mossberg always has the choice not to use it.
Apparently, Mossberg's 35 years at the WSJ have gone to his head and he has forgotten that he is a journalist, not a usability expert. It is supremely arrogant for someone with his background to make judgements about the usability or quality of applications. In fact, someone who actually knows about usability wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Fortunately, we all have a choice: we don't have to read the ill-informed drivel Mossberg publishes in the WSJ.
The Constitution does not endorse companies getting around the publishing and public domain requirements using "smarmy ways". Therefore, we, the people, get to decide what constitutes publishing. It is therefore constitutionally justifiable (and arguably necessary) to disallow DRM for any content that someone claims copyright on. What copyright holders argue or say about it only matters to the degree that they have a vote.
Mac users tend to be the most compulsive about their user interfaces, while Windows and Linux users are much more used to a mish-mash of UI paradigms.
Mac users have lived through OS9/OSX hybrid desktops, they accept OfficeX on a Mac desktop, they tolerate metal/gumdrop interfaces, and they don't even notice that Apple mixes gumdrop and Windows buttons in the same application. Compared to OSX, something like KDE is a lot more consistent. Mac users may be vocal about demanding consistency, but they are pretty tolerant about what they actually use--as long as it's been blessed by Apple.
What is it I need? A package manager that doesn't suck (Fink and Darwinports suck). A window system and web browser that aren't dog slow and enormously memory hungry. Desktop apps that don't go away sometimes for minutes spinning a little colored wheel. And for those UNIX apps, high-quality X11 support, rather than XDarwin.
OS X is a dog. It's a cute and friendly dog, and may be man's best companion, but it's still a dog. While it is nicer in some ways than Linux, it is worse in other ways, and I don't think it's the future of operating systems or "the world's most advances operating system" as Apple likes to call it.
If I write a memoir that reveals all sorts of sordid details about my life, I shouldn't be forced to publish it in order to stop someone else from publishing it.
There are laws to protect you from people stealing your data and publishing it, but that's not what copyright law is concerned with.
It's my work, I should be able to choose what to do with it.
A priori, your only choice about your work is whether you choose to communicate it to others or not. The notion that you get to control what other people do with your work has neither a sound basis in ethics, nor is it universally recognized. And, in fact, it is a fairly absurd consequence of copyright (and patents) that you get to control what other people do with ideas and works they developed independently.
In the US, we have chosen to recognize and enforce copyrights (after centuries of flaunting it) for a variety of practical and political reasons, but those are social and legal choices, not fundamental rights.
Copyright is a pretty clear deal: people publish content, they get certain guarantees from the government for a limited time, and then the content becomes public domain. The emphasis here is on "publish", that is "make public". Any form of DRM actually violates this deal: if a company uses technological measures to prevent copying, they should not also be able to claim copyright because, among other things, the content will never become public domain. In different words, using DRM violates the agreement and constitutional basis on which copyright is based in the first place.
So, the question to ask is not whether I should be able to play copyrighted content on my Linux computer. Rather, it is clear that we need to resolve the conflict between DRM and copyright law in a way that is constitutionally and socially acceptable. And the only way I see is to eliminate all copyright protection for content that prevents copying through technological measures, including DRM or use of proprietary formats.
I would like to see a formal usability evaluation comparing OS X to other GUIs. Even some Macintosh veterans have criticized the OS X GUI pretty strongly.
Personally, I don't see much of a difference between the major GUI environments (Windows, Gnome, KDE, and OS X) in terms of usability; familiarity seems to be a bigger issue.
KDE isn't just for browsing files, it is dozens of well-integrated applications. Porting KDE to the Mac makes lots of shareware applications obsolete and brings lots of new, mature applications to the Mac. And even KDE's file browser has a lot of nice features compared to Apple's.
The only limitation of this port is that it is based on X11; since Apple refuses to integrate X11 better into the Mac desktop environment, that's not a good solution for regular users. However, since the Qt toolkit underlying KDE has a native Mac version, we can expect a native port of KDE to follow fairly soon.