* Ostensibly, the dynamic upside of this new process innovation goes beyond the ubiquitous expansion of existing consolidation synergies for cloud computing consumers. * It also represents a radical reduction in physical footprint, power consumption and management headaches, err challenges in replacing and disposing old servers in a constant cycle. * This eco-friendly initiative is a solid platform to establish PR campaigns. * It further maximizes up-time through cloud redundancy, and fewer hardware upgrade cycles. This enables departments to place a greater mind-share on customer service practices, establishing better inter-department goodwill. * It is also an emerging paradigm shift from a foreign hardware market to an American services market of fat pipes, I mean growing telecommunications infrastructure and service based platforms. * It allows corporations to eliminate the positions of smarmy sysadmins, those bastards that no one likes. Oh, wait. Shit.
Apple is the same company who has repeatedly sent threatening legal letters to teenage bloggers and such. They also clearly violated their deal with Apple records, and then went on the legal offensive like they were victims.
Apple certainly isn't afraid to use their lawyers. My guess is that they wanted Pystar to make some profits to the lawsuit would make financial sense.
Those who push for "pure" desktops are supposed freedom advocates, but they don't want to advocate the freedom of allowing users to use whatever software they want.
OSS software is great. I wish more software was open. I wish Nvidia would provide open drivers.
But what I really want more than anything, is to run the software I need to make my box work.
For those who want a pure box, then run it. Don't try to force it on me however.
A Google Trends graph was showing that Ubuntu is rising while searches for Linux are falling. In the near future, the term Ubuntu may become completely ubiquitous for Linux to most people.
Gnome is the default desktop of Ubuntu.
Sad but true.
Please educate the masses that better alternatives exist.
Information is akin to speech. And as a writer I value the ability to protect my intellectual property.
In the software world we've discovered other markets, such as selling support for free software, but the best means to profit from software is usually to sell it directly. It is difficult (not impossible) to sell software for a profit while at the same time giving it away for free.
Without copyrights, programming likely wouldn't be much of a viable profession. OSS profits directly often from people who learned to program professionally, but also contribute code freely because they choose to do so.
In a world without copyrights, many people wouldn't have learned to program because the career paths wouldn't be there.
Really? I'm used to Rhythmbox on Linux, iTunes on Mac, and mplayer back when I stored my music collection right on the HDD instead of having an iPod.
I think Amarok is the best music player I've used on any platform. Amarok integrates really well with web services like mp3tunes, last.fm, etc. Amarok does a great job handling my library of music. Amarok has various context views while playing my music, such as grabbing lyrics, or pulling up the band's wikipedia page.
How's the syntax highlighting and auto-indentation? I'm working with Python code at the moment.
I don't use Kate myself much so I'm not sure. However the "engine" of Kate (the KPart) is used in Quanta (web development) and KDevelop, so I imagine those features should be there. Notepad++ handles both quite well on Windows, but I rarely do much coding. I really suck at it.
Oh, I used to love watching an emerge begin. Then I tried Synaptic.
Emerge shows me in a tree view exactly which packages pull in which dependencies. I also really love use flags, because I like having fine-grained control. That being said, I really loathe Ubuntu and really am starting to love openSUSE. Zypper is much faster in openSUSE 11.0 and I'd compare it with Synaptic.
Googling for IIS 7 benchmarks isn't really finding anything. However I have two points right back at you.
1. Every benchmark I've seen up until now has Apache leaving IIS in the dust for performance. I'm skeptical this has changed. 2. Even is IIS7 ran as well as Apache or better (which I doubt) Apache is vastly more secure.
Sabayon isn't a bad option in that it gives you a rather feature-complete pre-compiled version of Gentoo, and the freedom of emerge to recompile it as you see fit later.
You can use compiz (or compiz-fusion which I recommend) on top of KDE 3 or 4. fusion-icon is a great app to handle configuring compiz, switching Emerald themes, switching window managers, etc.
Firefox is great. I use it on KDE. I use Kmail when I need a mail client because it ties in so well with the rest of the PIM suite. Wine is really agnostic to KDE/Gnome. VLC works fine on either, though I usually use SMPlayer or Kaffeine. Both are great players. Amarok is the crown jewel of music players.
Kate is getting "vi type" input support which should make lots of people happy. Actually my favorite text editor is windows only (notepad++).
And for some reason I never really took to Portato. I like handling emerge from a command line.
Question on KDE 4.1: When it comes out, will I still be forced to install all those K* applications (like K3B, Konqueror, et al) in order to use the KDE desktop-environment?
It depends on your distro and how they package things. In openSUSE (which I've been using a lot of more lately) for each person I've been installing the KDE 4 version to get all the KDE 4 apps, and then just installing the KDE 3 session, which doesn't necessarily include any KDE 3 apps. Then piece-meal I install individual KDE 3 apps I prefer (like KDE 3's version of Ark).
Most distros have a huge meta-package which pulls in all other smaller ones as dependencies. Installing a KDE 4 meta package will likely install all the invidual apps, but your distro should provide you with smaller packages to install pieces as you see fit.
You should be able to install a KDE 4 session (which will pull in the core libraries and minimal apps) and run all your Gnome apps in that session.
I found them almost two years ago by Googling KDE Gnome memory benchmarks. It showed running Natilus on KDE was faster than running on Gnome, and the same was true for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and I think they tested a few other apps as well.
First off, a KDE desktop running a GTK app does so through Kwin, so even aside from composite effects, there is a difference in which window manager is handling the app. Furthermore, the overhead of the overall desktop and all its services don't disappear. You suggest only swapping comes into play. However, if one desktop is tasking the CPU less in the background, it does affect the speed of apps running on top of it.
As for KDE 4 desktop lags, a big part of that seems to be video drivers. People with onboard Intel video chipsets on older computers and reporting great performance, where as brand new monster rigs with powerful Nvidia cards are reporting unusable performance.
Many people have suggested part of the issue is that GTK was never designed from the beginning to being the heart of a platform. It was designed for the GIMP. It was extended in less than optimal ways, and backwards compatibility had to be maintained, which meant people couldn't rewrite core piece to make necessary improvements.
Gnome 3 will involve rewriting those portions of every app in the same way that KDE 4 meant porting over every app to QT 4. That work is going to be done regardless. The question is, what is the framework going to be that they port to?
Building upon existing technology that is already better saves development work on establishing that framework.
If you ask the question "What does QT 4.x lack that we need for Gnome?" that might be easier than saying "How do we rewrite GTK and the Gnome libs from the ground up?"
Why don't you ask the Plasma developer*s* (i.e. more than just Aaron)? In addition the KDE feature plans [kde.org] are linked to from the front page of the KDE TechBase. For things not covered there you could add Planet KDE [planetkde.org] to your news reader or subscribe to the panel-devel [kde.org] mailing list. Want to see all commits made just to plasma? Use the KDE commit filter [kde.org].
Most of the areas of KDE have some nice long-term planning. Many areas of KDE 4 were well planned out ages ago. Plasma however is another story. The abandonment of the current icon implementation and the implementation of folder view demonstrate that there was no early grand plan for the Plasma desktop. Again, a grand revolution was promised when people didn't even know how icons were going to be handled. Aaron repeatedly says that he has long term plans, but has no intention of spelling them out. That just isn't very useful.
As far as Aaron he's been under a constant heap of criticism lately because Plasma in KDE 4 is not *exactly like* kicker+kdesktop in KDE 3 so perhaps you can excuse him for being irritable.
About 9 months back I suggested to Aaron that when KDE 4.0 launched, he had better prepare himself for all the flack he was going to get. I suggested some of it was going to be undue, and that he needed to prepare to put on his PR hat. Instead I got flamed for suggesting that anyone might have any negative reaction to the 4.0 release, and no one listened. About two weeks ago I suggested he could/should focus either on PR and let others code for a while, or focus on code and let others handle PR for a while. It seemed like wearing both hats was wearing on him, and he wasn't as productive as he wanted to be in either arena.
People started calling him Hitler and everything. Perhaps if he had heeded my friendly advice, he would be better prepared to deal with this crap. Maybe they could have preempted a bunch of this with some good PR and education. Instead, when I offer friendly advice I'm labeled a troll and attacked. I have never once attacked the guy. I just state that I disagree with some of his opinions as of late.
Given the statements he is making, I understand why people are irate. They should be. I empathize that he is likely stressed out. When you spend a great deal of time on a community project to have people throw shit in your face, it seems like everyone is ungrateful. I really empathize. But him suggesting end users shouldn't have configuration options, or that end users don't know enough to discuss interface issues is alarming. He isn't helping his case.
In fact, his statements are just bringing more shit down on his head.
Have you ever thought that taking the trouble to make a program easier to use doesn't necessarily imply that the user is dumb?
Except the Gnome interface guidelines directly state that users can't be given choices because they are too stupid to understand them. Linus had a great flamefest back and forth with the Gnome devs over this issue. Linus gave them patches to improve configuration options, and they rejected them.
A good design should be intuitive. Sometimes choice is called for, and sometimes it isn't.
On Windows I use 7-zip. I can right click and select a bevy of great options. I can select "Extract to..." which gives me a dialog if I need to provide specifics of where to extra my file to. There is also a context menu option for "Extra to filenamefoo" which creates a folder that mirrors the name of the compressed file.
Extracting a file in KDE 4's Ark is a nightmare. 7-zip and most extraction programs demonstrate that alternatives exist that require fewer clicks and dialog windows. I'm not against simple. 7-zip also provides tons of features and dialog options, but they don't get in the way of doing something quickly when you need to.
Gnome's answer is to limit features. Ark's answer is to give you tons of dialog windows. Ideally, the options should exist, but not get in the way.
I've seen him use the term stupid directly repeatedly. Also a recent comment of his was that non-coders on the whole shouldn't be allowed to comment on design issues.
He also repeatedly said that if you don't read the code, you can't understand the UI. That itself is a problem.
Frankly, end users should be able to pick things up and learn them intuitively. Suggesting that if you don't read the source code, you can't understand the project means there is a serious usability issue.
Yep. KDE 4 apps run just fine in KDE 3, and vice-versa. However, to configure the KDE 4 apps, I log into a KDE 4 session and set themes, colors, etc. KDE 4 apps will also run in KDE 3 even if you don't have the KDE 4 session installed. openSUSE 10.3 installed a KDE 3 desktop with the KDE 4 games for instance.
Some people suggested removing the animation, which was a problem because it interfered with maximized windows, and he said no.
Some people suggested allowing people to move or relocate the cashew because it interfered with panels at the top, and he said no.
Some people suggested having the cashew disappear when the panel is locked, and he said no.
And frankly, no right-click means you can do a key+click.
The worst thing is he repeatedly said everyone was too stupid to understand his design, which he had no intention of explaining. He said users can't comment on design or UI issues. That is a problem.
I didn't say the two projects should become one. If they are going to design a new gnomelibs and base for Gnome 3.0, I think many of the core underlying libraries should come together between the two projects.
Gnome can still have all the Gnome apps, and a Gnome desktop configured how they want. However, a proof of concept app might open the door to discusing gnomelibs3.0 being built on QT and maybe even incorporating some KDE features.
Slashdot Mirror
* Ostensibly, the dynamic upside of this new process innovation goes beyond the ubiquitous expansion of existing consolidation synergies for cloud computing consumers.
* It also represents a radical reduction in physical footprint, power consumption and management headaches, err challenges in replacing and disposing old servers in a constant cycle.
* This eco-friendly initiative is a solid platform to establish PR campaigns.
* It further maximizes up-time through cloud redundancy, and fewer hardware upgrade cycles. This enables departments to place a greater mind-share on customer service practices, establishing better inter-department goodwill.
* It is also an emerging paradigm shift from a foreign hardware market to an American services market of fat pipes, I mean growing telecommunications infrastructure and service based platforms.
* It allows corporations to eliminate the positions of smarmy sysadmins, those bastards that no one likes. Oh, wait. Shit.
Apple is the same company who has repeatedly sent threatening legal letters to teenage bloggers and such. They also clearly violated their deal with Apple records, and then went on the legal offensive like they were victims.
Apple certainly isn't afraid to use their lawyers. My guess is that they wanted Pystar to make some profits to the lawsuit would make financial sense.
Those who push for "pure" desktops are supposed freedom advocates, but they don't want to advocate the freedom of allowing users to use whatever software they want.
OSS software is great. I wish more software was open. I wish Nvidia would provide open drivers.
But what I really want more than anything, is to run the software I need to make my box work.
For those who want a pure box, then run it. Don't try to force it on me however.
With Gentoo, you just set use flags for various codecs and compile away.
I can't get my desktop that I want because KDE 4 provides no options for it. It isn't as simple as changing one line in a config file.
A Google Trends graph was showing that Ubuntu is rising while searches for Linux are falling. In the near future, the term Ubuntu may become completely ubiquitous for Linux to most people.
Gnome is the default desktop of Ubuntu.
Sad but true.
Please educate the masses that better alternatives exist.
Information is akin to speech. And as a writer I value the ability to protect my intellectual property.
In the software world we've discovered other markets, such as selling support for free software, but the best means to profit from software is usually to sell it directly. It is difficult (not impossible) to sell software for a profit while at the same time giving it away for free.
Without copyrights, programming likely wouldn't be much of a viable profession. OSS profits directly often from people who learned to program professionally, but also contribute code freely because they choose to do so.
In a world without copyrights, many people wouldn't have learned to program because the career paths wouldn't be there.
Really? I'm used to Rhythmbox on Linux, iTunes on Mac, and mplayer back when I stored my music collection right on the HDD instead of having an iPod.
I think Amarok is the best music player I've used on any platform. Amarok integrates really well with web services like mp3tunes, last.fm, etc. Amarok does a great job handling my library of music. Amarok has various context views while playing my music, such as grabbing lyrics, or pulling up the band's wikipedia page.
How's the syntax highlighting and auto-indentation? I'm working with Python code at the moment.
I don't use Kate myself much so I'm not sure. However the "engine" of Kate (the KPart) is used in Quanta (web development) and KDevelop, so I imagine those features should be there. Notepad++ handles both quite well on Windows, but I rarely do much coding. I really suck at it.
Oh, I used to love watching an emerge begin. Then I tried Synaptic.
Emerge shows me in a tree view exactly which packages pull in which dependencies. I also really love use flags, because I like having fine-grained control. That being said, I really loathe Ubuntu and really am starting to love openSUSE. Zypper is much faster in openSUSE 11.0 and I'd compare it with Synaptic.
Googling for IIS 7 benchmarks isn't really finding anything. However I have two points right back at you.
1. Every benchmark I've seen up until now has Apache leaving IIS in the dust for performance. I'm skeptical this has changed.
2. Even is IIS7 ran as well as Apache or better (which I doubt) Apache is vastly more secure.
Sabayon isn't a bad option in that it gives you a rather feature-complete pre-compiled version of Gentoo, and the freedom of emerge to recompile it as you see fit later.
You can use compiz (or compiz-fusion which I recommend) on top of KDE 3 or 4. fusion-icon is a great app to handle configuring compiz, switching Emerald themes, switching window managers, etc.
Firefox is great. I use it on KDE. I use Kmail when I need a mail client because it ties in so well with the rest of the PIM suite. Wine is really agnostic to KDE/Gnome. VLC works fine on either, though I usually use SMPlayer or Kaffeine. Both are great players. Amarok is the crown jewel of music players.
Kate is getting "vi type" input support which should make lots of people happy. Actually my favorite text editor is windows only (notepad++).
And for some reason I never really took to Portato. I like handling emerge from a command line.
So Gnome could work on top of QT 4, but not GTK. GTK could still be maintained separately.
I think the Gnome devs need to ask what is truly best for them.
Windows really doesn't belong here. Nor most places in a data center.
Question on KDE 4.1: When it comes out, will I still be forced to install all those K* applications (like K3B, Konqueror, et al) in order to use the KDE desktop-environment?
It depends on your distro and how they package things. In openSUSE (which I've been using a lot of more lately) for each person I've been installing the KDE 4 version to get all the KDE 4 apps, and then just installing the KDE 3 session, which doesn't necessarily include any KDE 3 apps. Then piece-meal I install individual KDE 3 apps I prefer (like KDE 3's version of Ark).
Most distros have a huge meta-package which pulls in all other smaller ones as dependencies. Installing a KDE 4 meta package will likely install all the invidual apps, but your distro should provide you with smaller packages to install pieces as you see fit.
You should be able to install a KDE 4 session (which will pull in the core libraries and minimal apps) and run all your Gnome apps in that session.
I found them almost two years ago by Googling KDE Gnome memory benchmarks. It showed running Natilus on KDE was faster than running on Gnome, and the same was true for OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and I think they tested a few other apps as well.
First off, a KDE desktop running a GTK app does so through Kwin, so even aside from composite effects, there is a difference in which window manager is handling the app. Furthermore, the overhead of the overall desktop and all its services don't disappear. You suggest only swapping comes into play. However, if one desktop is tasking the CPU less in the background, it does affect the speed of apps running on top of it.
As for KDE 4 desktop lags, a big part of that seems to be video drivers. People with onboard Intel video chipsets on older computers and reporting great performance, where as brand new monster rigs with powerful Nvidia cards are reporting unusable performance.
Many people have suggested part of the issue is that GTK was never designed from the beginning to being the heart of a platform. It was designed for the GIMP. It was extended in less than optimal ways, and backwards compatibility had to be maintained, which meant people couldn't rewrite core piece to make necessary improvements.
Gnome 3 will involve rewriting those portions of every app in the same way that KDE 4 meant porting over every app to QT 4. That work is going to be done regardless. The question is, what is the framework going to be that they port to?
Building upon existing technology that is already better saves development work on establishing that framework.
If you ask the question "What does QT 4.x lack that we need for Gnome?" that might be easier than saying "How do we rewrite GTK and the Gnome libs from the ground up?"
Why don't you ask the Plasma developer*s* (i.e. more than just Aaron)? In addition the KDE feature plans [kde.org] are linked to from the front page of the KDE TechBase. For things not covered there you could add Planet KDE [planetkde.org] to your news reader or subscribe to the panel-devel [kde.org] mailing list. Want to see all commits made just to plasma? Use the KDE commit filter [kde.org].
Most of the areas of KDE have some nice long-term planning. Many areas of KDE 4 were well planned out ages ago. Plasma however is another story. The abandonment of the current icon implementation and the implementation of folder view demonstrate that there was no early grand plan for the Plasma desktop. Again, a grand revolution was promised when people didn't even know how icons were going to be handled. Aaron repeatedly says that he has long term plans, but has no intention of spelling them out. That just isn't very useful.
As far as Aaron he's been under a constant heap of criticism lately because Plasma in KDE 4 is not *exactly like* kicker+kdesktop in KDE 3 so perhaps you can excuse him for being irritable.
About 9 months back I suggested to Aaron that when KDE 4.0 launched, he had better prepare himself for all the flack he was going to get. I suggested some of it was going to be undue, and that he needed to prepare to put on his PR hat. Instead I got flamed for suggesting that anyone might have any negative reaction to the 4.0 release, and no one listened. About two weeks ago I suggested he could/should focus either on PR and let others code for a while, or focus on code and let others handle PR for a while. It seemed like wearing both hats was wearing on him, and he wasn't as productive as he wanted to be in either arena.
People started calling him Hitler and everything. Perhaps if he had heeded my friendly advice, he would be better prepared to deal with this crap. Maybe they could have preempted a bunch of this with some good PR and education. Instead, when I offer friendly advice I'm labeled a troll and attacked. I have never once attacked the guy. I just state that I disagree with some of his opinions as of late.
Given the statements he is making, I understand why people are irate. They should be. I empathize that he is likely stressed out. When you spend a great deal of time on a community project to have people throw shit in your face, it seems like everyone is ungrateful. I really empathize. But him suggesting end users shouldn't have configuration options, or that end users don't know enough to discuss interface issues is alarming. He isn't helping his case.
In fact, his statements are just bringing more shit down on his head.
Have you ever thought that taking the trouble to make a program easier to use doesn't necessarily imply that the user is dumb?
Except the Gnome interface guidelines directly state that users can't be given choices because they are too stupid to understand them. Linus had a great flamefest back and forth with the Gnome devs over this issue. Linus gave them patches to improve configuration options, and they rejected them.
A good design should be intuitive. Sometimes choice is called for, and sometimes it isn't.
On Windows I use 7-zip. I can right click and select a bevy of great options. I can select "Extract to..." which gives me a dialog if I need to provide specifics of where to extra my file to. There is also a context menu option for "Extra to filenamefoo" which creates a folder that mirrors the name of the compressed file.
Extracting a file in KDE 4's Ark is a nightmare. 7-zip and most extraction programs demonstrate that alternatives exist that require fewer clicks and dialog windows. I'm not against simple. 7-zip also provides tons of features and dialog options, but they don't get in the way of doing something quickly when you need to.
Gnome's answer is to limit features. Ark's answer is to give you tons of dialog windows. Ideally, the options should exist, but not get in the way.
How is this not modded funny yet?
This is the best comment I've read in days.
I have no intention of trying the current iteration of folder view.
I think it is a problem to roll out features that aren't ready yet.
I've seen him use the term stupid directly repeatedly. Also a recent comment of his was that non-coders on the whole shouldn't be allowed to comment on design issues.
He also repeatedly said that if you don't read the code, you can't understand the UI. That itself is a problem.
Frankly, end users should be able to pick things up and learn them intuitively. Suggesting that if you don't read the source code, you can't understand the project means there is a serious usability issue.
Yep. KDE 4 apps run just fine in KDE 3, and vice-versa. However, to configure the KDE 4 apps, I log into a KDE 4 session and set themes, colors, etc. KDE 4 apps will also run in KDE 3 even if you don't have the KDE 4 session installed. openSUSE 10.3 installed a KDE 3 desktop with the KDE 4 games for instance.
However, that is just a theme. You still need to write ports.
The nice thing is that if you write a QT/KDE app, it should run on Solaris, Linux, Mac and Windows natively without too much porting hassle.
digiKam just released a new version which includes the KDE 4 port as well as tons of great new features.
Yesterday Amarok just released the first alpha of 2.0, and from people who have been using the nightly builds, it supposedly works well.
Some people suggested removing the animation, which was a problem because it interfered with maximized windows, and he said no.
Some people suggested allowing people to move or relocate the cashew because it interfered with panels at the top, and he said no.
Some people suggested having the cashew disappear when the panel is locked, and he said no.
And frankly, no right-click means you can do a key+click.
The worst thing is he repeatedly said everyone was too stupid to understand his design, which he had no intention of explaining. He said users can't comment on design or UI issues. That is a problem.
By bloated, do you mean, requires less memory and runs faster?
There are plenty of benchmarks that show even GTK apps run faster on the KDE desktop.
If you're suggesting however that fewer features on the whole is what you want, then Gnome is there for you.
I didn't say the two projects should become one. If they are going to design a new gnomelibs and base for Gnome 3.0, I think many of the core underlying libraries should come together between the two projects.
Gnome can still have all the Gnome apps, and a Gnome desktop configured how they want. However, a proof of concept app might open the door to discusing gnomelibs3.0 being built on QT and maybe even incorporating some KDE features.