Google has recently unveiled Google Voice, Android, Chromium, Wave and announced they are making Chrome OS. Purchasing a codec shop doesn't invalidate the fact that Google is still making some awesome products.
Facebook is supposedly the single most popular site on the web right now. And doesn't Microsoft own a big share of Facebook?
Facebook usurped Myspace's spot, and Myspace arguably was the successor to Geocities.
Who could knock Facebook from their perch? Google could with Wave.
Imagine one integrated service that allowed you to really create content, easily upload your content, and share it. Wave is also built around collaboration. Myspace allows you to customize your page, but you have to know HTML. Facebook won't let you customize your page. Wave could be Facebook mixed with Youtube, mixed with Myspace, mixed with Flickr, mixed with Office Live. Except it would be better, and completely free.
Seriously, don't sell Google short with Wave. I really think that if and when Google started to push it, it could become the biggest thing on the web.
YouTube still loses money hand over fist, where as Hulu is growing in revenue and popularity.
It is extremely easy to rip videos from YouTube, which might be a sticking point in YouTube getting more mainstream/commercial content. Frankly, I don't want to see adds for lame user-generated content on YouTube. And I do find most YouTube content lacking. But at the end of the day, if both YouTube and Hulu had say, full Simpsons episodes, I'd rather support Google's site rather than NBC's site.
These developers could perhaps tweak their existing code to develop a closed, DRM-laden codec that would allow YouTube to stream commercial content. And if YouTube doesn't make a move like this, it may just continue to hemorrhage money from here to eternity.
As a KDE user, I don't have Mono installed with the default desktop. I install Mono only as a dependency for moonlight for the few websites that require it.
I don't see Mono as being inherently evil. It allows people to get away from Microsoft by creating an alternate implementation using free software. Isn't that a good thing?
Microsoft has said that the Mono team completely owns the Mono code, and they made a patent pledge to never sue for patents that might be covered by Mono. They can't simply go back on that pledge, since it is part of the deal to appease the EU.
That being said, I am a little disappointed to see Gnome devs make Mono a dependency for more and more apps, given that many people don't want to go anywhere near Mono.
I've seen people make personal attacks and snipe at you on your blog. I know you've taken a lot of flack since the KDE 4.0 release, much of personally directed as opposed to polite differences over design decisions.
And I don't want to call you a liar. But the suggestions I made had no personal attacks or criticisms. They were short, simple suggestions and they were deleted.
In the end, it is your blog. You're entitled to do what you want with it. And while I'm sure most would say the best place to make such suggestions is a plasma mailing list, it doesn't make sense for me to join a mailing list for plasma development when I'm not a developer. I left the comments on your blog because I see other casual suggestions and discussion there from time to time.
As for non-multi-touch devices, not a whole lot of people are even using touch hardware today, though I expect that to change real soon. Windows 7, and OS X both support multi-touch. The iPhone has suddenly laid down the mobile gauntlet, and all would-be competitors are using multi-touch. Android devices have multi-touch.
Any touch screen put into a netbook/notebook/smartbook for Windows 7 is going to be multi-touch. I'm not sure limiting design to the lowest common denominator is always necessary. You do have to weight it against leaving a set of users behind for certain features, but arguably that is the decision those users made for themselves in their hardware purchase.
I've heard from others that KDE is just copying OS X. Certainly Oxygen bears a certain resemblance to OS X, but overall I find the KDE 4 desktop to be very different.
* No dock. * Dolphin and Finder are worlds different * No Mac-style application menus at the top * Windows buttons on the left in Mac, on the right in KDE
OS X borrowed virtual desktops from Linux. I believe OS X and Compiz borrowed some visual effects from each other.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Amarok 2 now uses Plasma to display plugins in the middle portion of the window. If your graphics driver doesn't like Plasma, then you're likely to have issues here.
Sadly it seems Plasma, and other Qt 4 apps/libraries don't really like the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers.
Konqueror still ships as a file manager in KDE 4.x. Dolphin is default in most distros, but you can switch that back. And I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm no expert, but from what I was reading on the dot near the actual 4.0 release, the problems were the switch to Cmake, and where packages were located. From what I understand, the Kubuntu team had trouble properly compiling and packaging.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit
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KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
This did occur to me even as I was typing it. I think there is certainly some truth to your statement.
Fair enough. Microsoft hasn't patented everything. You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.
As for multi-touch gestures, Apple has Microsoft beat there. So there is is prior art, and even Apple is having trouble getting patents on the gestures from what I understand.
The early Oxygen mock-ups were bland and very white, much like the Oxygen that was shipped with 4.0, except the mock-ups had a few nice splashes of green in them. I really loved the little splash of color and I find the Oxygen we have today is still lacking. They added blue stripes in the window deco, and I'm not sure that was the best place to add color.
What gets me is that while there as some Plasma devs working on a Netbook containment for small screens, we haven't seen a widget theme/overall theme designed for small screens.
Between mobile phones, netbooks and smartbooks, you think Nokia/Qt would be all over this. If not, then perhaps the KDE devs themselves would come up with a good solution here.
The wasted space issue is part of the Oxygen widget theme. It drives me nuts as well, but frankly I don't know how to make a new Qt4/KDE4 widget theme. So I keep waiting and hoping that someone else will come up with a tighter Oxygen theme. That being said, the actual Oxygen theme has been tightened up a bit since the 4.0 launch.
And many bugs were simply closed WONTFIX because the bugs pertain to old versions that are no longer being maintained.
Karma burning for fun and profit
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
From the KDE 4.0 launch and on, Kubuntu/Ubuntu has been shipping some pretty broken packages. I don't want to hate on the Kubuntu developers/packages, but it is the simple truth. And it sure seems like everytime I hear a complaint about KDE 4.x, it is from someone who had a bad experience trying KDE 4.x in *buntu land.
If that is the case, might I suggest that you try a better KDE distro? openSUSE, Arch Linux and Sabayon would be recommendations, in that order.
Here is a weekly snapshot openSUSE/KDE 4 SVN live CD.
It really bothers me when I hear people make uninformed silly comparisons saying that KDE 4 just copies Vista or 7. Honestly, I think there are some great "pillars" that have great potential, but sadly are still under developed, such as Sonnet and Nepomuk I think KDE 4 is just starting to really come into its own and can become a truly great desktop. I just don't think it has delivered on its potential yet.
Conversely, in the areas that perhaps KDE should consider taking a page from Microsoft, they refuse to do so. When I've suggested to Aaron Seigo that he solve the "no-right-click" problem when designing Plasma to also be fully usable on a touch-screen, I suggested he take a page from 7 and use a multi-touch gesture such as 7's for a right-click. In 7, you hold one finger down and then tap with a second finger for a right-click. Aaron deleted my suggestion. I made it a second time thinking maybe I didn't post it, and he deleted it a second time. I've made suggestions to maybe take a few cues from 7's taskbar, and those are always deleted as well.
Is it honestly some great sin to emulate the better features of other desktops? Hasn't KDE done that from the beginning?
The only problem with this accounting is that it makes it seem like there wasn't much time between the -ck patches and the CFS. There was a three year period in there, in which Ingo reviewed the -ck patches repeatedly.
Ingo did publicly admit that he took the concept from the Staircase scheduler in writing his own CFS.
I was merely trying to suggest it is hard to boycott an entire OS because of one developer flaming someone. I could have just as easily asked if he was going to boycott the GNU userland because of Stallman.
Ingo did write the new scheduler, at the request of Linus. Ingo didn't make personal attacks on Con.
Linus was the one for years who said Con was wrong about scheduler theory. Ingo admitted Con was correct, but Linus wouldn't admit he was wrong. Linus asked Ingo to write a new scheduler, basically ignoring the one Con had submitted.
When several people pushed to include Con's scheduler (which at that point was called Staircase) Linus made more personal attacks and wrapped it up saying that Con couldn't be trusted to support his work.
For the average user with a netbook, what are these benefits of Win 7?
I for one do really enjoy the new taskbar, but I feel that a good chunk of the UI in Vista/7 is still a huge regression. It takes more clicks to perform the same tasks.
The OS is slower, despite the claim that 7 is considerably faster than XP. It does use more memory, and often memory is limited on a netbook.
7 looks shiny and new, but the Seven Transformation Pack can replicate the appearance of Windows 7 on XP, including mimicing the appearance of the task bar.
IE 8 and most of the security fixes exist on XP. So the reason to run Win7 is per process audio control? On a netbook, how many applications are you going to be running at once that are each outputting sound?
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Google has recently unveiled Google Voice, Android, Chromium, Wave and announced they are making Chrome OS. Purchasing a codec shop doesn't invalidate the fact that Google is still making some awesome products.
Facebook is supposedly the single most popular site on the web right now. And doesn't Microsoft own a big share of Facebook?
Facebook usurped Myspace's spot, and Myspace arguably was the successor to Geocities.
Who could knock Facebook from their perch? Google could with Wave.
Imagine one integrated service that allowed you to really create content, easily upload your content, and share it. Wave is also built around collaboration. Myspace allows you to customize your page, but you have to know HTML. Facebook won't let you customize your page. Wave could be Facebook mixed with Youtube, mixed with Myspace, mixed with Flickr, mixed with Office Live. Except it would be better, and completely free.
Seriously, don't sell Google short with Wave. I really think that if and when Google started to push it, it could become the biggest thing on the web.
YouTube still loses money hand over fist, where as Hulu is growing in revenue and popularity.
It is extremely easy to rip videos from YouTube, which might be a sticking point in YouTube getting more mainstream/commercial content. Frankly, I don't want to see adds for lame user-generated content on YouTube. And I do find most YouTube content lacking. But at the end of the day, if both YouTube and Hulu had say, full Simpsons episodes, I'd rather support Google's site rather than NBC's site.
These developers could perhaps tweak their existing code to develop a closed, DRM-laden codec that would allow YouTube to stream commercial content. And if YouTube doesn't make a move like this, it may just continue to hemorrhage money from here to eternity.
As a KDE user, I don't have Mono installed with the default desktop. I install Mono only as a dependency for moonlight for the few websites that require it.
I don't see Mono as being inherently evil. It allows people to get away from Microsoft by creating an alternate implementation using free software. Isn't that a good thing?
Microsoft has said that the Mono team completely owns the Mono code, and they made a patent pledge to never sue for patents that might be covered by Mono. They can't simply go back on that pledge, since it is part of the deal to appease the EU.
That being said, I am a little disappointed to see Gnome devs make Mono a dependency for more and more apps, given that many people don't want to go anywhere near Mono.
Air is the plasma theme. It still uses the Oxygen widget theme. And depending on the distro it uses Oxygen or Ozone for the window decoration.
Well that is because Intel seems to be seriously rewriting their drivers.
I've seen people make personal attacks and snipe at you on your blog. I know you've taken a lot of flack since the KDE 4.0 release, much of personally directed as opposed to polite differences over design decisions.
And I don't want to call you a liar. But the suggestions I made had no personal attacks or criticisms. They were short, simple suggestions and they were deleted.
In the end, it is your blog. You're entitled to do what you want with it. And while I'm sure most would say the best place to make such suggestions is a plasma mailing list, it doesn't make sense for me to join a mailing list for plasma development when I'm not a developer. I left the comments on your blog because I see other casual suggestions and discussion there from time to time.
As for non-multi-touch devices, not a whole lot of people are even using touch hardware today, though I expect that to change real soon. Windows 7, and OS X both support multi-touch. The iPhone has suddenly laid down the mobile gauntlet, and all would-be competitors are using multi-touch. Android devices have multi-touch.
Any touch screen put into a netbook/notebook/smartbook for Windows 7 is going to be multi-touch. I'm not sure limiting design to the lowest common denominator is always necessary. You do have to weight it against leaving a set of users behind for certain features, but arguably that is the decision those users made for themselves in their hardware purchase.
I've heard from others that KDE is just copying OS X. Certainly Oxygen bears a certain resemblance to OS X, but overall I find the KDE 4 desktop to be very different.
* No dock.
* Dolphin and Finder are worlds different
* No Mac-style application menus at the top
* Windows buttons on the left in Mac, on the right in KDE
OS X borrowed virtual desktops from Linux. I believe OS X and Compiz borrowed some visual effects from each other.
Amarok 2 now uses Plasma to display plugins in the middle portion of the window. If your graphics driver doesn't like Plasma, then you're likely to have issues here.
Sadly it seems Plasma, and other Qt 4 apps/libraries don't really like the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers.
Konqueror still ships as a file manager in KDE 4.x. Dolphin is default in most distros, but you can switch that back. And I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.
I'm no expert, but from what I was reading on the dot near the actual 4.0 release, the problems were the switch to Cmake, and where packages were located. From what I understand, the Kubuntu team had trouble properly compiling and packaging.
This did occur to me even as I was typing it. I think there is certainly some truth to your statement.
Fair enough. Microsoft hasn't patented everything. You could simply look and see if they filed patents for their taskbar improvements in 7.
As for multi-touch gestures, Apple has Microsoft beat there. So there is is prior art, and even Apple is having trouble getting patents on the gestures from what I understand.
The early Oxygen mock-ups were bland and very white, much like the Oxygen that was shipped with 4.0, except the mock-ups had a few nice splashes of green in them. I really loved the little splash of color and I find the Oxygen we have today is still lacking. They added blue stripes in the window deco, and I'm not sure that was the best place to add color.
What gets me is that while there as some Plasma devs working on a Netbook containment for small screens, we haven't seen a widget theme/overall theme designed for small screens.
Between mobile phones, netbooks and smartbooks, you think Nokia/Qt would be all over this. If not, then perhaps the KDE devs themselves would come up with a good solution here.
The wasted space issue is part of the Oxygen widget theme. It drives me nuts as well, but frankly I don't know how to make a new Qt4/KDE4 widget theme. So I keep waiting and hoping that someone else will come up with a tighter Oxygen theme. That being said, the actual Oxygen theme has been tightened up a bit since the 4.0 launch.
And many bugs were simply closed WONTFIX because the bugs pertain to old versions that are no longer being maintained.
From the KDE 4.0 launch and on, Kubuntu/Ubuntu has been shipping some pretty broken packages. I don't want to hate on the Kubuntu developers/packages, but it is the simple truth. And it sure seems like everytime I hear a complaint about KDE 4.x, it is from someone who had a bad experience trying KDE 4.x in *buntu land.
If that is the case, might I suggest that you try a better KDE distro? openSUSE, Arch Linux and Sabayon would be recommendations, in that order.
Here is a weekly snapshot openSUSE/KDE 4 SVN live CD.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/KDE4-UNSTABLE-Live.i686-1.3.62-Build1.1.iso
It really bothers me when I hear people make uninformed silly comparisons saying that KDE 4 just copies Vista or 7. Honestly, I think there are some great "pillars" that have great potential, but sadly are still under developed, such as Sonnet and Nepomuk I think KDE 4 is just starting to really come into its own and can become a truly great desktop. I just don't think it has delivered on its potential yet.
Conversely, in the areas that perhaps KDE should consider taking a page from Microsoft, they refuse to do so. When I've suggested to Aaron Seigo that he solve the "no-right-click" problem when designing Plasma to also be fully usable on a touch-screen, I suggested he take a page from 7 and use a multi-touch gesture such as 7's for a right-click. In 7, you hold one finger down and then tap with a second finger for a right-click. Aaron deleted my suggestion. I made it a second time thinking maybe I didn't post it, and he deleted it a second time. I've made suggestions to maybe take a few cues from 7's taskbar, and those are always deleted as well.
Is it honestly some great sin to emulate the better features of other desktops? Hasn't KDE done that from the beginning?
If you're not careful, Michael Bay will use that as the script for Transformers 3.
Please see my parent post where I say most of the time I really agree with him, and that nobody is perfect. Everyone has a few personality conflicts.
The only problem with this accounting is that it makes it seem like there wasn't much time between the -ck patches and the CFS. There was a three year period in there, in which Ingo reviewed the -ck patches repeatedly.
Ingo did publicly admit that he took the concept from the Staircase scheduler in writing his own CFS.
I was merely trying to suggest it is hard to boycott an entire OS because of one developer flaming someone. I could have just as easily asked if he was going to boycott the GNU userland because of Stallman.
I read the LKML for years.
Ingo did write the new scheduler, at the request of Linus. Ingo didn't make personal attacks on Con.
Linus was the one for years who said Con was wrong about scheduler theory. Ingo admitted Con was correct, but Linus wouldn't admit he was wrong. Linus asked Ingo to write a new scheduler, basically ignoring the one Con had submitted.
When several people pushed to include Con's scheduler (which at that point was called Staircase) Linus made more personal attacks and wrapped it up saying that Con couldn't be trusted to support his work.
Ingo had nothing to do with that.
For the average user with a netbook, what are these benefits of Win 7?
I for one do really enjoy the new taskbar, but I feel that a good chunk of the UI in Vista/7 is still a huge regression. It takes more clicks to perform the same tasks.
The OS is slower, despite the claim that 7 is considerably faster than XP. It does use more memory, and often memory is limited on a netbook.
7 looks shiny and new, but the Seven Transformation Pack can replicate the appearance of Windows 7 on XP, including mimicing the appearance of the task bar.
Again, what are the huge benefits of 7?
IE 8 and most of the security fixes exist on XP. So the reason to run Win7 is per process audio control? On a netbook, how many applications are you going to be running at once that are each outputting sound?