Why don't they just block Kazaa? Seems easier than this system, and less Gestapo-style. Won't catch me going to a school that's out to get its own students.
Stole the bandwidth? Dude, take a chill pill. I leave my wireless network open - sometimes my neighbors in my apartment building use it, and that's fine (probably because their living room is closer to my AP than it is to their own AP on the other side of their apartment and they just use the network with the stronger signal). If I didn't want them, or visitors, to use it, I would have put WEP up, which albeit weak, prevents wanderers-by from getting access. When I need all my bandwidth, or rather I need a low latency link for gaming and somebody else's use of my upstream is interfering with it, I pull the plug on them.
If somebody were doing something more than checking email, doing some web surfing, and were really imposing a bandwidth burden, I'd reconsider. But bandwidth isn't metered, I don't pay by the byte, and nobody else with residential service in the US does either. So it's not analogous to taking my electricity or charging pay-per-view to my TV. It's more like using my phone line for local calls when I'm not using it.
Actually, as far as I can tell, many sports aren't much more fundamentally interesting to watch people play than games are (for example, I find soccer to be quite boring to watch even at the top levels, though I can definitely enjoy playing it). I think the fundamental difference is that people empathize with the _players_ of sports, and the training for pro sports tends to involve vigorous, healthful athletic training, producing strong, young, buff men, characteristics that other men wish they had, and that women desire.
As best I can tell, CRT tan, pasty complexion, overweight/underweight and unhealthy looking fellows wearing dirty tee shirts and spending their lives practicing Quake aren't really appealing to women, and (either thusly or similarly) don't really ignite a flame of semi-jealous, semi-sympathetic fandom in the average person.
It's not that becoming a world-champion Quake player is _easy_, or necessarily requires less time and effort than becoming an NFL football player (years of practice and training). It's just that people don't empathize with the players or want to be them, so the sport itself loses much of the interest.
Unfortunately, much like the stock market, just because your algorithm *appears* to work on historical data, it's a bit of a leap to the "trade on this algorithm, it'll always make you money" stage. The market always comes up with surprises, mostly because the "market" represents the aggregate behavior of millions of human beings and (more importantly) their complex interactions.
Similarly, I'm sure with this technology certain patterns are definitely there and can be latched onto, but that doesn't mean you'll catch every hit, or that everything you catch will actually be a hit.
How long was their access denied for? Weren't many of those POWs released anyway? And what about the rest, weren't most of them given access to the ICRC eventually? I'm not saying our government and military have done everything right - I don't support the way the POWs are being held and treated at Guantanamo Bay. Or rather, I would support those conditions for known high-risk terrorist types, it's just that it's not clear to me that their are meaningful procedures in place to determine who deserves that kind of treatment. Run-of-the-mill POWs whose only offense was picking up a gun and fighting for what they perceived as their legitimate national government at the time, awful and terrible as it was for its atrocities against its own people, and for supporting and harboring terrorists who attacked civilian population centers in the US, the uneducated grunt with an AK doesn't deserve perpetual solitary confinement with no meaningful recourse or trial mechanism in place (and we are still releasing 15 year olds now, after determining they probably didn't deserve to be at Gitmo).
But this is a few hundred folks. These are small numbers. And I don't think the Geneva convention accurately applies to people who may be trying to coordinate retaliatory terrorist actions and themselves inflict massive civilian population casualties - illegitimate combat at its most appalling.
Sounds dangerously close to what bankrupted mp3.com back in the day. You had to be a legal owner to download the MP3s, too, and they still lost in court. Of course, that's because our courts are fucking idiotic.
The problem with civil cases like this is you can't just share one or two files and get arrested and charged over it so you can fight a big symbolic case. If you try that shit, the RIAA won't touch you with a twenty foot pole. They don't _have_ to sue anybody - in fact, they can always just decide not to push ahead with a lawsuit, which they probably would with anybody who has a decent case. They are looking for easy wins to intimidate others with. This is, I must admit, a winning strategy.
No, they make bullshit-ware. That's exactly what I'm talking about. More bullshit-ware expenses don't add up to jack shit, when the problem is that you insist on running your large established business in a stupid way, rather than fixing the basic problems.
As for me, I've never worked for SAP or Peoplesoft. I was the CTO of a small (35 person) enterprise software company, and have worked as a consultant for large financial exchanges and so forth - generally they have hired me to solve problems that they think they want solved with technology, and usually I have to fight with them to get them to accept that the problems they've been having are mostly due to their fucked up bureaucracy, poor requirements definitions, decision by committee, top-tier executives trying to micromanage software development that they don't understand (and let me refer you back to their unwillingness to sit down and do real requirements definition), and reticence to rethink or rationalize "the way things work".
Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I gave up and had my team make the software they wanted, prove the performance results they want, and get the hell out with as much of their money as possible before they start blaming me that the software they asked for doesn't solve their real problems.
This, my friend, is why enterprise software is a crappy business. I much prefer selling real products to the mass market.
A big part of the reason software lets businesses down is that they are often paranoically afraid of change at the middle management layers (pardon, but I fucking hate the word IT, and I find it devoid of meaning so I'll stick to terms that mean something to me).
Basically, companies don't want to change the way their fundamental "business processes" work even when these "processes" don't make any sense. So if you take the same old inefficient way of doing things, and make software to facilitate it, you're still doing it inefficiently. Especially when requirements for "visionary" systems get bogged down with specification by committee - everybody wants to make sure that their department or group level jobs are represented and that nobody designs them out of the picture. Even if a top level executive recognizes that the way things works is too costly and generally sucks, if lots of mid-tier shitheads play the bureaucracy card and bog a system down until it's in le toilette, well, no surprise when the software you end up with is no better than the way you do things now.
It also doesn't help that "IT" is the result of years and years of evolution and almost NOBODY in the business IT world is sufficiently bright to take the big picture, generalize about it, and create a logical, functioning infrastructure to replace it. No, the people who are smart enough to do this generally work for tech-focused companies in more interesting jobs where there are tiers upon tiers of bureaucratic wretchedness breaking everything down.
Oh, so now you're supposed to be able to develop new applications in minutes, for deployment in two days, just because the CEO says so? That must be an adaptive enterprise. Well damn, why didn't she just say so.
No man, that's a stupid enterprise. If Adaptive Enterprise was described as a strategy and technique for building better communication channels between business and IT within an organization to facilitate rapid rollout of reliable, rock-solid new applications at minimal cost and effort, then why didn't this moron just say so? Jesus, apparently HP needs me as a Senior VP. Too bad they could never afford what I'd want to work in such a mindnumbing environment - though I'd consider the CEO position when it opens up.
Sorry, you mistranscribed the law and reversed the logical meaning of those clauses. It appears that the actual text (read it here) explicitly _EXCLUDES_ inventions that meet either of those 2 prongs of the test. You can't slightly change the wording of the law and pretend that it means what you think it means. The crux of this issue from a legal perspective can be reduced to "Does this 'invention' meet prong A of this legal text?" Apple would say "software is our business, and media is our business, so yes". I would say that's too broad of an interpretation.
What would a judge say? IANAL, so I'm not sure, I bet it would depend on the judge. Also, most employees don't want to take their employers to court, it can make it a bit tough to convince somebody else to hire you (employee who sued previous employer is a rather big hiring red flag).
P2P is just like radio, only the people actually listen to music they _like_ instead of shit that the stations are payed to pimp out as top 40? Fucking amazing. These guys are geniuses.
All the systems you mention are auditable by the people using them. You can check to make sure that the ATMs correctly recorded your transactions at the end of the month and get your statements corrected if they over-deducted funds (it's happened twice to me that ATMs charged me without giving me funds).
In this case, the proper result is observable over a substantial period of time on an individual as well as systemic basis. Likewise, calculators - we have been using them for years and noting that they give us correct results assuming correct input except in very unusual cases (battery dying, etc.).
How do we _know_ or _verify_ that a Diebold voting machine is recording our vote properly? That's all we're asking for here. A way to validate that the system is representing our votes properly, and gives us a verifiable paper trail. I don't think we will actually need or want to verify every vote by hand in every election, once the system has proven that it has integrity, and once we have enough checks and balances in place to trust that any fraud would likely be detected. This kind of trust must be earned, it cannot just be demanded by appointed elections officials and other beaurocrats.
Umm, I don't know what planet you live on, but on my planet people actually do this with some frequency. It's all about being motivated and having enough drive, ambition, connections and skill to break into a business. If you can convince a small group of core folks with expertise in a business area to defect from existing companies, and then convince a financier that these are *THE* guys in the business who want to strike out on their own, and that you have a unique, differentiable market segment, strategy and/or product concept, you raise a few million bucks (where few may be 1 or 100 depending on the business) and set about beating the competition, or trying to.
Now the hard part is that the established companies are often very well capitalized from years of above-normal profits produced by dominating some niche. That's a barrier you have to break through. And sometimes, even if you have a few key, brilliant guys, who had the balls to set out and do something new and risky (not everybody has this appetite for risk, by the way - the vast majority of sheep out there don't), you'll find there's an entirely new, unanticipated challenge - attracting and training a solid base of *new* talent to a risky, not-yet-profitable venture to do the rest of the work that needs to be done in a new company. Oh yeah, and somebody has to coordinate all these people - so the brilliant technical folks get Peter-principled up the chain to more management-focused positioned.
If you play all your cards right, and you grow the business properly, can make yourself profitable at an early enough stage or raise enough funds to get good product out there on the market, then you discover that actually selling product is somewhat of a challenge - hope you brought along a few talented sales and marketing folks too, or you'll need to bring some on board now. Oh yeah, and these guys are used to making big money. Don't want to pay them big money? Okay, then find some guys without proven track records and let them do it (but good luck explaining _that_ decision to the investors).
In short you CAN do all of this. I've seen it done before - it's easier to do in certain businesses, like services shops. For example, I have a product design and engineering firm working for me - they are a 5 person shop that spawned out of a large industrial design firm, where they were the star team. They make more money now, and have much more control, and in the case of that business, it works for them. They still need one of them to function as the primary sales/customer relationship lead, though they all work as a team together. It also works for them because they aren't trying to grow it into a massive shop, they are happy making what is probably pretty darned good money, having a really nice, slick looking office where they can come to work and enjoy themselves every day, working with people they know and like.
In any case, considering this "mutiny" is somewhat silly. It's entrepreneurship. If there's an opportunity exposed by your company doing a shitty job serving its market and you think you can strike out on your own, or with a group from said shitty shop, and compete effectively with your former employer, then by all means, do it. It happens all the time. But don't trivialize it and forget how many elements there are to starting a new business and succeeding. And if you manage to get them all right, you might find yourself tempted to pay yourself a bit more for having started this shop, and reap some of the reward for doing something so risky. Of course, new businesses are often better at rewarding the employees who helped start it and make it happen, that's why everyone gave away options in the dot com boom. The unfortunate reality is it's harder to build a profitable business than many people thought (giving shit away for free over the web definitely wasn't the best business model either, of course).
Sorry, that's bullshit. The "average" CEO of a Fortune 500 company, yes. However, the average CEO of a small to medium-sized software company (let's say 10-100 employees) might make twice what his top engineers make. If that. And some equity incentives, but if it's a private company, hey, that may be worthless anyway.
And there are a lot more small and medium sized software companies out there than Fortune 500 companies. Just something to noodle over for those of you so entrenched in Big Corporate America that you forget about the alternatives. Is a good CEO worth two or even three times what a top engineer is? Maybe, maybe not. But that's a very different picture from your factor of 1000, which is the exception, not the rule. Obviously no man is likely to provide _that_ much more value to the company on the margin than everybody else.
I snortled your chir-blek!
on
The Scar
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A long, long time ago, in a zilblex far far asnog, a chir-blek named Firby snortled a zamphod.
Sorry, I'm not attacking the book, since I haven't read Perdido, nor any work by this author, but if the review is an indication, this falls into the category of sci-fi author who feels the need to throw strange terminology out there to make it feel "different". In my experience, this is what happens when an author can't make the story compelling enough on its own merits - I mean, every sci-fi or science fantasy work has strange, inexplicable elements. And, sure, some of them will have odd and unusual names. But it should be done where it's important to the plot, the storytelling and the characters, not just because it sounds cooler to call it a "sneebleblex" than a "car". And generally nonstandard words that at least convey an image to the target audience are substantially better than random combinations of non-standard phonemes.
Anyway, this isn't intended to be a flame against this author, just a general gripe I have with a type of sci-fi. I'm going to go back to snortling my chir-blek now.
Unfortunately, cost recovery usually comes after the main penalty phase in a civil case. It's definitely not guaranteed that the instigator of the suit bears the cost of the lawyers, though if they instigated a very weak, baseless case, it's much more likely they will have to bear the costs.
Unfortunately, in this case, it's clear that the SCO strategy is to draw out litigation long enough to give everybody an uncomfortable feeling in their rectal areas, until somebody snaps and decides to make a favorable acquisition offer. And if SCO loses, good luck getting a dime out of them, they'll fold the shop up in a way that lets them get out of everything, I'm quite sure, and still make off with a lot of money. This is definitely one of these cases where the malfeasance of corporate officers and attorneys is so blatant, I'd like to see the corporate veil pierced and have personal liability passed on to these fuckers for the financial losses and damaged reputations they have incurred on lots of other legitimate, hardworking people and companies.
Sure, start up a GNOME app without GNOME running (Evolution for example) and wait 25 seconds while it starts up twenty GNOME components under KDE. And at least when I last tried it, this process was not exactly perfectly reliable or stable. Ugh. Awful.
"Force" meaning "forced by my aesthetic sense". I thought that was clear from the context of the sentence. I just can't stand the clashing look and feel of Gtk apps side-by-side with Qt apps. And no amount of tweaking has ever been able to fully resolve this issue for me in a way I find aesthetically satisfactory. Apparently, however, I am a legitimate target for mod-slamming just because I don't think XFree86 was delivered to us on a golden plate by the gods, and that Gtk and Qt are the prophets of this god. Oh well.
Also, I find the aqua themes out there annoying because none of the aqua themes come close to looking and feeling like real aqua. I'd rather just have it look and feel, well, like its own consistent platform, than drive me batty looking and feeling _almost_ like something it's not.
I realize all of this, I have written semi-definitive HOWTOs on deuglifying Linux Mandrake's font configurations (back in the 8.0 and 8.1 days of Mandrake, this was). I simply don't have time to spend that much effort anymore, and I have found in the past (though it may not be true anymore), it didn't matter whether you used identical fonts or not, the interactions with XRender/Xft were ever-so-slightly different and the fonts didn't come out looking quite the same. It drives me up the wall to see Qt and Gtk apps side by side like that. Maybe current Redhat/Fedora distros with Bluecurve don't suffer from this problem any more, but I'm not convinced.
Okay, let me revise and resubmit my post. Before there's a chance in hell of ME switching back to Linux for my primary desktop machine, *I* want to have a consistent desktop. I have acknowledged that maybe I'm overestimating the importance of consistency in Joe Average's life, and that may very well be true, but I know for a fact that many fairly techno-literate friends of mine can't stand running Linux/X/Desktop Environment of choice on their primary desktop system because no matter what you do to configure it, it always looks and feels amateurish due to the complete lack of consistency between apps. Apparently some of the other people responding to me don't see that Windows is not terribly consistent between apps, but X is a whole buttload worse, to the point that Windows doesn't cause my eyeballs aggravation to look at, but X does.
Are you dense? The force I was referring to was a sense of aesthetic necessity, not a technical issue. You obviously didn't read my post, nor did the rest of the imbeciles responding here telling me that it's perfectly possible to run Gtk and Qt apps side by side. Of course it's possible, if you like scraping your eyes out of your sockets. Maybe I'm just obsessive compulsive, but I can't frigging stand the lack of consistency in my UI caused by doing this, and no, using a similar theme for both generally doesn't hack it if the font rendering and other effects looks completely different between the toolkits.
This is just wrong. Windows is not perfect by any means. Like I said, if I REALLY wanted the best possible consistency, I'd use Mac OS X (which is also not a perfect platform, but substantially better in the consistency department than Windows). Nonetheless, you can't tell me with a straight face that X with it's umpteen million different toolkits, widget sets, desktop environments, etc. is comparable in consistency to Windows.
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Why don't they just block Kazaa? Seems easier than this system, and less Gestapo-style. Won't catch me going to a school that's out to get its own students.
If somebody were doing something more than checking email, doing some web surfing, and were really imposing a bandwidth burden, I'd reconsider. But bandwidth isn't metered, I don't pay by the byte, and nobody else with residential service in the US does either. So it's not analogous to taking my electricity or charging pay-per-view to my TV. It's more like using my phone line for local calls when I'm not using it.
As best I can tell, CRT tan, pasty complexion, overweight/underweight and unhealthy looking fellows wearing dirty tee shirts and spending their lives practicing Quake aren't really appealing to women, and (either thusly or similarly) don't really ignite a flame of semi-jealous, semi-sympathetic fandom in the average person.
It's not that becoming a world-champion Quake player is _easy_, or necessarily requires less time and effort than becoming an NFL football player (years of practice and training). It's just that people don't empathize with the players or want to be them, so the sport itself loses much of the interest.
Similarly, I'm sure with this technology certain patterns are definitely there and can be latched onto, but that doesn't mean you'll catch every hit, or that everything you catch will actually be a hit.
But this is a few hundred folks. These are small numbers. And I don't think the Geneva convention accurately applies to people who may be trying to coordinate retaliatory terrorist actions and themselves inflict massive civilian population casualties - illegitimate combat at its most appalling.
Sounds dangerously close to what bankrupted mp3.com back in the day. You had to be a legal owner to download the MP3s, too, and they still lost in court. Of course, that's because our courts are fucking idiotic.
The problem with civil cases like this is you can't just share one or two files and get arrested and charged over it so you can fight a big symbolic case. If you try that shit, the RIAA won't touch you with a twenty foot pole. They don't _have_ to sue anybody - in fact, they can always just decide not to push ahead with a lawsuit, which they probably would with anybody who has a decent case. They are looking for easy wins to intimidate others with. This is, I must admit, a winning strategy.
As for me, I've never worked for SAP or Peoplesoft. I was the CTO of a small (35 person) enterprise software company, and have worked as a consultant for large financial exchanges and so forth - generally they have hired me to solve problems that they think they want solved with technology, and usually I have to fight with them to get them to accept that the problems they've been having are mostly due to their fucked up bureaucracy, poor requirements definitions, decision by committee, top-tier executives trying to micromanage software development that they don't understand (and let me refer you back to their unwillingness to sit down and do real requirements definition), and reticence to rethink or rationalize "the way things work".
Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I gave up and had my team make the software they wanted, prove the performance results they want, and get the hell out with as much of their money as possible before they start blaming me that the software they asked for doesn't solve their real problems.
This, my friend, is why enterprise software is a crappy business. I much prefer selling real products to the mass market.
Never mind. It wasn't very funny.
"Myaaa, Did you get the memo? We're now using the new cover on all TPC Reports. If you could just do that, that would be great. Thanks."
Basically, companies don't want to change the way their fundamental "business processes" work even when these "processes" don't make any sense. So if you take the same old inefficient way of doing things, and make software to facilitate it, you're still doing it inefficiently. Especially when requirements for "visionary" systems get bogged down with specification by committee - everybody wants to make sure that their department or group level jobs are represented and that nobody designs them out of the picture. Even if a top level executive recognizes that the way things works is too costly and generally sucks, if lots of mid-tier shitheads play the bureaucracy card and bog a system down until it's in le toilette, well, no surprise when the software you end up with is no better than the way you do things now.
It also doesn't help that "IT" is the result of years and years of evolution and almost NOBODY in the business IT world is sufficiently bright to take the big picture, generalize about it, and create a logical, functioning infrastructure to replace it. No, the people who are smart enough to do this generally work for tech-focused companies in more interesting jobs where there are tiers upon tiers of bureaucratic wretchedness breaking everything down.
No man, that's a stupid enterprise. If Adaptive Enterprise was described as a strategy and technique for building better communication channels between business and IT within an organization to facilitate rapid rollout of reliable, rock-solid new applications at minimal cost and effort, then why didn't this moron just say so? Jesus, apparently HP needs me as a Senior VP. Too bad they could never afford what I'd want to work in such a mindnumbing environment - though I'd consider the CEO position when it opens up.
What would a judge say? IANAL, so I'm not sure, I bet it would depend on the judge. Also, most employees don't want to take their employers to court, it can make it a bit tough to convince somebody else to hire you (employee who sued previous employer is a rather big hiring red flag).
P2P is just like radio, only the people actually listen to music they _like_ instead of shit that the stations are payed to pimp out as top 40? Fucking amazing. These guys are geniuses.
In this case, the proper result is observable over a substantial period of time on an individual as well as systemic basis. Likewise, calculators - we have been using them for years and noting that they give us correct results assuming correct input except in very unusual cases (battery dying, etc.).
How do we _know_ or _verify_ that a Diebold voting machine is recording our vote properly? That's all we're asking for here. A way to validate that the system is representing our votes properly, and gives us a verifiable paper trail. I don't think we will actually need or want to verify every vote by hand in every election, once the system has proven that it has integrity, and once we have enough checks and balances in place to trust that any fraud would likely be detected. This kind of trust must be earned, it cannot just be demanded by appointed elections officials and other beaurocrats.
Now the hard part is that the established companies are often very well capitalized from years of above-normal profits produced by dominating some niche. That's a barrier you have to break through. And sometimes, even if you have a few key, brilliant guys, who had the balls to set out and do something new and risky (not everybody has this appetite for risk, by the way - the vast majority of sheep out there don't), you'll find there's an entirely new, unanticipated challenge - attracting and training a solid base of *new* talent to a risky, not-yet-profitable venture to do the rest of the work that needs to be done in a new company. Oh yeah, and somebody has to coordinate all these people - so the brilliant technical folks get Peter-principled up the chain to more management-focused positioned.
If you play all your cards right, and you grow the business properly, can make yourself profitable at an early enough stage or raise enough funds to get good product out there on the market, then you discover that actually selling product is somewhat of a challenge - hope you brought along a few talented sales and marketing folks too, or you'll need to bring some on board now. Oh yeah, and these guys are used to making big money. Don't want to pay them big money? Okay, then find some guys without proven track records and let them do it (but good luck explaining _that_ decision to the investors).
In short you CAN do all of this. I've seen it done before - it's easier to do in certain businesses, like services shops. For example, I have a product design and engineering firm working for me - they are a 5 person shop that spawned out of a large industrial design firm, where they were the star team. They make more money now, and have much more control, and in the case of that business, it works for them. They still need one of them to function as the primary sales/customer relationship lead, though they all work as a team together. It also works for them because they aren't trying to grow it into a massive shop, they are happy making what is probably pretty darned good money, having a really nice, slick looking office where they can come to work and enjoy themselves every day, working with people they know and like.
In any case, considering this "mutiny" is somewhat silly. It's entrepreneurship. If there's an opportunity exposed by your company doing a shitty job serving its market and you think you can strike out on your own, or with a group from said shitty shop, and compete effectively with your former employer, then by all means, do it. It happens all the time. But don't trivialize it and forget how many elements there are to starting a new business and succeeding. And if you manage to get them all right, you might find yourself tempted to pay yourself a bit more for having started this shop, and reap some of the reward for doing something so risky. Of course, new businesses are often better at rewarding the employees who helped start it and make it happen, that's why everyone gave away options in the dot com boom. The unfortunate reality is it's harder to build a profitable business than many people thought (giving shit away for free over the web definitely wasn't the best business model either, of course).
And there are a lot more small and medium sized software companies out there than Fortune 500 companies. Just something to noodle over for those of you so entrenched in Big Corporate America that you forget about the alternatives. Is a good CEO worth two or even three times what a top engineer is? Maybe, maybe not. But that's a very different picture from your factor of 1000, which is the exception, not the rule. Obviously no man is likely to provide _that_ much more value to the company on the margin than everybody else.
Sorry, I'm not attacking the book, since I haven't read Perdido, nor any work by this author, but if the review is an indication, this falls into the category of sci-fi author who feels the need to throw strange terminology out there to make it feel "different". In my experience, this is what happens when an author can't make the story compelling enough on its own merits - I mean, every sci-fi or science fantasy work has strange, inexplicable elements. And, sure, some of them will have odd and unusual names. But it should be done where it's important to the plot, the storytelling and the characters, not just because it sounds cooler to call it a "sneebleblex" than a "car". And generally nonstandard words that at least convey an image to the target audience are substantially better than random combinations of non-standard phonemes.
Anyway, this isn't intended to be a flame against this author, just a general gripe I have with a type of sci-fi. I'm going to go back to snortling my chir-blek now.
Unfortunately, in this case, it's clear that the SCO strategy is to draw out litigation long enough to give everybody an uncomfortable feeling in their rectal areas, until somebody snaps and decides to make a favorable acquisition offer. And if SCO loses, good luck getting a dime out of them, they'll fold the shop up in a way that lets them get out of everything, I'm quite sure, and still make off with a lot of money. This is definitely one of these cases where the malfeasance of corporate officers and attorneys is so blatant, I'd like to see the corporate veil pierced and have personal liability passed on to these fuckers for the financial losses and damaged reputations they have incurred on lots of other legitimate, hardworking people and companies.
Sure, start up a GNOME app without GNOME running (Evolution for example) and wait 25 seconds while it starts up twenty GNOME components under KDE. And at least when I last tried it, this process was not exactly perfectly reliable or stable. Ugh. Awful.
Also, I find the aqua themes out there annoying because none of the aqua themes come close to looking and feeling like real aqua. I'd rather just have it look and feel, well, like its own consistent platform, than drive me batty looking and feeling _almost_ like something it's not.
I realize all of this, I have written semi-definitive HOWTOs on deuglifying Linux Mandrake's font configurations (back in the 8.0 and 8.1 days of Mandrake, this was). I simply don't have time to spend that much effort anymore, and I have found in the past (though it may not be true anymore), it didn't matter whether you used identical fonts or not, the interactions with XRender/Xft were ever-so-slightly different and the fonts didn't come out looking quite the same. It drives me up the wall to see Qt and Gtk apps side by side like that. Maybe current Redhat/Fedora distros with Bluecurve don't suffer from this problem any more, but I'm not convinced.
Okay, let me revise and resubmit my post. Before there's a chance in hell of ME switching back to Linux for my primary desktop machine, *I* want to have a consistent desktop. I have acknowledged that maybe I'm overestimating the importance of consistency in Joe Average's life, and that may very well be true, but I know for a fact that many fairly techno-literate friends of mine can't stand running Linux/X/Desktop Environment of choice on their primary desktop system because no matter what you do to configure it, it always looks and feels amateurish due to the complete lack of consistency between apps. Apparently some of the other people responding to me don't see that Windows is not terribly consistent between apps, but X is a whole buttload worse, to the point that Windows doesn't cause my eyeballs aggravation to look at, but X does.
Are you dense? The force I was referring to was a sense of aesthetic necessity, not a technical issue. You obviously didn't read my post, nor did the rest of the imbeciles responding here telling me that it's perfectly possible to run Gtk and Qt apps side by side. Of course it's possible, if you like scraping your eyes out of your sockets. Maybe I'm just obsessive compulsive, but I can't frigging stand the lack of consistency in my UI caused by doing this, and no, using a similar theme for both generally doesn't hack it if the font rendering and other effects looks completely different between the toolkits.
This is just wrong. Windows is not perfect by any means. Like I said, if I REALLY wanted the best possible consistency, I'd use Mac OS X (which is also not a perfect platform, but substantially better in the consistency department than Windows). Nonetheless, you can't tell me with a straight face that X with it's umpteen million different toolkits, widget sets, desktop environments, etc. is comparable in consistency to Windows.