Not sure if you use it, but Gmail goes down enough that I wouldn't use it for anything crucial. MSN messenger and Gtalk more so. Not only that, there are hundreds of points inbetween me and Google which could fail, 503 was just an example. When I have to tranpsort documents, I tend to put them on my server, use a USB pen and send them via Gmail. Each one has had issues at some point or other.
One of my ISP's routers could go down. It's happened before and left us without internet for over a week (small ISP, no choice). If one of my computers goes down, then I move onto the other one. If that goes down too then if I really need to I can take out the hard drive and pop down to a friend's house. So far there has been much more time that I haven't been able to access Gmail, Gtalk, MSN messenger or even Google than there has been time I haven't been able to access my computer, however you could argue that my computer is more stable than the average user's.
I'm assuming it's a buzzwordy way of saying thin-client, netboot, or referring to actually having all your applications as fancy AJAX things. When they say OS I don't think they mean it in a managing the hardware computer science sense, but more referring to the desktop environment.
An internet operating system may be possible... but do we need it? The last thing I want is "503: Service Unavailable" when trying to print a document for a deadline. They may well have backups, but what use is that when I need it *now*.
An internet linked desktop environment has all the advantages of the internet - updates, blogging, social stuff - with the advantages of a more traditional system - you actually have your documents stored locally, you're not subject to some company suddenly suspending your service and deleting your account (WGA is another matter...), and things load up quickly and run fast.
Totally agree. Words when written to be read whereas when pronounced are to be heard. These two functions are not identical. Reading words works by analysing the curves and spacing of the marks on the paper or screen. Having things that are pronounced the same written different ways will increase the amount of individual patterns that our brain can quickly recognise and can speed up reading greatly once the language has been learned properly. Since stuff written phonetically is more likely to have patterns repeated between words since there are few unique sounds in the English language, it could mean that average reading ability would become worse, despite the initial learning being quicker.
Our brain tries to look for shortcuts. How often has it happened that you read something like "Well" as "We'll" when it's in a valid context. This perhaps indicates that our brain is only skim reading and using the context and the overall look of the word to derive it's meaning. Just as not many people have trouble udnersatnding wehn wrods are wrirten lkie tihs, provided they don't overthink. If there are more words that look similar because they have similar sounds, it could result in more mistakes. Our brain probably isn't going to listen to every other syllable when someone is speaking but we might read only every other letter.
Any anyway, if we're going to go the simplified spelling route.. why not just teach the phonetic alphabet to everyone?
It will be a good thing if people spend the combined time they would have spent learning how to spell/reading the dictionary/using a spellchecker doing something else worthwhile, however the chances are is that people will just waste that time and not get anything more done than they would have without simplifying the spelling.
Essentially things should be made to have as little overhead as possible so that more can be done, but sometimes it's the overheads that keep things interesting. Certain jobs may be a little more interesting if they were on foot rather than in a car, and that might make people work harder. That said, if everything was done by computers and robots such that it supported the economy enough people didn't have to do anything, then I'd still be glad to do programming, photography, music, whatever else for free because it interests me. If some people decide to sit, eat and watch TV until they get a heart problem, that's up to them I guess. Just as some people will take the bus home rather than walk, even if all they're going to do when they get there is complain about how little there is on TV.
How can apple go after the high end market with out cross fire or SLI support in there systems?
Crossfire and SLI are for the really top high end systems. Every game available today will run fine without them and for the performance gain you get for cost of buying 2+ high end graphics cards, it really should be the last thing you think about.
I used to think this way completely until I saw the difference with using USB devices on Linux, Windows and OS X. As far as internal hardware goes I'm sure that Apple test the hell out of anything that goes into their systems a lot more than Dell do, being that they do both the hardware and software, but there still are some places where you can see Windows has problems.
Linux and OS X with a USB pen tends to be plug it in, icon appears near immediately -- you can save to it, open it, whatever. Windows flicks up a load of balloons about how it's detected a USB mass storage device, it's installing the USB device, it's a disk drive, it's on disk drive E: (and it seems to rack the hard drive quite a bit on my computer) then a dialog with it scanning the USB device for what files it contains, then another dialog asking what you want to do with it. This can be very annoying if I've already got an open dialog up and I just want the thing to appear on the dropdown so I can load a document from it.
Admittedly, quite a lot of that is about the UI but there is a significant problem with the way it seems to handle USB devices, and often, a messy UI reveals underlying cracks in the system, for instance on Linux look at all attempts for an Xorg/Xfree configuration UI -- all are subject to the horrific beasts that are Xorg/Xfree, hope they recieve some 'love' in the near future.
Windows actually seems to install a new copy of the driver every time you plug in a USB device with a different device/vendor number or into a different port. When I had a USB modem, it would appear in the device manager as "Fujitsu USB modem". I took it out to clean the computer then plugged into a different port... setup wizard... ran through that, it installed the driver and now I had "Fujitsu USB modem #2" in device manager. Plugging it back into the previous port it worked immediately with no setup wizard and it was called "Fujitsu USB modem" again. Is this really 2 drivers installed for the same device? If the way the UI behaves is anything to go by then it certainly seems that way.
The reason I chose to pick on USB devices is that they're pretty standardised and made for implementation ease, and it's one of the few areas you can compare Windows and OS X directly. On Linux and OS X *most* stuff tends to work pretty flawlessly, especially when it's some standard like mass storage or audio. On Windows it's still a bit of a mess.. SP2 seems to have helped some of the issues I was having with USB input devices though. Doesn't Widnows still lack the ability to unload drivers while it's running, meaning you need restarts to do trivial things like upgrade audio drivers?
Actually, there will be less interop problems with OpenOffice. Being in school currently, I know that everyone either runs an illegal copy of Office or OpenOffice. Nobody our age can afford Microsoft Office even with their student discounts (well... I guess we could but there are more important things that require our money, like the computer itself).
Having the internal stuff all using OpenOffice will satisfy everyone. Runs on most OSes that anyone uses (and if not they're free to port it), it's free and will run alongside Office anyway, and any other problems can be solved usually by creating a PDF. The only problem I can see is those stupid teacher support documents they get from exam boards and such which seem to be word processor documents created in Microsoft Publisher (which nobody I know even has at home anyway).
Not so much that the Linux destkop isn't profitable entirely, I think, but that the Windows market was far more profitable. $1 million to put into the Windows development would probably have had a far higher return than putting it into the Linux development, due to increasing the marketshare. Given this, if a company is in trouble it seems only natural to drop the support for Linux and focus more on getting more Windows customers.
Perhaps samba has gotten much better since I last used it, but setting connecting to or creating Windows shares was far easier with Windows than with Linux.
Well, on my computer at home with GNOME 2.14 I seem to recall Right click folder -> Sharing and the Sharing admin panel, which sets up Samba appropriately. Browsing network shares was simply a matter of clicking the network bit in Nautilus (and it actually didn't keep hanging like explorer, but YMMV -- some Windows networks I tried worked horribly)
try and find an a good open source alternative to something like Soundforge, Cubase or Protools
It is a bit of a problem but progress is being made (see the ANGULA project). If you're willing to mess about at the command line a bit you can get quite a nice setup with JACK and DSSI/VST/LADSPA/LADCCA stuff and using rosegarden as a sequencer, linuxsampler and others for sampling, ardour for recording. Most audio people I've known haven't been afraid to get down to the ugly parts of their Windows systems to improve performance, though.
Some integration needs to be made, and the frontend stuff is inferior to their Windows counterparts currently. The backends still need some work but IMO they're better than the mess on Windows, though in Windows that is hidden by the UI. Plus another advantage is that you can strip the system down to bare minimals with a custom kernel for audio work (low latency, realtime optimisations with ALSA can get extremely low latency of less than 2ms consistently and no stuttering on my low end system but again YMMV).
said that Windows does them perfectly well.
I have to disagree here though. It's not so much that Windows struggles with the tasks themselves, but the OS can end up a bit of a mess when you leave it in the hands of a typical non-geek user for long. I tried my best with my family's laptop, created them an Admin account and a Limited user and told them only to use the Admin to install software. Sooner or later they found stuff didn't work right in Limited user and switched over to the admin account.
Then a misclick in IE just yesterday, one month after getting it (not sure how they got it up, I set firefox as their default and deleted the IE shortcuts) caused their computer to be infected with so much spyware it needed a reinstall. The only experience I had with that on the family linux computer was when someone got the WINE install infected with spyware... I just blew it away and started again.
it can't play some media files (whether it be because of lack of mp3 support out of the box or some random.wmv format) it lacks proper support from many hardware companies (Linux on laptops anyone?).
This is a problem, but it's a very hard to solve one. The solution is sadly getting enough people on Linux that free formats like ogg become more commonplace (or using that fluendo mp3 plugin). Unfortunately it means there's going to be a period of format 'flux'.
Another point of interest is that Windows is often easier to get help on
I agree. At the moment, you search for help on something and you're nearly bound to get something detailing how to do it in RedHat 6 via the command line, despite it possibly being 2 menus away on a modern install of Ubuntu (as changing the resolution is). Possibly more focus should be put on the brand name of the distro and trying to get their help pages (wikis and such) high on the search results as MS tech support articles often are. A better online help system wouldn't go unappreciated either.
Implementing most of the CSS specs in theory is an easy thing to do, provided the browser has a solid, workable base. Firefox has implemented support for specs reasonably speedily, despite it's COM "paperwork" overhead. Though, IE6 has somewhat incomplete and buggy CSS1 support and awful CSS2 support, and worse, 7 years later, IE7 doesn't look set to change this.
Implementing the child selector ( A > B ) should in theory be very, very simple, especially considering that other selectors are implemented already. Why hasn't this been done as a patch to IE6 -- if the code base were good, it should take no more than 20 minutes. Being that I've not seen the IE code, I can't say for certain, but judging from the speed it takes to do anything and the general bugginess, it must be pretty bad.
How is this relevant? Well the w3c specs are currently far far ahead of a browser with 90% marketshare, being that a spec 8 years old still has rubbish support. Until browser development speed picks up, I doubt W3C are going to be the main bottleneck.
In my experience, Opera is the least resource hogging browser there is that supports the latest standards (except IE maybe, but that's broken so it doesn't count). I usually use firefox but will start Opera when I'm low on RAM.
I've nearly finished creating my own livecd from Debian unstable packages, and getting the hardware detection working reliably and fast was just a matter of enabling the modules in the kernel and starting udev/udevtrigger at boot with the appropriate permissions.rules and any custom rules installed.
With the later kernels and udevs, you don't even need to have hotplug or tell the kernel what hotplug program to execute, as it uses a netlink socket. I was surprised at how reliable and easy it's become.
A video file should never be able to infect a computer... if it does then it's not the IM client's fault, but the codec's.
Anyway, GAIM *does* have file transfer for MSN. If it's not working for you then your firewall is probably set up improperly. Webcam/Voice will be implemented soon and they are trying to make MSN file transfer more reliable. An IM app is a great way to transfer files for an average person -- it usually uses SSL and doesn't require setup of a SSH, FTP or HTTP server which is way beyond the scope of a normal user, and in theory has good firewall traversal support.
MSN Messenger is not married to the kernel. It's not even included by default, only Windows Messenger which is used a lot for corporate IM. I'm not saying that I like MSN Messenger, I hate it deeply, and the service is the most unreliable IM service I have ever tried, but a lot of the points you make are quite plainly false.
I meant to put the dependency libs in / -- is / not managed by solaris?
All Linux distros do this (that I know of), since bash is often used early in the boot procedure way before/usr is mounted. It's not like it depends on GTK or anything:
On a large shell server or something that allows remote desktop in some way or form (or even a webserver which allows CGI), it is absolutely crucial to ensure that there is no way for a user to escalate their privileges. It's near impossible to keep track of if anyone has had their password stolen or whatever. Though, if there has been a known escalation, then you almost need to reinstall (unless you can do offline rootkit scanning with very high confidence after neutralising the vulnerability).
Well it's a bit more complicated than this. Technically, an application that wants to be able to use GNOME-VFS has to use the GNOME-VFS functions instead of the stdio functions (obviously), but since GTK+ is cross platform (e.g. the GIMP), but GNOME-VFS isn't enabled automatically, rather an app needs to initialise that library.
It's very simple to do and aside from that, GTK can be fully integrated with GNOME-VFS, but it actually requires, like kioslaves, that you don't use stdio. A significant number of applications are written using only GTK and none of the GNOME libraries. I'd consider any program in the GNOME platform not working with GNOME-VFS as buggy or inconsistent behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you use it, but Gmail goes down enough that I wouldn't use it for anything crucial. MSN messenger and Gtalk more so. Not only that, there are hundreds of points inbetween me and Google which could fail, 503 was just an example. When I have to tranpsort documents, I tend to put them on my server, use a USB pen and send them via Gmail. Each one has had issues at some point or other.
One of my ISP's routers could go down. It's happened before and left us without internet for over a week (small ISP, no choice). If one of my computers goes down, then I move onto the other one. If that goes down too then if I really need to I can take out the hard drive and pop down to a friend's house. So far there has been much more time that I haven't been able to access Gmail, Gtalk, MSN messenger or even Google than there has been time I haven't been able to access my computer, however you could argue that my computer is more stable than the average user's.
I'm assuming it's a buzzwordy way of saying thin-client, netboot, or referring to actually having all your applications as fancy AJAX things. When they say OS I don't think they mean it in a managing the hardware computer science sense, but more referring to the desktop environment.
An internet operating system may be possible... but do we need it? The last thing I want is "503: Service Unavailable" when trying to print a document for a deadline. They may well have backups, but what use is that when I need it *now*.
An internet linked desktop environment has all the advantages of the internet - updates, blogging, social stuff - with the advantages of a more traditional system - you actually have your documents stored locally, you're not subject to some company suddenly suspending your service and deleting your account (WGA is another matter...), and things load up quickly and run fast.
Totally agree. Words when written to be read whereas when pronounced are to be heard. These two functions are not identical. Reading words works by analysing the curves and spacing of the marks on the paper or screen. Having things that are pronounced the same written different ways will increase the amount of individual patterns that our brain can quickly recognise and can speed up reading greatly once the language has been learned properly.
Since stuff written phonetically is more likely to have patterns repeated between words since there are few unique sounds in the English language, it could mean that average reading ability would become worse, despite the initial learning being quicker.
Our brain tries to look for shortcuts. How often has it happened that you read something like "Well" as "We'll" when it's in a valid context. This perhaps indicates that our brain is only skim reading and using the context and the overall look of the word to derive it's meaning. Just as not many people have trouble udnersatnding wehn wrods are wrirten lkie tihs, provided they don't overthink. If there are more words that look similar because they have similar sounds, it could result in more mistakes. Our brain probably isn't going to listen to every other syllable when someone is speaking but we might read only every other letter.
Any anyway, if we're going to go the simplified spelling route.. why not just teach the phonetic alphabet to everyone?
It will be a good thing if people spend the combined time they would have spent learning how to spell/reading the dictionary/using a spellchecker doing something else worthwhile, however the chances are is that people will just waste that time and not get anything more done than they would have without simplifying the spelling.
Essentially things should be made to have as little overhead as possible so that more can be done, but sometimes it's the overheads that keep things interesting. Certain jobs may be a little more interesting if they were on foot rather than in a car, and that might make people work harder. That said, if everything was done by computers and robots such that it supported the economy enough people didn't have to do anything, then I'd still be glad to do programming, photography, music, whatever else for free because it interests me. If some people decide to sit, eat and watch TV until they get a heart problem, that's up to them I guess. Just as some people will take the bus home rather than walk, even if all they're going to do when they get there is complain about how little there is on TV.
Crossfire and SLI are for the really top high end systems. Every game available today will run fine without them and for the performance gain you get for cost of buying 2+ high end graphics cards, it really should be the last thing you think about.
For details, see this page: http://tomshardware.co.uk/2005/12/02/vga_charts_v
I used to think this way completely until I saw the difference with using USB devices on Linux, Windows and OS X. As far as internal hardware goes I'm sure that Apple test the hell out of anything that goes into their systems a lot more than Dell do, being that they do both the hardware and software, but there still are some places where you can see Windows has problems.
Linux and OS X with a USB pen tends to be plug it in, icon appears near immediately -- you can save to it, open it, whatever. Windows flicks up a load of balloons about how it's detected a USB mass storage device, it's installing the USB device, it's a disk drive, it's on disk drive E: (and it seems to rack the hard drive quite a bit on my computer) then a dialog with it scanning the USB device for what files it contains, then another dialog asking what you want to do with it. This can be very annoying if I've already got an open dialog up and I just want the thing to appear on the dropdown so I can load a document from it.
Admittedly, quite a lot of that is about the UI but there is a significant problem with the way it seems to handle USB devices, and often, a messy UI reveals underlying cracks in the system, for instance on Linux look at all attempts for an Xorg/Xfree configuration UI -- all are subject to the horrific beasts that are Xorg/Xfree, hope they recieve some 'love' in the near future.
Windows actually seems to install a new copy of the driver every time you plug in a USB device with a different device/vendor number or into a different port. When I had a USB modem, it would appear in the device manager as "Fujitsu USB modem". I took it out to clean the computer then plugged into a different port... setup wizard... ran through that, it installed the driver and now I had "Fujitsu USB modem #2" in device manager. Plugging it back into the previous port it worked immediately with no setup wizard and it was called "Fujitsu USB modem" again. Is this really 2 drivers installed for the same device? If the way the UI behaves is anything to go by then it certainly seems that way.
The reason I chose to pick on USB devices is that they're pretty standardised and made for implementation ease, and it's one of the few areas you can compare Windows and OS X directly. On Linux and OS X *most* stuff tends to work pretty flawlessly, especially when it's some standard like mass storage or audio. On Windows it's still a bit of a mess.. SP2 seems to have helped some of the issues I was having with USB input devices though. Doesn't Widnows still lack the ability to unload drivers while it's running, meaning you need restarts to do trivial things like upgrade audio drivers?
Actually, there will be less interop problems with OpenOffice. Being in school currently, I know that everyone either runs an illegal copy of Office or OpenOffice. Nobody our age can afford Microsoft Office even with their student discounts (well... I guess we could but there are more important things that require our money, like the computer itself).
Having the internal stuff all using OpenOffice will satisfy everyone. Runs on most OSes that anyone uses (and if not they're free to port it), it's free and will run alongside Office anyway, and any other problems can be solved usually by creating a PDF. The only problem I can see is those stupid teacher support documents they get from exam boards and such which seem to be word processor documents created in Microsoft Publisher (which nobody I know even has at home anyway).
To use this product, you need to install free software
This product requires Microsoft© Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft© Media Player 10, and Macromedia Flash 6. To download these free software applications, click the links below and follow the on-screen instructions.
Funnily, if you read the EULA, it informs you that WMP and IE are not free, but are licensed to users of the commercial Windows product...
Not so much that the Linux destkop isn't profitable entirely, I think, but that the Windows market was far more profitable. $1 million to put into the Windows development would probably have had a far higher return than putting it into the Linux development, due to increasing the marketshare. Given this, if a company is in trouble it seems only natural to drop the support for Linux and focus more on getting more Windows customers.
Perhaps samba has gotten much better since I last used it, but setting connecting to or creating Windows shares was far easier with Windows than with Linux.
Well, on my computer at home with GNOME 2.14 I seem to recall Right click folder -> Sharing and the Sharing admin panel, which sets up Samba appropriately. Browsing network shares was simply a matter of clicking the network bit in Nautilus (and it actually didn't keep hanging like explorer, but YMMV -- some Windows networks I tried worked horribly)
try and find an a good open source alternative to something like Soundforge, Cubase or Protools
It is a bit of a problem but progress is being made (see the ANGULA project). If you're willing to mess about at the command line a bit you can get quite a nice setup with JACK and DSSI/VST/LADSPA/LADCCA stuff and using rosegarden as a sequencer, linuxsampler and others for sampling, ardour for recording. Most audio people I've known haven't been afraid to get down to the ugly parts of their Windows systems to improve performance, though.
Some integration needs to be made, and the frontend stuff is inferior to their Windows counterparts currently. The backends still need some work but IMO they're better than the mess on Windows, though in Windows that is hidden by the UI. Plus another advantage is that you can strip the system down to bare minimals with a custom kernel for audio work (low latency, realtime optimisations with ALSA can get extremely low latency of less than 2ms consistently and no stuttering on my low end system but again YMMV).
said that Windows does them perfectly well.
I have to disagree here though. It's not so much that Windows struggles with the tasks themselves, but the OS can end up a bit of a mess when you leave it in the hands of a typical non-geek user for long. I tried my best with my family's laptop, created them an Admin account and a Limited user and told them only to use the Admin to install software. Sooner or later they found stuff didn't work right in Limited user and switched over to the admin account.
Then a misclick in IE just yesterday, one month after getting it (not sure how they got it up, I set firefox as their default and deleted the IE shortcuts) caused their computer to be infected with so much spyware it needed a reinstall. The only experience I had with that on the family linux computer was when someone got the WINE install infected with spyware... I just blew it away and started again.
it can't play some media files (whether it be because of lack of mp3 support out of the box or some random .wmv format) it lacks proper support from many hardware companies (Linux on laptops anyone?).
This is a problem, but it's a very hard to solve one. The solution is sadly getting enough people on Linux that free formats like ogg become more commonplace (or using that fluendo mp3 plugin). Unfortunately it means there's going to be a period of format 'flux'.
Another point of interest is that Windows is often easier to get help on
I agree. At the moment, you search for help on something and you're nearly bound to get something detailing how to do it in RedHat 6 via the command line, despite it possibly being 2 menus away on a modern install of Ubuntu (as changing the resolution is). Possibly more focus should be put on the brand name of the distro and trying to get their help pages (wikis and such) high on the search results as MS tech support articles often are. A better online help system wouldn't go unappreciated either.
Implementing most of the CSS specs in theory is an easy thing to do, provided the browser has a solid, workable base. Firefox has implemented support for specs reasonably speedily, despite it's COM "paperwork" overhead. Though, IE6 has somewhat incomplete and buggy CSS1 support and awful CSS2 support, and worse, 7 years later, IE7 doesn't look set to change this.
Implementing the child selector ( A > B ) should in theory be very, very simple, especially considering that other selectors are implemented already. Why hasn't this been done as a patch to IE6 -- if the code base were good, it should take no more than 20 minutes. Being that I've not seen the IE code, I can't say for certain, but judging from the speed it takes to do anything and the general bugginess, it must be pretty bad.
How is this relevant? Well the w3c specs are currently far far ahead of a browser with 90% marketshare, being that a spec 8 years old still has rubbish support. Until browser development speed picks up, I doubt W3C are going to be the main bottleneck.
More of a resource hog?
In my experience, Opera is the least resource hogging browser there is that supports the latest standards (except IE maybe, but that's broken so it doesn't count). I usually use firefox but will start Opera when I'm low on RAM.
I've nearly finished creating my own livecd from Debian unstable packages, and getting the hardware detection working reliably and fast was just a matter of enabling the modules in the kernel and starting udev/udevtrigger at boot with the appropriate permissions.rules and any custom rules installed.
With the later kernels and udevs, you don't even need to have hotplug or tell the kernel what hotplug program to execute, as it uses a netlink socket. I was surprised at how reliable and easy it's become.
Wouldn't that mean MS were just sort of selling a per-seat version of Qt?
A video file should never be able to infect a computer... if it does then it's not the IM client's fault, but the codec's.
Anyway, GAIM *does* have file transfer for MSN. If it's not working for you then your firewall is probably set up improperly. Webcam/Voice will be implemented soon and they are trying to make MSN file transfer more reliable. An IM app is a great way to transfer files for an average person -- it usually uses SSL and doesn't require setup of a SSH, FTP or HTTP server which is way beyond the scope of a normal user, and in theory has good firewall traversal support.
MSN Messenger is not married to the kernel. It's not even included by default, only Windows Messenger which is used a lot for corporate IM. I'm not saying that I like MSN Messenger, I hate it deeply, and the service is the most unreliable IM service I have ever tried, but a lot of the points you make are quite plainly false.
All Linux distros do this (that I know of), since bash is often used early in the boot procedure way before
Maybe so, but what of those features you listed are required for this particular task and cannot be done with istanbul+kino?
Rather than statically compiling bash, wouldn't the better choice be to have it's dependencies all available in single user mode?
The people watching porn probably don't really think it's particularly immoral (despite what they might say in public).
You can still use Xlib as normal, however, Xcb (http://xcb.freedesktop.org/wiki/) may be "where it's at" in the future.
On a large shell server or something that allows remote desktop in some way or form (or even a webserver which allows CGI), it is absolutely crucial to ensure that there is no way for a user to escalate their privileges. It's near impossible to keep track of if anyone has had their password stolen or whatever. Though, if there has been a known escalation, then you almost need to reinstall (unless you can do offline rootkit scanning with very high confidence after neutralising the vulnerability).
Some of my text files seem to be infected with a pox of periods, an abscess of ampersands, or an eruption of exclamation marks
That's just perl
Hey, when I said to my friends: "This DVD smells like celery", they just looked at me funny. I guess I wasn't imagining it then
Well it's a bit more complicated than this. Technically, an application that wants to be able to use GNOME-VFS has to use the GNOME-VFS functions instead of the stdio functions (obviously), but since GTK+ is cross platform (e.g. the GIMP), but GNOME-VFS isn't enabled automatically, rather an app needs to initialise that library.
It's very simple to do and aside from that, GTK can be fully integrated with GNOME-VFS, but it actually requires, like kioslaves, that you don't use stdio. A significant number of applications are written using only GTK and none of the GNOME libraries. I'd consider any program in the GNOME platform not working with GNOME-VFS as buggy or inconsistent behaviour.