Yes, but XP and OSX are operating systems, while GNOME/KDE are just "desktop environments" (whatever that means). I can take a fully functional light weight window manager running on X with the Linux kernel and it will run 10 times faster than the same Linux kernel running X with GNOME/KDE. This is unexcusable (and again - why?).
I get pissed off because so many Linux users (the newer ones mostly) are completely clueless when it comes to X. GNOME/KDE have a lot of mindshare which is undeserved IMHO.
You haven't answered my question (again). What does KDE/GNOME give you for that bloat? Why are they both so much bigger and slower than their equivalents on other platforms?
This isn't going to happen, and in a first-past-the-post system you're wasting your vote if you don't vote for one of the 2 front-runners in your area.
This tendency for first-past-the-post systems to create 2-party systems is called Duverger's Law, and a common consequence of it is the spoiler effect. For example, in the last US presidential election Nader's candidacy "spoiled" the election for Gore, by taking away enough votes from Gore in many states to give Bush enough votes to win the electors in those states.
No matter how appealing a third candidate may be and how unappealing the 2 front-runners, you must vote for one of the 2 front-runners. Often this means voting against the front-runner you dislike most rather than voting for the front-runner you prefer.
That's probably because many EU countries (I'm thinking of the nordic ones and the Benelux) are fundamentally more decent and liberal than the US. Just because the UK (with it's dodgy un-written "constitution") has regressed, it doesn't mean that the rest of the EU member-states have.
For example many of us have civil codes that are built on fair, just and easily understood principles rather than arbitrary precedant, proportional representation that means that every member of the electorate's vote counts, and a respectful approach to the environment.
Perhaps you could explain why GNOME and KDE need the latest hardware - I can't see any good reason. And one more thing - hardware's only obsolete if it can no longer be used. Bloated software like KDE and GNOME encourage people to think that what should be perfectly adequate hardware is "obsolete". The hardware upgrade cycle benefits the big corporate playerls like Microsoft and Intel, but harms us the users, and it makes no sense for Linux to emulate.
And for your second point, I don't use KDE and GNOME. It's perfectly possible to run X without them (and suits me and many others much better). Making X act like a poor Windows ripoff may be of use to users migrating from Windows, but is completely counter productive to people like me.
Hmm. Windows 95 on a 386 can run it's (built-in) window manager, explorer.exe and notepad.exe acceptably. Early Apple Macs, Amigas, Atari STs, NeXT boxes and Acorns can also run their GUIs and a text editor fine. What's GNOME's and KDE's excuses?
There are people out there who still run 486s, hell, even 386s. Should Gnome have targetted these as the lowest common demoninator? No, for the simple reason that there ARE window managers for these circumstances, and Gnome wanted to move forward.
Sorry, but there is absolutely no reason why a window manager should not be able to run quickly on a 386. Why shouldn't a 386 be able to run Metacity, Gnome-panel and gedit comfortably?
I emailed them the following: > Greetings. > > I have been responsible for monitoring communications from your planet > for some time now. It's been a largely dull and unsatisfying job, the > highlights until recently being the discovery of fire and the wheel. The > last couple of years have seen the creation of search engines; a > development that proves you may be worthy of our further interest. > > I am communicating with you to tell you that we have a sleeping opeartive > on your planet who may be useful to you. His name is <SNIP/>, a > human as yet unaware of his importance to inter-stella information > retrieval. He has been conditioned to know much about C/C++, languages > that were in the ascendency before Java/C# caused the beginning of the > end of computational technology. You would be well advised to employ this > organism. > > Yours faithfully, > [string outside unicode encoding] > > PS. We may be interested in exchanging your knowledge of "PageRank" with > our knowledge of inter-stella travel. Your employment of our operative > may help cement the deal.
A firefox is a red panda. Here's a picture of one. This site has some more info, specifically "The Chinese name for red panda is hunho or firefox, due to their colour and similar size to a fox".
Yeah, and you can certainly tell. I love the GCC, but I wish they would follow the standards. Taken from here:
It [GCC] will compile and link almost anything. It would probably compile Perl without too much modification and wouldn't even emit that many warnings. Look! Look at this!
*&(int)f = 1;
Is that C? I don't fucking think so. And look at this:
Yes, that's supposed to be C, not C++, because the things they've done to C++ are almost bloody unspeakable. The words "embrace" and "extend" come to mind. How about this, for instance:
It is very convenient to have operators which return the "minimum" or the
"maximum" of two arguments. In GNU C++ (but not in GNU C),
a <? b
is the minimum, returning the smaller of the numeric values a and b;
a >? b
is the maximum, returning the larger of the numeric values a and b.
What? What the hell is that about? And you know the worst thing? People actually use these abortions in real code, because obviously, if it compiles on Linux with gcc, it'll compile anywhere. That's why you're having problems linking on AIX - because nobody's even thought about AIX before. We use autoconf, right, so it must be portable? Yeah, fucking right. Portable between GNU OSes, I think you'll find.
Part of the reason Parrot 0.0.1 was so slow getting out of the door was because of all these stupid idiots writing GCC "C" and not realising how completely fucking broken it was.
And while we're on the subject of standards, does anyone know if Linux has a standard way of treating the keys that Microsoft added to the keyboard. Is the left Windows key Super_L or F13, and is it a modifier or not? Enquiring coders want to know.
Never forget that the reason why Microsoft persists with Bob-like interactive assistants (Microsoft Agents), is that MS Bob's project manager was Melinda French, the woman who would later become BillG's wife.
I figure there's more open source window managers for X Windows then there are proprietary GUIs, and it's a shame that GUIdebook doesn't cover them. There's a good site here that does.
Unlike proprietary GUIs, some of the open source offerings are more innovative. I particularly like Ion, a tiled wm, and WindowLab, which seems pretty original.
"Whatever it is that annoys other cultures about the Jewish culture almost certainly has nothing to do with religion."
This is incorrect. Historically the main reason why the Jews were persecuted by Christians was that the Bible did not permit usary (money lending) while the Jewish religion did. As a result only Jews were allowed by their religion to be money lenders and they were resented because this meant that they were typically more wealthy then the christian communities in which they lived.
The Muslims on the other hand tend to be anti-Israeli because Israel was founded on Palestinian land, and when the Palestinans resist the occupation the Israelis have tended to react brutally.
"The complaints about America are largely the result of American culture and history. It's not like suddenly in 2001 Bush took office and people just started having problems with America"
No, this is not true. In Europe we pretty much switched overnight from liking and respecting the US to despising it as a result of Bush's response to the terrorist attack in New York.
Hopefully you guys will get rid of the current administration soon and we can get some sanity back into world affairs.
I'm a C/C++ coder who's just been roped (against my wishes) into a J2EE project that's using OptimalJ to save time. It seems to me that J2EE is totally over engineered and that something like OptimalJ is needed to make J2EE development competitive (developer time wise) with ASP or PHP. OptimalJ is woefuly inefficient in the Java code it creates, but is very powerful - you can make an entity relationship diagram, click a few buttons and you've got a fully working website ready for deployment. I can see all web development going this way soon...
I want to know if there's a sensible way of writing web applications using C/C++. It would have to have a way of seperating out the HTML so that designers don't have to pick through code. Any ideas?
I hate to break it to you, but the UK's part of Europe, both geographically and politically. What you said's like saying: "as opposed to the USA and Hawaii".
But if we're talking about the Linux desktop and assume that it will continue to be open source, then compiling from source certainly is an option. It may not be an option in a closed-source commercial software house (where I'm presuming you work), but then I guess you're not writing GPL'ed code.
"Seriously, code inside VMs has advantages, such as security and portability."
I'm not disputing that. I'm currently editing some Java (bleh) in an IDE written in Java (double bleh) on my nice super fast new Dell, and every so often I have to wait a couple of seconds for all of the characters I've typed to appear. GUI code written on languages that use a virtual machines are hugely inefficient. A 2 Ghz PC should be able to run a text editor faster than my old 7 Mhz Amiga 500!
...is a nice C++ GUI framework. Once you have one of these, be it gtkmm, qt or wxWidgets you're set.
People need to avoid the language hype - C# and Java are not the way to go. There's quite enough bloatware out there already, and running code inside virtual machines does not help.
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Yes, but XP and OSX are operating systems, while GNOME/KDE are just "desktop environments" (whatever that means). I can take a fully functional light weight window manager running on X with the Linux kernel and it will run 10 times faster than the same Linux kernel running X with GNOME/KDE. This is unexcusable (and again - why?).
I get pissed off because so many Linux users (the newer ones mostly) are completely clueless when it comes to X. GNOME/KDE have a lot of mindshare which is undeserved IMHO.
You haven't answered my question (again). What does KDE/GNOME give you for that bloat? Why are they both so much bigger and slower than their equivalents on other platforms?
This isn't going to happen, and in a first-past-the-post system you're wasting your vote if you don't vote for one of the 2 front-runners in your area.
This tendency for first-past-the-post systems to create 2-party systems is called Duverger's Law, and a common consequence of it is the spoiler effect. For example, in the last US presidential election Nader's candidacy "spoiled" the election for Gore, by taking away enough votes from Gore in many states to give Bush enough votes to win the electors in those states.
No matter how appealing a third candidate may be and how unappealing the 2 front-runners, you must vote for one of the 2 front-runners. Often this means voting against the front-runner you dislike most rather than voting for the front-runner you prefer.
If you think this situation sucks, campaign for proportional representation, where everyone's votes count.
"US == Evil ; Any EU nation == Can do no wrong"
That's probably because many EU countries (I'm thinking of the nordic ones and the Benelux) are fundamentally more decent and liberal than the US. Just because the UK (with it's dodgy un-written "constitution") has regressed, it doesn't mean that the rest of the EU member-states have.
For example many of us have civil codes that are built on fair, just and easily understood principles rather than arbitrary precedant, proportional representation that means that every member of the electorate's vote counts, and a respectful approach to the environment.
Perhaps you could explain why GNOME and KDE need the latest hardware - I can't see any good reason. And one more thing - hardware's only obsolete if it can no longer be used. Bloated software like KDE and GNOME encourage people to think that what should be perfectly adequate hardware is "obsolete". The hardware upgrade cycle benefits the big corporate playerls like Microsoft and Intel, but harms us the users, and it makes no sense for Linux to emulate.
And for your second point, I don't use KDE and GNOME. It's perfectly possible to run X without them (and suits me and many others much better). Making X act like a poor Windows ripoff may be of use to users migrating from Windows, but is completely counter productive to people like me.
Hmm. Windows 95 on a 386 can run it's (built-in) window manager, explorer.exe and notepad.exe acceptably. Early Apple Macs, Amigas, Atari STs, NeXT boxes and Acorns can also run their GUIs and a text editor fine. What's GNOME's and KDE's excuses?
There are people out there who still run 486s, hell, even 386s. Should Gnome have targetted these as the lowest common demoninator? No, for the simple reason that there ARE window managers for these circumstances, and Gnome wanted to move forward.
Sorry, but there is absolutely no reason why a window manager should not be able to run quickly on a 386. Why shouldn't a 386 be able to run Metacity, Gnome-panel and gedit comfortably?
I emailed them the following:
> Greetings.
>
> I have been responsible for monitoring communications from your planet
> for some time now. It's been a largely dull and unsatisfying job, the
> highlights until recently being the discovery of fire and the wheel. The
> last couple of years have seen the creation of search engines; a
> development that proves you may be worthy of our further interest.
>
> I am communicating with you to tell you that we have a sleeping opeartive
> on your planet who may be useful to you. His name is <SNIP/>, a
> human as yet unaware of his importance to inter-stella information
> retrieval. He has been conditioned to know much about C/C++, languages
> that were in the ascendency before Java/C# caused the beginning of the
> end of computational technology. You would be well advised to employ this
> organism.
>
> Yours faithfully,
> [string outside unicode encoding]
>
> PS. We may be interested in exchanging your knowledge of "PageRank" with
> our knowledge of inter-stella travel. Your employment of our operative
> may help cement the deal.
You can :D
Use mod_spin, a template engine with C API
support and session data tracking.
A firefox is a red panda. Here's a picture of one. This site has some more info, specifically "The Chinese name for red panda is hunho or firefox, due to their colour and similar size to a fox".
That sounds very sensible. The problem is that on my Vector Linux box (and so Slackware as well probably), running "xmodmap -pk" shows that:
keycode 115 = Super_L
keycode 116 = Multi_key
keycode 117 = Menu
and I'm sure other distros have different definitions, or maybe no definitions at all for these keys. *sigh*
It [GCC] will compile and link almost anything. It would probably compile Perl without too much modification and wouldn't even emit that many warnings. Look! Look at this! Is that C? I don't fucking think so. And look at this: Yes, that's supposed to be C, not C++, because the things they've done to C++ are almost bloody unspeakable. The words "embrace" and "extend" come to mind. How about this, for instance: What? What the hell is that about? And you know the worst thing? People actually use these abortions in real code, because obviously, if it compiles on Linux with gcc, it'll compile anywhere. That's why you're having problems linking on AIX - because nobody's even thought about AIX before. We use autoconf, right, so it must be portable? Yeah, fucking right. Portable between GNU OSes, I think you'll find.
Part of the reason Parrot 0.0.1 was so slow getting out of the door was because of all these stupid idiots writing GCC "C" and not realising how completely fucking broken it was.
And while we're on the subject of standards, does anyone know if Linux has a standard way of treating the keys that Microsoft added to the keyboard. Is the left Windows key Super_L or F13, and is it a modifier or not? Enquiring coders want to know.
Why has this been modded as Offtopic - it sounds like a good idea.
Never forget that the reason why Microsoft persists with Bob-like interactive assistants (Microsoft Agents), is that MS Bob's project manager was Melinda French, the woman who would later become BillG's wife.
I figure there's more open source window managers for X Windows then there are proprietary GUIs, and it's a shame that GUIdebook doesn't cover them. There's a good site here that does.
Unlike proprietary GUIs, some of the open source offerings are more innovative. I particularly like Ion, a tiled wm, and WindowLab, which seems pretty original.
"Whatever it is that annoys other cultures about the Jewish culture almost certainly has nothing to do with religion."
This is incorrect. Historically the main reason why the Jews were persecuted by Christians was that the Bible did not permit usary (money lending) while the Jewish religion did. As a result only Jews were allowed by their religion to be money lenders and they were resented because this meant that they were typically more wealthy then the christian communities in which they lived.
The Muslims on the other hand tend to be anti-Israeli because Israel was founded on Palestinian land, and when the Palestinans resist the occupation the Israelis have tended to react brutally.
It's all a bit of a mess really.
"The complaints about America are largely the result of American culture and history. It's not like suddenly in 2001 Bush took office and people just started having problems with America"
No, this is not true. In Europe we pretty much switched overnight from liking and respecting the US to despising it as a result of Bush's response to the terrorist attack in New York.
Hopefully you guys will get rid of the current administration soon and we can get some sanity back into world affairs.
I'm a C/C++ coder who's just been roped (against my wishes) into a J2EE project that's using OptimalJ to save time. It seems to me that J2EE is totally over engineered and that something like OptimalJ is needed to make J2EE development competitive (developer time wise) with ASP or PHP. OptimalJ is woefuly inefficient in the Java code it creates, but is very powerful - you can make an entity relationship diagram, click a few buttons and you've got a fully working website ready for deployment. I can see all web development going this way soon...
I want to know if there's a sensible way of writing web applications using C/C++. It would have to have a way of seperating out the HTML so that designers don't have to pick through code. Any ideas?
"They're making their own X86 compatible chip called Dragonballz"
Actually the "Dragon Chip" (Godson-I/II chips) are MIPS based.
"(as opposed to Europe and the UK.)"
I hate to break it to you, but the UK's part of Europe, both geographically and politically. What you said's like saying: "as opposed to the USA and Hawaii".
But if we're talking about the Linux desktop and assume that it will continue to be open source, then compiling from source certainly is an option. It may not be an option in a closed-source commercial software house (where I'm presuming you work), but then I guess you're not writing GPL'ed code.
"C++ is not a good object orientated language by any means"
C++ supports multiple inheritance, unlike Java.
"Seriously, code inside VMs has advantages, such as security and portability."
I'm not disputing that. I'm currently editing some Java (bleh) in an IDE written in Java (double bleh) on my nice super fast new Dell, and every so often I have to wait a couple of seconds for all of the characters I've typed to appear. GUI code written on languages that use a virtual machines are hugely inefficient. A 2 Ghz PC should be able to run a text editor faster than my old 7 Mhz Amiga 500!
...is a nice C++ GUI framework. Once you have one of these, be it gtkmm, qt or wxWidgets you're set.
People need to avoid the language hype - C# and Java are not the way to go. There's quite enough bloatware out there already, and running code inside virtual machines does not help.