I agree that most of what is expressed about the different desktops is couched in very opinionated language with little or no underlying rational basis. It would be nice if people could express themselves in a constructive way that would help both desktops proceed as directly as possible to the most usable state.
So my question is this:
Have the underlying object models of KDE and Gnome stabilized sufficiently and is it even possible to suggest that some day a semi-useful interobject communication layer could be constructed between the two systems?
As a run of the mill Linux user that has used both KDE and Gnome, I'd really like it if client applications built under the two models would be as functional as possible if you happen to be running the "wrong" desktop.
Also, as a developer, I'd like to be able to develop with either just Qt or GTK and have my application automatically be available to a larger audience, one of the KDE users and the Gnome users.
Particularly, is there anything in these ancient sources that the GNU tools have overlooked? Or have they succeeded in their earlier goal of superseding the original UNIX utilities?
Second, if the focus was on 16 bit computers, then is there anything in these sources that could be helpful on smaller processors of the current age, namely embedded applications where power requirements take us back a few generations.
Busybox is popular among the embedded crowd - does this old code have anything in it for BusyBox to learn from?
One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction
This is GREAT NEWS!!!
I know of a great many people with plentiful supplies of fat cells that would be raring to go, donating them to science, or to helping to replicate a new liver. Heh, especially after the liver got so trashed in conjunction with the accumulation of a massive beer belly (see, it all fits together).
How do the next few months look in terms of the ability of either Intel or AMD to improve upon these products?
While I'm a fan of AMD's price/performance ratios, it looks as if they will be hard pressed to keep increasing the clock on the Athlon, while the Pentium 4 seems to have a lot more potential for higher clock rates.
Then, too, I'm wondering about the news reports that suggest that Athlons won't be paired up with the new DDR 333 MHz memory.
It may mean that the highest performance x86 architecture this summer will be from Intel and will be able to command more of a premium in price than if AMD were breathing down their necks, which has been the case over the past year and a half.
In my shop we're starting to deploy SANs using FC/AL, but I'm noticing that my desktop access to those storage devices is through a server that handles NFS to my end and has FC/AL on a different interface.
So, I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be better to have either
Fiber Channel all the way to the desktop, or
GigE all the way to the disk array system,
and to avoid the servers altogether.
Would the performance gain be offset by complexity of managing such a large FC network or am I missing something else?
Apparently Microsoft has promotional displays with free WindowsXP promotional software in U.S. Post Offices.
Wait, don't tell me - these promotional displays for Windows XP are hanging right next those posters the USPS has warning about
Suspicious Mail Alert
[Warning: gratuitous MS bashing ahead. Mature audiences only.]
Given all the latest scares about anthrax spores being distributed via US Mail, I'd say that Windows XP would constitute a similarly receptive medium for distributing viral agents and that such posters are not at all out of place.
All these instituted regulations on minors remind me of the fundamental flaw that is at work here.
Namely, if it is so important for said minors to not be playing violent video games after 8 PM in the evening, then where are the parents? If you want to replace parents with government, then just say so and call the modern family a failure.
I doubt "the Internet" has anything to do with this issue. It's just another thing for kids to do. Movie theaters were probably thought to be similar breeding grounds for dissoluteness back in the 1920s when the problem was really that the parents didn't care enough about what their children were doing.
Of course, it's always amusing watching free software advocates (who think software should be free/beer) whine about Microsoft giving away software for free.
Alright, you win.
I'll stop whining about Microsoft making IE strongly integrated by default in its operating systems (you know, the ones that come installed by default on 90+ percent of the PCs that you find in stores?)
In particular, if Microsoft started giving away free software such as AOL 7.0 or Red Hat 7.2 or the source code to IE as part of their magnanimous gestures, then I'd be prepared to eat crow.
OK, the price for these kinds of things is really nice and low. Low enough to make anyone in the numerically-intensive computing arena really want something like this.
(However, I probably wouldn't want one of these as my desktop machine if the power supplies took more current than a typical wall outlet, if it made as much noise as a helicopter taking off, and if heated up my cubicle to 92 F.)
But the key ingredient in my mind is making these distributed boxes more conveniently usable, much like those 64-way big boxes from Sun and SGI.
How far along are MOSIX, Scyld's products, others(?) that make these distributed clusters have a nice Single System Image?
Have they got a good lead on solving the power to weight ratio problem?
Getting the total energy/weight ratio high enough so the flyer has reasonable range (think hummingbirds)?
Cost per unit?
Cost is not so important, since we're willing to spend quite a bit to get these things to Mars, but even so, if the cost could be brought done enough there might be terrestrial applications for little drones loaded up with various sensors.
It only takes one bogus scanner, or even one legitimate scanner that is poorly implemented, and your security is history.
For sure.
That's the part that's always bothered me about even the seemingly super secure authentication based on biometric data combined with some piece of data from your memory.
The only remedy to this (and, again, it's not foolproof) that I see is to make devices accountable for at least as strong authentication as the people, from the backbone routers all the way down to the devices on the furthest edge.
I think it's technically possible to get the devices mutually authenticated to the degree where social engineering is the weakest link in the web of trust.
My thoughts on all those services, too, were along the lines of "Whoa, Nelly!"
Just because it is possible for Linux to simultaneously make available all these different standard services reliably and inexpensively doesn't mean it is a good idea to do it by default.
Such a Ginsu knife device would be great as long as it started out with low services by default (https), with some intuitive feedback to help the novices notice dangerous combinations of configurations.
Also, it wouldn't hurt to put it in tandem with a honeypot machine to help in the detection arena. Certainly if my house had that many different open doors I'd be very anxious.
Unfortunately such honesty is impossible in our political climate. Unforunately it's going to take an epidemic to change our unsatiable consumption for Oil.
Good points.
If you've got the stomach for an extra helping of honesty about our Oil habit, then you might want to start asking some questions like this:
Our good, bought and paid-for friends in the House of Saud assuage their Islamic consciences by putting up a front of being very conservative and right wing as far as those things go. The charade is a little
too real, though, once your realize how much of that oil money has gone into supporting the religious schools in northern Pakistan that trained the Taliban, filled with impoverished students who would not be there were it not for the largesse of Arab oil money.
Reconcile that money stream the next time you're at the gas pump, cheering on U.S special forces in Afghanistan, risking their lives to rout the Taliban that sheltered bin Laden.
Well, I'm interested in how things work out in Oz because I'm a resident of the United States, which is similarly populated by some large cities and vast territories that are expensive to wire.
This is rather different than, say, Europe, where 90% of their territory is populated with a much greater density of people.
Some have said that Canada's heavily regulated telecom's have provided nice service up there and they, too, have some sparsely populated areas with some urban centers.
So of Australia, USA, Canada, who has done the best job of getting broadband service to the people?
I've wondered about how the Celeron's fare against the low end Pentium 4 chips.
Are not the Celeron's just the old P-III with different cache sizes? And didn't the old P-III at 1 GHz beat out the lower clocked Pentium 4 chips?
So when the Best Buy customer sees 1.3 GHz Duron 1 GHz Celeron and 1.4 GHz Pentium 4, will he choose the highest clocked chip, because I think they can be had pretty cheaply now.
In my town there's a small discount house that builds computer systems and advertises on one of those cheap little billboard signs that you see in front of honky-tonk bars and in seedier parts of town. They used to advertise Duron 800 MHz systems for some low price, but now they marquee the Pentium 4 at 1400 MHz as part of the cheap system.
Has the Duron already lost out to the low end Pentium 4?
Let's not forget, though, that the majority of workers are underqualified for their job, don't understand their job at all, or are completely incompetent.
I'm sympathetic, but...
If I managed to get hired on for a job for which I'm underqualified, then what makes it difficult to get hired on a second time for a job for which I'm underqualified?
Well, by any of us that have been suffering under CDE, GNOME represents an improvement.
OTOH, if your talking about other user interfaces such as KDE, WinXP, MacOS 9,X, then you might get only one raised eyebrow instead of two at the prospect of GNOME.
I'd agree that efficiency in the economy, the key thing that drives up productivity and enables higher growth in wages, is enhanced by introducing new technologies and requiring workers to be flexible and to change what they do.
OTOH, I think that too much change in the human environment is a source of stress, with various physiological and psychological side effects that we are only beginning to understand.
None of this is particularly new, however. I think Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (30 years old now) and follow-on books discussed this in some detail.
Microsoft has been the dominant player for so long now (what, about 15 years?) that it has become complacent and arrogant. They can say, with all credibility,
"Standards? We are the standard."
even if it grates on the ears of their competitors and users.
There are definitely some brilliant people working in Redmond, but if they are managed by the same people that bred this culture of arrogance, then only rare glimpses of that brilliant work will be revealed to the world. Most of that good work will be muffled and warped beyond recognition under various business pratices such as supporting Windows, leveraging Office, promoting.NET or whatever the fad (cf, Trustworthy Computing) of the day happens to be.
The sooner that megalithic company is split into smaller pieces the sooner it will have a chance to bring genuinely good products to the marketplace.
The Real beauty of it is that MS also has an alibi - they kept SGI in business (maybe), thus ensuring they still have competitors.
You laugh, but it's true!
Remember several years back when Apple was on the ropes and MS bailed them out with $150M ?
You'll also recall that part of the deal included a provision for Apple to start distributing MS IE instead of Netscape Navigator, whose stock symbol has, umm, disappeared.
I think bailing Apple was absolutely critical for MS, since otherwise their market share would have shot up even more alarmingly close to 100% than it is already. It's easier to claim there are competitors when you have only 92% of the market compared to when you have 98% of the market:)
Taken to the extreme, it wouldn't be out of place for MS to buy or bail out a Linux based company either. I think that almost happened with Corel. My own paranoid view on that deal was that Corel developers might have been moving Wine along too quickly to suit MS and they had to throw some molasses into the machine.
Don't forget to mention in passing that the open source free software has been built up over many years in the world's leading universites and government institutions and it's high time that our governments took advantage of its investment in these quality resources. Otherwise, most voters will confuse free software with free beer ware and the crap they've downloaded for "free" off the internet that gave them a virus and nags them constantly to send money to a purported author.
But OSS is but one very small part of the total equation of running and getting elected to local government.
The big thing is, indeed, "show me the money". First, taxes. Second, visible services, like how many hours you stand in line at the Motor Vehicle Department to get a new drivers license.
What impresses voters are politicians that fix potholes, pass ordinances against noise, are in favor of police, firefighters and teachers.
Other measures are more controversial and if you want to get elected you'd best steer clear of divisive issues (such as zoning of a megastore) where 90% of the people are on one side of the issue and 90% of the money is on the other side of the issue. You can take care of those according to your conscience once you've made it into office.
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I agree that most of what is expressed about the different desktops is couched in very opinionated language with little or no underlying rational basis. It would be nice if people could express themselves in a constructive way that would help both desktops proceed as directly as possible to the most usable state.
So my question is this:
As a run of the mill Linux user that has used both KDE and Gnome, I'd really like it if client applications built under the two models would be as functional as possible if you happen to be running the "wrong" desktop.Also, as a developer, I'd like to be able to develop with either just Qt or GTK and have my application automatically be available to a larger audience, one of the KDE users and the Gnome users.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way.
I was going to ask the same questions.
Particularly, is there anything in these ancient sources that the GNU tools have overlooked? Or have they succeeded in their earlier goal of superseding the original UNIX utilities?
Second, if the focus was on 16 bit computers, then is there anything in these sources that could be helpful on smaller processors of the current age, namely embedded applications where power requirements take us back a few generations.
Busybox is popular among the embedded crowd - does this old code have anything in it for BusyBox to learn from?
One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction
This is GREAT NEWS!!!
I know of a great many people with plentiful supplies of fat cells that would be raring to go, donating them to science, or to helping to replicate a new liver. Heh, especially after the liver got so trashed in conjunction with the accumulation of a massive beer belly (see, it all fits together).
How do the next few months look in terms of the ability of either Intel or AMD to improve upon these products?
While I'm a fan of AMD's price/performance ratios, it looks as if they will be hard pressed to keep increasing the clock on the Athlon, while the Pentium 4 seems to have a lot more potential for higher clock rates.
Then, too, I'm wondering about the news reports that suggest that Athlons won't be paired up with the new DDR 333 MHz memory.
It may mean that the highest performance x86 architecture this summer will be from Intel and will be able to command more of a premium in price than if AMD were breathing down their necks, which has been the case over the past year and a half.
So, then, how about some comparison of
In my shop we're starting to deploy SANs using FC/AL, but I'm noticing that my desktop access to those storage devices is through a server that handles NFS to my end and has FC/AL on a different interface.So, I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be better to have either
- Fiber Channel all the way to the desktop, or
- GigE all the way to the disk array system,
and to avoid the servers altogether.Would the performance gain be offset by complexity of managing such a large FC network or am I missing something else?
Educate me.
Apparently Microsoft has promotional displays with free WindowsXP promotional software in U.S. Post Offices.
Wait, don't tell me - these promotional displays for Windows XP are hanging right next those posters the USPS has warning about
[Warning: gratuitous MS bashing ahead. Mature audiences only.]
Given all the latest scares about anthrax spores being distributed via US Mail, I'd say that Windows XP would constitute a similarly receptive medium for distributing viral agents and that such posters are not at all out of place.
All these instituted regulations on minors remind me of the fundamental flaw that is at work here.
Namely, if it is so important for said minors to not be playing violent video games after 8 PM in the evening, then where are the parents? If you want to replace parents with government, then just say so and call the modern family a failure.
I doubt "the Internet" has anything to do with this issue. It's just another thing for kids to do. Movie theaters were probably thought to be similar breeding grounds for dissoluteness back in the 1920s when the problem was really that the parents didn't care enough about what their children were doing.
Of course, it's always amusing watching free software advocates (who think software should be free/beer) whine about Microsoft giving away software for free.
Alright, you win.
I'll stop whining about Microsoft making IE strongly integrated by default in its operating systems (you know, the ones that come installed by default on 90+ percent of the PCs that you find in stores?)
In particular, if Microsoft started giving away free software such as AOL 7.0 or Red Hat 7.2 or the source code to IE as part of their magnanimous gestures, then I'd be prepared to eat crow.
I'm waiting.
OK, the price for these kinds of things is really nice and low. Low enough to make anyone in the numerically-intensive computing arena really want something like this.
(However, I probably wouldn't want one of these as my desktop machine if the power supplies took more current than a typical wall outlet, if it made as much noise as a helicopter taking off, and if heated up my cubicle to 92 F.)
But the key ingredient in my mind is making these distributed boxes more conveniently usable, much like those 64-way big boxes from Sun and SGI.
How far along are MOSIX, Scyld's products, others(?) that make these distributed clusters have a nice Single System Image?
Cost is not so important, since we're willing to spend quite a bit to get these things to Mars, but even so, if the cost could be brought done enough there might be terrestrial applications for little drones loaded up with various sensors.
I've been browsing now for 72 hours continuously here in my darkened upstairs bedroom and I can tell you for a fact, Mister, that I am not alone.
Harvey is sitting right here beside me, commenting continuously about what he likes and dislikes.
It only takes one bogus scanner, or even one legitimate scanner that is poorly implemented, and your security is history.
For sure.
That's the part that's always bothered me about even the seemingly super secure authentication based on biometric data combined with some piece of data from your memory.
The only remedy to this (and, again, it's not foolproof) that I see is to make devices accountable for at least as strong authentication as the people, from the backbone routers all the way down to the devices on the furthest edge.
I think it's technically possible to get the devices mutually authenticated to the degree where social engineering is the weakest link in the web of trust.
Exactly.
My thoughts on all those services, too, were along the lines of "Whoa, Nelly!"
Just because it is possible for Linux to simultaneously make available all these different standard services reliably and inexpensively doesn't mean it is a good idea to do it by default.
Such a Ginsu knife device would be great as long as it started out with low services by default (https), with some intuitive feedback to help the novices notice dangerous combinations of configurations.
Also, it wouldn't hurt to put it in tandem with a honeypot machine to help in the detection arena. Certainly if my house had that many different open doors I'd be very anxious.
Unfortunately such honesty is impossible in our political climate. Unforunately it's going to take an epidemic to change our unsatiable consumption for Oil.
Good points.
If you've got the stomach for an extra helping of honesty about our Oil habit, then you might want to start asking some questions like this:
Reconcile that money stream the next time you're at the gas pump, cheering on U.S special forces in Afghanistan, risking their lives to rout the Taliban that sheltered bin Laden.
Well, I'm interested in how things work out in Oz because I'm a resident of the United States, which is similarly populated by some large cities and vast territories that are expensive to wire.
This is rather different than, say, Europe, where 90% of their territory is populated with a much greater density of people.
Some have said that Canada's heavily regulated telecom's have provided nice service up there and they, too, have some sparsely populated areas with some urban centers.
So of Australia, USA, Canada, who has done the best job of getting broadband service to the people?
I've wondered about how the Celeron's fare against the low end Pentium 4 chips.
Are not the Celeron's just the old P-III with different cache sizes? And didn't the old P-III at 1 GHz beat out the lower clocked Pentium 4 chips?
So when the Best Buy customer sees 1.3 GHz Duron 1 GHz Celeron and 1.4 GHz Pentium 4, will he choose the highest clocked chip, because I think they can be had pretty cheaply now.
In my town there's a small discount house that builds computer systems and advertises on one of those cheap little billboard signs that you see in front of honky-tonk bars and in seedier parts of town. They used to advertise Duron 800 MHz systems for some low price, but now they marquee the Pentium 4 at 1400 MHz as part of the cheap system.
Has the Duron already lost out to the low end Pentium 4?
Shouldn't the OS be optimised for the hardware? Not the hardware comprimised for the OS?
Excellent question.
So I'm wondering two things:
Let's not forget, though, that the majority of workers are underqualified for their job, don't understand their job at all, or are completely incompetent.
I'm sympathetic, but...
If I managed to get hired on for a job for which I'm underqualified, then what makes it difficult to get hired on a second time for a job for which I'm underqualified?
highly regarded user interface? by whom?
Well, by any of us that have been suffering under CDE, GNOME represents an improvement.
OTOH, if your talking about other user interfaces such as KDE, WinXP, MacOS 9,X, then you might get only one raised eyebrow instead of two at the prospect of GNOME.
I've got a plot showing SPECint2000 vs SPECfp2000 for eight different chips, including the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz.
From the looks of it, overclocking to 3.5 GHz might make the Pentium 4 almost equal in performance to the IBM Power4 running at 1.3 GHz.
There's a difference between working for the government and being a contractor for the government.
What I've seen is that contractors
- (-)are treated ever so slightly 2nd class
- (-)have slightly less job security
- (+)their companies (themselves if they're lucky) get paid more than being employees of the government
- (-)pension and benefits are less than straight government
Just what I've seen.I'd agree that efficiency in the economy, the key thing that drives up productivity and enables higher growth in wages, is enhanced by introducing new technologies and requiring workers to be flexible and to change what they do.
OTOH, I think that too much change in the human environment is a source of stress, with various physiological and psychological side effects that we are only beginning to understand.
None of this is particularly new, however. I think Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (30 years old now) and follow-on books discussed this in some detail.
That part is really central to the problem.
Microsoft has been the dominant player for so long now (what, about 15 years?) that it has become complacent and arrogant. They can say, with all credibility,
even if it grates on the ears of their competitors and users.There are definitely some brilliant people working in Redmond, but if they are managed by the same people that bred this culture of arrogance, then only rare glimpses of that brilliant work will be revealed to the world. Most of that good work will be muffled and warped beyond recognition under various business pratices such as supporting Windows, leveraging Office, promoting .NET or whatever the fad (cf, Trustworthy Computing) of the day happens to be.
The sooner that megalithic company is split into smaller pieces the sooner it will have a chance to bring genuinely good products to the marketplace.
The Real beauty of it is that MS also has an alibi - they kept SGI in business (maybe), thus ensuring they still have competitors.
You laugh, but it's true!
Remember several years back when Apple was on the ropes and MS bailed them out with $150M ?
You'll also recall that part of the deal included a provision for Apple to start distributing MS IE instead of Netscape Navigator, whose stock symbol has, umm, disappeared.
I think bailing Apple was absolutely critical for MS, since otherwise their market share would have shot up even more alarmingly close to 100% than it is already. It's easier to claim there are competitors when you have only 92% of the market compared to when you have 98% of the market:)
Taken to the extreme, it wouldn't be out of place for MS to buy or bail out a Linux based company either. I think that almost happened with Corel. My own paranoid view on that deal was that Corel developers might have been moving Wine along too quickly to suit MS and they had to throw some molasses into the machine.
Don't forget to mention in passing that the open source free software has been built up over many years in the world's leading universites and government institutions and it's high time that our governments took advantage of its investment in these quality resources. Otherwise, most voters will confuse free software with free beer ware and the crap they've downloaded for "free" off the internet that gave them a virus and nags them constantly to send money to a purported author.
But OSS is but one very small part of the total equation of running and getting elected to local government.
The big thing is, indeed, "show me the money". First, taxes. Second, visible services, like how many hours you stand in line at the Motor Vehicle Department to get a new drivers license.
What impresses voters are politicians that fix potholes, pass ordinances against noise, are in favor of police, firefighters and teachers.
Other measures are more controversial and if you want to get elected you'd best steer clear of divisive issues (such as zoning of a megastore) where 90% of the people are on one side of the issue and 90% of the money is on the other side of the issue. You can take care of those according to your conscience once you've made it into office.