I learned Extreme Programming in 1999. The article that started Scrum was published in the 80s. So... what? Insanely wrong articles aren't anything new in /., but in this case I don't even know what it's supposed to mean. Maybe it was submitted from an alternate reality.

Maybe not. But perhaps it could win them several thousand developers. And then the apps would win millions of customers.

Or maybe I'm a dreamer...

Can't tell you why Nokia thinks MeeGo makes business sense. Or Intel. I can tell you why I'll buy it if/when it comes out (and my current phone is an N900): because it's not Java. I can write stuff in Python (comes pre-installed), I can run stuff not specifically written for the platform (emacs, kobodeluxe), I don't have to put up with anything I don't want to. That, for me, is a sell.

...can mean whatever you want. Based on how much market share they gain each year, I'd say Linux is the MOST successful desktop OS. And I'll ignore any data you come up with to contradict me, because I'm an important paid blogger and you're just some dude on the comments.

Science routinely makes new discoveries that contradict or invalidate old data. Keeping up require setting aside the time to read and understand all the relevant research. If the research is not personally or professionally relevant to me, this becomes more trouble than it's worth. So in most areas, I choose to believe whatever makes most sense to me, and disregard scientific data. If I'm ever in a position where my opinion/belief about something actually matters, then I take the time to actually do some homework. I don't see anything wrong with that; I'm much more appalled by the ridiculous notion that every layman should know all the latest scientific point of views and agree with it.

In a reasonable world, I suspect he'd be right. Early-gen consoles ruled because they were cheaper and easier than computers, later-gen consoles ruled because, by being specialised hardware, they could deliver better performance than price-equivalent computers. But now we don't honestly need more performance than we already have, and the benefits of gaming on demand will outweight performance soon.

But we don't live in a reasonable world. We live in a world ruled by marketing. Manufacturers will keep finding new gimmicks to sell consoles for many years, rest assured. There's more and more expensive motion tracking (camera-based now, which takes a lot of CPU to run). Then there's 3D. Then there's things like facial recognition, gesture tracking, etc. Then brainwave controls. And Live and PSN have proven to my satisfaction that consoles can do gaming on demand via internet as well.

Guns don't kill people, eh?

A language can help a lot. And some languages are inherently less maintainable. If you don't agree, then you're in denial.

Hmm, lost in the shuffle of the Chrome OS announcement... but maybe it's related? I can see such a component being hugely useful on Chrome OS.

I don't see anything wrong with that logic... or, for that matter, anything "insightful" about your comment. One of the primary strengths of Python is being maintainable.

While living in mainland China, I've been preferring those based on paracetamol. It works well for me, without any side effects I have noticed. But now spending some time in HK, all their popular pain-killers are based on this acetaminophen, which I had never heard of before. So I held off buying, decided to research a bit online, and then of course, forgot to actually do it. Thanks Slashdot :-P

Then you want as many people as possible to hear about your work, otherwise you'll drown in the competition. If you don't have millions of bucks for advertising, maybe uploading to the Pirate Bay will do the trick.

Where's the fact? What I see here is "revelation" based on speculation...

Probably because GTK+ is written in a standard language, and Qt is written in a custom, non-standard dialect which nobody else uses, forces you to use weird special-purpose nonsense pre-compiling tools, and doesn't really add anything useful to the parent language.

Actually, the biggest problem (apart from historical peeves) I have with Qt is that it's not C++. When I use gtkmm, I have a full C++ experience. With Qt is a bizarre trip, because the toolkit uses Trolltech's own, non-standard C++ dialect which doesn't really add anything of value.

Here I go for the troll mod, but oh well.

First, the article says nothing of the sort. As usual, the summary is completely off the point.

But to address the summary and the other comments, rather than the article:

The Free OS world (whether you call yours Linux, GNU, GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, etc etc) does NOT suffer from a lack of standardization. I've been hearing this for 13 years (people who are in the community longer than me have been hearing it for longer) and I'm sick of it. It wasn't true then and it wasn't true now. We have lots of standards, maybe more than I would prefer. We have standards for a lot of things that other OSes don't.

And we also have a lot of people who choose not to follow them. It's a freedom we have and it's one of the things that makes it so great.

Standard UI toolkit? We had one in the 90s, and it sucked. So people decided to write Qt and GTK+ and we're much better off now. Standard HIG? KDE has one, GNOME has one, and XFCE has one, take your pick. Standards for binary compatibility? Yes we can, and as another commenter mentioned, Skype uses it rather effectively for their crapware.

Now, does all that choice pose a minor problem to proprietary vendors who want to offer non-free, closed-source software in our platform(s)? Yes, it does. However, I don't care. They have a very simple solution: give us the source, and if the product is good, the people who care will help you port. You can provide one, bare-bones port, and the GNOME/XFCE/KDE/portable/etc people will work out the customisation and integration for you. Don't want to give us the source? Then I'm sorry, it's going to be your problem.

Incidentally, this is exactly Google's solution, well, almost exactly. I doubt there's going to be, say, a XFCE port of Chrome, but chances are there will be a XFCE-integration version of Chromium (or an add-on that does it). Everybody wins, nothing to bitch about.