Basically you're argument is that it's all about Microsoft Office? I agree with you, then it has nothing to do with how Good or Bad GNOME vs OSX are. The Linux Desktop will not happen on any serious scale until the corporate world stops revolving around Office and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.
It's funny you say that.. The important Linux Desktop APIs have been stable for over a decade. Look at GLib 2.x and indeed the entire GNOME 2.x stack, it hasn't been broken. You can still run an application compiled against GTK+ 2.0 on any modern distribution.. Obviously, it will have the same functionalities that it had 10 years ago, but the same can be said of Windows or OSX.
And well, GTK+ 3 has a slightly different API, etc, but so is WinRT or many of the newer OSX APIs. And Well, GTK+ 2.x is parallel installable, so you can keep using it more or less forever.
Different places have different specialties.. And when a place attracts lots of people who know something, it becomes a pole for that thing, generates high salaries in that field, and make life very expensive for everyone else. Silicon Valley, Bangalore, etc do high tech. New York, London, Hong Kong do banking. You can't have all of them. And I doubt a small-ish country like the UK can have many of them. The US can afford to have New York and Silicon Valley because they're very very far appart. The City is just too close to East London (or even Cambridge) to make them separate markets, meaning that old humid houses are still terribly expensive and no one in their right minds would want to move there unless they are made tons and tons of money.
I really like GNOME 3, to me, it's better than any other desktop I've ever used. So I don't feel any nostalgia towards old, ugly, clunky desktops.
They've been around for more than 15 years so take that for what you will. There is no guarantees that any company won't go under but they seem solid enough.
Except that I'm pretty sure their biggest client was Nokia for most of these 15 years, so good luck to them.
In Canada, does their Supreme Court make laws? Or did the court just interpret an existing law which will be quickly altered to void this inconvenient decision?
It depends on how you define "make laws". Technically, the legislature in Canada is supreme - they make the laws. Just like in the US. But all laws are subject to the Constitution and more specifically the Charter, which means that they can be struck down by the judiciary; i.e. Canada has de facto judicial supremacy. And of course, the common law is judge-made law, just as it is in every common law country.
But in this case, yeah, the legislature can just go ahead and introduce a new law that it thinks will pass the judicial test. That's how the system is supposed to work anyway.
But the constitution is irrelevant in this case, this case was all about regular law. So this is about common law, which is what the judges use to interpret the laws passed by parliament. So Parliament can absolutely void all of this by changing th statutes.. But the last time time they touched copyright law, it was hugely controversial, so I don't expect this government or any government to expand political capital doing that in the near future.
Well, how is that different from half the hotel/casinos on the strip in Las Vegas ? Appart from the fact that's it's more realistic.
Google didn't make their own maps, neither did Microsoft or Nokia or Garmin or Tomtom. They all buy their maps (the raw data) from a small numbers of companies like Maptech or Teleatlas who do all the hard work. Apple can buy their maps from the same place... The real challenge for Apple to make their own maps application is that they don't have Google search to find stuff on it.
Even if the polling could be made to work to get a true representation of the people's will (and not of some determined hackers, social engineer or just well organised group), there is a much bigger problem. One of the important uses of representative democracy is that the People are often wrong about the details, and you can't let them make all the choices. As an example, see California, which has a very strong popular initiave system (referendums), and they voted themselves low taxes and lots of services, and now the state is more or less bankrupt. And California how has a constitution that runs hundreds of pages with all kind of crap added by referendums. You can't trust the average man to know what's best in details. That why we vote for politicians along broad principles and let them figure out the details.
1. I'm not convinced at all that HP is giving up on WebOS, if they had wanted to get rid of it, they could have sold it for a lot of money. There are many interested buyers.
2. WebOS has a huge advantage, it already exists. Tizen doesn't. Intel had announced that they would announce the architecture at Linuxcon Europe, but they had nothing to show. Rumour is that they're still in negotiation with Samsung.. And doing this kind of work in a joint venture is always a terrible idea as there is no clear direction. On the other hand, WebOS exists, works and is on devices already. And it seems HP is still investing in it. Also WebOS has applications, Tizen doesn't, it doesn't even have any defined APIs, no one knows what will be in it, etc.
They're all engineers.
It's not that uncommon at all. Also, the majority of the members of the executive committee of the communist party of China (the center of power in China) are eng. too.
Engineering tends to attracts the best and the brightest in dictatorship as it's seen as safer profession where there is less risk of angering the regime. And well, law of example is less important when you have mostly political trials..
Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?
Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?
The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.
1. Lennart is NOT a kernel developer. He is a userspace developer who wrote many important pieces of infrastructure for all free operating systems.
2. Lennart is trying to make Linux more like OSX.. What he is saying is that the other BSDs are way way behind in features. Apple had to radically change BSD to make it suitable for a desktop, and Lennart is doing the same.
The WebRTC code that was released is missing many important bits that are required to compete against Skype. The most important is probably a bandwidth management engine, the code that's currently public just sends at a pre-configured bitrate. That means it can only do low resolution video with a shitty quality.
That said, Google Talk in GMail and Android have a dynamic bitrate stuff, and I expect they will be released at some point. I should also mention that Farsight2/Farstream using in Empathy and Pidgin are currently gaining the same kind of bandwidth management that Google is doing. So we should get at least two independent open implementations soon.
ICE with TURN work really well.. TURN means using a relay.. And Google said that with Google Talk, less than 5% of calls use the relay, that means that NAT traversal is successful 95% if the time. With a relay,. you get very close to 100%.
He says Gnome-Shell uses software rendering.. It's not true, fedora ships free 3D drivers for Intel, AMD/ATI and NVidia now.
Also, why use VLC when he could use Totem on all 3.And Why does he use apt-get in his test ?
Even though I like the result, it seems like a pretty lame test.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
