It'd never work because different pieces of software have different kinds of capabilities. You could eventually reach some shared common functionality, but the edge cases (and the effort to bring it up that far) would most likely piss off users more than any utility it brings.

There have been some efforts towards moving to a unified settings system (see DConf/GSettings), but even then, each application is responsible for its own settings.

With GIO, the file chooser can load any thumbnails that are available, but Gtk+ doesn't actually have the architectural pieces for doing thumbnailing itself (since it's quite a lot of specialized code that's not widely needed). But in most cases, Nautilus has already generated the thumbnails you require anyways.

[citation needed]. There's exactly a single GNOME desktop dependency using C#, Tomboy, and even that's been cloned in C++ (GNote). and is gaining adoption instead of the Mono-based variant by many major distros including Fedora. I really wouldn't be surprised to see it proposed to replace Tomboy in the upcoming months.

Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack. There has been a heavy push to add networking to the lower libraries so that libraries above can take advantage without reinventing the wheel. A D-Bus layer is merging into GLib next. GNOME Shell is written mostly in Javascript with Clutter being used as a 3D toolkit, after Gtk+ itself was extensively modified for better offscreen rendering support. Webkit replaced Mozilla's Gecko, and is being used by more up-and-coming GNOME projects. Telepathy and Empathy were adopted into GNOME and gives us an instant messaging client. There are half a dozen new projects around the rather small-but-growing geography and cartography communities. GNOME technologies are also heading towards the more-deeply embedded direction, with Clutter-GTK+ pushing Moblin to new heights and products like the Litl webbook (which is also very heavily Javascript-based).

There have been no new .NET components accepted or even proposed to be included in GNOME in years. The Mono fear is a sound one, but it's not one you realistically have to worry about today as a GNOME user. With the recent improvements in GThumb and newer photo cataloging apps like Shotwell, not even F-Spot can be considered a 'killer app' for Mono anymore. That community has long since left GNOME along with Miguel.

Red Hat is currently in the process of consolidating all its community hosted servers to a single hosting facility. As part of that, the gnome.org servers are being moved *this weekend*. You plan on doing something other than working on GNOME this weekend, or find a programming task that doesn't rely on access to GNOME servers. Time ==== Start: Sat, Dec 12 approx. 1200 UTC End: on or before Mon, Dec 14 The plan is for a 48 hour outage window; we would hope to have major services back up and functional sooner than that. Affected systems ================ Most gnome.org services other than ftp.gnome.org and irc.gnome.org. This includes: www.gnome.org master.gnome.org bugzilla.gnome.org git.gnome.org mail.gnome.org live.gnome.org IP Changes ========== The gnome.org servers will all be moving to new IP addresses; in general this will be invisible to users, but you might notice messages from SSH in some cases. Selected new IPs: master.gnome.org: 209.132.180.167 git.gnome.org: 209.132.180.173

No it isn't.

GSM phones can be turned on remotely by a probe from the network by a qualified entity[1]. Your phone isn't communicating to the cell towers when it's off, this is very much true. However, it just takes someone in the government high enough up the food chain and a judge's okay to boot up your phone.

I really wouldn't worry about it unless you're a mobster, an agent for a foreign government, or a terrorist, but they definitely have the capability to be rather scary, which is precisely why those latter entities have moved on to "burn phones" and older, more reliable methods of message passing.

I can't believe people buy operating systems and software from a two-decade old, twice-convicted and twice settled-out-of-court, unrepentant monopolist. And it amuses me deeply when one monopolist fights with another over who's to blame for putting out crap that the other has to deal with.

However, the problem doesn't exist in their competitor's products and Intel's errata clearly spells out why it wouldn't work, so why Microsoft tried to get away with it is anyone's guess.

They're all evil. Every single one of them. Even the ones you consider to be perfect for you are evil to others. There is no absolute empirical measure of evil, thusly one man's good is another man's supreme evil.

Refusing to vote because someone's evil is like refusing to breathe because there are toxins in the air. While it's true and maybe 'noble', it's absolutely stupid and you're likely to die because of it... okay maybe that's stretching the metaphor a bit much, but there are plenty of historical examples.

Therefore all votes are evil? So we shouldn't express an opinion at all then?

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

This is the US Government we're talking about. One of the few entities on the planet where "Budget" is virtually meaningless. Someone sneezes funny and a million dollars goes out the door. How much do you think it'd cost to financially compel Sony to enabling Linux installs on their machines? Exactly how much does a PS3 dev-kit license cost again? How hard to do you think it'd be to get a judge to sign some order compelling Sony to releasing the schematics to the US Government under NDA, so that they can write and maintain their own Linux loader for the machine?

Even if the cost of the above was in the lower 8-digit range without the machines included, which I really doubt, it'd likely be cheaper to source these machines than it would be to develop your own hybrid compute node and software for it (or nVidia's crazy-expensive, less mature solution).

Sony doesn't support Linux on these machines, which makes it practically impossible for the home user to boot Linux on them. (Well, tbh, 'improbable', look at how much reverse engineering has happened with the GameCube & Wii). But for someone with deep enough pockets, like say a government agency, it's almost trivial.

There is a way to know explicitly where the minerals came from. The unfortunate part is, it's very expensive and revealing the fact that you know where the minerals came from is only more likely to cause you trouble, rather than solving a problem.

Scientists figured out years ago that different parts of the earth have different concentrations of radioisotopes and impurities. Those are more than enough to geolocate the source of any number of mineral supplies. It's virtually the same way scientists can know if a sample of rock is really a meteorite or if a sample of drugs came from someone's backyard methcook or some superlab in Mexico. Measuring the amount of tantalum-180 vs -181 will tell you whether or not it came from Africa or China, and as any nuclear engineer will tell you, separating two isotopes that close in weight is extremely difficult, so it's hard to disguise.

Still, stopping the world so you can test someone's ore isn't really going to solve any problems. You might stop buying from one company because of it, but since every other company will still use the conflict ore, and the ones that don't will charge more, simple economics will force this stuff to be used as long as it is created. Not buying it simply isn't a realistic option; even if we started mining the minerals that we could (like tungsten) here in the States, it'd still cost a fortune more than importing it (at least in the beginning), which is enough to keep people from doing it here.

You don't really still need the spinning media. There's a cheap, incredibly easy, fast and inexpensive media that's perfect for booting your computer, and your computer is loaded with ports for it. It's called a USB thumbdrive.

It's pretty simple actually: they're cheap and easily available in all kinds of different sizes ranging from "I just need to boot Linux" (256MB) to "I want all of my apps on it too" (32GB+), they're writable so you can update the OS, and you've likely got a multitude of ports inside of your computer that go completely wasted because they're not connected to anything (and a pigtail for one of these is a nickel at a computer store, if your motherboard didn't come with a few in the box). Just plug it in, plug in the USB drive, install your OS on it, and be done. You can choose to swap to it or the faster media at your own discretion.

Qt's "Core" library is a pretty solid platform shim. Plain GLib is also (somewhat easier to port due to no C++ ABI differences, but no native C++ api makes it less attractive to you).

Either one is an exceptional choice.

No offense, but the powers that be are right, for now. The advantages of these devices are vastly outweighed by the current comparative price of these devices. Monitoring your blood sugar often is good, but if you can only buy a thousand of these meters and treat a few thousand people, verses buying millions of other, vastly cheaper, but otherwise perfectly good meters and treating millions, from the view point of "the powers that be" the millions are better served. Right now they are essentially high-tech biogadgets, and even from the way you evangelize it in your post, you and they both know it. The cheapest one of those continuous-monitoring meters costs better than nine times what I paid for my standard "finger-prick" meter, and the sensors are even more expensive on top of that.

Besides, you're diabetic. If you've got the money for one of these things, get your doctor to write you a Rx saying you need one, then go to the company and buy one. If you were even smarter, you'd ask one of these companies to give you one for free, and they'd probably go for it since you're particularly vocal on the issue (and do the whole "human review"/"tech review" thing in trade).

Be overjoyed your national health care gets you diabetic testing supplies. Hell, be glad you have healthcare at all, that your government cares enough to make sure you can test your blood sugar as often as you need.

And yet, you still make excuses for them? Any other company would get slaughtered in the press for such an obvious stunt...