I used "Jus' Sayin' " simply to denote something that the OP wanted, that was already present in an alternative OS (OS X).

As a user of OS X since 10.0.0, IMHO, The Finder, even at it's shittiest, is head and shoulders above any "explorer" version out of Redmond.

And at least Spotlight frickin' WORKS...

hooray. someone who actually finally understands the point of the asimov stories. many people reading asimov's work do not understand that it was only in the later works commissioned by the asimov foundation (when Caliban - a Zero-Law Robot - is introduced; or it is finally revealed that Daneel - the robot that Giskard psychically impressed with the Zeroth Law to protect *humanity* onto - is over 30,000 years old and is the silent architect of the Foundation) that the failure of the Three Laws of Robotics is finally explicitly spelled out in actual words instead of being illustrated indirectly through many different stories, just as you describe, wisnoskij.

in the asimov series there _are_ actually robots that are successful. the New Law Robots (those that are permitted to *cooperate* with humans; these actually have some spark of creativity). Caliban - who had a Gravitonic brain - was a Zero Law Robot: an experiment to see if a robot would derive its own laws under free will (it did). and Daneel, whose telepathic ability and the Zeroth Law were given to him by Giskard. these robots are the exception. the three law robots are basically intelligent but entirely devoid of creativity.

you have to think: how can anything that has hundreds of millions of copies of the three laws be anything *but* a danger to human development, by preventing and prohibiting any kind of risk-taking?? we already have enough stupid laws on the planet (mostly thanks to america's sue-happy culture and the abusive patent system). we DON'T need idiots trying to implement the failed three laws of robotics.

Oh, you mean like this?

I'm just sayin d0gg it ain't that bad.

Yes. Yes it is.

That was my exact feeling. In fact, I have said multiple times about now it looks like Window 3.1... Only worse!

I have to deal with that POS GUI every single day at work. Makes me ever so glad to get home to my Mac, where I can have multiple overlapping windows, multiple desktops and real window-management.

Yeahrightsure.

But what does your face look like when they do this or this ?

And they didn't even have to get Gorilla Arm to do it!

If it's Transparency you want, have I got a deal for you...

Jus' Sayin'...

Well, you know what they say:

"You can never be too rich, or too thin; or have too much protruding bulge..."

You mean like that new HTC phone with the CURVED BACK?!?

How can you tell that it is shown at exactly right angles? All they have to do is offset the angle by the tiniest fraction and "boom", the lens bulge is obscured by the case.

As you said, it is 1mm, and they are shooting it from the other side of the phone in every photo/rendering I have seen.

I submit that you have to be able to see the back of the phone, or perhaps be "dead-on" to the side to see a "bulge" of such diminutive proportions.

That's not really "parallax" by the way.

in looking at why both apple and microsoft have been overwhelmingly successful i came to the conclusion that it is because both companies are using dynamic object-orientated paradigms that can allow components from disparate programming languages to be accessible at runtime. COM is the reason why, after 20 years, you can find a random Active-X component written two decades ago, plug it into a modern windows computer and it will *work*.

Objective-C is the OO concept taken to the extreme: it's actually built-in to the programming language. COM is a bit more sensible: it's a series of rules (based ultimately on the flattening of data structures into a stream that can be sent over a socket, or via shared memory) which may be implemented in userspace: the c++ implementation has some classes whilst the c implementation has macros, but ultimately you could implement COM in any programming language you cared to.

the first amazing thing about COM (which is based on MSRPC which in turn was originally the OpenGroup's BSD-licensed DCE/RPC source code) is that because it is on top of DCE/RPC (ok MSRPC) you have version-control at the interface layer. the second amazing thing is that they have "co-classes" meaning that an "object" may be "merged" with another (multiple inheritance). when you combine this with the version-control capabilities of DCERPC/MSRPC you get not only binary-interoperability between client and server regardless of how many revisions there are to an API but also you can use co-classes to create "optional parameters" (by combining a function with 3 parameters in one IDL file with another same-named function with 4 parameters in another IDL file, 5 in another and so on).

the thing is that:

a) to create such infrastructure in the first place takes a hell of a lot of vision, committment and guts.

b) to mandate the use of such infrastructure, for the good of the company, the users, and the developers, also takes a lot of committment and guts. when people actually knew what COM was it was *very* unpopular, but unfortunately at the time things like python-comtypes (which makes COM so transparent it has the *opposite* problem - that of being so easy that programmers go "what's all the fuss about???" and don't realise quite how powerful what they are doing really is)

both microsoft and apple were - are - companies where it was possible to make such top-down decisions and say "This Is The Way It's Gonna Go Down".

now let's take a look at the GNU/Linux community.

the GNU/Linux community does have XPIDL and XPCOM, written by the Mozilla Foundation. XPCOM is "based on" COM. XPCOM has a registry. it has the same API, the same macros, and it even has an IDL compiler (XPIDL). however what it *does not* have is co-classes. co-classes are the absolute, absolute bed-rock of COM and because XPCOM does not have co-classes there have been TEN YEARS of complaints from developers - mostly java developers but also c++ developers - attempting to use Mozilla technology (embedding Gecko is the usual one) and being driven UP THE F******G WALL by binary ABI incompatibility on pretty much every single damn release of the mozilla binaries. one single change to an IDL file results, sadly, in a broken system for these third party developers.

the GNU/Linux community does have CORBA, thanks to Olivetti Labs who released their implementation of CORBA some time back in 1997. CORBA was the competitor to COM, and it was nowhere near as good. Gnome adopted it... but nobody else did.

the GNU/Linux community does have an RPC mechanism in KDE. its first implementation is known famously for having been written in 20 minutes. not much more needs to be said.

the GNU/Linux community does have gobject. gobject is, after nearly fifteen years, beginning to get introspection, and this is beginning to bubble up to the dynamic programming languages such as python. gobject does not have interface revision control.

the GNU/Linux community does actually have a (near full) implementation of MSRPC and COM: it's part of the Wine Project. the project named TangramCOM did make an attempt to separate COM from Wine: if it had succeeded it would be maintained as a cut-down fork of the Wine Project. The Wine Project developer's answer - if you ask - to making a GNU/Linux application use COM is that you should convert it to a Wine (i.e. a Win32) application. this is not very satisfactory.

in other words, the GNU/Linux community has a set of individuals who are completely discoordinated, getting on with the very important task - and i mean that absolutely genuinely - the very important task of maintaining the code for which they are responsible.

the problems that they deal with are *not* those of coordinating - at a top level - with *other projects*.

now, whilst this "Alliance" may wish to "guide" the development of the GNU/Linux community, ultimately it comes down to money. do these companies have the guts to say - in a nice way of course - "here's a wad of cash, this is a list of tasks, any takers?"

but, also, does this "Alliance" have the guts to ask "what is actually needed"? would it be nice, for example, rather than them saying "this is what you need to do, now get on with it", which would pretty much guarantee to have no takers at all, would it be nice for them to actually get onto various mailing lists (hundreds if necessary) and actually canvas the developers in the software libre world, to ask them "hey, we have $NNN million available, we'd like to coordinate something that's cross-project that would make a difference, and we'd like *you* to tell *us* what you think is the best way to spend that money".

where the kinds of ideas floated around could be something as big and ambitious as "converting both KDE and Gnome to use the same runtime-capable object-orientated RPC mechanism so that both desktops work nicely together and one set of configuration tools from one desktop environment could actually be used to manage the other... even over a network with severely limited bandwidth [1]".

or, another idea would be: ensure that things like heartbleed never happen again, because the people responsible for the code - on which these and many companies are making MILLIONS - are actually being PAID.

but the primary question that immediately needs answering: is this group of companies acting genuinely altruistically, or are they self-serving? an immediate read of the web site, at face value, it does actually look like they are genuine.

however, time will tell. we'll see when they actually start interacting with software libre developers rather than just being a web site that doesn't even have a public mailing list.

[1] i mention that because the last time i suggested this idea people said "what's wrong with using X11?? problem solved... so what are you talking about?? i'm talking about binary-compatible APIs that stem ultimately from IDL files". *sigh*...

It does not seem that hard to me, apply the common carrier requirements to ISP's and be done with it.

No lengthy committee meetings, findings, reports, etc.

If the ISP wishes to be a contract carrier and not a common carrier then so be it, but by turning it down they are legally responsible for all the content including the child porn, the pirated software, etc. Accept common carrier and you can not choose but you get legal protection.
 

Replyng to undo faulty moderation

How are you "Endlessly trapped on Lion?"

Apple released the OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" for FREE over a year ago. One of the design criteria for Mavericks was that it would install on any Mac on which Snow Leopard would install. Since you said you were "stuck on Lion" (10.7), which is already 64-bit only, why would this be of concern to you?

Back when I was a computer science student just learning Linux, kdevelop was one of the apps that made Linux accessible for me. That and kde itself. Once I got acclimated, I quickly switched to vim and ended with gnome. But I've always had a soft spot for kdevelop and think it's great they've come so far.