"Nat Friedman has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the Linux desktop for a few year now. First with his own company Ximian, founded together with Mono chief architect Miguel de Icaza, after its acquisition now inside Novell. A few months ago he has been named 'Technologist of the Year' by the VarBusiness magazine for his work around the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Since then he has been promoted to Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source, besides the desktop he is also overseeing Novells server business now. During Novells Brainshare Andreas Proschofsky had the possibility to sit down with Friedman and talk about the Linux desktop, the consequences of the Microsoft agreement and the mistakes of the Hula project."
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Member since:2005-07-24
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Nowhere in the desktop projects does he mention KDE which has much more demand among enterprises than Gnome.
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Only in your fantasy world.
Enterprises don't roll out PCLinuxOS. They use enterprise distros. And all the enterprise distros I know of (SLED and RHEL Desktop) are Gnome based.
Enterprises don't really care about Gnome or KDE. They care about what their vendor supports.
So there is really no enterprise *demand* for either one.
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2006-01-28
Enterprises do care about desktops. The proof is that Novell was force to reinstate KDE as a desktop choice in its enterprise distribution after it announced that it was no longer going to support it.
Do you think Suse made this decision out of the kindness of its sweet corporate heart?
KDE is what made Suse popular in Europe and KDE is what everyone runs over here.
Red Hat has no desktop presence and is largely irrelevant in that space. And SLED has at best an equal share of KDE/Gnome users, in spite of the fact that Gnome is the default desktop. Want numbers? Ask Miguel or Nat and if they are honest, they will tell you exactly what I am telling you.
Edited 2007-04-02 11:41
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2006-01-28
Suse had to go back to the drawing board when they announced that they would no longer be supporting KDE as a desktop choice on their enterprise distribution.
Why? Because too many clients called in and complained. Here in Europe, I have deployed and worked on hundreds of linux desktops over the last 4 years and have not seen many corporate linux deployments where the choice was gnome.
Member since:2006-02-27
The original article was in German; I guess the interview was done in English, translated into German and then translated back into English. And English/German translators in Germany and Austria aren't what you'd call "good" by any means. (Maybe except me, self-serving plug)
It's sort of like when you read your VCR's manual that was written in Japanese, translated into English, translated into Japanese, translated back into English and then published...
What I mean is I guess the guy actually speaks proper English.
Member since:2007-04-04
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2006-01-28
Does anyone else have the feeling that Nat is completely self-serving and nor furthering the interests of Novell itself?
Nowhere in the desktop projects does he mention KDE which has much more demand among enterprises than Gnome. If he really is setting desktop/server strategy at Novell, all my hope for Novell is quickly vanishing and I have a large number of desktops and servers on Suse right now.
He seems to be a typical child of dysfunctional corporations allowing the most incongruent and disqualified people to rule supreme based on their sheer arrogance. To top it all all, the man cannot even speak proper English. It becomes very annoying to read someone who sounds like a character out of a 1980s fraternity house B-Movie:
"Also there is a fork called Bongo now, were they are doing some great work, so I guess Hula will live on through both of that."
Moderation be damned. I have seen nothing good come from Nat and Miguel's involvement with the Linux desktop. They are self-important luminaries in their own minds.
Damn shame what they are doing to the face of the linux desktop and damn shame that Novell has allowed them to run amok.
Edited 2007-04-02 00:48