Red Hat announced a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual Red Hat Summit tradeshow in San Diego. This move is designed, in part, to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop, which has achieved success in business desktop markets, and with Ubuntu 7.04, which will soon appear on Dell PCs. Some reporting about this can also be found at the company's magazine. Update: Elsewhere, talking security with Red Hat's Mark Cox.
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Member since:2005-08-07
They should simply run with the idea.
There are already signs that they are though, with things like HotNewStuff, they are enabling a more internet focused usage paradigm.
Just get Digikam syncing with Flickr, more of a presence machanism for Kopete, and a way for KOffice to sync with Google tools, you're more than half way there.
I think this is really a great idea, because most people don't really use local tools anymore.
Member since:2006-02-27
"I think this is really a great idea, because most people don't really use local tools anymore."
What ??? Nobody using local tools anymore? Nobody i know uses "external" tools (well certainly exclusivly), apart from Flickr and the odd e-mail acount. Certainly in hte businees and enterprise space, no-one i have ever met uses any of the Ajax Web 2.0 Apps. Personally i don't want all my data / documents / photos etc exposed to the whole world (and certainly not for google to extract information and index them).
I think the whole Web 2.0 is just another bubble waiting to burst ... it is nice and interresting and sometimes also useful ... that's about it.
Member since:2005-08-11
People don't really use local tools anymore? That's just crazy talk. I think most people use a mix of online and local tools, I don't see any big takeup of online office apps, Real graphical work needs local processing, I really wouldn't want to send that 700Mb .psd file across the interweb for storage, and I certainly don't want a web-based IDE. Ripping DVDs/CDs, burning DVDs/CDs, video editing, all stuff that should be done locally, at least for the forseable future.
Member since:2006-06-02
Member since:2005-07-06
"To us, the traditional desktop metaphor is dead"
wow, some one need to tell to the KDE crew that their work is in vane because Red Hat says so.
This is because they don't have the technology or the infrastructure available to them to build a desktop with the supporting libraries, APIs and henceforth applications of Windows or a desktop like KDE. After using RHEL and its CentOS form, that much has become very clear to me in the past few months.
Like a lot of others, Red Hat is desperately searching around for a new desktop paradigm that would mean they wouldn't have to put in the sheer amount of donkey work required to build a desktop of the size, scale and general quality of Windows or KDE - certainly in their supporting infrastructure. Unfortunately for them, everybody is not moving their applications to the web. People still buy off-the-shelf software they expect to be able to install, they still use rich client software and ISVs have to be able to build that software with the development tools, libraries and APIs required to do that. You can't just assume everyone will use online services, because that is doomed to failure, and it's not something enterprises are going to fully do either.
Member since:2006-02-01
Like a lot of others, Red Hat is desperately searching around for a new desktop paradigm that would mean they wouldn't have to put in the sheer amount of donkey work required to build a desktop of the size, scale and general quality of Windows or KDE - certainly in their supporting infrastructure. Unfortunately for them, everybody is not moving their applications to the web. People still buy off-the-shelf software they expect to be able to install, they still use rich client software and ISVs have to be able to build that software with the development tools, libraries and APIs required to do that. You can't just assume everyone will use online services, because that is doomed to failure, and it's not something enterprises are going to fully do either.
I'm curious. What, specifically, can a developer do using KDE that cannot be done using GTK+/Gnome?
With the likes of Cairo, GStreamer, DBus and Telepathy -- the last two of which are cross-desktop efforts -- it seems to me that the Gnome platform is itself using just as advanced technology as KDE will be with Arthur, Phonon and the rest.
Of course, as everyone knows, programming in pure GTK in C is horrible. But I'm told the C++ API (gtkmm) is very highly regarded, as is GTK# on Mono. And then there's PyGTK, which is falling-off-a-log easy -- even I can use it.
What Gnome hasn't managed to do anywhere near as successfully as KDE is to tie everything together under a single banner. What they need to do is produce a single website -- say, developers.gnome.org -- full of documentation and code examples for all the technology used on the Gnome platform.
They also need a talented artist to sit down and design a really modern GTK theme using all that Cairo drawing can offer. Even Clearlooks looks pretty old-fashioned these days with its inoffensive greys.
But to say the whole of the Gnome platform is antiquated and need massive investment to get it up to the standard of the competition just doesn't ring true to me.
Edited 2007-05-10 21:08
Member since:2005-07-24
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This is because they don't have the technology or the infrastructure available to them to build a desktop with the supporting libraries, APIs and henceforth applications of Windows or a desktop like KDE.
"""
You're trolling Segedunum.
But I'll answer anyway.
RedHat *could* just use KDE.
But the fact of the matter is that Enterprise Linux distros, who are absolutely free to choose what will work best for them, are uniformly rejecting KDE in favor of Gnome.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And that's absolutely *all* I'm going to say on that matter.
If you want a DE war, I'm not participating any further.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-09-27
"To us, the traditional desktop metaphor is dead"
wow, some one need to tell to the KDE crew that their work is in vane because Red Hat says so.