The Gnome Project released version 2.12 yesterday. We had a quick look at it by using the latest Gnome Live CD (1.12-pre) and Foresight 0.9.0 (2.12 final) and here are our thoughts over 2.12 and Gnome's status in general.
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Member since:I should say that I really really regret the lack of support for XRenderAccel from the ATI fglrx driver.
As an ATI user, I am however not stuck with it. There is a alternative, the radeon driver that *should* work with XRender. I must say I never tested it, because I need performance .... for games. I just cry I choosed a laptop with ATI 
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BUT I DO NOT LIKE YOUR DEBATE ON GNOME. Come on... GNOME. It managed a lot of stuff concerning interactions between aps, and that's what a "desktop" needs. It might be slower than KDE, I might be more beautifull, it might be less.
Do you need a Desktop? I am not alone in this room to NOT use gnome desktop, but to use a lot of the gnome-related apps: Evince, Eog, Gimp, the gonme-toolbar, various gnome-utils.... etc.... etc Everything under FVWM 
Yes I like Gnome and Gnome developer and I thanks them a lot for the nice app and the extreme modularity of it all ! By comparison most of KDE tools are too integrated to be used without KDE, other philosophy.
To me and many other Gnome let you the choice, above all. Speed issue with Metacity? Try Fvwm, Enlightenment, Sawfish... so many Gnome2 compatibles WM. You do not like nautilus, I recommand you RoxFiler ... etc.. I have many exemples. I am a guy that like to have the choice, like my distro gives me much liberty (debian ).
You can't blame people for the thinks that they should do to be nice to you while it take a lot of their time and none of yours, that's why you often see fed up developers posting "do it your self" of course. On the other hand, developers are very enthousiasts people (I am one too) and like to convience people that their apps can fullfil your dreams, which is never the case.
Open source gives you tools, you are free to use them in any configuration you want. Thanks to the gnome team for the work done so far.
Member since:2005-07-06
As an ATI user, I am however not stuck with it. There is a alternative, the radeon driver that *should* work with XRender. I must say I never tested it, because I need performance .... for games. I just cry I choosed a laptop with ATI .
Your logic is pretty flawed... You need performance for games, yet you run Linux. Why not just get an XBOX or PS2 and use Linux for what it's meant... Downloading games for XBOX and PS2
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Please keep in mind that downloading is illegal, and
stuff. Don't do it. It was a joke.
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:
2005-07-06
XRenderAccel is NOT supported by the ATI closed drivers and cards from the R300 series and up have no hardware acceleration from the open source drivers. NVidia is the only major card maker that has a decent set of drivers for Linux.
Relying in Render acceleration to get decent speed is a big mistake from the GNOME developers because only NVidia cards will have it.