Linked by David Adams on Fri 18th Jun 2010 19:17 UTC
Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.
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RE[2]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?
by jtfolden on Sat 19th Jun 2010 05:03
in reply to "RE: Rip-offs are news worthy now?"
Member since:2005-08-12
I've yet to see a simple, easy-to-use, universal solution to upgrading apps on Linux.
I'm talking about not having to upgrade your whole distro just to use the latest release of your favorite music player, etc...
This happens all the time.
"For example, if Ubuntu ships with OpenOffice.org 2.0.x, it will remain at OpenOffice.org 2.0.x for the entire 6-month release cycle, even if a later version gets released during this time. The Ubuntu team may apply important security fixes to 2.0.x, but any new features or non-security bugfixes will not be made available."
Sure there are "backports" but lots of apps never get this treatment.
This is not normally an issue on Windows or Mac OS X.
RE[3]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?
by Neolander on Sat 19th Jun 2010 05:12
in reply to "RE[2]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?"
Member since:2010-03-08
Oh but you *can* always have the latest releases, or even pre-releases, with either rolling-release distros like Arch, "testing" repositories, or downloading and installing a .deb/.rpm of the update.
I prefer not to do so when I don't need to, because I prefer the increased stability of a stable installed base. But you can do that. As an example, my old Ubuntu box had repositories for GIMP betas and Emesene nightlies. Others have one for Opera.
Just imagine one second, knowing the famous quality of Nvidia and ATI drivers on all platforms, that they were always updated to the latest release on Windows. Your computer would effectively be broken quite often.
Edited 2010-06-19 05:30 UTC
RE[3]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?
by tupp on Sat 19th Jun 2010 06:14
in reply to "RE[2]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?"
Member since:2006-11-12
RE[3]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?
by chris_l on Sat 19th Jun 2010 11:10
in reply to "RE[2]: Rip-offs are news worthy now?"
Member since:2010-02-14
I've yet to see a simple, easy-to-use, universal solution to upgrading apps on Linux.
There is no so such animal for *ANY* OS
I'm talking about not having to upgrade your whole distro just to use the latest release of your favorite music player, etc...
This happens all the time.
"For example, if Ubuntu ships with OpenOffice.org 2.0.x, it will remain at OpenOffice.org 2.0.x for the entire 6-month release cycle, even if a later version gets released during this time. The Ubuntu team may apply important security fixes to 2.0.x, but any new features or non-security bugfixes will not be made available."
Bullshit. Under Fedora for instance just run "yum install blah" as root using su from a terminal.
If you don't have what the program needs, yum will download and install it for you.
Sure there are "backports" but lots of apps never get this treatment.
This is not normally an issue on Windows or Mac OS X.
There is no so such animal for *ANY* OS
I'm talking about not having to upgrade your whole distro just to use the latest release of your favorite music player, etc...
This happens all the time.
"For example, if Ubuntu ships with OpenOffice.org 2.0.x, it will remain at OpenOffice.org 2.0.x for the entire 6-month release cycle, even if a later version gets released during this time. The Ubuntu team may apply important security fixes to 2.0.x, but any new features or non-security bugfixes will not be made available."
Bullshit. Under Fedora for instance just run "yum install blah" as root using su from a terminal.
If you don't have what the program needs, yum will download and install it for you.
Sure there are "backports" but lots of apps never get this treatment.
This is not normally an issue on Windows or Mac OS X.
That's because Windows or Mac OS X will require you to run out and spend $$$$ on the latest version of the OS, or buy a freaking new computer.
Don't agree? Try running the latest versions of either VLC or Firefox on Windows 98se for instance. There's quite frankly no reason that I can see for either of these programs to *NOT* run under Win98se except for the fact the the developers wanted to force people to upgrade for no real reason.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"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.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2010-03-08
Oo How ? In my experience, the central repository system of Linux, to the contrary, made updates a much easier and smoother experience than on Windows and OSX...
Except, of course, if you're referring to some distros which just introduce buggy updates right away, instead of heavily testing them before moving them in repositories at the expense of not having newly released upstream updates available right away. But it's not the case on all. I've yet to see an update breaking the system on Debian stable (or even Testing) ^^
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More seriously, for people who don't like the make-your-own approach of Debian, my distro of choice, Pardus, never broke with an update, pretty much anything worked out of the box and continued to do so ever since. Even when upgrading to the newest 2009.2 release, which I did with extreme caution and backups because of my past experience with upgrading Windows and Linux to a new release, everything just worked perfectly fine. Its packages are of acceptable freshness when having the excellent stability in mind.
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My advice in that area is to use a rock-solid distribution and then put bleeding-edge repositories for some softwares only if you need it.
Edited 2010-06-19 04:58 UTC