Cogs can think.

To all the Mono whiners:

THE WORLD DOESN’T CARE.

That is all.

So, my parents bought this brand new multifunction uber-printer that can do anything, including making coffee. Great stuff.

I took their old printer home with me, because I don’t have one and was on the verge of buying one anyway. This is when I entered the twilight zone.

The HP Deskjet 840c has no Vista drivers. HP doesn’t make them. I need my Linux machine to print.

And now the world will end.

I find it rather pathetic that the only entry on Planet GNOME so far regarding KDE 4.2 is some guy complaining about the release announcement using Flash for the screencasts. From a project that embraces such a controversial technology like Mono.

Jealous much?

I try to stay away from angry rant blogging, since it doesn’t really make me look good, but sometimes, I jut have to let of steam a bit.

Not too long ago, Eugenia took down GnomeFiles.org because it got hacked, and she didn’t feel like fixing it any more. She set up a redirect from GnomeFiles.org to OSNews.com, which is not weird seeing OSNews is more or less GnomeFiles’ parent.

Oh boy, the reactions.

From the OSNews contact form:

Whatever lame reasons lead you to put down gnomefiles.org just don’t redirect me to this osnews.. it’s a shame that a site like gnomefiles.org is in hands of incompetents…

And from the OSNews mailing list, a certain Ray Carter:

OS news

Why have you taken over the Gnome Files site?

God I hate people like you. I shall never read your rag and will advise others to avoid you like the plague.

If you are a yank may many hurricanes forever plague you.

Why don’t you just go away.

I was baffled. Here OSNews and Eugenia are, working hard to provide a service to the GNOME/Gtk+ community - a service they aren’t providing themselves - and this is what we/she get in return? Eugenia has received almost nothing but crap from the GNOME and Gtk+ guys, for her often harsh but almost always valid criticisms, and despite all that, she continued to work on providing a valuable service for them. A service, I might add, almost all self-respecting desktop environments/operating systems provide.

You know what? The GNOME and Gtk+ community can GO FCUK THEMSELVES. If I were Eugenia, I’d let GnomeFiles stay offline, and I wouldn’t find a maintainer at all. Let them figure it out themselves.

Bunch of ungrateful twats.

So, like, GNOME was on its way to irrelevance, simply because they had no plan for the future, no direction, no leadership, no vision, no nothing.

Then came GUADEC, and at GUADEC, they came up with a vision for GNOME 3.0. And it’s all about tabs.

This basically means no more GNOME for me. Tabs suck balls in just about every implementation except settings panels. Tabs are bad because they constrain you. Tabbing is all the shizzle in web browsers, but all it does is stop you from having differently sized windows, having websites side by side - and to make it all even worse, tabbed programs introduce a new place to manage windows: the application window itself. So, users have to think about where to switch to a certain window - do we switch using the panel, or via an application? Wait, we have to switch to the application via the panel first, and then switch to the particular window we want inside the application? And what about closing documents versus closing windows? What about having 15 scientific .pdf’s loaded in a tabbed Evince? Can I still read the tabs, or are they shortened to only the first few letters of the filename?

What do you mean, pointless clicks?

We have been trying for ages now to move away from an application-centric world, towards a document-centric world, and Mac OS X is doing really, really well in that regard (Quick Look!), and GNOME itself was not doing bad either. By focussing efforts on tabbed applications, all that work has been in vain. They are setting the clock back, I don’t know, 15 years?

I’m happy that GNOME has a vision, but sadly, it’s one step forward, three billion steps back. I mean, vertical damn tabs? Why don’t you start eating babies while you’re at it?

All I want to say here is that this is a pretty darn sad state of affairs.

Us OSNews folk deal with that stuff every day, but we don’t get to shut anything off. At one point, Aaron, you just get used to it. I’m happy you have the option to just turn it all off.

Happy coding!

Can someone explain to me what’s so funny about this latest intertubes hype? I mean, the kid makes some very good points regarding the inherent crappiness of Linux, but it’s written like he’s a 12 year old.

Wait. 12 Years old?

I guess I just answered my own question. Of course teh intertubes loves him.

There’s a geek soap opera going on over at Planet GNOME, with the center of attention being Jeff Waugh and his (non?) work for GNOME. Since I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the people behind the software I use (really, I don’t. I care about the product or art, not the programmer or artist), and I only had one run-in with Waugh, I really cannot comment on this stuff. That run-in was perfectly resolved, and he didn’t come across me in a way that resembles whatever Cumming is claiming.

In the end, this is all useless political blabber. GNOME is falling apart. As I have said many times before on this blog as well as on OSNews, GNOME is dead. Dead, dead, dead. If you, as a major software project in a fast-changing world, do not have a well thought-out plan for the future, then you are dead. Cold, harsh, but reality. People have flamed Eugenia and I for saying it, but if a strong leader does not step up soon, a leader that dares to make the hard decisions needed to set a viable plan for the future, than GNOME is doomed to insignificance. It won’t be able to adapt. And we all know what happens to things that do not adapt.

KDE had the guts to make the tough decisions, and despite delays and setbacks, they are slowly but surely seeing the fruit of their labour. I may not like everything coming out of KDE 4, but at least they are trying. And I commend them for it.

I do want KDE 4.0 to be released after December 31st, 2007, though. I want to win my bet with Aaron.

I doubled the RAM in my laptop, from 768MB to 1.5GB. And you know what?

You don’t notice a damn thing in either Vista or Ubuntu.

• My dad and I have decided to buy a digital SLR camera together - I want to take good pictures damn it. We both want one, but in order to make it affordable for me, we decided to buy one together. After consulting the interweb and Eugenia and her husband, we decided on getting the Nikon D40 (we’ll buy it somewhere in the coming weeks). It has gotten raving reviews, is easy to use, and is relatively affordable at ~500 EUR. As for a lens, we’ll be settling on the kit lens (18-55mm) for the time being, seeing that has also been getting very good reviews (despite it being a kit lens). We can always buy a better, more professional lens later on. They don’t come cheap at all, you see. Great stuff.
• For the first time ever, Debian has let me down. A dist-upgrade on my laptop went tits up, and manual fixage got me quite far, but not far enough. I’m quite pissed off right now about this one. Ten pounds of suck, that’s what it is.