Gnome 3 is out ! And it looks like Unity.
Apr 08There once was a time, in the not so distant path, that Linux users where a minority. Well, to be honest, they where a small group of really really big Nerds. Yes, beard-wearing, spectacle sporting, maternal basement dwelling single guys (and the occasional female) They would stare at their command prompts all night long, browsing newsgroups and irc channels where they could flame new Linux users and have their snickers chase away their own loneliness. With a completely misplaced superiority complex they would make up funny acronyms that nobody understood and look down on users who where ignorant of their nerdy inside jokes. Whenever a question about something the the KDE or Gnome interface would pop up on the newsgroup, they would be the first to flame that user shouting “Who needs a GUI ! Use the command line , you Newbie !” Linux was for the Nerd Elite and the average new user was NOT welcome.
These days its a whole different story. All the nerds have grown out of this childish behavior (All except One ! Yes, thats YOU i’m referring to Mr Stallman) and the Linux community is a happier one. With the new ‘rules of conduct’ pioneered by Ubuntu Linux, that “old” behavior is now frowned upon. And even the old flame posts stating that the command line interface is the only thing Linux really needs, are no longer relevant. These days progress has caught up with them like a jetplane overtakes a turtle. We have rejoiced at the fact that stable user graphical user interfaces have emerged over the last five years. In stead of a crummy X server with windows that look like they came from a Commodore Amiga, we even had our own Gnome Vs Kde wars where complete graphical user interfaces battled for the users preference. These battles sparked progress of course and the ‘terminal’ became a window INSIDE a GUI desktop, instead of a screen filling item.
However, when watching the buzz in the Linux Community when Ubuntu shifted the ‘window buttons’ from the left to the right .. I thought I had somehow slipped into an alternate reality ! This was the same “community” that flamed GUI’s 10 years ago ! Now they where going all mental over a button change ? Amazing. Suddenly the “look and feel” of Linux became extremely important. Sure, the major issues of stability and ‘ease of use’ have been all but covered, but this is amazing. Its like meeting a coal-miner who pays attention to the color of his eyeshadow ! Amazing. But “Looks and Feels” are very very important. So when Ubuntu decided to DROP their Gnome interface for Unity (a Different looking interface) the whole community was up in arms again. “What was Ubuntu thinking ?” “This is outrageous! ” , and my all time favorite ” Ubuntu wants to make Linux look more like OSX”. But hey, as Linux users we ALWAYS have a choice. We could always choose to use KDE, a plethora of other obscure GUI’s or even just classic Gnome.. Right ? We didn’t HAVE to use Canonical’s option of Unity, Especially with the new Gnome 3 coming out ? Right ?
Well, figure my amazement when I saw the new demo video’s of Gnome 3 and (as a complete lamen) spotted that Gnome 3 looks a LOT like Unity and that Unity looks a lot like OSX. Somehow the entire community made a big pooha about “losing Gnome” and “getting Unity” while Gnome3 has a lot of resemblance to Unity.
This debate is of course purely for the Nerds. The average user won’t recognize it and I know that when I roll out the Ubuntu Granny’s new laptop she won’t know the difference between Gnome 3 or Unity for that matter. But it IS funny to see that all of these “different” operating systems (Different GUI’s, Os’s etc) are all starting to “melt together” into one general standard. Osx, Gnome3, Unity, all of them are starting to adopt simular features. As a cross platform slider I think that’s pretty cool and it ALSO proves my theory that the OS is just a shell, just a platform and should be as transparant as possible to allow the user to interact with their data and just ‘”get things done”. By eliminating the harsh differences between the different plaforms its easier for users to “transfer” over to another OS. But I do hope this does not get in the way of progress or ‘innovative thinking’ because in the Tech world, everybody is trying to be like the other guy. Google wants to be more like Facebook, Facebook wants to me more like Twitter and so forth. I do hope this doesn’t happen to the Linux distribution. For ” common features ” are good, but “imitation” is just .. boring.
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The return of the C64 ?
Apr 07
There are some things everybody remembers. Their first girlfriend, their first car, their first kiss and of course, and of course, their first computer. For me that was a beige Commodore 64 (With brown keys) that I had gotten in 1986. At that time my older brother had bought it for my dads company and would use it for the paperwork and stuff. One of his buddies even came over to hand-program an accounting program for my parents to use in basic. I remember gawking in stunned fascination as I would stare over my brothers shoulder as the white cursor would blink on the blue background. Somehow I knew, I wanted one to. So I saved up untill I had the money and instead of waiting for my parents to take us to the shop, I just plonked down the envelope with the correct amount of cash on my brothers desk, and made of with the C64 !
After that (well, first my brother got mad at me) but after THAT came data recoders, giant floppy drives, matrix printers, power cardridges, games and even some word processing applications. In short, the C64 was my gateway drug into computing. Somehow i’ve always ‘held on’ to that C64. Nostalgia ? perhaps. If we geeks can be accused of one thing in this ever faster flowing technological world, then it HAS to be pointless, ungrounded nostalgia with ‘old things’. Even to this day the C64 still resides in our house where it sleeps softly (along with my big plans to revive it one day)
That geek-nostalgia has also been what has powered the “continuation” of the Commodore legacy. (Not the machines, Just the brand) Even when the Commodore company went belly up in 1996, there have been several “deals” where the brandname ‘Commodore’ was bought up by some company. Every time it would be a hype ! “Commodore is coming back, Commodore is coming back..” geeks would should across the digital block sinus waves of the interweb. The last time I remember that it was some Chinese MP3 player company that bought the name and promised to ship simple MP3 players with nostalgic names like the ‘Amiga’ and the ‘vic 20’. But just like the times before when the buzz-machine had .. buzzed .. it turned out to be vaporware.
So yesterday the C64 buzz-machine cranked out another beep in my feed when I read about an American company that is planning to ship a “modern day” computer in a classic C64 casing. Not a bad idea since you can probably stack 4 netbooks into that bold brown housing. According to the company you can even buy an empty ‘housing’ and shove in your own hardware, or you can buy prebuilt models at (to me) pretty high prices.
The question is ? Is all that Nostalgia really worth it ? 29 years ago the C64 might have looked hip and cool. These days the fat brown casing would make for pretty un-ergonomic writing and wrist pains.
But hey, your Computer NEEDS a case right ? You can choose for some slim sleek led-infested plexi-glass 70’s disco with a main board inside, but it would be much cooler to have a C64 parked on your desk ! So hey .. why not !
And here I am getting al exited again about the C64, but when visiting the website, my vaporware sensor starts to tingle. No contact information, no “actual” pictures (just 3D mockups), even a cross platform promo with the new TRON movie ? It all sounds a little good to be true. The models are available for pre-order and even though the website looks like it came out of a 1997 “Microsoft Frontpage project abortion clinic” my mouse still hovers over the 250 euro ‘bare bone’ option. Do I want to pay now ? No thanks, I’ll wait until I actually SEE the products in the wild.
I hope other geeks also weigh their sence of nostalgia and times gone by against the risks of handing cash to yet another C64 revival. Patience is a virtue. And remembering the hours of “waiting around” we did for games to load on the C64, I think I can muster up some patience too.
So how about you ? Did you have C64 ? Do you still have it ? Do you think the new Commodore 64 is just a dream in a bottle ?
Links commodore64.net
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