Slashdot Mirror

Enjoy.

Metacity Screenshots.... Yawn.

Cheers,

flog(if(horse=="dead")then return horse);

Some alternatives to "Themes.org" are Deskmod, Skinz, my own site, System 26, and numerous other sites in the skinning community. They all accept and support Linux windowmanager themes, as well as KDE and GNOME themes, and have been around for quite a while now.

Cheers,

You think you know alot, but, you dont.

This was posted by a guy who calls himself a "Project Manager" for a site which produces background tiles for Linux. How's the market for GIMPified crap, Bowie?

Pictures of space will scare off women, and make your co-workers you're some sort of Star Trek idiot. On the other hand, if you have PROPAGANDA on your desktop, you're helping to promote Linux, women dig your style, and your co-workers will envy your desktop. Simple as that.

Cheers, and have a merry one,

Yes, i'm the original Pancake-Eatin' Ninja from last February. But of our kind there are many, and we gladly embrace the cold hand of death should anything try to come between us and our pancakes. For years, I studied my art in my dojo, and longed for the day that I would be united with shugyiyo-karamitsu, or, as you know her, "Aunt Jemimah". Can you help me in my quest?

Got Pancakes?

Sorry, gang, but this "innovation" seems utterly useless. Here's why.

1) Why do you need a GPS phone? If you don't know where you are, you ask, or buy a map for a buck or two. The only people who would ever buy a GPS phone are the same kinds of people who get confused looking at rotary telephones.

2) Paper maps don't run out of batteries, or break.

3) Paper maps wont cost you $30 a month.

4) There are plenty of Road Atlases available in bookstores, many of which provide comprehensive data on where you are and where you want to go. They cover every major metropolitan city in the world, streets and landmarks included, and cost a fraction of the amount of money you'de blow on a useless (not to mention difficult to read) GPS phone that will not only eat your batteries, but will eat your money.

5) The GPS doesn't provide you with any unique information. Your speed, distance and travel times can all be figured out in your head or on paper, probably in less time it takes you to fire up the damn thing and take a reading from satellites.

6) Only titanic idiots ever get themselves truly lost anyway. Trust me, I live near a forest preserve. Morons go in there all the time, totally unprepared, no maps, no money, no clue. If you suddenly find yourself so far away from civilization that you need to use a GPS to locate your position (nice fantasy world there, by the way) , you sure as hell aren't going to be able to place a cellphone call. There wont be any nearby towers to handle the call. Gee, didn't think about THAT one, didja? :)

7) A five-minute reading of any basic book on Astronomy will teach you how to find your location anywhere on earth, day or night.

You don't even need a magnetic compass.

So, who wants to step up to the plate and give me ONE irrefutable reason why ANYONE would NEED a GPS-Enabled Cell Phone?

Cheers, (and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,

I'm doing my part to try and improve things, and finding that nobody cares enough to help. Personally, I dont release jack squat until I can confirm to the best of my ability to test it that my code is clean, and solid. People who release anything less are either lazy or wreckless, IMHO. .

So whats your excuse?

Cheers,

Ok. i'll take a dare and assert that i'm not the only one puzzled by wether or not we even need such a thing.

Anybody with an hour or two and a good book on Perl can write a client/server package, complete with a crude protocol that allows both sides to talk. I guess what i'm getting at is, what good is an "application substrate" in this situation? If peer-to-peer sharing is by definition a specialized application meant only to communicate (and deal with) an equally specialized scorresponding part, then why bother building a "one size fits all" version in the first place? Perhaps a common protocol for P2P would be a good idea, but then again, we already have that. Its called TFTP. Or NFS, for that mattter. I've always thought that publically exported NFS shares make the best platform-independant P2P solution. :)

Sometimes, especially for experienced coders, it becomes tempting to want to reinvent the wheel. If you're going to set out to make something as complicated into something thats now easier to handle, cool..Go for it. But don't try and over-do something that is already simple by its very design.

By the way, if you're one of the guys building such an app, feel free to swing by System 26 when you're ready and have a look around. You might find something useful to include in your code to make it a little more asthetically pleasing. Plus, its free. :)

Cheers,

This is gonna sound like spam, but i'll say it anyway.

If you're interested in developing games for Linux, alot of the work may already be done for you. I recently started up a project called System 26 a little over a week ago, that aims to provide Linux developers (and Win32 developers, for that matter) with a resource they can visit, and grab all the raw materials they need to build basically anything. By "raw materials", I mean things like images, icons, other graphics, music, sound samples, things like that. They're organized into kits that developers can freely download and incorporate into their apps. In exchange for doing so, we even offer them the ability to showcase their work via our page, to encourage others to do the same.. In essence, we provide the lumber, the developers build the house.

We're trying to build the project's popularity by word of mouth -- I don't believe in banner advertising, and there really is no money to be made by running such a project.. I just thought it would be cool to set up a nexus where artists and coders could exchange their work and loosely collaborate on building high-quality apps and games.

If you're interested, especially if you're going to be building games for Linux, feel free to swing by and check us out. We'll see you there. :)

Cheers,

My favorite little utility for AmigaDOS was a thing called MultiClock.. It sat nicely up in Workbench's titlebar, and would annouce the time in English at user-specified intervals. The guy who wrote it recorded a series of sound samples of himself saying different numbers so that he could play them on-the-fly whenever someone requested the time. "The time is" + "Eight" + "Oh" + "Six" + "PM".

The timing of this article is sort of interesting. We released a verbal clock toolkit on System 26 earlier this morning, featuring the voice of yours truly. Time to start coding.. :)

Being monitored in the workplace isn't so bad..Just ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. :)

...How is it fraudulent, if you bought it?

You can register mcdonalds.com and list Harry Balzac as your contact person as far as I'm concerned.. If you're the first in line to grab the domain, it should be yours. Thats what the whole appeals process is for. Suppose your company is McDonald's Heating & Air Conditioning, and you got your name on the dotted line before The Evil Clown did.. Too bad for Clownburger, the domain is yours, and if they still have a problem with it, there are plenty of avenues of recourse.

This whole post is pretty much pointless. There is no such thing as a "bogus registration".

You (meaning, the average user) may only be buying Windows off-the-shelf infrequently, but you're buying it every time you buy a new computer that you don't assemble yourself.

We aren't like most people. Most of us assemble our own machines from pieces. The vast, vast majority of people have no idea they can do this, so they go out and buy PCs, and surprise-surprise, Windows is factored into the cost of that PC.

Besides.. some of us have broadband. Takes me about 4 hours to download an ISO of any new Linux distrib. For free. And, as i'm sure many other people will point out to you, you can take even the most ancient Linux boxes around and upgrade them incrementally without having to tear the whole thing down every time. I have problem with your assertion--it just doesn't hold water.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

Good one. :) Few people have the ballage to address their posting mistakes. And you're welcome, by the way. You're right. My sole contribution to the open source revolution is a set of square pictures that a few million people use, and enjoy...That is, if you look past the three projects i've founded over the years, countless projects i've contributed to, helped with, worked on, and continue to support.

i.e. , Your ignorance isn't my responsibility to correct, sir.

Cheers,

Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

1) It should be named Chango, not "Mono". Somebody needs to brush up on their Spanglish.

2) The biggest problem with Mono is not in what it does--it's in what it will do. In short, .Net is a leverage tool made by Microsoft. Its a teeter-totter with a fat kid on one end..Anyone who steps up and sits on the other side of the plank isn't going to have much fun, because the fat kid dictates the fun. Imagine this scenario if you will.. Microsoft keeps their implenetation constant for the entire development cycle of Mono. Then waits for Mono to become a commonly accepted feature on Linux desktops, same as Gnome is now. Then *whack*, the fat kid jumps off the teeter-totter..Microsoft breaks their own standard, and effectively breaks Mono in the process. The Linux community is sent scrambling to find a way to level the plank again while the fat kid laughs. You have a situation where .Net can remain untouched, but the Linux community's development effort is in a continual state of upheval trying to keep up.

A couple days ago I wrote a post about this, which 10 people said was interesting, and another 10 people said was total flamebait -- About how this is Gnome's mentallity. They dont want to take the lead. They want to permanently fix themselves into second place because (big surprise) being able to imitate the leader is a cozy existance. It's been like that for years -- They steadfastly refuse to do or accept anything even remotely unique and try it out.

Meanwhile, Mono consumes more and more metric tons of brainpower to keep it stable, and all the while, Microsoft uses it as something they can point to and say "Hey, look. See, we told you, the Open Source development model is flawed."

The saddest part about all of this is that I actually do believe the people running the show in Gnome's inner circle are stupid enough to walk into that trap. You gotta hand it to Microsoft.. They've elevated the science of mental trojan horsing to an art form.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

Anyone who knows me in my personal life knows that I'm often terrible with my analogies...When it comes to competitions, sometimes I hit a bullseye, other times I misfire and end up killing someone sitting in the stands. :)

(Hah. And there you go.)

The point I was trying to make was, that the only way to be first in anything is to have the balls to take the lead, instead of imitating the current leader, which unfortunately both Gnome and KDE both seem consigned to do. They'll never win with that strategy, and anyone with half a clue back in 1996 (*cough*) could have seen it coming.

Thanks for the intelligent reply, btw.


Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

Ahem yourself.

Color-Reactiveness (and Eckehart Burns code along with it) were removed from the Gnome CVS tree about 6 months later.

At the time, I emailed the CVS admin asking why it was removed, and never got a reply. Sent an email off to Eckehart himself, he didn't know why it was removed either. Now, do you believe me yet when I tell you GNOME doesn't want to bother with trying new ideas?



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

.

"..It seems to me that KDE is the one that's really been chasing Windows. KDE looks a lot like Windows, and Konqueror's similarity to IE is very disturbing. "

Which is why both Gnome and KDE will ultimately fail when it comes to grabbing the brass ring in the desktop arena. They both made a very critical mistake early on that falls along the lines of this statement:

"Lets build our desktop to look like Windows, because thats what people are used to."

..Which is a flaming pile of bullshit, logically, because it immediately commits you (and your project) to a life of constantly playing second fiddle..Nobody ever won a marathon by saying "I'm just going to run right behind the leader for the whole race..."

Rather than try out new ideas, take a few risks here and there, and rethink the ways in which things have always been done, they both followed like puppy dogs into the same bloody mess. Now both are stuck. The defacto standard Linux GUI is now roughly equivalent to a Windows desktop from seven years ago. Clap at your leisure.

The real solution would have been to take a very radical departure early on, and over time, refine that departure into a stable, usable, likeable model. They didn't do that. Now they're paying the price, and have no one to blame but themselves. Meanwhile, we've been pissing in the wind for so many years, trying desparately to shove a square peg in a round hole.

There are better places to rest your sympathy.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

isTheLinuxCommunityWhatItUsedToBe() returned FALSE.


Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 1996

"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 1998

"Lets make Gnome look and feel like Windows." - Gnome, 2000

"We're not trying to copy Microsoft.." - Gnome, 2001.

Mmmmkay. Glad to see Gnome is sticking to the same ideology that brought such revolutionary advances like "The Foot Menu". I'd be hard pressed to find a bigger waste of effort than to clone .Net...Its the same basic beef i've had with Gnome for years. They steadfastly refuse to do anything new or unique... They just want to play catch-up to everyone else, and thats all Gnome will probably amount to in the end anyway. A self-imposed rule that keeps them second best at everything. The same luke-warm boredom that made all of us flock to Linux in the first place.

The world is filled with with flea market knock-offs and ultramundane ideas. There are better flags to march under than this one, i'm afraid. If only a fraction of the effort that will be undertaken to make a clone of .Net were put toward researching new ideas and putting them into use, within 6 months Linux would be leaps and bounds ahead of anything Microsoft could come up with.

Nobody seems to want to do that anymore.



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

In other news, Italian officials have assigned Otzi's murder investigation to their cold-case file.
(Sorry, couldnt resist. Heheh)



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile

I wonder what the Iceman's last words were...

Probably "Owwww!" ....



Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, System 26 GUI Component Stockpile