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Themes.org Returning
Well, a number of readers noted, and I've been on X-Chat with ElCoronel and technoir regarding themes.org. It's been down for the last day or so due to some technical difficulties (hard drive go buh-bye!), but it should be returning soon -- it was not Apple seizing the hardware, like a couple of submitters had thought.Most of you probably noticed that Themes is back-up - thanks to Patrick Ashmore, Tony Ramos, and Marc Merlin (and anyone else I forgot) for riding the evil-hell bus of late night sysadmining, finding the problem and fixing it.
Is it just me, or do other people find it just a touch ironic that one of VA's own flagship sites goes down and stays down for *days*...a system run by their own employees, on their own hardware. Great product endorsement, guys.
"Every time IBM says Linux, our phone rings." - Larry Augustin, 2001.
This guy wants you to buy a "server" that dies because a single HD fails. Meanwhile, IBM sells RAID arrays built to withstand earthquakes, fire damage, power failures, collisions up to 27 G's worth of force. Mmmmkay.
Perhaps you mean "I've been on IRC with..." instead? Dammit Hemos, you sound like the newbies who say "I was talking to somebody on mIRC yesterday," you should know better than that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hmm...I'm not sure it's an actual do-able idea - but I'd start with ONE wm, and make it compatible with the rest - then add the others.
For example...the original poster's itch was using Windowmaker themes in Sawfish. OK - first you have to make a "generic" Windowmaker theme for Sawfish (or if there's already a good one available, modify that) with "hooks" for the various Windowmaker theme components (gradients, pixmaps, etc...) -- then you'll have to make a parser that goes through the Windowmaker theme, and converts everything to a format your meta-theme can understand.
I'm not much of a programmer myself (I dabble in perl a bit) but that's a heckuva lot more complicated than I just made it sound. =)
The real problems will come when you're trying to convert a theme from an "uber-shell wm" like Enlightenment (that has many, many different configs) to a more restrictive wm, like Windowmaker.
Lionman has been promising this for ages, perhaps you can beat him to it.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
ok, I didn't notice either until someone pointed it out to me, but that doesn't mean t.o isn't important.
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I'm pretty sure most of them were submitted with the offending parts removed. Just grab your fave macish themes and plaster apple logos on them and you'll have something similar.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
Yeah, why can't they just use one of those 100% uptime systems like eveyone else.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
The real trick would be to identify the bits that *are* common between, say, GTK+ and QT themes, and let those be shared, and provide a mechanism to allow your theme designers to do the toolkit specific bits.
Or everyone else could stop using (insert non-favourite WM/toolkit here) and switch to (insert favourite WM/toolkit here) the problem would go away . . . :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yes, there a few zealots out there that hate every company that runs off proprietary code.
./'s nervous and suspicious.
They should probably take a hint from Sun since they make most of their cash from hardware. After all, most MacOS folks would not download their OS, they would still buy the CD.
However, you can't forget the ridiculous look and feel copyrigth nonsense mail they sent to themes.org on a couple of their themes that were modeled after their venerable OS. That is enough to make most
There are two types of people who are suspicious or hate Apple.
1) You got the guys who are pissed off at the legal tactics pulled off on themes.org. I can't blame them I used those themes and nobody is going to mistake my linux box for a Mac. I can't really blame these folks. You think a company is getting cool releasing some of their source code to the world and think they might have a clue, then, -BLAM!- they let their lawyers pull that kind of bonehead play.
2) You got people who hate Apple because they hate everything that isn't linux and Open Source. Some go far as to just blindly hate everything that is big and corporate. They hate Intel so they use AMD. They hate Microsoft, which is just normal everyone hates Mickey$oft. They hate, hate, hate, hate...
BTW, they can't legally take their hardware but they could shut down the site through the courts if they ever got really ticked off of at the Mac OS modeled themes again.
Not all people are necessarily suspicious Apple's intentions. I think the company's leaders actually believe they are trying to do the right thing and make money at the same time.
ACK
i can't tell if this is a troll, but...
well to be fair there is another benefit to the current crop of buggy, slow, and complicated OSs and that's that they are quite useful for most workloads and applications now. and it is hard to see how another os would be immune: as the capabilities the kernel provides increase, so does its size, and the number of bugs introduced. most every os at one time or another has been small, fast, and nearly bug-free; then it got useful.
the job security thing though is another miss too. anyone in a company is basically interchangable, and there is always going to someone able to step in and get up to speed with things. with the free oses there is no job to secure. or perhaps you mean by the users?
os's are complicated because they do complicated things. they're buggy because doing complicated things is hard. on the otherhand you are always free to run a single task at a time, and take care of your own memory management.
i say this not so much for your benefit, as for mine. i have successfully avoided working on stuff for 15 minutes.
anonymous hero indeed!
Shouldn't the stormtroopers' whole body armor be in the iMac colors? Ruby, Indigo, Snow, Sage, Graphite, Tangarine, etc.
Mike
While backing up should always be done (and it probably was in this case), it may not always be the solution.
For example, what if the controller board on the drive dies?
One could say "Well, go down to Fry's and buy a new drive, slap it in and restore!", but rarely is it that simple.
You see, hardware manufacturers sometimes have maintenance contracts (and when I mean hardware, I mean the high end, "sell-yo-mamma-to-afford-it" type stuff) that stipulate that in order for the contract and warantee on the product to remain valid, you must do all service through the manufacturer.
That means when something fails, you have to call them, get them to come out when they can (at _their_ earliest possible conveniance), then they have to diagnose the problem, say "Yep, it's the hard drive alright!", then they call in to get a replacement hard drive - but maybe they don't have a spare, so it needs to be overnighted or couriered in from IBM or somewhere, then they get it, install it, verify it is working, then let you restore your data (which might take a day in itself, depending on if you send tapes out for offsite storage, and your rotation happened just before the crash, so now your tapes are in transit to storage - wait some more!).
Later in the month they send you a check for [bignum] bucks...
So, while in theory something that could have been done in a day using COTS hardware and a good admin, generally takes a ton of time when dealing with the higher end hardware. In this case, I don't think themes.org has to worry about a bill, they are probably doing a managed co-lo somewhere, and don't own the hardware. If they _do_ own the hardware, oh-boy, will they love the bill (at that point it becomes an issue whether you should stick to high-end, or go with a more COTS solution, and hope it doesn't break often under load)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Just found out it was run on VA by themselves - that is pathetic - relatively COTS, should _NOT_ have taken this long to restore to operation!
What I was speaking of tends to happen when you work with companies like Sun, SGI, or IBM - but it is truely amazing when it takes this long for a company that built and runs the hardware to fix the problem...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Just for the record, the system didn't die because of a hard drive, apparently it just crashed, and god forbid, it may even be linux that crashed.
Sure, a drive died, but the machine was running RAID obviously, and the array was still working after that, but due to some unknown problem, the machine crashed and the kernel refused to load after a reboot (either a problem on disk, or an admin problem which caused an bad kernel to be installed)
Hard to say for sure after the fact, but at this point it can be a software problem as well as a hardware one (or even a admin mistake)
I see a bunch of fruity-colored stormtroopers stumbling around, twisting their torso this way and that, smacking their head on the doorjam because of the iHelmet being integrated into the iBodyArmor (ala the iMac monitor), and the short, fat and round iBoots (like the iMac mice)... toddle toddle...
And all the time shouting "what? what?", because you can't hear a thing on those Bang and Olfson headsets...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Kinda funny that no one noticed the great big OSDN banner at the top of every page on the site.
Can you say cross promotion?
I knew you could...
" it was *not* Apple seizing the hardware, like a couple of submitors had thought. "
Are linux users that suspicious/ full of hate of Apple? What reasoning can people use to come to the conclusion that Apple can seize theme.org's hardware? I don't mean this as flamebait, but come on, how can *Apple* legally grab their hardware?
Because they don't know the magic word: RAID.
/dev/md0 (or the *BSD equivalent).
get 2 IDE drives dammit and mirror them. Linux can do this. *BSD also. Or get a hw raid card if you're too lazy to configure
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
it was *not* Apple seizing the hardware
I just got an image in my head of a bunch of Apple stormtroopers, looking much like the Star Wars versions, except with different colored, large, shiny apple logos on their chest, marching in and siezing hardware. And Jeff Goldblum, dressed in black, coming in right behind them, saying "I want those themes.org maintainers alive!"
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
What it boils down to is Apple and Microsoft are in the way of our World Domination plans. Of course, we're in the way of theirs too, so I suspect it kind of evens out...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Does anyone else find themes under X a little disconcerting? I'm pretty sick of the fact that I can't use any of the WindowMaker themes under my Gnome/Sawfish combo.
I'm planning on writing a library frontend to themes that would let any window manager and widget set use all themes by going through the library. There would be a universal theme format as well for eventual use that would be WM/Widget set unspecific. Any thoughts on the idea?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
As for the second, I fail to see how withstanding fire or earthquake is funcionality that a RAID array should or could provide, and 27g of acceleration is downright pathetic, because you get peak accelerations that are a multiple of that if you just drop a HD a few inches on a hard surface, and most of your ragular, cheap-as-dirt ATA HDs can actually withstand that without a problem.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Oh, I see that you're a troll. Sorry to bother you. Go on.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
So, where can I get those OSX themes
If you remove the parts with copyright and trademark restrictions (i.e. remove any Apple and Mac logos and make the pills look slightly different), you get the newer crop of aqua-like themes. But while you're waiting for them to show up, you can play Vitamins, a Dr. Mario clone that makes fun of Aqua.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hemos, you might wanna update your xchat link to point to www.xchat.org. that sourceforge site has a REALLY old release. =)
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stephen
But the whole suits should be in a variety of fruity colors.
"I find your lack of faith... refreshing. Continue to Think Different, in accord with company policy."
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