Slashdot Mirror
Cobind Desktop Reviewed, With Interview
An anonymous reader writes "Cobind Desktop takes a remarkable turn from other Linux distributions by being one of the first to include Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla Thunderbird in their first release. Though Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, its entire design is based on a clutter-free workspace. Flexbeta.net took the time to write up a review and conduct an interview with David Watson, Co-Founder and President of Cobind Desktop. He mentions how the entire design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at Swarthmore. David Watson believes that this concept can be applied to software design, and produce more usable products as a result." (We mentioned Schwartz's book earlier today.)
w00tness
go azn pplz
COULD IT BE A FRIST POST?
I've nailed it this time!
Really, who cares?
KEKEKEKKEE YOU'RE A FUCKING FAILURE, GO SLIT YOUR WRISTS IN REPENTANCE.
# Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic.
# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
# If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
It would be interesting to know which compiler would give the best kernel. Has anyone done such a test? Or do the Zealots not dare compare gcc's output to a commercial compiler? I'm guessing MS Visual C++ would kick gcc when it comes to compiling a Linux kernel.
John "Eff-ing" Kerry: A tax-and-spend liberal and anti-war communist
Since quitting the Navy six months early at age 27 so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform, John Kerry has built a political career on his service in Vietnam. His unsuccessful 1970 congressional bid lasted only a month, during which it proved impossible for even he to get to the left of the winner, Robert Drinan, but it forged a conflicting political persona - one hammered out between his combat medals earned in the Mekong delta and the common cause he made with the enemy upon his return home.
Now, at age 60, the junior Democratic senator from Massachusetts is milking his veteran status once again in an effort to show that he's tougher and more patriotic than the man he seeks to replace, President George W. Bush. And, as unrepentant as ever for his pro-Hanoi activism, he is just as conflicted in 2004 as he was in the 1960s.
If there is any consistency in Kerry's political career, it is his in-your-face use of that four-month stint in Vietnam. He enlisted like many other young men of privilege, trying to serve without going to the front lines. When in 1966 it looked like his draft number was coming up during his senior year at Yale University, and already having spoken out in public against the war, Kerry signed up with the Navy under the conscious inspiration of his hero, the late President John F. Kennedy. As a lieutenant junior grade, Kerry skippered a CTF-115 swift boat, a light, aluminum patrol vessel that bore a passing resemblance to PT-109. He thought he'd arranged to avoid combat. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," he later would tell the Boston Globe. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling, and that's what I thought I was going to do."
Soon, however, Kerry was reassigned to patrol the Mekong River in South Vietnam, a formative experience for his political odyssey. The official record shows that he rose to the occasion. It was along the Mekong where he first killed a man, aggressively fighting the enemy Viet Cong and reportedly saving the lives of his own men, earning a Bronze Star, a Silver Star for valor, and three Purple Hearts in the process.
Kerry opted for reassignment to New York City, where - as a uniformed, active-duty officer - he reportedly began acting out the antiwar feelings he had expressed before enlisting. Press reports from the time say that he marched in the October 1969 Moratorium protests - a mass demonstration by a quarter-million people that had been orchestrated the previous summer by North Vietnamese officials and American antiwar leaders in Cuba (see sidebar, p. 27). Kerry had found his purpose in life. The New York Times reported on April 23, 1971, that at about the time of the Moratorium march, Lt. Kerry had "asked for, and was given, an early release from the Navy so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform from his home district in Waltham, Mass."
For Kerry, politicizing the nation's war effort for partisan purposes was the right thing to do, in contrast to the violent revolutionary designs of colleagues who were out to destroy the system. Kerry didn't want to take down the establishment. He wanted to take it over. His aborted, monthlong 1970 congressional campaign was a victory for him politically, as it landed him on television's popular Dick Cavett Show, where he came to the attention of some of the central organizers of the antiwar/pro-Hanoi group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
VVAW was a numerically small part of the protest movement, but it was extremely influential through skillful political theater, the novelty of uniformed combat veterans joining the Vietniks, and a ruthless coalition-building strategy that forged partnerships with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), its Trotskyite rival, the Socialist Workers Party, and a broad front that ranged from pacifists to supporters of the Black Panthers and other domestic terror
>>by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at
may the schwartz be with you.
Does anyone know what the FUCK is going on with Dreamhost web hosting?
I have a number of client's sites hosted with them and none of their servers are responding to pinging or visible on tracert.
Anyone know what is happening? I have been scouring the web for info to no avail.
Read Pynchon.
One alternative is a one-party system -- we all learned in school in the U.S. on how terrible the Soviet system was that they had only one party, and I grew up in Chicago, which with many other big cities really only had one party. Apart from the anti-Communist propaganda telling us how bad it is, what is does a political party even do when there is only one party? In Chicago, the one party was both a political party as well as a kind of social welfare system: kind of like Hamas.
In Soviet Russia (please, no "in Soviet Russia" jokes), I don't have any direct experience, but as far as I can tell it worked like some kinds of committee structures in an American university. The Party was not the government, it was not the military, it was not industry nor agriculture, and it was not a labor union, but it supervised all of those institutions to make sure that they were run according to "scientific socialist" principles. I imagine the Party was resented by people in government, military, industry, and other places just trying to do their jobs because it was a kind of oversight that a lot of people dedicated to their jobs could do without -- a lot like what takes place in universities.
The multi-party system, however, would have a Liberal Party, a Conservative Party, a Green Party, a Libertarian Party, a Labor Party, a Civil Rights Party, and so on. The problem with a multi-party system is forming a majority government -- think Israel where they have two major parties but they have to suck up to religious parties to form a government.
The two party system means that you stack the deck against minority parties to narrow it down to just two parties so one or other party is sure of having a governing majority. The two parties don't really offer much in the way of choice unless you think Coke and Pepsi represents choice. But on the other hand, the two parties compete for the center of the voting electorate, and the two parties act as critics of each other to expose gross wrong doing. Kerry and Bush are not really that different because they are all part of the same political culture, but they represent themselves as polar opposites to rally their respective core supporters, but they are careful to position themselves for the middle when they govern so having Kerry in office or Bush in office is not going to change all of that much. But that is the goal, to have a stable equalibrium of two parties competing for the center rather than the anarchy and travails of a multi-party democracy.
Well, that is the whole point of a 2-party structure, that if you vote for a 3rd or 4th party (Green Party, Pat Buchanan Party), your vote isn't going to count for nothin' and you might get "the other guy" elected.
What you want is the multi-party system, your Greens would get their 3 percent of House seats, which might mean the Democrats could get the House back, but they would have to form a coalition with the Greens and anytime the Greens didn't like it that Tom Daschle voted for some logging deal because a union in his home state wanted the jobs, they would be in a snit and threaten to fracture the coalition.
Under the 2-party system, everytime some member of the coalition under the tent of a major party feels a minor slight, they tend to suck it up because they consider the opposition party to be far worse.
Under your multi-party system, think of what Jim Jeffords did to the Republicans by switching to "Independent" -- yeah, your Greens would get their 3 percent, but they would be pulling a Jeffords on the Democrats all the time instead of just sticking flyers on people's front doors.
The 2-party system is not meant to afford equal representation -- it is meant to provide stable government without being too stable in the manner of a 1-party system.