This tirade from the record industry is to be expected. Fair use is now dead with the current state of laws in this country.
Right now, even the use of DVDs you own out right are in jeopardy from laws regarding circumvention devices. This is all so insane and this comes from someone that does take these issues seriously and votes accordingly.
Corporate America makes the heart of the country beat because our culture based on the bottom line. Unless you want to go Socialist and I don't then you accept this.
However, I do not think that gives the corporate powers that be the right to trample on the personal rights of the citizens to actually use the products they spend good many for, including copying that material to a different format and using it in that medium (from CD to mp3 of course for example).
We also know the insane diregard for prior-use in copyright and trademark law as well.
Laws simply have no clue about technology and see all use of technology beyond a corporate money-making function as suspect.
That is the scary part that know one really talks about.
I don't know if this guy is just a Mickeysoft basher or what but I like the surprise he stated about the fact that Micro$oft has so many internal troubles in its decision making process.
He says that they are not the unstoppable Juggernaut most people make them out to be.
That is pretty cool stuff. It gives me the hope that maybe a company software based or not will come along and make some business decisions that are not bone-headed and knock the Borg off their perch.
In any case, the article in terms of getting a feel for Redmond is very interesting.
Listen the regular cnet and zdnet sites usually have reviews of laptops. They are not as tech centered or as unbiased as other sources IMHO. However, they make for a good starting point.
If you are going to use an alternative OS (linux or BSD for examples obviously) then check out a quick google search first to see people's impressions of the compatibility. This is a good idea anyway since people often sprinkle general comments into these and give you an idea of the quality of the product.
Finally, unless you are going for a Dell please go to a computer store and browse. Laptops are very personal machines and pointing device preference and the feel of the keyboard beneath your fingers as well as general layout of special buttons and the brightness and clarity of the screens are something you need to get a feel for first-hand.
If you get a Dell or other mail-order product it also gives you a point of reference so you know what to look for. For example if you try a box out at a store and realize you can't live without at least 15" screen or something.
I have Dell Inspiron 4000 and have been very happy with the quality of the product. SuSE 7.3 installed with no issues and Sax2 did a better job than Dell in figuring out my video settings.
This is fine and I have done this same move for simple docs.
However, when the project manager sends complex doc based templates expecting you to edit these for the task and then send them back you are stuck. Why? Because the rtf format can't handle the formatting and embedded images and other noise they send in these documents.
When the docs have tables, images and funky formatting that even Abiword sees as odd symbols then you are shot and have to use OpenOffice and save in a.doc format or even worse I go over to my NT compile box and open it there. God, I hate windows but simplistic solutions only work for the simple.
There are a lot of people that live and die by the hand of MSOffice and do all kinds of unexpected overly complicated documents and spreadsheets with these tools probably to impress their bosses with their 'puter skills.
In these cases the wonderous.rtf format won't cut it.
Listen, I prefer to send my docs out as pdf files or rtf if I can get away with it.
However, I have been asked more than once to send a document in the dreaded.doc format. I rely on OpenOffice at this point to do that job for me on documents without a great deal.doc style voodo and formatting going on inside. (I have only had one doc that refused to convert correctly with some very nasty embedded graphics by the way.)
Unless a word processor can save in the dreaded doc format I am not about to chunk OpenOffice for all its speed issues anytime soon. It is a sad thing that corporate america has hinged most of its documentation onto this standard but they have.
I don't mean this as a troll because anytime a commercial software company releases software for linux its nice in terms of having options. I just hope they get their filters straight for the next release.
Why can't computers companies get this fine point of consumerism right?
Dell is a perfect example. I think that the Optiplex series make fine corporate desktops. Still the latest black case with a slightly odd front shape does not make it stylish in the least. In fact, in some ways they are actually uglier than the plain jane Optiplex GX110 I have in my cube.
I don't care if its a cube or aluminum or has a winodw in the side or some combo. It seems that people like Compaq and Dell ought to have enough money to hire some industrial designers to come up with a nicier looking more functional case.
Considering the many divergent tools most users end up having to learn to manipulate system settings especially if they use multiple or try out multiple distros of linux, I found the Ximian Setup project very exciting.
Where does Ximian as a company see this component fitting into its list of priorities?
Currently I am still on dial-up primarily due to the cost. I see this as a luxury I currently do not need since I can hook my laptop up at work and get down the big updates and such.
It seems the real battle here in government will be whether or not the companies get the green light (green for cash in this instance) to do whatever they want or will governmnet step in to mandate changes to therefore push for quicker implementation and better competition.
The sad part is that initiatives by the government helped to get telephones and electricity to rural areas but at the same time I fear that government in its current state can't pull of the same move for high speed access. Why? Because we are not living in the same times and current government movement for such initiatives lately have been messes of bad comprimises and half thought out proposals that have just made situations worse.
We have the choice between industry strangling growth out of greed or government stepping in and quite possibly making the situation even worse.
I understand that the rates for telephone service in this country are much less than many parts of the world comparing to average incomes and such but what move can government or the consumer make to promote the kind of growth and price lowering to make broadband a true mass consumer reality?
Every commercially available OS with the exception of Windows and its incarnations are based at their core with Unix.
The internet runs on Unix based OSes for the most part. The majority of major system services had their origin and are mostly installed on Unix based systems. The homogenous Windows NT datacenter server farm idea is flawed and has IMHO failed.
Unix is alive and well and if it was not Mickeysoft would never bother putting up sites bashing it. Micro$oft does not need to beat the dead horses (ever see them run ads today bashing OS/2?).
Very good point. As long as you have new modules being popped in without consideration to the resources needed then you are going to have problems.
The funny thing is that I have some two other problems arise from Brooke's law.
1) Not wanted to justify more resources to a project the managers simply roll in features into existing modules that should really be seperated out. The same number of programmers end up getting hit twice as hard.
2) Managers have actually quoted this law to others as a excuse for not assigned more resources to a project. Many times in smaller software houses the problem you have is getting the programmer resources for a project. Only the larger houses run into the problem of justing throwing people at a problem to make their deadlines and not having that work the way they wanted it to.
Someone else called this oversimplification. It all depends on the project.
The number of programmers needed on a project depends upon the number of software modules in said project. Each programmer working on their module and with the other programmers and project managers for the sake of integration and communication between modules talking to each other. I am not a project manager so I do not have the magic formula but there needs to be some serious research in the IT industry of how many programmers are needed per project for the number of independent sections or modules of software being created.
Then and only then will you have a situation of better utilized output over a large group of programming talent.
10 may me too few programmers for some huge program and too many for plenty of other projects.
Listen I supported sales reps who used pen based Sharp Zaurus pdas nearly 5 years ago now. They sucked then and I did not get excited when I heard they were using linux because I had this bad sneaking suspicion they would screw up again.
The interface was daunting and the signature capture was clumsy at best. Oddly enough syncing up with the laptop was never the problem before.
Honestly, I was hoping the folks building this thing would grab themselves a clue before fumbling this. Sad. Perhaps with enough people tinkering out there on it (Someone posted earlier that it was good for geek tinkerers) that a better interface can be achieved with a few good hacks.
My wife uses KDE and likes it..
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
I got the anti-aliased fonts working and the desktop shortcuts with Konquerer, Kmail, Kppp and OpenOffice and she was happy.
The woman mostly surfs the web and reads email anyway and it works for her. People tend to over-estimate the needs of most home users. Linux on the desktop is really just a matter of setting up the icons and menus in a logical fashion and listening to the end-user on what to change.
She has not asked about changing window decorations and styles and basically found her self jumping on and working immediately. For her the OS does not really matter along as she can open that attachment her friend sent her in Word format.
Well, at least Iomega has the foresight to give the customers the options.
After all, not everyone in the universe has been sucked in and assimilated over to Windows.
The funny thing though is the fact that most of the people using these appliances are looking for quick plug it in and forget solutions or they would load a cheap PC with a bunch of big drives and roll their own.
It would be nice to see a review comparing the Unix to Windows install of these machines. Which tends to work better -- I would think obviously that the Unix version would be more stable and the configuration UIs would be standardized so that the choice would make Unix the logical choice for most.
After all if we are talking Windows hosts there are about a dozen ways to screw the box up using Windows scripting tools and a half bit of VB knowledge. Is there something I am missing from the article?
Most of the posters here have either screamed about the possibilities of exploits or reached the same conclusion I just did. What are the other half missing?
I was trying to keep the debate to office suites but I agree that the timely stable windows-based version was an issue. I would still assert that enough firms especially law firms used WordPerfect right up till the day they converted over to an Office suite environment or in some odd cases I knew firms that waited till WordPerfect 7 convinced them to go over to the WordPerfect suite.
In other words they used WordPerfect DOS right up till the day WordPerfect 7 convinced them that WordPerfect on Windows was stable to use. Most firms did not wait this long and corporate america in general said screw it and went with Office instead.
As a pimply smelly UNIX-hacker who has a wife that does not use MS Office (She has always preferred WordPerfect), I can say that the problem with all the OTHER office suites has not been about a lack of features.
The problem is the head-start that Mickeysoft got in the dark days when the idea of an office suite was quite novel. In fact, I would say that even more important than the MS monolopy on PC OSes the fact that Microsoft beat out every other player in the Office suite market.
Listen every other player got off to lame start. I have to give it to Micro$oft for putting together a very seamless suite of apps. WordPerfect fumbled all over itself getting together a suite of apps. Lotus did a better job putting Lotus 123 and AmiPro together but the Windoze version of Lotus 123 sucked for so long it gave Microsoft all the time in the world to make Excel a good product. By the way, I will venture to say that today Excel (for the common business user) is probably Microsoft most well put together apps minus all the bloat.
WordPerfect's office suite has a much better Word Processor. WordPerfect blows the socks off of Word IMHO. However, the spreadsheet program is forgettable Quattra Pro and the Presentation is ok if you do not need PPT compatibility (and you will).
My wife BTW was a paralegal which means that she was in essence a Office suite power user hitting almost every facet of suite's functionality. The whole idea that Office wins because of more features is a load of sh*t. At least her boss was smart and knew they would be using the word processing of their office app more than other function and choose a suite according to which one he thought had the best word processor.
Listen KDE and GNOME by default have configurations that are similiar to Windoze.
It does NOT mean that you have to live with your desktop set this way. The control center for GNOME is confusing in its placement but KDE is logically laid out (the only bad part is that with KDE you get an insane amount of dizzying options to choose from).
I live with GNOME because I use primarily GTK+ or GNOME apps and have it set with a CDE style main panel and a menu panel above (which is kinda like Mac OSX but the usability is light years different and yes this is not the configuration for those short on screeen real estate).
However, I have KDE set up for my wife because I could make it look very XPish to cut her learning curve and SuSE 7.3 actually has a fairly tasty looking default look. You can play with the styles and Windows decorations and end up something that look very unique.
If you don't like the desktop environments then run WindowMaker. It looks good and is very traditional in the Unix way it does things. You can go to the KDE control-panel and set the kde apps to have NeXtStep look and choose one of the many GTK themes so the Gnomish apps have a Step feel to it. That way you still get the uniformed feeel except for the stock icons.
The great thing about Linux is that you have a zillion or so different choices in the way to do these things.
Its also what makes it pain in the ass for the common user trying to figure what is best for them.:->
Its funny our attitude about success...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Listen the Americans beat the USSR in the race to get to the moon but that is absolutely it.
They got:
1st satellite. 1st man in orbit. 1st woman in orbit. 1st lunar rover. 1st space station. 1st long term space station.
The US my country that I love so well got to the moon first.
The Soviet's took us down in every other first. It terms of keeping people in space for long periods of time they had it down while we had lost interest after seeing some guys hope around on the moon.
There are plenty of times I have thrown up my hands in disgust because some nutball wants to re-write a perfectly good app in the hot language of the moment.
However, I live everyday with a badly thought out program married to absolutely bizzare methods for socket and thread support. If the very core of the program is rotten and maintenance costs more than a re-write then by the above author's own admission the project needs re-writing.
I have seen both sides and extremists drive me nuts in all things.
Don't throw out something that works and works well.
Fix the program that works but does not work well.
Re-write the program that does not work, breaks all the time and costs too much to keep in its current state.
I use to be a Sysadmin. The deal is with CVS is that as many other people have noted merges are not so much an issue if you do your updates regularily in your workspace. Unless the project is really small 2-5 programmers or so most people know that they can working on files in the same module as someone else. When the programmer is ready to unit test it is vitally important that they update. Also regular check in's along the development path is also very important.
Remember also, that the use of tags for marking the progress of files in development from a code ready to test ready to integration ready status is very important and as for remembering cryptic commands that is why you need a technical person and not a corporate type as your CM because all it takes is a few shell scripts, perl scripts and web interfaces to simplify tagging files and looking over the CVS structure. Hack CVSweb that is why its there.
Ghost in the Shell had the characters basically wearing a suit that made the wearer invisible. The drawing from the story looks like a straight up rip off of the art concept used by said anime.
However, who ever submitted the story could have made that clearer.
Still does not mean that a dozen jokes would not have come out of the comparison. I am not sure this will happen though considering how cheap a body is next to the cost of a plane or a tank but we can hope. The American military putting its soldier's first? I hope so.
Sure I go to AltaVista and others after hitting a brick wall with Google but that is very rare for me. Perhaps the issue is when I do searches I am looking for info on technical issues usually revolving around compiling this or that GNU package or Service.
No tool is the best tool for every purpose and perhaps many people should give other search engines a try and see the strengths.
However, I don't really see that point of an article that is simply a Hoorah for one service over another with differing models of profit and aims.
The author had simply pointed out that AltaVista as opposed to other search engines has advanced searching abilities including the ability to exclude terms. No, it has to be an AltaVista over Google article.
Different tools for different times and different uses.
Slashdot Mirror
This tirade from the record industry is to be expected. Fair use is now dead with the current state of laws in this country.
_ __
Right now, even the use of DVDs you own out right are in jeopardy from laws regarding circumvention devices. This is all so insane and this comes from someone that does take these issues seriously and votes accordingly.
Corporate America makes the heart of the country beat because our culture based on the bottom line. Unless you want to go Socialist and I don't then you accept this.
However, I do not think that gives the corporate powers that be the right to trample on the personal rights of the citizens to actually use the products they spend good many for, including copying that material to a different format and using it in that medium (from CD to mp3 of course for example).
We also know the insane diregard for prior-use in copyright and trademark law as well.
Laws simply have no clue about technology and see all use of technology beyond a corporate money-making function as suspect.
That is the scary part that know one really talks about.
_______________________________________________
I don't know if this guy is just a Mickeysoft basher or what but I like the surprise he stated about the fact that Micro$oft has so many internal troubles in its decision making process.
_ __
He says that they are not the unstoppable Juggernaut most people make them out to be.
That is pretty cool stuff. It gives me the hope that maybe a company software based or not will come along and make some business decisions that are not bone-headed and knock the Borg off their perch.
In any case, the article in terms of getting a feel for Redmond is very interesting.
_______________________________________________
Listen the regular cnet and zdnet sites usually have reviews of laptops. They are not as tech centered or as unbiased as other sources IMHO. However, they make for a good starting point.
_ __
If you are going to use an alternative OS (linux or BSD for examples obviously) then check out a quick google search first to see people's impressions of the compatibility. This is a good idea anyway since people often sprinkle general comments into these and give you an idea of the quality of the product.
Finally, unless you are going for a Dell please go to a computer store and browse. Laptops are very personal machines and pointing device preference and the feel of the keyboard beneath your fingers as well as general layout of special buttons and the brightness and clarity of the screens are something you need to get a feel for first-hand.
If you get a Dell or other mail-order product it also gives you a point of reference so you know what to look for. For example if you try a box out at a store and realize you can't live without at least 15" screen or something.
I have Dell Inspiron 4000 and have been very happy with the quality of the product. SuSE 7.3 installed with no issues and Sax2 did a better job than Dell in figuring out my video settings.
Castle Wolfenstein looks damn good.
_______________________________________________
At the risk of my karma, I reply...
.doc format or even worse I go over to my NT compile box and open it there. God, I hate windows but simplistic solutions only work for the simple.
.rtf format won't cut it.
_ __ _
This is fine and I have done this same move for simple docs.
However, when the project manager sends complex doc based templates expecting you to edit these for the task and then send them back you are stuck. Why? Because the rtf format can't handle the formatting and embedded images and other noise they send in these documents.
When the docs have tables, images and funky formatting that even Abiword sees as odd symbols then you are shot and have to use OpenOffice and save in a
There are a lot of people that live and die by the hand of MSOffice and do all kinds of unexpected overly complicated documents and spreadsheets with these tools probably to impress their bosses with their 'puter skills.
In these cases the wonderous
But, I am still open to suggestions.
_______________________________________________
Listen, I prefer to send my docs out as pdf files or rtf if I can get away with it.
.doc format. I rely on OpenOffice at this point to do that job for me on documents without a great deal .doc style voodo and formatting going on inside. (I have only had one doc that refused to convert correctly with some very nasty embedded graphics by the way.)
_ __
However, I have been asked more than once to send a document in the dreaded
Unless a word processor can save in the dreaded doc format I am not about to chunk OpenOffice for all its speed issues anytime soon. It is a sad thing that corporate america has hinged most of its documentation onto this standard but they have.
I don't mean this as a troll because anytime a commercial software company releases software for linux its nice in terms of having options. I just hope they get their filters straight for the next release.
_______________________________________________
Why can't computers companies get this fine point of consumerism right?
_ __
Dell is a perfect example. I think that the Optiplex series make fine corporate desktops. Still the latest black case with a slightly odd front shape does not make it stylish in the least. In fact, in some ways they are actually uglier than the plain jane Optiplex GX110 I have in my cube.
I don't care if its a cube or aluminum or has a winodw in the side or some combo. It seems that people like Compaq and Dell ought to have enough money to hire some industrial designers to come up with a nicier looking more functional case.
_______________________________________________
Considering the many divergent tools most users end up having to learn to manipulate system settings especially if they use multiple or try out multiple distros of linux, I found the Ximian Setup project very exciting.
_ __ __
Where does Ximian as a company see this component fitting into its list of priorities?
_______________________________________________
Currently I am still on dial-up primarily due to the cost. I see this as a luxury I currently do not need since I can hook my laptop up at work and get down the big updates and such.
_ __
It seems the real battle here in government will be whether or not the companies get the green light (green for cash in this instance) to do whatever they want or will governmnet step in to mandate changes to therefore push for quicker implementation and better competition.
The sad part is that initiatives by the government helped to get telephones and electricity to rural areas but at the same time I fear that government in its current state can't pull of the same move for high speed access. Why? Because we are not living in the same times and current government movement for such initiatives lately have been messes of bad comprimises and half thought out proposals that have just made situations worse.
We have the choice between industry strangling growth out of greed or government stepping in and quite possibly making the situation even worse.
I understand that the rates for telephone service in this country are much less than many parts of the world comparing to average incomes and such but what move can government or the consumer make to promote the kind of growth and price lowering to make broadband a true mass consumer reality?
_______________________________________________
Every commercially available OS with the exception of Windows and its incarnations are based at their core with Unix.
_ __
The internet runs on Unix based OSes for the most part. The majority of major system services had their origin and are mostly installed on Unix based systems. The homogenous Windows NT datacenter server farm idea is flawed and has IMHO failed.
Unix is alive and well and if it was not Mickeysoft would never bother putting up sites bashing it. Micro$oft does not need to beat the dead horses (ever see them run ads today bashing OS/2?).
_______________________________________________
Very good point. As long as you have new modules being popped in without consideration to the resources needed then you are going to have problems.
_ __
The funny thing is that I have some two other problems arise from Brooke's law.
1) Not wanted to justify more resources to a project the managers simply roll in features into existing modules that should really be seperated out. The same number of programmers end up getting hit twice as hard.
2) Managers have actually quoted this law to others as a excuse for not assigned more resources to a project. Many times in smaller software houses the problem you have is getting the programmer resources for a project. Only the larger houses run into the problem of justing throwing people at a problem to make their deadlines and not having that work the way they wanted it to.
_______________________________________________
Someone else called this oversimplification. It all depends on the project.
_ __
The number of programmers needed on a project depends upon the number of software modules in said project. Each programmer working on their module and with the other programmers and project managers for the sake of integration and communication between modules talking to each other. I am not a project manager so I do not have the magic formula but there needs to be some serious research in the IT industry of how many programmers are needed per project for the number of independent sections or modules of software being created.
Then and only then will you have a situation of better utilized output over a large group of programming talent.
10 may me too few programmers for some huge program and too many for plenty of other projects.
_______________________________________________
Cold steel and sponge baths?!?
_ __
No way. another fantasy dashed by higher technology.
_______________________________________________
Are there any good linux distros that work on older PPC hardware?
_ __
There were a couple of posts complaining that PPC distros only run on the latest and greatest stuff.
Are there any PPC Linux distros that break this mould.
Inquiring minds and all that stuff...
I got a friend with an old mac that thinks its time to try linux.
_______________________________________________
Listen I supported sales reps who used pen based Sharp Zaurus pdas nearly 5 years ago now. They sucked then and I did not get excited when I heard they were using linux because I had this bad sneaking suspicion they would screw up again.
_ __
The interface was daunting and the signature capture was clumsy at best. Oddly enough syncing up with the laptop was never the problem before.
Honestly, I was hoping the folks building this thing would grab themselves a clue before fumbling this. Sad. Perhaps with enough people tinkering out there on it (Someone posted earlier that it was good for geek tinkerers) that a better interface can be achieved with a few good hacks.
One can hope.
_______________________________________________
I got the anti-aliased fonts working and the desktop shortcuts with Konquerer, Kmail, Kppp and OpenOffice and she was happy.
_ __
The woman mostly surfs the web and reads email anyway and it works for her. People tend to over-estimate the needs of most home users. Linux on the desktop is really just a matter of setting up the icons and menus in a logical fashion and listening to the end-user on what to change.
She has not asked about changing window decorations and styles and basically found her self jumping on and working immediately. For her the OS does not really matter along as she can open that attachment her friend sent her in Word format.
_______________________________________________
Well, at least Iomega has the foresight to give the customers the options.
_ __
After all, not everyone in the universe has been sucked in and assimilated over to Windows.
The funny thing though is the fact that most of the people using these appliances are looking for quick plug it in and forget solutions or they would load a cheap PC with a bunch of big drives and roll their own.
It would be nice to see a review comparing the Unix to Windows install of these machines. Which tends to work better -- I would think obviously that the Unix version would be more stable and the configuration UIs would be standardized so that the choice would make Unix the logical choice for most.
_______________________________________________
Why is this such a big deal in terms of exploits?
_ __
After all if we are talking Windows hosts there are about a dozen ways to screw the box up using Windows scripting tools and a half bit of VB knowledge. Is there something I am missing from the article?
Most of the posters here have either screamed about the possibilities of exploits or reached the same conclusion I just did. What are the other half missing?
_______________________________________________
I was trying to keep the debate to office suites but I agree that the timely stable windows-based version was an issue. I would still assert that enough firms especially law firms used WordPerfect right up till the day they converted over to an Office suite environment or in some odd cases I knew firms that waited till WordPerfect 7 convinced them to go over to the WordPerfect suite.
_ __
In other words they used WordPerfect DOS right up till the day WordPerfect 7 convinced them that WordPerfect on Windows was stable to use. Most firms did not wait this long and corporate america in general said screw it and went with Office instead.
_______________________________________________
As a pimply smelly UNIX-hacker who has a wife that does not use MS Office (She has always preferred WordPerfect), I can say that the problem with all the OTHER office suites has not been about a lack of features.
_ __
The problem is the head-start that Mickeysoft got in the dark days when the idea of an office suite was quite novel. In fact, I would say that even more important than the MS monolopy on PC OSes the fact that Microsoft beat out every other player in the Office suite market.
Listen every other player got off to lame start. I have to give it to Micro$oft for putting together a very seamless suite of apps. WordPerfect fumbled all over itself getting together a suite of apps. Lotus did a better job putting Lotus 123 and AmiPro together but the Windoze version of Lotus 123 sucked for so long it gave Microsoft all the time in the world to make Excel a good product. By the way, I will venture to say that today Excel (for the common business user) is probably Microsoft most well put together apps minus all the bloat.
WordPerfect's office suite has a much better Word Processor. WordPerfect blows the socks off of Word IMHO. However, the spreadsheet program is forgettable Quattra Pro and the Presentation is ok if you do not need PPT compatibility (and you will).
My wife BTW was a paralegal which means that she was in essence a Office suite power user hitting almost every facet of suite's functionality. The whole idea that Office wins because of more features is a load of sh*t. At least her boss was smart and knew they would be using the word processing of their office app more than other function and choose a suite according to which one he thought had the best word processor.
_______________________________________________
Listen KDE and GNOME by default have configurations that are similiar to Windoze.
:->
_ __
It does NOT mean that you have to live with your desktop set this way. The control center for GNOME is confusing in its placement but KDE is logically laid out (the only bad part is that with KDE you get an insane amount of dizzying options to choose from).
I live with GNOME because I use primarily GTK+ or GNOME apps and have it set with a CDE style main panel and a menu panel above (which is kinda like Mac OSX but the usability is light years different and yes this is not the configuration for those short on screeen real estate).
However, I have KDE set up for my wife because I could make it look very XPish to cut her learning curve and SuSE 7.3 actually has a fairly tasty looking default look. You can play with the styles and Windows decorations and end up something that look very unique.
If you don't like the desktop environments then run WindowMaker. It looks good and is very traditional in the Unix way it does things. You can go to the KDE control-panel and set the kde apps to have NeXtStep look and choose one of the many GTK themes so the Gnomish apps have a Step feel to it. That way you still get the uniformed feeel except for the stock icons.
The great thing about Linux is that you have a zillion or so different choices in the way to do these things.
Its also what makes it pain in the ass for the common user trying to figure what is best for them.
_______________________________________________
Listen the Americans beat the USSR in the race to get to the moon but that is absolutely it.
_ __
They got:
1st satellite.
1st man in orbit.
1st woman in orbit.
1st lunar rover.
1st space station.
1st long term space station.
The US my country that I love so well got to the moon first.
The Soviet's took us down in every other first. It terms of keeping people in space for long periods of time they had it down while we had lost interest after seeing some guys hope around on the moon.
_______________________________________________
There are plenty of times I have thrown up my hands in disgust because some nutball wants to re-write a perfectly good app in the hot language of the moment.
_ __
However, I live everyday with a badly thought out program married to absolutely bizzare methods for socket and thread support. If the very core of the program is rotten and maintenance costs more than a re-write then by the above author's own admission the project needs re-writing.
I have seen both sides and extremists drive me nuts in all things.
Don't throw out something that works and works well.
Fix the program that works but does not work well.
Re-write the program that does not work, breaks all the time and costs too much to keep in its current state.
This is not freakin' rocket science!
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I use to be a Sysadmin. The deal is with CVS is that as many other people have noted merges are not so much an issue if you do your updates regularily in your workspace. Unless the project is really small 2-5 programmers or so most people know that they can working on files in the same module as someone else. When the programmer is ready to unit test it is vitally important that they update. Also regular check in's along the development path is also very important.
Remember also, that the use of tags for marking the progress of files in development from a code ready to test ready to integration ready status is very important and as for remembering cryptic commands that is why you need a technical person and not a corporate type as your CM because all it takes is a few shell scripts, perl scripts and web interfaces to simplify tagging files and looking over the CVS structure. Hack CVSweb that is why its there.
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Ghost in the Shell had the characters basically wearing a suit that made the wearer invisible. The drawing from the story looks like a straight up rip off of the art concept used by said anime.
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However, who ever submitted the story could have made that clearer.
Still does not mean that a dozen jokes would not have come out of the comparison. I am not sure this will happen though considering how cheap a body is next to the cost of a plane or a tank but we can hope. The American military putting its soldier's first? I hope so.
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Sure I go to AltaVista and others after hitting a brick wall with Google but that is very rare for me. Perhaps the issue is when I do searches I am looking for info on technical issues usually revolving around compiling this or that GNU package or Service.
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No tool is the best tool for every purpose and perhaps many people should give other search engines a try and see the strengths.
However, I don't really see that point of an article that is simply a Hoorah for one service over another with differing models of profit and aims.
The author had simply pointed out that AltaVista as opposed to other search engines has advanced searching abilities including the ability to exclude terms. No, it has to be an AltaVista over Google article.
Different tools for different times and different uses.
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