Lynx - Really, really good for low-bandwidth or low-resource systems.
KDE's browser - From what I've heard, its coming well.
Mozilla. Don't start crying out about how bad it is, its in alpha release. How bad was IE in alpha? I don't even want to try and find out.
Streaming media. Well, we've got plenty of MP3 players. And I believe there's work underway on an MP4 player. Anything else, as far as I'm concerned, is a waste of time.
Yes, this is hostile. I'm generally hostile when replying to posts that, IMHO, shouldn't have been moderated up.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
"1. The Academy Awards are coming up later this month. What better place than this to stage a protest on the Motion Picture Association and DVD than here? Can any linux mag journalists get passes to this to ask some tough questions? Ask actors, directors, and producers as well as executives about the dvd problems."
Good idea. Especially if the results get published on the web and in print. Might get some more people to wake up and start speaking out publically against this. And if a major director or actor who's been locked in a closet for the last year or so decided he/she didn't like this and told the MPAA where to put it...
"5. Vote. Not just in the main elections, but in your local elections. They affect you the most. 6. Support campaign finance reform. Stop letting corporations choose which candidates you will vote for."
Another good idea. Also, boycott the products of any corporation that supports the DMCA.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Thank you! That's what I was planning to say anyway, but you've said it much better than I could have. I don't know why the original post got moderated up. Its not insightful, its just stupid.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Actually, I think this is more of an education point than a software point. There's software being worked on that could replace Office. Although I personally don't think that creating another Office-like program is a good idea. What would be better would be creating an "office" program that takes the next step. (And, no, I don't know what that would be)
What would work better would be educating people about other ways of doing things. The story slight farther down this page about "Tux going to school" is a good example of this.
This is intended as constructive criticsm, not a flame. Any flame responses talking about how I'm obviously biased against Microsoft wil be ignored. Have a nice day!
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
This is what I've been hoping for in a computer program all through school. Now I'm in Grade 12, and it looks like I'll have to wait until university. Unfortunately, the attitude towards computer courses in most Nova Scotian schools seems to be that they're not "real courses" and are "only playing with computers." So they get less money devoted to them , worse teachers, and crummy curriculum. I hope Beacon's method catches on.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Well, a fast processor is nice when running some of the more complex games, but I think you could get by with a medium-speed processor and a good 3D card.
Something to wonder, though. Exactly what does Windows do to require so much processor power and memory? FVWM95 looks pretty much the same from the outside (with the exception of not having desktop icons), and it'll run in what? 8 megs of RAM? 16 megs? On a low-end Pentium?
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
I took a look at this, and it looks quite neat. If Freenet manages to get this right, I hope it really takes off. I especially like the idea of not having to dole out tons of cash or make do with a free web service in order to get something published.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Wait a minute. A thought. They claim: "...80 to 90 percent of the space on a server...", right? So, by my fairly limited understanding, this would mean that any files owned by any user that had duplicate content would be symlinked using this system.
Several problems I can see already:
It would have to be a superuser-owned process to have that wide action, right? Am I the only one who sees some possible big, huge, gaping security holes here?
Encrypted files. Sounds like these would break the system.
Swap space. From what I know, M$ systems store swapped data as "files." Suppose two of these had the same content? Looks to me like they'd be symlinked, which could cause major performance problems.
Speed considerations. If this is running all the time, constantly comparing the data of any file written to every file already on the system to look for duplicates... Sounds like a big drain on both I/O and processor power.
Salamander - Since this probably won't get moderated up (I'm not really saying anything anyway, just asking questions, so it probably shouldn't be), could you respond? I'm quite curious about this....
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Umm.... Let me get this straight. You'd trust a Microsoft product with access to your bank account? A closed-source system, that you couldn't see what its doing? And with Microsoft's track record for major bugs?
I can only assume that this was meant to be funny and was moderated up as something else by mistake.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
To me, GNOME has a lot over KDE. The versions of KDE I used always felt like someone had taken Win98 and tried to translate the interface to Linux. I can't stand the Win98 interface (especially the single-click icons and the browser integration!), so I switched to GNOME. I liked the panels, the applets, the interface... practically everything but Enlightenment.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Finally, a post that talks some sense. Its not about which Desktop Manager, KDE or GNOME is going to dominate. For how long have csh and bash co-existed? One's not going to win, they're both probably going to be fairly widely used, and each one's going to provide a different set of features.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
I can't stand KDE (the interface feels too windows-ish for me, and I hate the one-click and browser integration stuff!), but I've liked the versions of GNOME I've tried. The thing I haven't liked about GNOME is Enlightenment. It seems big and unwieldy, and a lot of what it does seems to be duplicated by GNOME. So a lighter-weight manager like IceWM seems the perfect solution.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
ROTFLMLO! I must say, you are one of the few people who really deserves a rating-5-funny score! Now you just need to get one of these in every thread, and the quality of Slashdot will be much improved! The Trolls won't be able to post, they'll be laughing so hard!;)
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Exactly the point I've been making (and trying to get Moderated up, but I'm glad someone has been). For Linux, you can probably find at least one group/program working on doing what you want to do. So you get to chose what you want. This is as opposed to Windows, which says "You will use this GUI and you will use this API and you will use this and this and this..."
Personally, I like the 1001 different wheels offered by Linux (and Unix...) as opposed to the one square wheel offered by Windows.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Another sane person! The moderation system actually seems to be working today. o.O
I like your point about the GUI and command line. Open-Source/Free-Software (to me) is about choice. So if Linux forces you to use one kind of interface, how is that choice? Right now, you can use either the GUI or the command line, and I don't think there's any reason to change that.
IMHO, tools that seperate the interface from the program are one of the best ideas I've ever seen. If implimented properly, this would allow most programs to run in pretty much any environment. Text mode, Text-GUI, graphics-GUI...
Something else to keep in mind. If a program's actions can possibly be controlled through command line flags or read in from text files, or whatever, include a way to do that!
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yes! Finally, someone sane! Linux doesn't need standards, the choices available to people just need to be advertised more widely.
Want a GUI? Ok, choose between these desktop programs, or these window managers, or... They're all different, but they're also (for the most part) compatible.
As an example, I like both KDE and GNOME. Both are nice, but I don't like to use KDE. So I've got a choice. But if there are standards, and the standard is KDE, I'm screwed.
That said, programmers should strive for their applications to be as compatible as possible. This includes keybindings, cross-desktop (GNOME running KDE stuff), etc.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
GNOME has a file manager too. I think its a variant of Midnight Commander. Wasn't very good, if memory serves. (Eazel is doing yet another Midnight Commander clone) Plus, there are a bunch of other file managers you can use if you want.
Personally, I like the command line. I doubt there will ever be a GUI that replicates its power, functionality, or simplicity.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yay! Something that wasn't undisguised praising Microsoft made its way past the pro-M$ anti-everything-else moderators that flock to M$ threads. I'll agree that Microsoft has turned out some decent software, but the instant you try to convince me that a Open/Free software group couldn't have done better, or a bunch of programs each with a small subset of related features wouldn't have worked better, I'll laugh at you.
Note that I am very pro-Linux, pro-Free/Open Software. This is because of some bad experiences with M$ software.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Perhaps your subject provides more insight into the content of your message than is apparently obvious.
To start off, I'm not disagreeing that men and women are "wired differently." Its practically a biological requirement. However, I would like you to prove to me that this affects how they think. Go ahead. Show me the studies. Prove scientifically that women are no good at computers.
Also, I'm willing to bet that just as many women as men are interested in computers. One of the best programmers I've ever met (IRL) is female. But guess what the attitude of most "hacker" guys towards women is? Not very appealing, I know that much.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Re:No one would pay for this - its no big deal
on
New Desktop for Linux
·
· Score: 1
The points I was trying to make were:
You can charge money for open source or free software.
Most people will pay reasonable amounts of money for quality software. Note to Adobe: Your programs are mostly good, but not worth several hundred dollars apiece.
I wasn't saying I'd pay for this, no. I couldn't even find anything on the website about what they'd done so far. If it were a really good shell program, I might pay a reasonable sum for it.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
There's a definition (I think) of this on the GNU web page. They provide a license list, and a section on licensing free software. Note that this is only part of the philosophy page, so you may want to dig a bit deeper into there.
Hope that helped.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Finally! Someone talking some sense! The way to fight isn't to mirror DeCSS all over the place (at least in America. If you're outside of it, it can't help to emphasize that US law does not apply outside of the USA). The best way to fight this is to provide money to the EFF, write letters to government reps about the DMCA, boycott MPAA products, and suggest defense strategies to the EFF. Oh, and publicize the real reasons why DeCSS is good and why you use it (and what it does!)
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Actually, I believe that if a high enough court believes a law is unconstitutional, violates a person's rights, or a couple of other things, they can declare it invalid or give a ruling they believe is right. Note that IANAL, so I could be completely off-base here. -RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yeah. This is one of the things that seems to be a problem with the random-moderators thing. Then again, its also produced some excellent results, so it can't be all bad. And one just has to filter comments in one's own head as well as getting the Slashcode to do it.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Well, if this is true, things don't look so hot for Eazel. I suspect that any neophyte employees they hire will get a crash course in "Linux culture" at some point. Then, if they do get treated badly, I suspect support will evaporate.
-RickHunter --"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star." --Gray council, Babylon 5.
Slashdot Mirror
Good browsers available for Linux:
Streaming media. Well, we've got plenty of MP3 players. And I believe there's work underway on an MP4 player. Anything else, as far as I'm concerned, is a waste of time.
Yes, this is hostile. I'm generally hostile when replying to posts that, IMHO, shouldn't have been moderated up.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
"1. The Academy Awards are coming up later this month. What better place than this to stage a protest on the Motion Picture Association and DVD than here? Can any linux mag journalists get passes to this to ask some tough questions? Ask actors, directors, and producers as well as executives about the dvd problems."
Good idea. Especially if the results get published on the web and in print. Might get some more people to wake up and start speaking out publically against this. And if a major director or actor who's been locked in a closet for the last year or so decided he/she didn't like this and told the MPAA where to put it...
"5. Vote. Not just in the main elections, but in your local elections. They affect you the most.
6. Support campaign finance reform. Stop letting corporations choose which candidates you will vote for."
Another good idea. Also, boycott the products of any corporation that supports the DMCA.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Thank you! That's what I was planning to say anyway, but you've said it much better than I could have. I don't know why the original post got moderated up. Its not insightful, its just stupid.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Actually, I think this is more of an education point than a software point. There's software being worked on that could replace Office. Although I personally don't think that creating another Office-like program is a good idea. What would be better would be creating an "office" program that takes the next step. (And, no, I don't know what that would be)
What would work better would be educating people about other ways of doing things. The story slight farther down this page about "Tux going to school" is a good example of this.
This is intended as constructive criticsm, not a flame. Any flame responses talking about how I'm obviously biased against Microsoft wil be ignored. Have a nice day!
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
This is what I've been hoping for in a computer program all through school. Now I'm in Grade 12, and it looks like I'll have to wait until university. Unfortunately, the attitude towards computer courses in most Nova Scotian schools seems to be that they're not "real courses" and are "only playing with computers." So they get less money devoted to them , worse teachers, and crummy curriculum. I hope Beacon's method catches on.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Well, a fast processor is nice when running some of the more complex games, but I think you could get by with a medium-speed processor and a good 3D card.
Something to wonder, though. Exactly what does Windows do to require so much processor power and memory? FVWM95 looks pretty much the same from the outside (with the exception of not having desktop icons), and it'll run in what? 8 megs of RAM? 16 megs? On a low-end Pentium?
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
I took a look at this, and it looks quite neat. If Freenet manages to get this right, I hope it really takes off. I especially like the idea of not having to dole out tons of cash or make do with a free web service in order to get something published.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Wait a minute. A thought. They claim: "...80 to 90 percent of the space on a server...", right? So, by my fairly limited understanding, this would mean that any files owned by any user that had duplicate content would be symlinked using this system.
Several problems I can see already:
Salamander - Since this probably won't get moderated up (I'm not really saying anything anyway, just asking questions, so it probably shouldn't be), could you respond? I'm quite curious about this....
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Umm.... Let me get this straight. You'd trust a Microsoft product with access to your bank account? A closed-source system, that you couldn't see what its doing? And with Microsoft's track record for major bugs?
I can only assume that this was meant to be funny and was moderated up as something else by mistake.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
To me, GNOME has a lot over KDE. The versions of KDE I used always felt like someone had taken Win98 and tried to translate the interface to Linux. I can't stand the Win98 interface (especially the single-click icons and the browser integration!), so I switched to GNOME. I liked the panels, the applets, the interface... practically everything but Enlightenment.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Finally, a post that talks some sense. Its not about which Desktop Manager, KDE or GNOME is going to dominate. For how long have csh and bash co-existed? One's not going to win, they're both probably going to be fairly widely used, and each one's going to provide a different set of features.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
I can't stand KDE (the interface feels too windows-ish for me, and I hate the one-click and browser integration stuff!), but I've liked the versions of GNOME I've tried. The thing I haven't liked about GNOME is Enlightenment. It seems big and unwieldy, and a lot of what it does seems to be duplicated by GNOME. So a lighter-weight manager like IceWM seems the perfect solution.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
ROTFLMLO! I must say, you are one of the few people who really deserves a rating-5-funny score! Now you just need to get one of these in every thread, and the quality of Slashdot will be much improved! The Trolls won't be able to post, they'll be laughing so hard! ;)
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Exactly the point I've been making (and trying to get Moderated up, but I'm glad someone has been). For Linux, you can probably find at least one group/program working on doing what you want to do. So you get to chose what you want. This is as opposed to Windows, which says "You will use this GUI and you will use this API and you will use this and this and this..."
Personally, I like the 1001 different wheels offered by Linux (and Unix...) as opposed to the one square wheel offered by Windows.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Another sane person! The moderation system actually seems to be working today. o.O
I like your point about the GUI and command line. Open-Source/Free-Software (to me) is about choice. So if Linux forces you to use one kind of interface, how is that choice? Right now, you can use either the GUI or the command line, and I don't think there's any reason to change that.
IMHO, tools that seperate the interface from the program are one of the best ideas I've ever seen. If implimented properly, this would allow most programs to run in pretty much any environment. Text mode, Text-GUI, graphics-GUI...
Something else to keep in mind. If a program's actions can possibly be controlled through command line flags or read in from text files, or whatever, include a way to do that!
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yes! Finally, someone sane! Linux doesn't need standards, the choices available to people just need to be advertised more widely.
Want a GUI? Ok, choose between these desktop programs, or these window managers, or... They're all different, but they're also (for the most part) compatible.
As an example, I like both KDE and GNOME. Both are nice, but I don't like to use KDE. So I've got a choice. But if there are standards, and the standard is KDE, I'm screwed.
That said, programmers should strive for their applications to be as compatible as possible. This includes keybindings, cross-desktop (GNOME running KDE stuff), etc.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
GNOME has a file manager too. I think its a variant of Midnight Commander. Wasn't very good, if memory serves. (Eazel is doing yet another Midnight Commander clone) Plus, there are a bunch of other file managers you can use if you want.
Personally, I like the command line. I doubt there will ever be a GUI that replicates its power, functionality, or simplicity.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yay! Something that wasn't undisguised praising Microsoft made its way past the pro-M$ anti-everything-else moderators that flock to M$ threads. I'll agree that Microsoft has turned out some decent software, but the instant you try to convince me that a Open/Free software group couldn't have done better, or a bunch of programs each with a small subset of related features wouldn't have worked better, I'll laugh at you.
Note that I am very pro-Linux, pro-Free/Open Software. This is because of some bad experiences with M$ software.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Perhaps your subject provides more insight into the content of your message than is apparently obvious.
To start off, I'm not disagreeing that men and women are "wired differently." Its practically a biological requirement. However, I would like you to prove to me that this affects how they think. Go ahead. Show me the studies. Prove scientifically that women are no good at computers.
Also, I'm willing to bet that just as many women as men are interested in computers. One of the best programmers I've ever met (IRL) is female. But guess what the attitude of most "hacker" guys towards women is? Not very appealing, I know that much.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
The points I was trying to make were:
I wasn't saying I'd pay for this, no. I couldn't even find anything on the website about what they'd done so far. If it were a really good shell program, I might pay a reasonable sum for it.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
There's a definition (I think) of this on the GNU web page. They provide a license list, and a section on licensing free software. Note that this is only part of the philosophy page, so you may want to dig a bit deeper into there.
Hope that helped.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Finally! Someone talking some sense! The way to fight isn't to mirror DeCSS all over the place (at least in America. If you're outside of it, it can't help to emphasize that US law does not apply outside of the USA). The best way to fight this is to provide money to the EFF, write letters to government reps about the DMCA, boycott MPAA products, and suggest defense strategies to the EFF. Oh, and publicize the real reasons why DeCSS is good and why you use it (and what it does!)
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Actually, I believe that if a high enough court believes a law is unconstitutional, violates a person's rights, or a couple of other things, they can declare it invalid or give a ruling they believe is right. Note that IANAL, so I could be completely off-base here.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yeah. This is one of the things that seems to be a problem with the random-moderators thing. Then again, its also produced some excellent results, so it can't be all bad. And one just has to filter comments in one's own head as well as getting the Slashcode to do it.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Well, if this is true, things don't look so hot for Eazel. I suspect that any neophyte employees they hire will get a crash course in "Linux culture" at some point. Then, if they do get treated badly, I suspect support will evaporate.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.