Mmm...not exactly. I have a specific interface in mind. Kioslave seems to accomplish what I'm talking about, but I'd like to see it in a more general sense.
For example, imagine if all Unix commands were represented graphically, so that you could arrange them like the screenshot showed in the article. Then say you could highlight multiple input files and send them through the pipe you created. It would save a lot of typing, and be easier for a beginner to understand.
Further, maybe you could save the specific combination of commands as something else. I know I'd love to be able to string together some Imagemagick commands and save the resulting pipe as a new command.
It's similar to how functional languages work. Wow, graphical programming. All we need to do is represent functions in a gui...
Maybe in a few years, Gnome will have caught up to where Lisp machines were a decade ago. I can only hope.
Just a simple example. Obviously you could get more complex. I'd imagine different stages of compilation from different languages to different object file formats to a final executable would be something you could do much easier in a gui than a Makefile.
And the point isn't to make it easier for people who already are adept at the command line, it's for people who can't be bothered with a cli. Otherwise there would be no Gnome at all.
Before everyone jumps all over me and thinks I'm being facetious, I don't mean applying tar and gzip via the command line, but rather with a GUI interface, as in the article.:-)
This really has come a long way from when I checked it out a while back.
It's a fantastic idea, although it's been around for a while. But being able to apply different filters to an audio stream is really cool. It's unix pipes for audio.
What would be great is if gnome standardized a bunch of filters like this for everything. Imagine being able to apply a tar and then a gzip filter in this manner. Or perhaps a.doc decode filter and a grep, then to a.csv. All file conversion could be handled by the environment, rather than individual programs, which is messy and inconsistent.
Gstreamer is a big step in the right direction. Way to go guys.
>I think the BSDs are great for internet servers, though I don't see how they're any more secure than a properly set up Mandrake system.
You couldn't be more right. The difference, at least to me, is that FreeBSD is much easier to configure properly because the documentation and ports system are so good.
With regard to OpenBSD however, there are many security enhancements that put its security far ahead of the rest. But it is rather paranoid for simple applications, and probably not worth the performance/ease of use hit.
Yeah, that's true. My experience is with FreeBSD, which is comparable to Linux. Not having used OpenBSD, I wouldn't know to compare, but I'd assume with things like Pro-police they'd take a performance hit.
If you want a BSD system that's the most comparable to Linux, however, it's hard to go wrong with FreeBSD. Being able to run Linux binaries is a decided advantage.
One of the biggest selling points for me is the ease of administration with ports. The ports system is kept up to date VERY well, so it's rare to come across a port that's broken or that won't build. Also, it's really nice to be able to set compilation options so you never are searching for the "right" binary. Ports does it all for you.
Also, the documentation is fantastic. The FreeBSD handbook has everything you could possibly want to know about system administration, and all the man pages are well maintained and actually there.
As far as performance goes, I'm sure there's not much of a difference. The reason you'd want to switch is that you'd want a mature, complete system, rather than a hodgepodge of libraries and binaries. It makes it a lot easier and more enjoyable to get stuff done.
This news hasn't even hit the freebsd site or bsdforums yet. I checked this morning.
I'm overdue for an upgrade, I've got 5.0 running on my main desktop machine. I just love how easy it is to administer and how well documented everything is compared to Linux.
I haven't tried the Linux 2.6 kernel yet, mostly because there's no reason for me to not use FreeBSD. X, Fvwm, and Gnome apps run flawlessly, and the ports system is fantastic.
>What makes you trust our generals and technocrats so much?
If you don't trust someone in the military more than you trust an average joe, odds are you haven't spent much time working with the military, if any at all. I have no qualms about saying that people who serve in the military are hands down the best people a country has to offer. That goes for most modern democratic societies. It's why you hear all the anti war crowd still saying "oh, I still support the troops." Why would you support the troops but turn on them when they rise to the rank of general? Is there some transformation that takes place? Generals are not appointed, you know.
The whole idea is not to come up with a better way to kill people, in order to go out and kill them. If that were true, we'd have nuked the rest of the world while we were the only ones with the bomb. The idea is to maintain a military superiority so we don't have to fight, and when we do, we fight as humanely as possible, with as little loss of life on either side as possible.
I know it's difficult for an idealist to accept, but defense, killing, and wars are sometimes necessary. It's best to be prepared. I'm for giving my generals the military might they need to win decisively, because, hell, they're on my side, and I think my side is better than all of the others.
Humanity is not perfect, my country is not perfect, but it's the best there ever was. I think we've accomplished a lot of good and prevented a lot of violence through our military influence. Most recent case in point is Libya.
But hey, I'd be perfectly happy for the US to pack up all around the world, and leave the rest of the world to itself. You can imagine how many days it would take for China to obliterate Taiwan, for Israel to flatten the rest of the mid-east (yes, they have a very advanced military), etc. etc. etc. You can imagine what the Soviet Union would have done absent our influence.
On one hand, it would be so gratifying to sit and watch Europe have to eat its words, on the other, I'm glad our generals are the kind of people they are.
I think this is more due to the fact that large companies really don't have an economic interest in a completely new operating system, and the hardware that would be required for something revolutionary isn't cheap enough for a hobbyist to develop on.
And the fact is, with the ridiculously backward 32 bit Intel x86 architecture being ubiquitous, Unix and Windows are pretty much as good as it gets anyway.
64 bit architectures could bring a huge revolution in operating systems. They'll make feasible tagged architectures, single address space systems, orthogonal persistence, and a whole host of other very exciting things that just aren't possible on a PC today.
It's going to take a startup, hobbyist, or grad student, in all likelyhood, to make this possible. Everyone else is just too entrenched in current OS's to change to something entirely new, which is what this would have to be.
That's true, but it's only true because from the time we're born, society civilizes us.
I'm not under the illusion that everyone's a jerk out to get me, I'm just saying that absent a civilizing influence, we're all a bunch of animals. That's why education and parenting are so important.
But it's also why we need to constantly be on guard, because there are always going to be parents who don't do their job, and societies that fail to civilize their next generation.
This is why societies fail. I have no doubt that American society will fail this way. It's happening around you.
We like to laugh at people who point out that our country is going to hell in a handbasket, with the excuse, "Yeah, every generation says that. Parents always remark about how much better it was when they were kids."
But every generation is right. Parents are right. The longer a society lasts, the more apathetic it becomes. It's happening all around you. Americans have a very sheltered and distorted view of the world. We have become a culture of ignorance, apathy, and selfishness.
So while it's understandable to me why someone would look at military sponsorship of research projects and think it's a bad thing, I find the idea ridiculous. This is one of the only ways such things get done, and perhaps one of the best reasons to do it. Advanced technology helps avert war and reduces casualties when war cannot be avoided. It's a fact. Not to mention the beneficial uses of military technology soon follow.
The reason most things get done is because there is a pressing need, and people in the military understand this better than anyone else. Defending yourself and defending a nation is a pressing need, whether you'd like it to be or not.
It would be nice if we could all hold hands and do research for the good of humanity, but unfortunately, human beings aren't wired that way. Nothing would get done. This is why communist societies, which are beautiful ideas on paper, don't work.
One of the major fallacies that far too many people put a lot of faith in is that people are basically good. We are not.
I know this might sound harsh and cynical, but the fact of the matter is, once you accept the fact that human nature is brutal, selfish, and ugly, you're most of the way there toward a realistic world view.
And if you look at it pragmatically, you'll realize that necessity is the mother of invention, and almost all of the great technological advances in history stem from military necessity.
Yeah, it's not nice. No, I don't like it. But that's how it works.
...people will still decide to include the whole thread of original messages as mangled text in the bottom of their email, just in case you deleted all the previous emails and forgot what the conversation was about.
>Oh geez, would you look at this? > >> Microsoft invents threaded email
You know, I'd agree with you, but ever since books and magazines became 3-D, they've been so much easier to read. Remember those old flat pages we suffered with? Blech.
Obviously, we should translate that experience in other text and video media to computers.
But I'm going really skip into the future and do a 4-d desktop, that changes over time, so that your desktop today will be different than yesterday.
The U.S. has the highest rate of class mobility in the world. To assume that one's income level is static during the course of their lifetime doesn't jive with reality.
>Most of the wealth held by the richest couple of percent today are in the hands of people who INHERITED their fortune or significant parts of it.
So? This doesn't impede my ability to work to improve my economic position. In fact, it helps to have wealthy people around to invest in new technologies and such.
Perhaps Africa is a bad example, but consider the U.S. 100 years ago. The standard of living today for our poor people is significantly better than for the wealthiest back then. Just the fact that just about anyone can afford a car that they can drive across the country in a matter of days is a luxury not even the richest person in 1903 could afford. I need not mention all the medical advances that improve quality of life.
The fact of the matter is, if you offered anyone the chance to go back in time when incomes were more "evenly" distributed, and be on the upper end of the economic scale, they'd be insane to accept.
That's an interesting economic model you're using. What you're saying is, that we'll all be willing to pay a ridiculous portion of our income for costly lunar power instead of cheaper earth-based solutions, thus giving the solar array people a monopoly on power generation?
I can see that now. "Hey, I can get power from the moon for three times the cost of the power I get now! Sign me up!"
Or are you assuming that this will be government mandated? "Vote for me! I'll triple the cost of power for consumers!"
Now that I think about it, the Green Party already runs on a similar platform, so you might be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm...not exactly. I have a specific interface in mind. Kioslave seems to accomplish what I'm talking about, but I'd like to see it in a more general sense.
For example, imagine if all Unix commands were represented graphically, so that you could arrange them like the screenshot showed in the article. Then say you could highlight multiple input files and send them through the pipe you created. It would save a lot of typing, and be easier for a beginner to understand.
Further, maybe you could save the specific combination of commands as something else. I know I'd love to be able to string together some Imagemagick commands and save the resulting pipe as a new command.
It's similar to how functional languages work. Wow, graphical programming. All we need to do is represent functions in a gui...
Maybe in a few years, Gnome will have caught up to where Lisp machines were a decade ago. I can only hope.
Even Paul Simon, when he wrote a whole damn song about Kodak film, admitted to using a Nikon camera.
Obviously he loved the film, didn't like the camera.
No big loss.
Just a simple example. Obviously you could get more complex. I'd imagine different stages of compilation from different languages to different object file formats to a final executable would be something you could do much easier in a gui than a Makefile.
And the point isn't to make it easier for people who already are adept at the command line, it's for people who can't be bothered with a cli. Otherwise there would be no Gnome at all.
Before everyone jumps all over me and thinks I'm being facetious, I don't mean applying tar and gzip via the command line, but rather with a GUI interface, as in the article. :-)
This really has come a long way from when I checked it out a while back.
.doc decode filter and a grep, then to a .csv. All file conversion could be handled by the environment, rather than individual programs, which is messy and inconsistent.
It's a fantastic idea, although it's been around for a while. But being able to apply different filters to an audio stream is really cool. It's unix pipes for audio.
What would be great is if gnome standardized a bunch of filters like this for everything. Imagine being able to apply a tar and then a gzip filter in this manner. Or perhaps a
Gstreamer is a big step in the right direction. Way to go guys.
>1982 Volvo GL to Mustang 5.0 conversion, if anyone here cares
I care, and that's awesome. What a sleeper.
>I think the BSDs are great for internet servers, though I don't see how they're any more secure than a properly set up Mandrake system.
You couldn't be more right. The difference, at least to me, is that FreeBSD is much easier to configure properly because the documentation and ports system are so good.
With regard to OpenBSD however, there are many security enhancements that put its security far ahead of the rest. But it is rather paranoid for simple applications, and probably not worth the performance/ease of use hit.
Yeah, that's true. My experience is with FreeBSD, which is comparable to Linux. Not having used OpenBSD, I wouldn't know to compare, but I'd assume with things like Pro-police they'd take a performance hit.
If you want a BSD system that's the most comparable to Linux, however, it's hard to go wrong with FreeBSD. Being able to run Linux binaries is a decided advantage.
One of the biggest selling points for me is the ease of administration with ports. The ports system is kept up to date VERY well, so it's rare to come across a port that's broken or that won't build. Also, it's really nice to be able to set compilation options so you never are searching for the "right" binary. Ports does it all for you.
Also, the documentation is fantastic. The FreeBSD handbook has everything you could possibly want to know about system administration, and all the man pages are well maintained and actually there.
As far as performance goes, I'm sure there's not much of a difference. The reason you'd want to switch is that you'd want a mature, complete system, rather than a hodgepodge of libraries and binaries. It makes it a lot easier and more enjoyable to get stuff done.
This news hasn't even hit the freebsd site or bsdforums yet. I checked this morning.
I'm overdue for an upgrade, I've got 5.0 running on my main desktop machine. I just love how easy it is to administer and how well documented everything is compared to Linux.
I haven't tried the Linux 2.6 kernel yet, mostly because there's no reason for me to not use FreeBSD. X, Fvwm, and Gnome apps run flawlessly, and the ports system is fantastic.
>What makes you trust our generals and technocrats so much?
If you don't trust someone in the military more than you trust an average joe, odds are you haven't spent much time working with the military, if any at all. I have no qualms about saying that people who serve in the military are hands down the best people a country has to offer. That goes for most modern democratic societies. It's why you hear all the anti war crowd still saying "oh, I still support the troops." Why would you support the troops but turn on them when they rise to the rank of general? Is there some transformation that takes place? Generals are not appointed, you know.
The whole idea is not to come up with a better way to kill people, in order to go out and kill them. If that were true, we'd have nuked the rest of the world while we were the only ones with the bomb. The idea is to maintain a military superiority so we don't have to fight, and when we do, we fight as humanely as possible, with as little loss of life on either side as possible.
I know it's difficult for an idealist to accept, but defense, killing, and wars are sometimes necessary. It's best to be prepared. I'm for giving my generals the military might they need to win decisively, because, hell, they're on my side, and I think my side is better than all of the others.
Humanity is not perfect, my country is not perfect, but it's the best there ever was. I think we've accomplished a lot of good and prevented a lot of violence through our military influence. Most recent case in point is Libya.
But hey, I'd be perfectly happy for the US to pack up all around the world, and leave the rest of the world to itself. You can imagine how many days it would take for China to obliterate Taiwan, for Israel to flatten the rest of the mid-east (yes, they have a very advanced military), etc. etc. etc. You can imagine what the Soviet Union would have done absent our influence.
On one hand, it would be so gratifying to sit and watch Europe have to eat its words, on the other, I'm glad our generals are the kind of people they are.
I think this is more due to the fact that large companies really don't have an economic interest in a completely new operating system, and the hardware that would be required for something revolutionary isn't cheap enough for a hobbyist to develop on.
And the fact is, with the ridiculously backward 32 bit Intel x86 architecture being ubiquitous, Unix and Windows are pretty much as good as it gets anyway.
64 bit architectures could bring a huge revolution in operating systems. They'll make feasible tagged architectures, single address space systems, orthogonal persistence, and a whole host of other very exciting things that just aren't possible on a PC today.
It's going to take a startup, hobbyist, or grad student, in all likelyhood, to make this possible. Everyone else is just too entrenched in current OS's to change to something entirely new, which is what this would have to be.
That's true, but it's only true because from the time we're born, society civilizes us.
I'm not under the illusion that everyone's a jerk out to get me, I'm just saying that absent a civilizing influence, we're all a bunch of animals. That's why education and parenting are so important.
But it's also why we need to constantly be on guard, because there are always going to be parents who don't do their job, and societies that fail to civilize their next generation.
This is why societies fail. I have no doubt that American society will fail this way. It's happening around you.
We like to laugh at people who point out that our country is going to hell in a handbasket, with the excuse, "Yeah, every generation says that. Parents always remark about how much better it was when they were kids."
But every generation is right. Parents are right. The longer a society lasts, the more apathetic it becomes. It's happening all around you. Americans have a very sheltered and distorted view of the world. We have become a culture of ignorance, apathy, and selfishness.
So while it's understandable to me why someone would look at military sponsorship of research projects and think it's a bad thing, I find the idea ridiculous. This is one of the only ways such things get done, and perhaps one of the best reasons to do it. Advanced technology helps avert war and reduces casualties when war cannot be avoided. It's a fact. Not to mention the beneficial uses of military technology soon follow.
The reason most things get done is because there is a pressing need, and people in the military understand this better than anyone else. Defending yourself and defending a nation is a pressing need, whether you'd like it to be or not.
It would be nice if we could all hold hands and do research for the good of humanity, but unfortunately, human beings aren't wired that way. Nothing would get done. This is why communist societies, which are beautiful ideas on paper, don't work.
One of the major fallacies that far too many people put a lot of faith in is that people are basically good. We are not.
I know this might sound harsh and cynical, but the fact of the matter is, once you accept the fact that human nature is brutal, selfish, and ugly, you're most of the way there toward a realistic world view.
And if you look at it pragmatically, you'll realize that necessity is the mother of invention, and almost all of the great technological advances in history stem from military necessity.
Yeah, it's not nice. No, I don't like it. But that's how it works.
It's you, I think. The writing is equally horrible no matter what the media.
Or should I say, "the verbiage utilized in news media tends to be horrific as of late."
...people will still decide to include the whole thread of original messages as mangled text in the bottom of their email, just in case you deleted all the previous emails and forgot what the conversation was about.
>Oh geez, would you look at this?
>
>> Microsoft invents threaded email
Jet Jaguar, obviously.
I thought the VI effect certainly would have kicked in by now.
You know, I'd agree with you, but ever since books and magazines became 3-D, they've been so much easier to read. Remember those old flat pages we suffered with? Blech.
Obviously, we should translate that experience in other text and video media to computers.
But I'm going really skip into the future and do a 4-d desktop, that changes over time, so that your desktop today will be different than yesterday.
It's one better, isn't it?
...I'm going to call him Jet-Jaguar.
As far as I'm concerned, he's got the right-of-way.
Shut up, you.
>Apparently, Some of them make Slashdot.
uhhh, what do you think Slashdot IS?
>Probably too simple for most of you to comprehend.
Yes, that's it. Just brilliantly simple. Blows my mind. Amen, brother, stick it to the man!
The U.S. has the highest rate of class mobility in the world. To assume that one's income level is static during the course of their lifetime doesn't jive with reality.
>Most of the wealth held by the richest couple of percent today are in the hands of people who INHERITED their fortune or significant parts of it.
So? This doesn't impede my ability to work to improve my economic position. In fact, it helps to have wealthy people around to invest in new technologies and such.
Perhaps Africa is a bad example, but consider the U.S. 100 years ago. The standard of living today for our poor people is significantly better than for the wealthiest back then. Just the fact that just about anyone can afford a car that they can drive across the country in a matter of days is a luxury not even the richest person in 1903 could afford. I need not mention all the medical advances that improve quality of life.
The fact of the matter is, if you offered anyone the chance to go back in time when incomes were more "evenly" distributed, and be on the upper end of the economic scale, they'd be insane to accept.
That's an interesting economic model you're using. What you're saying is, that we'll all be willing to pay a ridiculous portion of our income for costly lunar power instead of cheaper earth-based solutions, thus giving the solar array people a monopoly on power generation?
I can see that now. "Hey, I can get power from the moon for three times the cost of the power I get now! Sign me up!"
Or are you assuming that this will be government mandated? "Vote for me! I'll triple the cost of power for consumers!"
Now that I think about it, the Green Party already runs on a similar platform, so you might be right.