It certainly sounds like you're deploying new software
There's a difference between a university deploying software internally and its associated bookstore selling software to students. Just because the uni is still running Windows 98 doesn't mean that MS is gonna let the bookstore sell it -- you'll push the latest and 'greatest' or nothing, whether that's what you want or not. Don't forget that even though the school might not have needed to upgrade for several years, there's a fresh batch of students coming through every year that will need software.
What about blind people?? Is there a speech synthesized version?
From the Nethack Guidebook (ships with at least the official sources from nethack.org):
NetHack can be set up to use only standard ASCII characters
for making maps of the dungeons. This makes the MS-DOS versions
of NetHack completely accessible to the blind who use speech
and/or Braille access technologies.
If you arent a natural math genius you can forget about taking CS unless you want to be in college for 5 years.
Amen, brother. I've never, ever understood this. The only justification that even seems to come close is that CS != programming. Which is true, and would be fine if there were BS degrees offered for programming by respectable schools. (MIS doesn't count.)
Amount of math I did as a CS undergrad: equivalent to a math minor.
Amount of math beyond high school algebra I've used as a professional programmer since: nada.
I don't care that they think they'd be competing with Chimera, there *NEEDS* to be a Mac OS X version that's keeping up with development.
Amen. Chimera is great, and my primary browser on my OSX box, but it doesn't hold a candle to Phoenix in terms of stability, speed, or release times. (Well, okay, on second thought, it's not fair to compare speed across different architectures like that, but Chimera only gets a new release every couple of months... Phoenix is already surpassing it.)
Do you find information on how to build a nuclear device in your library?
Well, as a matter of fact, I did. Don't worry -- we'll march on in there together, burn the book, and declare a victory for the Society of the Repression of Information! Let's stand up for the principles of freedom by making sure knowledge is reserved for only a select few!
DVD player seems to be working fine for me... it does freak out if you try to change display depth/resolution/arrangement while DVD player is running, but just quitting and restarting it seems to fix it.
Aside from that minor (but understandable) issue, I haven't noticed any problems at all.
I have a 14" 700Mhz iBook. Unfortunately it reports "ATY,RageM6" on the Apple System Profiler. Should I risk running the script?
Well, I wouldn't want to be responsible for telling you to try something risky with your laptop... but having said that, I saw this on MacOSXHints.com last night. I have a 12" 700Mhz iBook, which reported the same video card. But I tried the hack anyway, and it works perfectly. I can't believe Apple didn't enable this on the iBooks that support it.
The funniest thing is, the video card supports waaay higher resolutions than the laptop display will do, so you can slam on an external monitor and have a decent desktop size when you're at your desk.
While I agree that RMS can get a little... vehement at times, I don't think he's being hypocritical here. Yes, the GPL requires that you allow people to receive your code under the GPL if you redistribute GPL code, but it doesn't require that they accept it. When receiving GPL'd code, you are free to reject the GPL -- you just aren't allowed to redistribute it, etc. afterwards.
The Plan 9 license requires acceptance of the license to get the code. A small distinction, and honestly not one I think it's worth getting upset over, but I don't think RMS is being hypocritical.
I think this guy is a little shallow by determining his desktop on the types of icons and menu picture! You use a GUI to help you accomplish work faster... NOT to debate about how pretty the pictures are!
I don't know -- I agree with him for the most part. Every time a new version of KDE comes out, I switch to it for a week or two. I always like KDE, it always feels very together and fluid. But I always go back to GNOME.
No matter how much time I spend poking through kde-look or classic.themes.org (you know, the one that actually has themes on it, unlike the new one), KDEs ugliness just nags at me. Eventually I get to the point where I avoid doing any work on the computer because it hurts my eyes to look at it.
I know there are people out there that like how KDE looks... great. But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer. (Switch to all-Motif apps for a week and see how you feel;) )
we'd be happy to give fair payment to the developers in return for our use of those components... [but if those components were GPLed] our new software would have to be available for free!
This seems to be a common misconception among those who have no clue about copyright law. The author of the software owns the copyright. Even if they choose to license it under the GPL, they are still free to relicense it later under any terms they want. The only thing they cannot do is rescend the previous GPLing on it.
What does this mean for your company? It means that you can go to the author of the component you want to use and offer them money. If they accept your offer, congratulations. You just bought the right to use their code in whatever manner you negotiated.
But I guess it's easier to complain about how the GPL is ruining your life than to actually do some work or pony up the cash you claim to be willing to pay...
all the Gnome1 programs will of course still work as usual
So they claim.:( I've used that channel twice now. Twice it's hosed my entire GNOME install and I've had to uninstall everything and go back to the original RPMs from my install CDs. (On a RedHat 7.2 install.)
The last time it hosed some system libraries somewhere in the process, and half my applications wouldn't run. (Anything using Python or Perl, apparently... plus X was very... flaky.)
My advice would be to only use the Red-Carpet snapshots on a machine you're willing to lose.
I don't know how it is at most other places, but at the University I attend the labs run NetBSD and KDE2.
That's impossible -- you must be lying. Didn't you read the article?
Linux hackers from Germany and elsewhere are working on a Windows-like graphical interface for Linux PCs called KDE (for K Desktop Environment). They expect to release it this spring...
How can you be using KDE2 when KDE won't be released until spring? Now we know you're trolling. After all, what reason would MSNBC have to lie?
Check the Interface Hall of Shame entry about QuickTime player. They had the same brain-damage in iTunes.
Re:Hours for iTunes?
on
BeOS For Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Part of the 'hours' were spent looking online for a player that didn't suck as much as iTunes. (I never found one for OS X, unfortunately, and I can't see running the whole classic environment for just an MP3 player.)
But the consistency problems are hardly minor. They're part of a disturbing trend with Apple -- they're moving away from usability as their primary concern and going toward flashiness. Sadly, I've had much better out-of-the-box experiences with Linux (mostly Mandrake, but Red Hat is getting better and better) than I did with OS X. OS X is frustrating to use... Linux Just Works (tm). It's all a matter of taste. But I still wouldn't set up my grandmother with a Mac.
(I pick on iTunes because it's the single most frustrating end-user app I've ever used. It won't play OGGs, ignores some directories of MP3s at random, is a pain to reorder files in (I have them sorted by filename in subdirectories for a reason, thank you. If you're going to sort by ID3 tags, at least do it by track number instead of track name!), etc. etc. It's just painful to use.)
Re:Fragmentation...
on
BeOS For Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
KDE, GNOME still lack the consistency of a real desktop environment like Mac OS 9 or X
You know, after hearing this for so long, I actually picked up an older iMac off of eBay and put OS X on it. Let me tell everyone something right off: OS X is no more consistent than either GNOME or KDE... probably less.
The Apple freaks will flame me to hell for this, but it's true. I like OS X -- it's pretty and based on Unix. But it's anything but consistent. After spending a couple of hours trying to either get iTunes to work or find a decent MP3 player for OS X, I started to understand how normal 'users' feel about computers. Half the time I couldn't figure out what was a control and what wasn't, and when I could, the controls had to be played with to figure out what they did. No tooltips, no useful icons. But they sure were pretty.
Yeah, that's just one app. But it's from the company that made the bloody OS! And don't get me started on QuickTime Player or iMovie... they suffer from the same problems, so it's not like it's an isolated case.
Third-party apps that follow Apple's HIG (you know, the document that Apple decided to ignore) are pretty good. But then, so are the GNOME and KDE apps that do the same things. OS X is decent, but it's not the end-all of desktops that some people would have you believe.
I think it says a good deal about the 'usability problems' between the two desktops when users don't even realize they're using pieces from both.
This isn't a flame or anything -- I think it's the way things *should* work. Users shouldn't have to care whether their app is QT or GTK... as long as QT apps work under GNOME and GTK apps work under KDE, everybody's happy.
50 Meg? Shoot, I have Jailbait Linux running on my I-Opener. On a 16-meg SANdisk. X, Netscape, VNC, the works.
As near as I can tell, you'd be lucky to fit the embedded version of Windows into that much space. This is a complete desktop distro, with all the yummy command-line goodness thrown in.
A friend of mine who was involved with the Rocky Horror Picture show casts (in a coupl eof casts for several years) has said he is yet to meet anyone in a Rocky cast that hadn't been previously molested as a child or raped.
<raises hand>
I don't know if you're trolling or what, but I've been in Rocky casts for years, and I wasn't molested or raped. Nor were several of my closest friends who are also in Rocky casts. Nor has anyone else in the casts I've been in ever even mentioned such a thing. Hardly conclusive evidence, but based on the sample I've taken, I think it's safe to say your friend is either crazy or lying.:)
What happens when someone creates a work ahead of its time? Ignored for 20 years only to be rediscovered as a modern masterpiece. Are you saying that because society decided to give the author nothing then it is all right for them to get it for free now?
Yup. That's exactly the point. What you and all the corporations don't seem to understand is that you're not entitled to a profit. You write something and publish it, and it doesn't make you any money. Tough luck. Them's the breaks.
If I make a big stack of Osama bin Ladin dartboards and then he turns up dead next week, I lose. No money. Too bad. Should society pay me what I think I would have gotten for those dartboards anyway? I'm entitled to a profit, right?
Besides, if the author is dead after this 20 years, he doesn't need the money from the book. And if he's alive and it's 'rediscovered as a modern masterpiece' I'm sure he can find some way to capitalize on that. He doesn't make money if the book doesn't sell, regardless of when it is, so the money argument is moot.
*shrugs* All I know is that I'm forced to use Outlook at work, on a 2000 box. Outlook shows whether or not the sender for any emails you're viewing are online or offline if they're in your MSN contact list.
it isn't integrated into anything, even if it comes with the OS
Bzzt yourself. Messenger is integrated with at least Outlook, and I suspect IE 6. (IE can make API calls to Messenger, regardless.) And you have apparently never used XP, where it seemingly pervades the entire system. *shudders*
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly sounds like you're deploying new software
There's a difference between a university deploying software internally and its associated bookstore selling software to students. Just because the uni is still running Windows 98 doesn't mean that MS is gonna let the bookstore sell it -- you'll push the latest and 'greatest' or nothing, whether that's what you want or not. Don't forget that even though the school might not have needed to upgrade for several years, there's a fresh batch of students coming through every year that will need software.
From the Nethack Guidebook (ships with at least the official sources from nethack.org):
If you arent a natural math genius you can forget about taking CS unless you want to be in college for 5 years.
Amen, brother. I've never, ever understood this. The only justification that even seems to come close is that CS != programming. Which is true, and would be fine if there were BS degrees offered for programming by respectable schools. (MIS doesn't count.)
Amount of math I did as a CS undergrad: equivalent to a math minor.
Amount of math beyond high school algebra I've used as a professional programmer since: nada.
I don't care that they think they'd be competing with Chimera, there *NEEDS* to be a Mac OS X version that's keeping up with development.
Amen. Chimera is great, and my primary browser on my OSX box, but it doesn't hold a candle to Phoenix in terms of stability, speed, or release times. (Well, okay, on second thought, it's not fair to compare speed across different architectures like that, but Chimera only gets a new release every couple of months... Phoenix is already surpassing it.)
Do you find information on how to build a nuclear device in your library?
Well, as a matter of fact, I did. Don't worry -- we'll march on in there together, burn the book, and declare a victory for the Society of the Repression of Information! Let's stand up for the principles of freedom by making sure knowledge is reserved for only a select few!
DVD player seems to be working fine for me... it does freak out if you try to change display depth/resolution/arrangement while DVD player is running, but just quitting and restarting it seems to fix it.
Aside from that minor (but understandable) issue, I haven't noticed any problems at all.
I have a 14" 700Mhz iBook. Unfortunately it reports "ATY,RageM6" on the Apple System Profiler. Should I risk running the script?
Well, I wouldn't want to be responsible for telling you to try something risky with your laptop... but having said that, I saw this on MacOSXHints.com last night. I have a 12" 700Mhz iBook, which reported the same video card. But I tried the hack anyway, and it works perfectly. I can't believe Apple didn't enable this on the iBooks that support it.
The funniest thing is, the video card supports waaay higher resolutions than the laptop display will do, so you can slam on an external monitor and have a decent desktop size when you're at your desk.
I don't want to accidentally choose the wrong desktop/application API
You do realize that no matter which desktop you're running, apps from the other will run flawlessly, right? Or were you just trolling?
Why not just make it a link? Then you can use as long a URL as you like and not worry about the filters trashing it.
:)
HTML really isn't that hard.
You might not sign up for Meetup, but I just want to say that Scott Heiferman (Meetup's Co-Founder & CEO) is a swell guy.
/. :)
Hey, Scott! Good to know you hang out on
While I agree that RMS can get a little... vehement at times, I don't think he's being hypocritical here. Yes, the GPL requires that you allow people to receive your code under the GPL if you redistribute GPL code, but it doesn't require that they accept it. When receiving GPL'd code, you are free to reject the GPL -- you just aren't allowed to redistribute it, etc. afterwards.
The Plan 9 license requires acceptance of the license to get the code. A small distinction, and honestly not one I think it's worth getting upset over, but I don't think RMS is being hypocritical.
I think this guy is a little shallow by determining his desktop on the types of icons and menu picture! You use a GUI to help you accomplish work faster... NOT to debate about how pretty the pictures are!
;) )
I don't know -- I agree with him for the most part. Every time a new version of KDE comes out, I switch to it for a week or two. I always like KDE, it always feels very together and fluid. But I always go back to GNOME. No matter how much time I spend poking through kde-look or classic.themes.org (you know, the one that actually has themes on it, unlike the new one), KDEs ugliness just nags at me. Eventually I get to the point where I avoid doing any work on the computer because it hurts my eyes to look at it.
I know there are people out there that like how KDE looks... great. But aesthetics does have a real effect on your attitude while using a computer. (Switch to all-Motif apps for a week and see how you feel
so i recommend debian's apt package manager
apt is independent (more or less) of the back-end; I've been using apt for Red Hat for quite a while. (It's quite choice... I love it.)
we'd be happy to give fair payment to the developers in return for our use of those components... [but if those components were GPLed] our new software would have to be available for free!
This seems to be a common misconception among those who have no clue about copyright law. The author of the software owns the copyright. Even if they choose to license it under the GPL, they are still free to relicense it later under any terms they want. The only thing they cannot do is rescend the previous GPLing on it.
What does this mean for your company? It means that you can go to the author of the component you want to use and offer them money. If they accept your offer, congratulations. You just bought the right to use their code in whatever manner you negotiated.
But I guess it's easier to complain about how the GPL is ruining your life than to actually do some work or pony up the cash you claim to be willing to pay...
all the Gnome1 programs will of course still work as usual
:( I've used that channel twice now. Twice it's hosed my entire GNOME install and I've had to uninstall everything and go back to the original RPMs from my install CDs. (On a RedHat 7.2 install.)
So they claim.
The last time it hosed some system libraries somewhere in the process, and half my applications wouldn't run. (Anything using Python or Perl, apparently... plus X was very... flaky.)
My advice would be to only use the Red-Carpet snapshots on a machine you're willing to lose.
That's impossible -- you must be lying. Didn't you read the article? How can you be using KDE2 when KDE won't be released until spring? Now we know you're trolling. After all, what reason would MS NBC have to lie?
Check the Interface Hall of Shame entry about QuickTime player. They had the same brain-damage in iTunes.
Part of the 'hours' were spent looking online for a player that didn't suck as much as iTunes. (I never found one for OS X, unfortunately, and I can't see running the whole classic environment for just an MP3 player.)
But the consistency problems are hardly minor. They're part of a disturbing trend with Apple -- they're moving away from usability as their primary concern and going toward flashiness. Sadly, I've had much better out-of-the-box experiences with Linux (mostly Mandrake, but Red Hat is getting better and better) than I did with OS X. OS X is frustrating to use... Linux Just Works (tm). It's all a matter of taste. But I still wouldn't set up my grandmother with a Mac.
(I pick on iTunes because it's the single most frustrating end-user app I've ever used. It won't play OGGs, ignores some directories of MP3s at random, is a pain to reorder files in (I have them sorted by filename in subdirectories for a reason, thank you. If you're going to sort by ID3 tags, at least do it by track number instead of track name!), etc. etc. It's just painful to use.)
KDE, GNOME still lack the consistency of a real desktop environment like Mac OS 9 or X
You know, after hearing this for so long, I actually picked up an older iMac off of eBay and put OS X on it. Let me tell everyone something right off: OS X is no more consistent than either GNOME or KDE... probably less.
The Apple freaks will flame me to hell for this, but it's true. I like OS X -- it's pretty and based on Unix. But it's anything but consistent. After spending a couple of hours trying to either get iTunes to work or find a decent MP3 player for OS X, I started to understand how normal 'users' feel about computers. Half the time I couldn't figure out what was a control and what wasn't, and when I could, the controls had to be played with to figure out what they did. No tooltips, no useful icons. But they sure were pretty.
Yeah, that's just one app. But it's from the company that made the bloody OS! And don't get me started on QuickTime Player or iMovie... they suffer from the same problems, so it's not like it's an isolated case.
Third-party apps that follow Apple's HIG (you know, the document that Apple decided to ignore) are pretty good. But then, so are the GNOME and KDE apps that do the same things. OS X is decent, but it's not the end-all of desktops that some people would have you believe.
(Slightly OT, but does pertain to KDE/GNOME)
I think it says a good deal about the 'usability problems' between the two desktops when users don't even realize they're using pieces from both.
This isn't a flame or anything -- I think it's the way things *should* work. Users shouldn't have to care whether their app is QT or GTK... as long as QT apps work under GNOME and GTK apps work under KDE, everybody's happy.
(Hooray for X, etc. etc.)
50 Meg? Shoot, I have Jailbait Linux running on my I-Opener. On a 16-meg SANdisk. X, Netscape, VNC, the works.
As near as I can tell, you'd be lucky to fit the embedded version of Windows into that much space. This is a complete desktop distro, with all the yummy command-line goodness thrown in.
A friend of mine who was involved with the Rocky Horror Picture show casts (in a coupl eof casts for several years) has said he is yet to meet anyone in a Rocky cast that hadn't been previously molested as a child or raped.
:)
<raises hand>
I don't know if you're trolling or what, but I've been in Rocky casts for years, and I wasn't molested or raped. Nor were several of my closest friends who are also in Rocky casts. Nor has anyone else in the casts I've been in ever even mentioned such a thing. Hardly conclusive evidence, but based on the sample I've taken, I think it's safe to say your friend is either crazy or lying.
What happens when someone creates a work ahead of its time? Ignored for 20 years only to be rediscovered as a modern masterpiece. Are you saying that because society decided to give the author nothing then it is all right for them to get it for free now?
Yup. That's exactly the point. What you and all the corporations don't seem to understand is that you're not entitled to a profit. You write something and publish it, and it doesn't make you any money. Tough luck. Them's the breaks.
If I make a big stack of Osama bin Ladin dartboards and then he turns up dead next week, I lose. No money. Too bad. Should society pay me what I think I would have gotten for those dartboards anyway? I'm entitled to a profit, right?
Besides, if the author is dead after this 20 years, he doesn't need the money from the book. And if he's alive and it's 'rediscovered as a modern masterpiece' I'm sure he can find some way to capitalize on that. He doesn't make money if the book doesn't sell, regardless of when it is, so the money argument is moot.
*shrugs* All I know is that I'm forced to use Outlook at work, on a 2000 box. Outlook shows whether or not the sender for any emails you're viewing are online or offline if they're in your MSN contact list.
it isn't integrated into anything, even if it comes with the OS
Bzzt yourself. Messenger is integrated with at least Outlook, and I suspect IE 6. (IE can make API calls to Messenger, regardless.) And you have apparently never used XP, where it seemingly pervades the entire system. *shudders*