It's a fuzzy line but "Desktop Environments" basically try to abstract EVERYTHING. This means sound, network, filesystem access, and so-forth. When they do this well enough, you'd have to open a terminal to tell you are on a BSD as opposed to Linux. Furthermore, the abstractions can be somewhat portable. KDE apps, though not the parts you'd normally call a "Desktop Shell" like the Desktop and menues, are coming to OS X and Windows. So we'll be able to run things like KOffice, Amarok, and K3B on those environments without replacing their file and desktop managers.
So it looks the main distinction is that DE's provide an API that be used by applications irregardless of whether they are running the "Desktop Shell" or not.
Not to be snarky but I never quite understood what you appear to be doing.
Why not get a Mac if that is what you want? I mean it LOOKs sorta like OS X but it won't ACT like OS X (and that is GOOD thing IMO.....). Since it won't act like OS X then why so much trouble to mimic the appearance?
To even have a shot at making GNOME usable for me, I'd have to endure the nightmare that is gconf (speaking of apeing bad ideas....). I just about tore my hair out using gconf to set a browser UI Agent (which unfortunately could be necessary at that time). I bumped into a few other times where gconf use was necessary to get sane behavior. It didn't take much of that to get me off of GNOME.
Some of the other posters are right about this. "Correct" is subjective in a great many situations and removing simple ways to define it for individual needs and tastes is not the correct way to handle it. Setting good defaults that work for most people and tucking the options in unobtrusive place is. And no making people stab blindly at gconf (which tends not to remember or overwrites tweaks.....) doesn't even begin to cut it.
Long and ago, I used to prefer GNOME. Now it makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a fork.
That doesn't prevent providing a list of relevent registers and ports. Sure there is a boatload of work left from there but that could save a FOSS driver effort at least a year of reverse engineering.
Assuming he really did kill her and had to ditch a bloody seat, the smart thing to do would have been to drive to a boneyard halfway across the state and replace the seat. For that matter, replace the entire interior if a matching seat couldn't be located.
Ethanol from sugarcane grown in a subtropical environment is a completely different animal from ethanol made from corn in the US. The Brazilians aren't cutting into their food supply to do this and the efficiencies for them is much higher.
Corn ethanol is loser fuel and another subsidized gift to agribusiness.
The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop.
The licensing for the roms could be wonky though. At a minimum if she does this, get a hold of the original set of roms for each game and have them stored appropriately inside the cab itself. You'll still have copy in there on the PC that a lawyer could make hay with but having the actual roms from licensed boards would at least show a good faith attempt to be on the up and up. There are also commercially sold emulator cabinets with licensed roms.
The director of the libraries I've working on, has been told that installing Linux will result in BSA audit. We did, nothing happened, obviously, but all the other libraries are still using Windows servers.
The thing to do there is to start dealing with Red Hat and then when that threat is made, passing it on to Red Hat. If you doubt they'll get anywhere with antitrust then I still doubt Novell would take kindly to MS pissing in their Wheaties that way and would be happy to create more European antitrust trouble for them.
You also tell whoever threatened you with the audit not to EVER approach you with that again and that they are to bring it straight to your attorney. Like any bully, they tend to blink when stood up to.
Xanga is really nasty too. A friend of mine's kids used it and his machines all acted like they went to the orgy with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears where Tila Tequila showed up later and sat on their faces.
For the record OO, also has a clause that stops it being fully GPL, thats why neo office code cant be used
One part of this I don't understand and the other part isn't factual. If OO wasn't "fully GPL" then NeoOffice wouldn't exist in the first place. It is true that Sun only accepts contributions if the copyright is turned over to them but that in no way un-GPL's the software.
As for NeoOffice, they contribute or at least attempt to contribute bugfixes under Sun's terms because bugs in the core OO code affect them too. But there is a political/personality problem that cause the OO devs to ignore the NeoOffice guys. For instance, the X11 OO on OS X was unable to open files on a network share. The NeoOffice guys had this problem fixed for two years before it was fixed in OO and had to keep forward porting the fix because NeoOffice is Politically Incorrect over in OO land.
My guess is this outcome was planned from the start. My guess OLPC got from us (us being the OS/FS crowd) exactly what they wanted. Which was exactly what Asus got. Microsoft's attention.
If true, then idealistic hardware and software designers need to remember this example the next time they are approached by someone like Negroponte. I have no problem with helping kids but it's starting to sound to me like the open source talent was cynically used to attain this end.
You could also write say 1M of data to the CD 700 times. If excessively damaged, you wouldn't read it in a standard reader but it would be possible to slow scan and reconstruct the contents. Basically, you write the data at the density the format supports but you write a small amount of data many times.
political fear and worship are fundamentally different.
Not necessarily. There is a reason why we call places like North Korea, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia "cults of personality". You have pictures of "The Glorious Leader" pasted on every flat surface and despite the dissidents who get all the attention in the rest of the world there are adoring millions who take the pronouncements of The Leader as incontrovertible fact. Personality cults redirect the adulation normally given to deities and redirect it to secular leaders. This adulation is then fostered to levels normally seen in groups like the Moonies or Branch Davidians.
Check out the supposed achievements and attributes believed of Kim Jong Il and his father. The man is held to be a God on Earth and the entirety of the country is run like the Scientologists Sea Org.
Plug in enough cars though and it becomes necessary to build more power plants which realistically will be coal fired. Sure, things will be tight enough then that we finally tell all the hippies to "STFU! We're building nuke plants already!" But still. There might even be enough extra generating capacity built under this scenario that America's carbon profile changes hardly at all. It would be an interesting step back to the 19th century when the British Empire was powered by coal....
In any case, a centrally controlled plant should be cleaner than that many indifferently maintained gasoline cars.
My understanding is that in practice TDP has to be finely tuned to the feedstock going into it. So if you can park one next to a rendering plant, then you can wring a bit of extra profit from the combined operation by turning some of the least valuable wastes into fuel. But no, it isn't a panacea. I suppose the next question is how tunable is the process and what are all the feasible feedstocks?
We're really getting into the soup though. It is past time the corn farmers by which I really mean large corporate agri-business outfits like Con-Agra were told to shut the hell up. Like everybody else, they've had an almost free on seemingly unlimited petroleum. Now that it isn't unlimited, we can ill afford pump billions into a loser fuel like corn ethanol. The sugar cane ethanol the Brazilians have is a different animal economically and it isn't going to work for us.
Besides, I had some Mexican Coke made with sugar last weekend. Yeah gods but HFCS has turned our soda into swill. They need to start cramming that product where the sun doesn't shine as well.........
Infeasibility in practice and unfalsifiable in principle are two different things. One of those differences is that what can be done in practice is subject to change. Another, and more importantly, you can specify conditions in principle sufficient to disprove the assertion. In this case, not observing speciation over commonly accepted evolutionary timescales under the sort of situations which generate evolutionary pressure mean that evolution is falsifiable in principle even if that particular test isn't very feasible (This doesn't rule out other tests. I suppose one could hurry things up a bit with some cobalt-60, some fast reproducing bacteria, a variety of foodstuffs, heat, cold, any stressor you care to play with actually, and antibiotics.)
On the other hand, I can't definitively falsify God or any other Intelligent Designer to you care to posit. Aliens intelligently designing us billions of years ago is equally problematic. I can marshal any number of arguments and make the case for such a being improbable to any number of degrees but I cannot rule it out once and for all even in principle (so-called "strong atheists" err in this btw). Try to explain to a kid about Santa Claus too soon and you'll see what I mean: "You have to BELIEVE in Santa to be able to see him!" That could actually be so but that makes Santa unfalsifiable; on the other hand if anyone can see Santa's Workshop if they but trouble to visit the North Pole then THAT particular part of the Santa Claus mythos is falsifiable. Even if Santa's workshop were located on the other side of the Milky Way, it's existence is still falsifiable in principle even if the test is infeasible.
Incidentally, I suspect using an unfalsifiable Designer to undermine evolutionary biology is a rhetorical equivalent to dividing by zero: You can prove/disprove ANYTHING that way. The IDers are going to have to do better than the tarted up God Of The Gaps arguments they've been using. Almost all ID I've seen is posited in terms in shooting holes in evolution. I see very little in the way of actual observational or experimental science. After all, what are these naughty academics going to do? Not let you publish in their journals or play their other reindeer games?
ID has yet to be any sort of scientific threat (politics on the other hand...) because it is lacking in actual positive scientific results. And really, how can it result in science? The chief work product is an assertion that this or that phenomena MUST be the work of a Designer because we can't think up any other way it might have happened. That may make for a variety of theology but I'm having a hard time finding actual science in it.
That is corruptible as well. The trick here is be sure all coders both writer and reviewer FULLY disclose their affiliations. You couldn't even begin to do this Wikipedia style. No pseudonyms, no handles, everybody has to use their real names and digging into and publicly disclosing corporate actions and affiliations would be cricket.
Even then, if 5000 MS coders blatantly write and approve each other how would you propose to handle it?
I suspect the answer here is "Write up what is actually being implemented into an RFC. Any RFC that can't be understood clearly and implemented will be dev nulled." Since many of us are already disregarding the ISO over this, I suppose that is happening already..........
I have several buildings full of Macs that think the Linux servers are "OS X" servers. I'll grant getting to that point wasn't turnkey but it can be done. When complete Samba 4 will make that possible for Windows too. For that matter, a Linux LDAP server can take care of Linux machines in the same way. Unfortunately, if you want a turnkey experience then you'll have to pay for it whether the server is Mac, Windows, or Linux.
Open source drivers from the manufacturer are ideal, but throwing away supported binary drivers because they aren't open source is spite.
True but the kernel devs have good reason to be resentful when the necessity to stay compatible with the NVidia drivers either forces design choices on them or causes them to catch heat when a new kernel won't work with them. It's happened before and most certainly isn't "spite". A few years back, the kernel devs changed the kernel memory page size because machines with over 1GB were becoming common and that made for a more performant kernel. It also broke the NVidia drivers that were out at the time for four months or so. That was four months that anyone who wanted to run NVidia's drivers either had to use a fourth party patch or forgo the latest kernels.
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It's a fuzzy line but "Desktop Environments" basically try to abstract EVERYTHING. This means sound, network, filesystem access, and so-forth. When they do this well enough, you'd have to open a terminal to tell you are on a BSD as opposed to Linux. Furthermore, the abstractions can be somewhat portable. KDE apps, though not the parts you'd normally call a "Desktop Shell" like the Desktop and menues, are coming to OS X and Windows. So we'll be able to run things like KOffice, Amarok, and K3B on those environments without replacing their file and desktop managers.
So it looks the main distinction is that DE's provide an API that be used by applications irregardless of whether they are running the "Desktop Shell" or not.
Not to be snarky but I never quite understood what you appear to be doing.
Why not get a Mac if that is what you want? I mean it LOOKs sorta like OS X but it won't ACT like OS X (and that is GOOD thing IMO.....). Since it won't act like OS X then why so much trouble to mimic the appearance?
To even have a shot at making GNOME usable for me, I'd have to endure the nightmare that is gconf (speaking of apeing bad ideas....). I just about tore my hair out using gconf to set a browser UI Agent (which unfortunately could be necessary at that time). I bumped into a few other times where gconf use was necessary to get sane behavior. It didn't take much of that to get me off of GNOME.
Some of the other posters are right about this. "Correct" is subjective in a great many situations and removing simple ways to define it for individual needs and tastes is not the correct way to handle it. Setting good defaults that work for most people and tucking the options in unobtrusive place is. And no making people stab blindly at gconf (which tends not to remember or overwrites tweaks.....) doesn't even begin to cut it.
Long and ago, I used to prefer GNOME. Now it makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a fork.
That doesn't prevent providing a list of relevent registers and ports. Sure there is a boatload of work left from there but that could save a FOSS driver effort at least a year of reverse engineering.
Assuming he really did kill her and had to ditch a bloody seat, the smart thing to do would have been to drive to a boneyard halfway across the state and replace the seat. For that matter, replace the entire interior if a matching seat couldn't be located.
You'd have sickly stodgy Windows Guy, young hip Mac Guy, and squared off chunky orthopedically impaired version of Mac Guy.
"Me um Hackintosh Man am just as good as Mac Guy!"
Ethanol from sugarcane grown in a subtropical environment is a completely different animal from ethanol made from corn in the US. The Brazilians aren't cutting into their food supply to do this and the efficiencies for them is much higher.
Corn ethanol is loser fuel and another subsidized gift to agribusiness.
The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop.
The licensing for the roms could be wonky though. At a minimum if she does this, get a hold of the original set of roms for each game and have them stored appropriately inside the cab itself. You'll still have copy in there on the PC that a lawyer could make hay with but having the actual roms from licensed boards would at least show a good faith attempt to be on the up and up. There are also commercially sold emulator cabinets with licensed roms.
The director of the libraries I've working on, has been told that installing Linux will result in BSA audit. We did, nothing happened, obviously, but all the other libraries are still using Windows servers.
The thing to do there is to start dealing with Red Hat and then when that threat is made, passing it on to Red Hat. If you doubt they'll get anywhere with antitrust then I still doubt Novell would take kindly to MS pissing in their Wheaties that way and would be happy to create more European antitrust trouble for them.
You also tell whoever threatened you with the audit not to EVER approach you with that again and that they are to bring it straight to your attorney. Like any bully, they tend to blink when stood up to.
It works with Opera but being crapped up on the other two browsers I tried would still cause me to pass on that vendor.
Xanga is really nasty too. A friend of mine's kids used it and his machines all acted like they went to the orgy with Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears where Tila Tequila showed up later and sat on their faces.
they didnt sign a clause in OO that allows it to be used in StarOffice.
That is true of their OS X GUI efforts but I don't believe it true of bugfixes to the OO core code.
For the record OO, also has a clause that stops it being fully GPL, thats why neo office code cant be used
One part of this I don't understand and the other part isn't factual. If OO wasn't "fully GPL" then NeoOffice wouldn't exist in the first place. It is true that Sun only accepts contributions if the copyright is turned over to them but that in no way un-GPL's the software.
As for NeoOffice, they contribute or at least attempt to contribute bugfixes under Sun's terms because bugs in the core OO code affect them too. But there is a political/personality problem that cause the OO devs to ignore the NeoOffice guys. For instance, the X11 OO on OS X was unable to open files on a network share. The NeoOffice guys had this problem fixed for two years before it was fixed in OO and had to keep forward porting the fix because NeoOffice is Politically Incorrect over in OO land.
My guess is this outcome was planned from the start. My guess OLPC got from us (us being the OS/FS crowd) exactly what they wanted. Which was exactly what Asus got. Microsoft's attention.
If true, then idealistic hardware and software designers need to remember this example the next time they are approached by someone like Negroponte. I have no problem with helping kids but it's starting to sound to me like the open source talent was cynically used to attain this end.
You could also write say 1M of data to the CD 700 times. If excessively damaged, you wouldn't read it in a standard reader but it would be possible to slow scan and reconstruct the contents. Basically, you write the data at the density the format supports but you write a small amount of data many times.
political fear and worship are fundamentally different.
Not necessarily. There is a reason why we call places like North Korea, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia "cults of personality". You have pictures of "The Glorious Leader" pasted on every flat surface and despite the dissidents who get all the attention in the rest of the world there are adoring millions who take the pronouncements of The Leader as incontrovertible fact. Personality cults redirect the adulation normally given to deities and redirect it to secular leaders. This adulation is then fostered to levels normally seen in groups like the Moonies or Branch Davidians.
Check out the supposed achievements and attributes believed of Kim Jong Il and his father. The man is held to be a God on Earth and the entirety of the country is run like the Scientologists Sea Org.
Plug in enough cars though and it becomes necessary to build more power plants which realistically will be coal fired. Sure, things will be tight enough then that we finally tell all the hippies to "STFU! We're building nuke plants already!" But still. There might even be enough extra generating capacity built under this scenario that America's carbon profile changes hardly at all. It would be an interesting step back to the 19th century when the British Empire was powered by coal....
In any case, a centrally controlled plant should be cleaner than that many indifferently maintained gasoline cars.
My understanding is that in practice TDP has to be finely tuned to the feedstock going into it. So if you can park one next to a rendering plant, then you can wring a bit of extra profit from the combined operation by turning some of the least valuable wastes into fuel. But no, it isn't a panacea. I suppose the next question is how tunable is the process and what are all the feasible feedstocks?
We're really getting into the soup though. It is past time the corn farmers by which I really mean large corporate agri-business outfits like Con-Agra were told to shut the hell up. Like everybody else, they've had an almost free on seemingly unlimited petroleum. Now that it isn't unlimited, we can ill afford pump billions into a loser fuel like corn ethanol. The sugar cane ethanol the Brazilians have is a different animal economically and it isn't going to work for us.
Besides, I had some Mexican Coke made with sugar last weekend. Yeah gods but HFCS has turned our soda into swill. They need to start cramming that product where the sun doesn't shine as well.........
Infeasibility in practice and unfalsifiable in principle are two different things. One of those differences is that what can be done in practice is subject to change. Another, and more importantly, you can specify conditions in principle sufficient to disprove the assertion. In this case, not observing speciation over commonly accepted evolutionary timescales under the sort of situations which generate evolutionary pressure mean that evolution is falsifiable in principle even if that particular test isn't very feasible (This doesn't rule out other tests. I suppose one could hurry things up a bit with some cobalt-60, some fast reproducing bacteria, a variety of foodstuffs, heat, cold, any stressor you care to play with actually, and antibiotics.)
On the other hand, I can't definitively falsify God or any other Intelligent Designer to you care to posit. Aliens intelligently designing us billions of years ago is equally problematic. I can marshal any number of arguments and make the case for such a being improbable to any number of degrees but I cannot rule it out once and for all even in principle (so-called "strong atheists" err in this btw). Try to explain to a kid about Santa Claus too soon and you'll see what I mean: "You have to BELIEVE in Santa to be able to see him!" That could actually be so but that makes Santa unfalsifiable; on the other hand if anyone can see Santa's Workshop if they but trouble to visit the North Pole then THAT particular part of the Santa Claus mythos is falsifiable. Even if Santa's workshop were located on the other side of the Milky Way, it's existence is still falsifiable in principle even if the test is infeasible.
Incidentally, I suspect using an unfalsifiable Designer to undermine evolutionary biology is a rhetorical equivalent to dividing by zero: You can prove/disprove ANYTHING that way. The IDers are going to have to do better than the tarted up God Of The Gaps arguments they've been using. Almost all ID I've seen is posited in terms in shooting holes in evolution. I see very little in the way of actual observational or experimental science. After all, what are these naughty academics going to do? Not let you publish in their journals or play their other reindeer games?
ID has yet to be any sort of scientific threat (politics on the other hand...) because it is lacking in actual positive scientific results. And really, how can it result in science? The chief work product is an assertion that this or that phenomena MUST be the work of a Designer because we can't think up any other way it might have happened. That may make for a variety of theology but I'm having a hard time finding actual science in it.
About 3.287 times more than a metric fuckton.
That is corruptible as well. The trick here is be sure all coders both writer and reviewer FULLY disclose their affiliations. You couldn't even begin to do this Wikipedia style. No pseudonyms, no handles, everybody has to use their real names and digging into and publicly disclosing corporate actions and affiliations would be cricket.
Even then, if 5000 MS coders blatantly write and approve each other how would you propose to handle it?
I suspect the answer here is "Write up what is actually being implemented into an RFC. Any RFC that can't be understood clearly and implemented will be dev nulled." Since many of us are already disregarding the ISO over this, I suppose that is happening already..........
What's funny about that is that I've used OpenOffice to convert Works documents to Office documents.
I have several buildings full of Macs that think the Linux servers are "OS X" servers. I'll grant getting to that point wasn't turnkey but it can be done. When complete Samba 4 will make that possible for Windows too. For that matter, a Linux LDAP server can take care of Linux machines in the same way. Unfortunately, if you want a turnkey experience then you'll have to pay for it whether the server is Mac, Windows, or Linux.
Open source drivers from the manufacturer are ideal, but throwing away supported binary drivers because they aren't open source is spite.
True but the kernel devs have good reason to be resentful when the necessity to stay compatible with the NVidia drivers either forces design choices on them or causes them to catch heat when a new kernel won't work with them. It's happened before and most certainly isn't "spite". A few years back, the kernel devs changed the kernel memory page size because machines with over 1GB were becoming common and that made for a more performant kernel. It also broke the NVidia drivers that were out at the time for four months or so. That was four months that anyone who wanted to run NVidia's drivers either had to use a fourth party patch or forgo the latest kernels.