Well, it is the only distro that works stably and useably on all imacs, aside from YellowDog, which is essentially indistinguishable from LinuxPPC, except for the fact that one gets the feeling that they are no more open source than the various licence agreements absolutely force them to be.
Well, if this joke ever even makes it to court, that detail will surely be enough to get the whole thing thrown back out.
That is if one of the other issues like the patent not having been enforced in umpty-aught years, prior art out the wazzoo, or the generally laughable nature of the whole venture, doesn't get it thrown out first
Current versions of netsacpe and IE either: 1) ship with these plugins (if they are popluar enough) or 2) will automatically down and install them without the user having to do anything (not even a reboot!)
Unless of course you happen to be using an NT lab, where they download and get three fourths of the way into the installer before they bother to tell you that you need administrator privileges before you can do anything.
By this time I am so pissed off at the website that if there is any way of finding the webmaster's contact e-mail without the plug-in, I send off an angry e-mail. Of course, there usually isn't, so the website maintainers have no idea how many people don't see their lovely, pretty, seven freegin' megabyte websites.
I was half kidding. Ok, maybe more like three quarters kidding. Seven ninths. American People's Software Company - c'mon...
Besides, I said in a properly democratic socialist country. Go on, disprove me. Name me one properly democratic socialist country. Name me one properly democratic capitalist country, for that matter.
And, by the by, Germany is a socialist country, isn't it? Well, red-green coalition government, anyway?
By the way, this would be even worse: in a strict socialist economy MS would be allowed to keep its monopoly, although as a state company.
Weellll.... In a proper socialist system, The government would run the American People's Ministry of Software for the good of the people. That would mean, there would be no need for breaking up the company. As a government monopoly, it would belong to all of us. And that means, its operation would be democratic. And, since corp == gov't, we already pay for the products through taxes. So, it's run to give people the most for their money, not to get the most money from people. Likely by visionless beaurocrats, but that would surely be better than the active evil of Gates & Co.
Likely, Windows would not have become the cludge it is, but a user-friendly(ish) UNIX OS, because the company would be there to make the best product. (When your profit stream is taxes, the way to maximize profit is to benefit the economy as a whole) And we all know what the most efficient OS style is.
In a properly democratic socialist country, all the company's products would necessarily be open source too, since to make informed decisions on the operation of the Ministry of Software, ie. to know how to vote, the people would need to see what MSFT/APM of S were up to, or at least to have some trusted computer scientist read the code on their behalf.
OK, this is an honest question, please answer if you can:
Just how does giving directories names that mean something to the average user entail breaking the functionality of the CLI? Wouldn't you just have to define your path to include things like $user/preferences,/applications,/documentation... as opposed to/opt,/usr/bin,/man...?
Or do all the apps expect a standard directory structure, looking for/etc/me.cfg as opposed to something like sys.prefs_path/me.cfg?
Take a look at some screenshots of (a) Windows and (b)Mac OS 8.5/6 (Yes, there's finally a proper CLI in OS X, but they've made such a hash of everything else). You would think you might be looking at some marvellous, instructive examples of what (a) to avoid and (b) to imitate in human computer interaction, interface design, etc.
But you wouldn't. You'd be looking at some pretty dull, uninformative pictures. The only noticeable difference would be that the Windows menus are attached to the windows, the Mac ones to the top of the screen. And I'm not about to get into which is superior, it'd be a flame war.
UI is about things like customizability, consistency, scriptability, informative names, consistency, elegant scaling, abstractions that don't get in your way, efficient placement of controls, and did I mention consistency?
So while the Mac OS has way better HCI than Windows, but you won't be able to tell that by looking at screenshots. You can tell by reading tech documents, interface design guidelines, scripting dictionaries (is there even such a thing in Windows?), etc. And of course by using the system in question.
And this means, I'm afraid, that giving Linux decent UI is going to take a lot more than Yet Another Desktop Environment. It'll take getting rid of directories called/etc,/usr/bin,/var... It'll take instituting some real user interface guidelines and standards, both in command line apps (so what does ^S mean in this context, I wonder?) and in graphical ones. Cause all YADE means is you get pretty screenshots.
...With the wording here: "...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."
Not "cause enormous inconvenience", but "provide" it. They want enormous inconvenience, because enormous inconvenience stops people understanding their computers.
"Ooops, I meant to say..." No, I think we can pretty safely conclude, we know who Satan is.
The question isn't can it be done but how to do it.
Right on Felinoid!!
Now for the fun part. Mac allready runs Microsoft office and Linux would be in areas where Microsoft compatability isn't an issue.
That, and Sun is going to release StarOffice for Mac sometime late this summer, if their FAQ is to be believed. That probably means OS X only, it being a UNIX already. Likely would minimize the amount of recoding...
This is some lunatic soldier who has delcared an abandoned military base to be an independent principality, and has fired shots at British battleships. I don't think he's too worried about political pressure from across the Atlantic.
Say the US government doesn't like it. It can pressure Sealand to enact controls by threatening to block US business access to the haven ( a significant portion of their market ) by passing a law (which would be quite constitutional, I think)
You really are American, aren't you? I usually try to keep myself from flaming American nationalists who don't realize that the world is not a U.S. colony, but I can't help it... Are you trying to say that there are not enough businesses in the entire world outside of the U.S. to keep a 'nation' about the size of a sports stadium in business? Or are you suggesting that every privacy-seeking group in the world will abandon a data haven because then they couldn't do business with the sacred United States of Heaven^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAmerica?
...is watching a clueless Windrone try to 'help' you with your Mac. My ISP took so long to get someone out to me that I set up everything myself. Then they sent out some guy that refused to believe it was working (the lack of horrendously annoying wizards confused him or something). By the time I got the guy to leave, it took me a good half hour to undo the mess he'd made of my hard-drive
Maybe this would serve as some sort of protection. Set up the mouse control panel to not actually make any permanent changes unless you give it the secret handshake first. Then clueless MCSE types could get as confused as they need to be before you can get rid of them without actually changing anything.
Offtopic, I know, but - do you have trouble with MI/X a lot? After multiple attempts at installing it, I finally got it to work, but then I found that there are a couple of X apps that kill MI/X dead, freezing the computer so solid that the menus won't respond. I have to cmd-opt-esc kill MI/X.
The really dumb part was that the only reason I installed MI/X was so I could use a particular program for school, and that was one of the ones that MI/X can't handle...
Ah well, I'll just wait until some enterprising soul works out how to compile XFree and run it right in OS X.
Yet, it is amazing that someone particularily in our own Open Source community hasn't taken the clue and built an easy to use windowing interface for the end-user and left the procrastinating Apple in the dust.
I don't find it that amazing. It's really hard work, involves a need for real research (the sort that requires real money) and I don't think that "someone in our own open source community" is up to it. There's a reason why most people use commercial OS's, and that, I'm afraid, is because they're the only ones an average human can use right now.
Someone earlier pointed out one benefit, namely that you can compile an app to check at runtime whether a library is there or not.
Another advantage I can see is, if you have a server box, you can update, eg, your DES library, and have, eg, sshd take advantage of it right away, without having to restart it and kick off any users currently logged in.
Wow. What University is that, you didn't mention? We not only pay here, we don't have the choice of not paying, even if we have computers at home, and we happen to be students of, say, drama, who need a computer lab account to type the odd essay, if at all.
I suspect that for IE 5, MS has used the Carbon API, because it's quicker to port the current Mac version of IE to Carbon.
But, Carbon is essentially a stepping stone to Cocoa, which is the real POSIX stuff, IIRC, and likely Apple intends to slowly supplant Carbon - it was introduced with OS 9, downloadable for OS 8.5 +. This presumably means that it doesn't use the full power of Mach, BSD, etc.
So, my (highly uninformed) guess is this will mean IE 6 for UNIX, since that will likely line up with Mac OS XI or 11 or whatever they decide to call it, which will be the one where they're really phasing out Carbon.
Bill: "Why, your honour, we released the specification, with a contract stipulating that it was to be used for the sole purpose of security testing. However, malicious hackers managed to obtain the specification without agreeing to the conditions, and began implementing their own versions. We did our level best to embrace the open source movement, but we only got burned."
In the British Common Law, on which the U.S.A.'s and Canada's, and most other U.K. colonies' legal systems are based, it is perfectly legal for a judge or jury to refuse to convict for a crime if they believe that the law that was broken is unjust or unreasonable.
This is why, for example, the death penalty, a.k.a. deportation to Australia, ceased to be applied to minor crimes in Britain. Not because Parliament suddenly went all humane, but because juries all over the U.K. refused to convict anyone of theft, minor frauds, etc. Eventually, they forced the government to change the laws to something more reasonable. The same should be applicable in the U.S., what we need is better informed judges.
Now, here's a really crazy bit, applying in Canada, I don't know about the U.S. in this respect: While it is legal for juries to refuse to convict if they believe the law in question is inhumane, it is illegel for lawyers & judges to inform jurors of those rights. In other words, the ignorance of juries of the laws related to their execution of their sworn duties is entrenched in law.
Don't get me wrong, scripts can automate a lot of things, and I like them, but do they necessarily come into the "User interface" part?
Well, you use it to make your computer do things, so yes, when you run or write a script, that is part of "user interface", and as such, subject to improvement through, e.g., better documentation of scripting languages, the writing of languages that the average user can at lest easily get started with.
This is all assuming we're sticking with the prevailing desktop GUI idea, as opposed to, say, a Canon Cat type thing. So this is possibly a case of making an abolutely state of the art ox-cart, but what the heck.
Efficiency and speed of use shouldn't be all in things you have to spend some time to learn. What I'm talking about is the little things not getting in your way. An example is Mac menus being always right up at the top of the monitor - you can't overshoot them, since you cursor won't dart through the top of the screen. This makes it that little bit quicker to open a menu. However, Mac doesn't take it far enough - the corners are the easiest to hit/hardest to overshoot parts of the screen real estate, but by default the Mac doesn't put anything useful in the corners of the screen. Essentially, the most commonly used things should be in the quickest places to reach.
Also, UI considerations should extend into what might seem like non-obvious places like the filesystem. I recently had a good laugh at an installer message in Windows NT that went something like, "For your convenience, the file VCVars32.bat has been placed in your bin directory." "/etc/rc.d/" does not impart much information about the contents of the directory, whereas "System Folder:Startup Items:" is pretty straightforward. You know where to go looking when you don't like what your computer does at boot-time
Another non-obvious place to put UI stuff is in scripting languages. People talk about scripting like it's some sort of thing only for the very nerdy super-user, but there's no reason it should be. When I first decided I needed to write an Applescript, it took me all of fifteen minutes to learn. Granted, it's not a super-powerful language, but a relatively new user can do a heck of a lot with it.
A CLI is vital, as a built-in part of the interface. I suppose it's hardly necessary to mention that on Slashdot, but... A CLImay not be used by ninety five percent of users, but that other five percent shouldn't have to learn a dozen different different types of subtly different consoles. Here again I speak from a Mac user's perspective, obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it is the only distro that works stably and useably on all imacs, aside from YellowDog, which is essentially indistinguishable from LinuxPPC, except for the fact that one gets the feeling that they are no more open source than the various licence agreements absolutely force them to be.
I can see footnotes being a problem...
That is if one of the other issues like the patent not having been enforced in umpty-aught years, prior art out the wazzoo, or the generally laughable nature of the whole venture, doesn't get it thrown out first
1) ship with these plugins (if they are popluar enough) or
2) will automatically down and install them without the user having to do anything (not even a reboot!)
Unless of course you happen to be using an NT lab, where they download and get three fourths of the way into the installer before they bother to tell you that you need administrator privileges before you can do anything.
By this time I am so pissed off at the website that if there is any way of finding the webmaster's contact e-mail without the plug-in, I send off an angry e-mail. Of course, there usually isn't, so the website maintainers have no idea how many people don't see their lovely, pretty, seven freegin' megabyte websites.
Besides, I said in a properly democratic socialist country. Go on, disprove me. Name me one properly democratic socialist country. Name me one properly democratic capitalist country, for that matter.
And, by the by, Germany is a socialist country, isn't it? Well, red-green coalition government, anyway?
Can you point me to the story you mention?
Berlin really does look nice...
Weellll.... In a proper socialist system, The government would run the American People's Ministry of Software for the good of the people. That would mean, there would be no need for breaking up the company. As a government monopoly, it would belong to all of us. And that means, its operation would be democratic. And, since corp == gov't, we already pay for the products through taxes. So, it's run to give people the most for their money, not to get the most money from people. Likely by visionless beaurocrats, but that would surely be better than the active evil of Gates & Co.
Likely, Windows would not have become the cludge it is, but a user-friendly(ish) UNIX OS, because the company would be there to make the best product. (When your profit stream is taxes, the way to maximize profit is to benefit the economy as a whole) And we all know what the most efficient OS style is.
In a properly democratic socialist country, all the company's products would necessarily be open source too, since to make informed decisions on the operation of the Ministry of Software, ie. to know how to vote, the people would need to see what MSFT/APM of S were up to, or at least to have some trusted computer scientist read the code on their behalf.
Just how does giving directories names that mean something to the average user entail breaking the functionality of the CLI? Wouldn't you just have to define your path to include things like $user/preferences, /applications, /documentation... as opposed to /opt, /usr/bin, /man...?
Or do all the apps expect a standard directory structure, looking for /etc/me.cfg as opposed to something like sys.prefs_path/me.cfg?
Take a look at some screenshots of (a) Windows and (b)Mac OS 8.5/6 (Yes, there's finally a proper CLI in OS X, but they've made such a hash of everything else). You would think you might be looking at some marvellous, instructive examples of what (a) to avoid and (b) to imitate in human computer interaction, interface design, etc.
But you wouldn't. You'd be looking at some pretty dull, uninformative pictures. The only noticeable difference would be that the Windows menus are attached to the windows, the Mac ones to the top of the screen. And I'm not about to get into which is superior, it'd be a flame war.
UI is about things like customizability, consistency, scriptability, informative names, consistency, elegant scaling, abstractions that don't get in your way, efficient placement of controls, and did I mention consistency?
So while the Mac OS has way better HCI than Windows, but you won't be able to tell that by looking at screenshots. You can tell by reading tech documents, interface design guidelines, scripting dictionaries (is there even such a thing in Windows?), etc. And of course by using the system in question.
And this means, I'm afraid, that giving Linux decent UI is going to take a lot more than Yet Another Desktop Environment. It'll take getting rid of directories called /etc, /usr/bin, /var... It'll take instituting some real user interface guidelines and standards, both in command line apps (so what does ^S mean in this context, I wonder?) and in graphical ones. Cause all YADE means is you get pretty screenshots.
"...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."
Not "cause enormous inconvenience", but "provide" it. They want enormous inconvenience, because enormous inconvenience stops people understanding their computers.
"Ooops, I meant to say..." No, I think we can pretty safely conclude, we know who Satan is.
Right on Felinoid!!
Now for the fun part. Mac allready runs Microsoft office and Linux would be in areas where Microsoft compatability isn't an issue.
That, and Sun is going to release StarOffice for Mac sometime late this summer, if their FAQ is to be believed. That probably means OS X only, it being a UNIX already. Likely would minimize the amount of recoding...
This is some lunatic soldier who has delcared an abandoned military base to be an independent principality, and has fired shots at British battleships. I don't think he's too worried about political pressure from across the Atlantic.
Say the US government doesn't like it. It can pressure Sealand to enact controls by threatening to block US business access to the haven ( a significant portion of their market ) by passing a law (which would be quite constitutional, I think)
You really are American, aren't you? I usually try to keep myself from flaming American nationalists who don't realize that the world is not a U.S. colony, but I can't help it... Are you trying to say that there are not enough businesses in the entire world outside of the U.S. to keep a 'nation' about the size of a sports stadium in business? Or are you suggesting that every privacy-seeking group in the world will abandon a data haven because then they couldn't do business with the sacred United States of Heaven^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAmerica?
Maybe this would serve as some sort of protection. Set up the mouse control panel to not actually make any permanent changes unless you give it the secret handshake first. Then clueless MCSE types could get as confused as they need to be before you can get rid of them without actually changing anything.
The really dumb part was that the only reason I installed MI/X was so I could use a particular program for school, and that was one of the ones that MI/X can't handle...
Ah well, I'll just wait until some enterprising soul works out how to compile XFree and run it right in OS X.
I don't find it that amazing. It's really hard work, involves a need for real research (the sort that requires real money) and I don't think that "someone in our own open source community" is up to it. There's a reason why most people use commercial OS's, and that, I'm afraid, is because they're the only ones an average human can use right now.
Another advantage I can see is, if you have a server box, you can update, eg, your DES library, and have, eg, sshd take advantage of it right away, without having to restart it and kick off any users currently logged in.
Wow. What University is that, you didn't mention? We not only pay here, we don't have the choice of not paying, even if we have computers at home, and we happen to be students of, say, drama, who need a computer lab account to type the odd essay, if at all.
Worse off? what's wrong with delusion and fanaticism? I love my delusion and fanaticism, don't you enjoy yours?
Or are you a Windows user, with no silly delusions about computers being potentially useful or pleasant to work with?
But, Carbon is essentially a stepping stone to Cocoa, which is the real POSIX stuff, IIRC, and likely Apple intends to slowly supplant Carbon - it was introduced with OS 9, downloadable for OS 8.5 +. This presumably means that it doesn't use the full power of Mach, BSD, etc.
So, my (highly uninformed) guess is this will mean IE 6 for UNIX, since that will likely line up with Mac OS XI or 11 or whatever they decide to call it, which will be the one where they're really phasing out Carbon.
By that standard, it's not fair that you should actually have to learn to drive just to use a car....
I'm pretty impressed that Photoshop can be compiled to run on non-Altivec processors, but can still take advantage of G4s with a simple plug-in.
Or am I just being paranoid?
Ha ha ha! Sorry.
In the British Common Law, on which the U.S.A.'s and Canada's, and most other U.K. colonies' legal systems are based, it is perfectly legal for a judge or jury to refuse to convict for a crime if they believe that the law that was broken is unjust or unreasonable.
This is why, for example, the death penalty, a.k.a. deportation to Australia, ceased to be applied to minor crimes in Britain. Not because Parliament suddenly went all humane, but because juries all over the U.K. refused to convict anyone of theft, minor frauds, etc. Eventually, they forced the government to change the laws to something more reasonable. The same should be applicable in the U.S., what we need is better informed judges.
Now, here's a really crazy bit, applying in Canada, I don't know about the U.S. in this respect: While it is legal for juries to refuse to convict if they believe the law in question is inhumane, it is illegel for lawyers & judges to inform jurors of those rights. In other words, the ignorance of juries of the laws related to their execution of their sworn duties is entrenched in law.
Well, you use it to make your computer do things, so yes, when you run or write a script, that is part of "user interface", and as such, subject to improvement through, e.g., better documentation of scripting languages, the writing of languages that the average user can at lest easily get started with.
Efficiency and speed of use shouldn't be all in things you have to spend some time to learn. What I'm talking about is the little things not getting in your way. An example is Mac menus being always right up at the top of the monitor - you can't overshoot them, since you cursor won't dart through the top of the screen. This makes it that little bit quicker to open a menu. However, Mac doesn't take it far enough - the corners are the easiest to hit/hardest to overshoot parts of the screen real estate, but by default the Mac doesn't put anything useful in the corners of the screen. Essentially, the most commonly used things should be in the quickest places to reach.
Also, UI considerations should extend into what might seem like non-obvious places like the filesystem. I recently had a good laugh at an installer message in Windows NT that went something like, "For your convenience, the file VCVars32.bat has been placed in your bin directory."
"/etc/rc.d/" does not impart much information about the contents of the directory, whereas "System Folder:Startup Items:" is pretty straightforward. You know where to go looking when you don't like what your computer does at boot-time
Another non-obvious place to put UI stuff is in scripting languages. People talk about scripting like it's some sort of thing only for the very nerdy super-user, but there's no reason it should be. When I first decided I needed to write an Applescript, it took me all of fifteen minutes to learn. Granted, it's not a super-powerful language, but a relatively new user can do a heck of a lot with it.
A CLI is vital, as a built-in part of the interface. I suppose it's hardly necessary to mention that on Slashdot, but... A CLImay not be used by ninety five percent of users, but that other five percent shouldn't have to learn a dozen different different types of subtly different consoles. Here again I speak from a Mac user's perspective, obviously.