By having women participate, there is a possibility that they will bring in ideas that male centric project would not have had.
(GNOME is male centric?!)
Let's put together a "diverse" group: William F. Buckley, Jr., Margaret Thatcher, Alan Keyes, and Michelle Malkin. We should get a wide variety of opinions and ideas from such a diverse group, right? It includes men and women, and people of African and Asian descent.
The GNOME project can discriminate if it wishes. OTOH, I have the right to switch to another windowing environment if I am sufficiently disgusted with the actions of the GNOME project.
Interesting article; I'm reminded of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, and how Boskone had the same problem of management not wanting to hear bad news and underlings fearing the consequences of reporting truthfully.
I do wonder about Vista's being the largest software project; I'd always heard it was #5 ESS. Has it been dethroned?
You can thank proprietary software and hardware vendors for a couple of your problems. MP3 et al. are not open standards for encoding multimedia. nVidia refuses to give out sufficient information to allow open source drivers.
About scan rates: eh? It's been possible to tell X to go ask the monitor what its ranges of acceptable horizontal and vertical scan rates are for years.
You may wish to actually read the link. A summary in case you don't: the linked page gives the history of Clarus, the "dogcow," named when a stray dingbat character in one of the original Macintosh fonts provoked confusion about whether it depicted a dog or a cow.
There's a certain irony in a person unfamiliar with Clarus labeling a Mac user a "pretender."
Some would argue that the various instances of companies/countries threatening to switch to Linux and then getting hefty discounts from MS would be something similar. I wouldn't be among those, though; the price drops under discussion here will benefit anyone buying a computer, while I as an individual would be laughed out of the room were I to go to a store, stamp my foot, and say "Give me Windows XP for cheap or I'm switching to Linux!"
Ack. The "faith" of tentatively going along with the postulates of a logical system, or some weak version of induction (sorry, Mr. Hume), is very different from that of believing in a particular god or religion. The former can be repeatedly and independently confirmed to be useful; the latter, very notoriously, cannot. You're equivocating on "faith."
Here is a comparison of memory and CPU usage between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org office applications. This is with just the bare application and blank data file loaded.
I don't know about Mr. Ou, but I would be far more interested in how memory and CPU usage increases as a function of document size or complexity.
The success of a new operating system depends at least in part on how easy it is to install.
Not when you have a monopoly, so you can strong-arm the vendors into preinstalling it on the computers they sell--then the customer doesn't see how hard it is to install.
You're the one initiating the data transfer when you tell your browser to go to http://www.google.com/; you pay, just as the person sending a snail mail letter initiates the transfer, and hence pays the postage. Would you think it reasonable for the USPS to bill you as well as the sender for mail sent to you?
Check out this case of a telco blocking its DSL customers from vonage.com. Another example: in Canada, Shaw Communications is claiming its customers must pay a $10/month fee to get decent VoIP service... unless they use Shaw's VoIP service. That's the kind of thing we have to look forward to in the absence of net neutrality.
Besides, it's not like they are lying: the drivers allow you to use their hardware with Linux, what should it be called if not "Linux support"?
Can I use the hardware with Linux on ARM? MIPS? PowerPC? Do they guarantee feature and speed parity with Windows drivers? Will they continue to support the hardware, or, like ATI, will they only bother to support their most recent hardware?
Linux indeed showed that a monolithic kernel could do all that... but is it really true that just because HURD is impractical, all microkernel-based OSs are impractical?
From TFA: "Critics attack the iPod and iTunes as 'closed' and 'proprietary'...but..iTunes and the iPod work on Windows computers, not just Macs. So how is that closed?"
From The Blues Brothers: "We have both kinds o' music here—country and western!"
Found the first four on Ubuntu using synaptic and searching for "blind" and "gnopernicus" (OK, I remembered the name on that one); about a minute's worth of Googling turned up the URLs.
Now...that's not to say that those are perfect or meet everyone's needs; I wouldn't know, because I've never used them.
From TFA, it looks like the generic GIMP UI rant all over again; "[fill in blank] sucks, but I won't bother to tell you in particular what needs fixing." That's a great way to get the "code it yourself, then" response, but not particularly useful as far as getting what one wants.
You haven't met my sister. Fine person, certainly no dummy... but very hesitant to do anything with the computer. Just the sort of people MS is counting on to not mess with the default settings. (Fortunately for my sister, I've already switched her over to Ubuntu.)
"We're active in all 50 states, have more than 200,000 registered voters and more than 600 people in office, which is more than all other third parties combined."
I hope you feel better having ranted, but your invective is perhaps better directed elsewhere.
I think you have the Libertarian Party confused with the Green Party. To quote Wikipedia:
"Nader has run for President of the United States three times, in 1996 & 2000 as candidate for the Green Party (Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential nominee) and in 2004 as an independent with Peter Camejo as his V.P. nominee."
Given the amount of content that is available only in WMA format, that's rather like saying "breathe or don't -- you have a choice." Can you say "network effects"? Sure, I knew you could.
The names are just code names, for heaven's sake. If you don't like them, use the numbers already!
IMHO, there's nothing wrong with "Ubuntu," save for people who pronounce it/ooh-BUN-too/ instead of/ooh-BOON-too/. I'm far from politically correct, but I expect you'll have to get used to more non-Eurocentric names for programs and OSs as time goes on.
If they'd chosen a name in a language like Xhosa that required clicks to say properly, I'd say you have a point, but unless you're a native speaker of Hawaiian or Japanese, you can probably correctly say "Ubuntu."
For that matter, it's not like GNOME or KDE are making great name choices: ekiga? pessulus? sabayon? K[a-z]*?
I recall, back in the days when IBM was the enemy, being told by someone that his boss handed him a copy of the specs for a 360/370 clone and a copy of Principles of Operation and told to find some difference betweeen the two. I imagine that difference was written into a requirements specification so that only the IBM iron would satisfy it.
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By having women participate, there is a possibility that they will bring in ideas that male centric project would not have had.
(GNOME is male centric?!)
Let's put together a "diverse" group: William F. Buckley, Jr., Margaret Thatcher, Alan Keyes, and Michelle Malkin. We should get a wide variety of opinions and ideas from such a diverse group, right? It includes men and women, and people of African and Asian descent.
The GNOME project can discriminate if it wishes. OTOH, I have the right to switch to another windowing environment if I am sufficiently disgusted with the actions of the GNOME project.
Interesting article; I'm reminded of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, and how Boskone had the same problem of management not wanting to hear bad news and underlings fearing the consequences of reporting truthfully.
I do wonder about Vista's being the largest software project; I'd always heard it was #5 ESS. Has it been dethroned?
You can thank proprietary software and hardware vendors for a couple of your problems. MP3 et al. are not open standards for encoding multimedia. nVidia refuses to give out sufficient information to allow open source drivers.
About scan rates: eh? It's been possible to tell X to go ask the monitor what its ranges of acceptable horizontal and vertical scan rates are for years.
Were the Romans still around, Microsoft would replace Carthage in that phrase.
I'd like to think that OSS vendors and programmers recall the fate of those companies that thought they could deal with Microsoft.
You may wish to actually read the link. A summary in case you don't: the linked page gives the history of Clarus, the "dogcow," named when a stray dingbat character in one of the original Macintosh fonts provoked confusion about whether it depicted a dog or a cow.
There's a certain irony in a person unfamiliar with Clarus labeling a Mac user a "pretender."
And I guess MacSnobs wouldn't know Clarus from Claris.
Given the link you provide for Clarus, perhaps pretender is indeed the word of the day.
Some would argue that the various instances of companies/countries threatening to switch to Linux and then getting hefty discounts from MS would be something similar. I wouldn't be among those, though; the price drops under discussion here will benefit anyone buying a computer, while I as an individual would be laughed out of the room were I to go to a store, stamp my foot, and say "Give me Windows XP for cheap or I'm switching to Linux!"
Ack. The "faith" of tentatively going along with the postulates of a logical system, or some weak version of induction (sorry, Mr. Hume), is very different from that of believing in a particular god or religion. The former can be repeatedly and independently confirmed to be useful; the latter, very notoriously, cannot. You're equivocating on "faith."
Here's a crazy thought. How about allowing each user to choose which way they want to see it.
YES! That would be most excellent.
(Mmmmmmm... Slashdot Zen Garden...)
Here is a comparison of memory and CPU usage between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org office applications. This is with just the bare application and blank data file loaded.
I don't know about Mr. Ou, but I would be far more interested in how memory and CPU usage increases as a function of document size or complexity.
The success of a new operating system depends at least in part on how easy it is to install.
Not when you have a monopoly, so you can strong-arm the vendors into preinstalling it on the computers they sell--then the customer doesn't see how hard it is to install.
You're the one initiating the data transfer when you tell your browser to go to http://www.google.com/; you pay, just as the person sending a snail mail letter initiates the transfer, and hence pays the postage. Would you think it reasonable for the USPS to bill you as well as the sender for mail sent to you?
Check out this case of a telco blocking its DSL customers from vonage.com. Another example: in Canada, Shaw Communications is claiming its customers must pay a $10/month fee to get decent VoIP service... unless they use Shaw's VoIP service. That's the kind of thing we have to look forward to in the absence of net neutrality.
Besides, it's not like they are lying: the drivers allow you to use their hardware with Linux, what should it be called if not "Linux support"?
Can I use the hardware with Linux on ARM? MIPS? PowerPC? Do they guarantee feature and speed parity with Windows drivers? Will they continue to support the hardware, or, like ATI, will they only bother to support their most recent hardware?
At best it's monogluteal Linux support.
Linux indeed showed that a monolithic kernel could do all that... but is it really true that just because HURD is impractical, all microkernel-based OSs are impractical?
From TFA: "Critics attack the iPod and iTunes as 'closed' and 'proprietary'...but..iTunes and the iPod work on Windows computers, not just Macs. So how is that closed?"
From The Blues Brothers: "We have both kinds o' music here—country and western!"
No kidding. I thought they were doing a TV series based on David Kahn's classic book about codes and ciphers.
Not to pick on the parent poster, but for those interested...
gnopernicus
the GNOME Accessibility Project
britty (sorry, couldn't find a web site for it)
speechd-el for emacs users
the KDE Accessibility Project (to be ecumenical)
the Mozilla Accessibility Project
Found the first four on Ubuntu using synaptic and searching for "blind" and "gnopernicus" (OK, I remembered the name on that one); about a minute's worth of Googling turned up the URLs.
Now...that's not to say that those are perfect or meet everyone's needs; I wouldn't know, because I've never used them.
From TFA, it looks like the generic GIMP UI rant all over again; "[fill in blank] sucks, but I won't bother to tell you in particular what needs fixing." That's a great way to get the "code it yourself, then" response, but not particularly useful as far as getting what one wants.
You haven't met my sister. Fine person, certainly no dummy... but very hesitant to do anything with the computer. Just the sort of people MS is counting on to not mess with the default settings. (Fortunately for my sister, I've already switched her over to Ubuntu.)
From the Libertarian Party FAQ:
"We're active in all 50 states, have more than 200,000 registered voters and more than 600 people in office, which is more than all other third parties combined."
I hope you feel better having ranted, but your invective is perhaps better directed elsewhere.
I think you have the Libertarian Party confused with the Green Party. To quote Wikipedia:
"Nader has run for President of the United States three times, in 1996 & 2000 as candidate for the Green Party (Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential nominee) and in 2004 as an independent with Peter Camejo as his V.P. nominee."
...don't you want to take the people behind CSI and just hang them by their thumbnails?
Only until they tell me the secret of infinite-resolution photography.
"use Media Player or don't -- you have a choice."
Given the amount of content that is available only in WMA format, that's rather like saying "breathe or don't -- you have a choice." Can you say "network effects"? Sure, I knew you could.
The names are just code names, for heaven's sake. If you don't like them, use the numbers already!
/ooh-BUN-too/ instead of /ooh-BOON-too/. I'm far from politically correct, but I expect you'll have to get used to more non-Eurocentric names for programs and OSs as time goes on.
IMHO, there's nothing wrong with "Ubuntu," save for people who pronounce it
If they'd chosen a name in a language like Xhosa that required clicks to say properly, I'd say you have a point, but unless you're a native speaker of Hawaiian or Japanese, you can probably correctly say "Ubuntu."
For that matter, it's not like GNOME or KDE are making great name choices: ekiga? pessulus? sabayon? K[a-z]*?
You might want to look at this article about Espresso, the GUI installer that one runs from the Dapper Drake Ubuntu Live CD.
...requirements.
I recall, back in the days when IBM was the enemy, being told by someone that his boss handed him a copy of the specs for a 360/370 clone and a copy of Principles of Operation and told to find some difference betweeen the two. I imagine that difference was written into a requirements specification so that only the IBM iron would satisfy it.