You don't have any high voltage available outside the power supply, which is self-contained. Most power supplies are difficult to open while they're installed, and you usually unplug them to uninstall them. Computers are probably the safest electric appliances you could tinker with while they're plugged in.
The most you have to worry about is the 12V lines. I've worked on more open machines than I can remember and I've never had a shock (not counting static). There's a lot more danger of the kid frying components with static electricity than shocking himself with 120V (or whatever you use where you are).
I hunt-and-pecked from the age of 7 on a Commodore 64 and an Atari 800 (I loved the 800's keyboard). I took a typing class in high school (using actual typewriters) and had no trouble picking up touch-typing.
Besides, look at piano lessons - they don't put 7-year-olds on Schroeder-sized pianos. The kids adjust as their hands grow.
Why is is that/. doesn't post stories of the 3,000 other scientific articles that suggest that Mars really was quite wet??!!
The same reason the news doesn't announce that the sun comes up. Everyone knows about the evidence for water on Mars. This is interesting because someone came up with an alternate source for the clay formation that doesn't require water.
Clearly there was once liquid water on Mars.... and a lot of it.
Well, yes, there's a lot of evidence to support that, but this paper says the presence of clay soil doesn't necessarily count as evidence of water. No one's saying that there wasn't water on Mars - they're just saying you can't count the clay as evidence for a wet Mars.
Any civilization that old would have left nothing to show its existance. Even the pyramids won't last that long.
A biosphere, however, leaves its mark on a world. You'd be able to tell easily if Mars or Venus was habitable by humans duing the time homo sapiens has existed.
There's tons of energy on the moon, if you're using solar and temperature differential sources.
As far as getting your spaceship off the moon, you throw it, although you'd probably throw individual modules and assemble them in orbit. Fueling the spacecraft would be more complicated, but hey, it's a lot cheaper to launch a few tanks of rocket fuel into space from Earth than a whole spaceship.
I did read the whole section. He said a whole lot of words and zero substance, other than that Obama's tactics were ineffective.
He gives the same old, "get rid of the regulators, invest in research" stuff we always hear. And that's fine, but that's pretty much what's been going on already, and it's not enough.
As far as the argument about China goes, it doesn't apply to energy policy (at least with reguards to electricity generation). You aren't going to run power lines from China. I get my electricity from coal. OG&E isn't going to stop generating my electricity with coal unless they have a very good reason to do so - and really, they shouldn't have to. Stopping them from building new coal plants is the ideal solution, but Romney doesn't seem willing and Obama doesn't seem able to stop that.
A good chunk of the Okies ended up in California doing migrant labor (both sides of my family were involved in that, so no, I'm not just basing it off of The Grapes of Wrath). If they hadn't been there, then they probably would have just had Mexican migrant labor doing it, so there wasn't really any advantage from the Okie influx.
There was a major disadvantage - Oklahoma had just acheived statehood some 30-40 years before the dust bowl. Towns were growing, and new businesses were being built up. A lot of that went away when farms failed, and there's a lot of ghost towns out that way. I've noticed a marked difference in western Oklahoma in my lifetime - it's still recovering. Had the dust bowl not happened, Oklahoma would have probably fared the depression fairly well.
The part of the line on the earth is essentially orbiting geosynchronously at sea level, so it tries to fall to the ground. The other end of the line is way out past geosynchronous orbit, so it's trying to escape Earth's gravity. The two balance each other out, but there's a lot of tension in the middle.
Woodie wagons cost more than other cars of the time, and most people who know of them today associate them with the '60s surfer craze. They were never associated with any particular race, other than Frankie Avalon-type surfer dudes.
Go mudding. Coat the entire lower 2' of your car in mud (including the license plate) and the cameras can't track you by license number.
I used to do this in my youth when my tag expired - worked like a charm.
Granted, if you drive a dinky sedan, you might bring some buddies along to push you out of the mud once you get stuck:) A 6-pack of beer can usually hire you a guy with a tow chain.
Interesting that Romney actually states that he believes global warming is both occurring and partly due to human activity. That's a pretty big change from the standard Republican line. (Of course, he also says that he'll essentially do nothing about it, since China is worse than us and he doesn't want to threaten the coal industry...)
It does make me wonder though - Romney mentions putting more into nuclear power, but Obama doesn't mention it. Considering that Obama removed a lot of the red tape preventing nuclear plants being approved, you'd think he'd at least mention it considering that energy policy is a fairly big issue. It makes me wonder if Fukishima has changed the Democratic party line on nuclear power.
Just once though, I'd like to see some politicians give some straight answers instead of treating everything like a campaign ad. Their answers have a lot of words, but very little meaning.
Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare.
That's true for a few applications, like office products and the like. Linux seems to have gotten those just fine without the unified desktop environment you keep going on about.
Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.
Netscape (and then later AOL) did host and direct early development on the Mozilla team, it's true. That lasted what, maybe two years? Most of that time was spent throwing out the codebase Netscape provided and starting from scratch. Firefox is self-funding now.
Firefox broke the IE monopoly because IE was a horrible, bug-ridden piece of crap. Website authors hated it because it never moved ahead with the standards. Sysadmins hated it because every week another worm targeted it. Users hated how their machines would fill up with spyware, and the people they had fix their machines would reccomend Firefox.
Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing.
I'm sure the LibreOffice people would be surprised to learn that it's no longer advancing. Seems to me that the lack of advancement under the OpenOffice.org name was due to Oracle's mismanagement. Volunteers kept improving it, hence LibreOffice.
KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.
Permanent funding doesn't exist, unless you have a very strong lobby group and some money to throw at the politicians.
The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.
Um, no.
Ask developers why they work on Linux. I doubt more than 5% would even mention LAMP. They work on it because they want to.
There are some developers who work for companies like IBM who do, yes, primarily work on it because of LAMP. Those are the minority.
That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues.
Look and feel is important for impressing the suits. Everyone else just uses whatever works.
Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding.
Cut and paste got figured out a long time ago, as far as GNOME->KDE goes. OLE is a nice dream, but let's face it; 1% of people actually use it. Generally what gets linked is data, not an application, and data generally has tools to work with it on both the GNOME and KDE sides of the fence.
The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well.
GNOME isn't aggressive. It's included in distributions by the distributors' choice. Obviously, the distributors had reasons for choosing GNOME over KDE.
For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.
Yeah, except the KDE team chose a non-free widget kit that they didn't have any control over. KDE couldn't get control over QT, because it was proprietary software owned by TrollTech. Yes, eventually an exemption was made, and nowdays QT is pretty much free, but it took a very long time for that to happen.
Personally I thought at the time and still do that people cr
I think you are forgetting the United Linux initiative and the players involved.
Yes, I did forget about them. Not that it changes anything.
This could have been a standard (at least for enterprise Linux).
No, it couldn't. Look up OSF/1 for a good example of why. Good operating systems aren't created that way.
Had Gnome not happened then the Sun / RedHat push towards standardization: RedHat, Java Desktop, Progeny Linux and UserLinux... never happens and thus Ubuntu's adoption of Gnome never happens.
Had the sky rained caramel coating we'd all be a sundae.
Debian legal's issues with KDE / QT are real but I think they get resolved.
They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.
Gnome was a gross overreaction to a license mess.
No, it wasn't. There was no DE at the time which met free software guidelines. OpenLook was never fully implemented in free software (and was considered obsolete by many) and CDE was strictly commercial and wasn't even free as in beer. KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).
To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.
This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter? It's free software, and you can use what you want. Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.
Yup, good ol' Miguel and his love of free software which has prevented fragmentation by backing up a sure winner (*cough*KDE*cough*)
Two points: 1) KDE has never been the clear winner. Before GNOME, it had license incompatabilities. By the time those were resolved, the differences in functionality and acceptance made either desktop a viable option. 2) Preventing fragmentation was never a goal of the GNOME project. Why should it be? Most people don't see fragmentation as a problem.
instead of slinging mud to satisfy his ego and not doing the "not-invented-here" trick... NOT!!
I don't remember him slinging mud, but it has been quite a few years since I paid attention to GNOME development, so I'll take your word on it. The "not invented here" crap has been flung by both sides, mostly by people who didn't know what they were talking about.
He's a traitor to the cause.
Cause? Seriously? Dude, it's software. I can understand RMS' cause, since he's concerned with the rights of developers and users, but your "cause" is simply wanting everyone to use the same desktop environment. That's not a cause, that's fanboyism.
Batch computing is still done, sure - no one is denying that. I would imagine that you're right that the absolute amount of batch processing has increased over the years, simply because computing is so much cheaper and ubiquitous. But it is obscure when you consider how many people who use computers actually understand what the term means.
A large company probably does its billing, mass mailing, and payroll by batch, but smaller companies generally use off the shelf software to accomplish pretty much everything. Scientific simulations and data crunching that once would have run via batch jobs are more often being done interactively - it's easier to change parameters and set up new data that way, and computers have enough power that interactive use is feasible for all but the largest data sets. Computers are simply more powerful and software is more flexible than it was in the days when batch was king. Also, you have to consider that most people using computers are not computer professionals - they're regular workers who just happen to use a computer to do their jobs. I would expect any tech worth his salt to understand the term, but certainly not a secretary, architect, or accountant.
I would certainly describe batch processing as obscure. Not extinct, certainly, but obscure nonetheless.
I'd agree, except this is Miguel de Icaza. He's not just some douchebag tech journalist or OS X shill - he was the top guy in GNOME development for ages, and is partially responsible for the lack of backwards compatability he mentions. He also headed the mono project to bring.NET compatability to UNIX.
I don't agree with his conclusion, but the guy has been involved in free software UI work for ages. His opinion should be taken into consideration.
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
Rocks in space.
Seriously, look at the price of titanium on earth - about $7 US per kg for commodity ferro titanium. Look at the price of titanium in low earth orbit - according to Wikipedia, it costs about $4300 US per kg using a Proton rocket (the cheapest non-subsidized launch method listed). There's quite a lot of titanium on the Moon, as well as aluminum, iron, and magnesium.
That's why we want to mine asteroids and the Moon - getting material out of the Moon's gravity well is a lot easier than getting it out of Earth's gravity well (and of course asteroids generally don't have an appreciable gravity well).
If we want a space station that's more than just a few tin cans glued together and can protect its inhabitants from radiation, we need building materials. We can get many of those materials from the Moon. We'd have to learn how to process and smelt them there first, of course, but you have to start somewhere.
He3? Well, maybe later. You don't build a gas station before the invention of combution engines. Water is more valuable, if it can be collected in any serious amount, which we still don't know.
That said, I have my doubts that anyone could put a space elevator on the moon in 8 years. It's just not going to happen. The design phase would take at least half that time.
"Batch processing" is not mostly unheard of. It still exists as an important component of all modern operating systems.
I would imagine the percentage of computer users in 1960 who were familiar with batch processing is much higher than the percentage of computer users who are famiiar with it now.
Touchscreen based computers appear to be good for people that barely ever bother to change the settings of the program they use. While I could never imagine myself in this category, I understand the need and I think that it's an interesting step.
Touchscreens were, until the advent of the PDA and cell phone, relegated to specialized computing. The ATM at my bank is a perfect example, or the fuel kiosk at Pilot truck stops you can use to print fuel receipts and track your points. They're popular on PDAs and cell phones because small keyboards are difficult to use and pointing devices such as trackballs are slow.
On topic: I have no idea what you mean with skeumorphic GUIs, but either they are a useless fad or they can work side by side to other forms of UIs. Nothing will replace anything.
It means a GUI that looks like a real world object. Think of how winamp tries to look like a stereo, or how Windows displays directories as "folders". In some cases (like the folders), it's done to help new users understand concepts like hierarchal data structures. In others (winamp, ical, pretty much any sound effect program, etc.) it's done to look cool*. As far as not replacing anything, there was a while where you had a very hard time finding mp3 playing software that used regular widgets.
It's becoming a lot more common with cell phones these days.
It seems to resonate a lot more with US citizens, of which I'm not.
Ah, OK. I assumed you were in the U.S. because that's where a lot of anti-socialist propaganda has been flowing lately. Anyone commenting on socialism in the context of the U.S. should be familiar with McCarthy and the effects he and people like him have had on the political landscape here.
3 - that socialism hasn't changed at all, or not significantly.
Fair enough. I don't agree, but whatever. That wasn't exactly clear by the context, which was some guy confusing Nazis with socialists.
And that modern socialists would prefer to deny their history, possibly for good reasons.
Sure. Nobody's proud of Stalin or the Khmer Rouge. You think the right like hearing about Fascism, Pinkerton's, or the abuses of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries?
And that I'm not really interested in all the neo this and neo that labels that are thrown around in an attempt to obfuscate meaning.
Oh, come on - that was an easy one! You should have gotten that by context, if Joseph McCarthy didn't spring to mind. Wikipedia describes McCarthyism as "the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence," which is pretty spot-on for what I was meaning. If you weren't aware of McCarthy and the Anti-American Activities Committe, then you've got no grounds making claims about socialist history.
Or perhaps it means today's socialists are as busy re-writing history as the Nazi movement was.
Exactly what are you inferring here? That the Nazis were socialists and modern socialists have covered that up somehow, or that socialism itself has changed from a Nazi-esque system to the current one?
If it's the first, than congratuations, you're as nutty as moon landing deniers.
If it's the second, then you're just wrong, and that can be backed up by historical first hand sources. Socialism has changed, but it was never like the Nazi system.
Want to see what old time socialism was about? Read Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward. It's fairly short and public domain. And of course you can look up the Communist Manifesto, although be warned that while those on the right tend to describe all socialism as communism (communism is just one type of socialism). Want to learn about modern socialism? Examine the way Scandinavia does it, since they're usually used as the best example. Want something a bit more extreme? Look at China, with their market communism, or Cuba.
Or, you can always just believe what all the Neo-McCarthyists tell you (socialists eat your babies!) and live in ignorance. Your choice.
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You don't have any high voltage available outside the power supply, which is self-contained. Most power supplies are difficult to open while they're installed, and you usually unplug them to uninstall them. Computers are probably the safest electric appliances you could tinker with while they're plugged in.
The most you have to worry about is the 12V lines. I've worked on more open machines than I can remember and I've never had a shock (not counting static). There's a lot more danger of the kid frying components with static electricity than shocking himself with 120V (or whatever you use where you are).
I doubt that's necessary.
I hunt-and-pecked from the age of 7 on a Commodore 64 and an Atari 800 (I loved the 800's keyboard). I took a typing class in high school (using actual typewriters) and had no trouble picking up touch-typing.
Besides, look at piano lessons - they don't put 7-year-olds on Schroeder-sized pianos. The kids adjust as their hands grow.
Why is is that /. doesn't post stories of the 3,000 other scientific articles that suggest that Mars really was quite wet??!!
The same reason the news doesn't announce that the sun comes up. Everyone knows about the evidence for water on Mars. This is interesting because someone came up with an alternate source for the clay formation that doesn't require water.
Clearly there was once liquid water on Mars.... and a lot of it.
Well, yes, there's a lot of evidence to support that, but this paper says the presence of clay soil doesn't necessarily count as evidence of water. No one's saying that there wasn't water on Mars - they're just saying you can't count the clay as evidence for a wet Mars.
Any civilization that old would have left nothing to show its existance. Even the pyramids won't last that long.
A biosphere, however, leaves its mark on a world. You'd be able to tell easily if Mars or Venus was habitable by humans duing the time homo sapiens has existed.
There's tons of energy on the moon, if you're using solar and temperature differential sources.
As far as getting your spaceship off the moon, you throw it, although you'd probably throw individual modules and assemble them in orbit. Fueling the spacecraft would be more complicated, but hey, it's a lot cheaper to launch a few tanks of rocket fuel into space from Earth than a whole spaceship.
I did read the whole section. He said a whole lot of words and zero substance, other than that Obama's tactics were ineffective.
He gives the same old, "get rid of the regulators, invest in research" stuff we always hear. And that's fine, but that's pretty much what's been going on already, and it's not enough.
As far as the argument about China goes, it doesn't apply to energy policy (at least with reguards to electricity generation). You aren't going to run power lines from China. I get my electricity from coal. OG&E isn't going to stop generating my electricity with coal unless they have a very good reason to do so - and really, they shouldn't have to. Stopping them from building new coal plants is the ideal solution, but Romney doesn't seem willing and Obama doesn't seem able to stop that.
Has anybody told Sen. Inhofe that?
That fucker's my senator. Sometimes I wish there was a hell, just so that elitist holier-than-thou asshole could go there.
A good chunk of the Okies ended up in California doing migrant labor (both sides of my family were involved in that, so no, I'm not just basing it off of The Grapes of Wrath). If they hadn't been there, then they probably would have just had Mexican migrant labor doing it, so there wasn't really any advantage from the Okie influx.
There was a major disadvantage - Oklahoma had just acheived statehood some 30-40 years before the dust bowl. Towns were growing, and new businesses were being built up. A lot of that went away when farms failed, and there's a lot of ghost towns out that way. I've noticed a marked difference in western Oklahoma in my lifetime - it's still recovering. Had the dust bowl not happened, Oklahoma would have probably fared the depression fairly well.
The line isn't at rest - it's orbiting the earth.
The part of the line on the earth is essentially orbiting geosynchronously at sea level, so it tries to fall to the ground. The other end of the line is way out past geosynchronous orbit, so it's trying to escape Earth's gravity. The two balance each other out, but there's a lot of tension in the middle.
How, exactly?
Woodie wagons cost more than other cars of the time, and most people who know of them today associate them with the '60s surfer craze. They were never associated with any particular race, other than Frankie Avalon-type surfer dudes.
Easy way around that:
Go mudding. Coat the entire lower 2' of your car in mud (including the license plate) and the cameras can't track you by license number.
I used to do this in my youth when my tag expired - worked like a charm.
Granted, if you drive a dinky sedan, you might bring some buddies along to push you out of the mud once you get stuck :) A 6-pack of beer can usually hire you a guy with a tow chain.
Interesting that Romney actually states that he believes global warming is both occurring and partly due to human activity. That's a pretty big change from the standard Republican line. (Of course, he also says that he'll essentially do nothing about it, since China is worse than us and he doesn't want to threaten the coal industry...)
It does make me wonder though - Romney mentions putting more into nuclear power, but Obama doesn't mention it. Considering that Obama removed a lot of the red tape preventing nuclear plants being approved, you'd think he'd at least mention it considering that energy policy is a fairly big issue. It makes me wonder if Fukishima has changed the Democratic party line on nuclear power.
Just once though, I'd like to see some politicians give some straight answers instead of treating everything like a campaign ad. Their answers have a lot of words, but very little meaning.
There is a reason why companies pay people to do tech support. It sucks, users are clueless and abusive, and you end up hating everybody.
I know, I did tech support for a machine running Windows 95. It's amazing I didn't go around stabbing people.
You can get support for Linux if you need it, but you have to either a) be polite and patient and ask in the right place or b) pay for it.
Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare.
That's true for a few applications, like office products and the like. Linux seems to have gotten those just fine without the unified desktop environment you keep going on about.
Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.
Netscape (and then later AOL) did host and direct early development on the Mozilla team, it's true. That lasted what, maybe two years? Most of that time was spent throwing out the codebase Netscape provided and starting from scratch. Firefox is self-funding now.
Firefox broke the IE monopoly because IE was a horrible, bug-ridden piece of crap. Website authors hated it because it never moved ahead with the standards. Sysadmins hated it because every week another worm targeted it. Users hated how their machines would fill up with spyware, and the people they had fix their machines would reccomend Firefox.
Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing.
I'm sure the LibreOffice people would be surprised to learn that it's no longer advancing. Seems to me that the lack of advancement under the OpenOffice.org name was due to Oracle's mismanagement. Volunteers kept improving it, hence LibreOffice.
KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.
Permanent funding doesn't exist, unless you have a very strong lobby group and some money to throw at the politicians.
The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.
Um, no.
Ask developers why they work on Linux. I doubt more than 5% would even mention LAMP. They work on it because they want to.
There are some developers who work for companies like IBM who do, yes, primarily work on it because of LAMP. Those are the minority.
That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues.
Look and feel is important for impressing the suits. Everyone else just uses whatever works.
Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding.
Cut and paste got figured out a long time ago, as far as GNOME->KDE goes. OLE is a nice dream, but let's face it; 1% of people actually use it. Generally what gets linked is data, not an application, and data generally has tools to work with it on both the GNOME and KDE sides of the fence.
The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well.
GNOME isn't aggressive. It's included in distributions by the distributors' choice. Obviously, the distributors had reasons for choosing GNOME over KDE.
For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.
Yeah, except the KDE team chose a non-free widget kit that they didn't have any control over. KDE couldn't get control over QT, because it was proprietary software owned by TrollTech. Yes, eventually an exemption was made, and nowdays QT is pretty much free, but it took a very long time for that to happen.
Personally I thought at the time and still do that people cr
I think you are forgetting the United Linux initiative and the players involved.
Yes, I did forget about them. Not that it changes anything.
This could have been a standard (at least for enterprise Linux).
No, it couldn't. Look up OSF/1 for a good example of why. Good operating systems aren't created that way.
Had Gnome not happened then the Sun / RedHat push towards standardization: RedHat, Java Desktop, Progeny Linux and UserLinux... never happens and thus Ubuntu's adoption of Gnome never happens.
Had the sky rained caramel coating we'd all be a sundae.
Debian legal's issues with KDE / QT are real but I think they get resolved.
They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.
Gnome was a gross overreaction to a license mess.
No, it wasn't. There was no DE at the time which met free software guidelines. OpenLook was never fully implemented in free software (and was considered obsolete by many) and CDE was strictly commercial and wasn't even free as in beer. KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).
To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.
This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter? It's free software, and you can use what you want. Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.
Yup, good ol' Miguel and his love of free software which has prevented fragmentation by backing up a sure winner (*cough*KDE*cough*)
Two points:
1) KDE has never been the clear winner. Before GNOME, it had license incompatabilities. By the time those were resolved, the differences in functionality and acceptance made either desktop a viable option.
2) Preventing fragmentation was never a goal of the GNOME project. Why should it be? Most people don't see fragmentation as a problem.
instead of slinging mud to satisfy his ego and not doing the "not-invented-here" trick... NOT!!
I don't remember him slinging mud, but it has been quite a few years since I paid attention to GNOME development, so I'll take your word on it. The "not invented here" crap has been flung by both sides, mostly by people who didn't know what they were talking about.
He's a traitor to the cause.
Cause? Seriously? Dude, it's software. I can understand RMS' cause, since he's concerned with the rights of developers and users, but your "cause" is simply wanting everyone to use the same desktop environment. That's not a cause, that's fanboyism.
Go out and get some fresh air.
Batch computing is still done, sure - no one is denying that. I would imagine that you're right that the absolute amount of batch processing has increased over the years, simply because computing is so much cheaper and ubiquitous. But it is obscure when you consider how many people who use computers actually understand what the term means.
A large company probably does its billing, mass mailing, and payroll by batch, but smaller companies generally use off the shelf software to accomplish pretty much everything. Scientific simulations and data crunching that once would have run via batch jobs are more often being done interactively - it's easier to change parameters and set up new data that way, and computers have enough power that interactive use is feasible for all but the largest data sets. Computers are simply more powerful and software is more flexible than it was in the days when batch was king. Also, you have to consider that most people using computers are not computer professionals - they're regular workers who just happen to use a computer to do their jobs. I would expect any tech worth his salt to understand the term, but certainly not a secretary, architect, or accountant.
I would certainly describe batch processing as obscure. Not extinct, certainly, but obscure nonetheless.
I'd agree, except this is Miguel de Icaza. He's not just some douchebag tech journalist or OS X shill - he was the top guy in GNOME development for ages, and is partially responsible for the lack of backwards compatability he mentions. He also headed the mono project to bring .NET compatability to UNIX.
I don't agree with his conclusion, but the guy has been involved in free software UI work for ages. His opinion should be taken into consideration.
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
Rocks in space.
Seriously, look at the price of titanium on earth - about $7 US per kg for commodity ferro titanium. Look at the price of titanium in low earth orbit - according to Wikipedia, it costs about $4300 US per kg using a Proton rocket (the cheapest non-subsidized launch method listed). There's quite a lot of titanium on the Moon, as well as aluminum, iron, and magnesium.
That's why we want to mine asteroids and the Moon - getting material out of the Moon's gravity well is a lot easier than getting it out of Earth's gravity well (and of course asteroids generally don't have an appreciable gravity well).
If we want a space station that's more than just a few tin cans glued together and can protect its inhabitants from radiation, we need building materials. We can get many of those materials from the Moon. We'd have to learn how to process and smelt them there first, of course, but you have to start somewhere.
He3? Well, maybe later. You don't build a gas station before the invention of combution engines. Water is more valuable, if it can be collected in any serious amount, which we still don't know.
That said, I have my doubts that anyone could put a space elevator on the moon in 8 years. It's just not going to happen. The design phase would take at least half that time.
IN short, I have studied this, and IO will destroy you with actual science and facts.
Wait, do you mean you've studied astronomy or Greek mythology?
"Batch processing" is not mostly unheard of. It still exists as an important component of all modern operating systems.
I would imagine the percentage of computer users in 1960 who were familiar with batch processing is much higher than the percentage of computer users who are famiiar with it now.
Touchscreen based computers appear to be good for people that barely ever bother to change the settings of the program they use. While I could never imagine myself in this category, I understand the need and I think that it's an interesting step.
Touchscreens were, until the advent of the PDA and cell phone, relegated to specialized computing. The ATM at my bank is a perfect example, or the fuel kiosk at Pilot truck stops you can use to print fuel receipts and track your points. They're popular on PDAs and cell phones because small keyboards are difficult to use and pointing devices such as trackballs are slow.
On topic: I have no idea what you mean with skeumorphic GUIs, but either they are a useless fad or they can work side by side to other forms of UIs. Nothing will replace anything.
It means a GUI that looks like a real world object. Think of how winamp tries to look like a stereo, or how Windows displays directories as "folders". In some cases (like the folders), it's done to help new users understand concepts like hierarchal data structures. In others (winamp, ical, pretty much any sound effect program, etc.) it's done to look cool*. As far as not replacing anything, there was a while where you had a very hard time finding mp3 playing software that used regular widgets.
It's becoming a lot more common with cell phones these days.
* It usually doesn't.
It seems to resonate a lot more with US citizens, of which I'm not.
Ah, OK. I assumed you were in the U.S. because that's where a lot of anti-socialist propaganda has been flowing lately. Anyone commenting on socialism in the context of the U.S. should be familiar with McCarthy and the effects he and people like him have had on the political landscape here.
3 - that socialism hasn't changed at all, or not significantly.
Fair enough. I don't agree, but whatever. That wasn't exactly clear by the context, which was some guy confusing Nazis with socialists.
And that modern socialists would prefer to deny their history, possibly for good reasons.
Sure. Nobody's proud of Stalin or the Khmer Rouge. You think the right like hearing about Fascism, Pinkerton's, or the abuses of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries?
And that I'm not really interested in all the neo this and neo that labels that are thrown around in an attempt to obfuscate meaning.
Oh, come on - that was an easy one! You should have gotten that by context, if Joseph McCarthy didn't spring to mind. Wikipedia describes McCarthyism as "the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence," which is pretty spot-on for what I was meaning. If you weren't aware of McCarthy and the Anti-American Activities Committe, then you've got no grounds making claims about socialist history.
Or perhaps it means today's socialists are as busy re-writing history as the Nazi movement was.
Exactly what are you inferring here? That the Nazis were socialists and modern socialists have covered that up somehow, or that socialism itself has changed from a Nazi-esque system to the current one?
If it's the first, than congratuations, you're as nutty as moon landing deniers.
If it's the second, then you're just wrong, and that can be backed up by historical first hand sources. Socialism has changed, but it was never like the Nazi system.
Want to see what old time socialism was about? Read Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward. It's fairly short and public domain. And of course you can look up the Communist Manifesto, although be warned that while those on the right tend to describe all socialism as communism (communism is just one type of socialism). Want to learn about modern socialism? Examine the way Scandinavia does it, since they're usually used as the best example. Want something a bit more extreme? Look at China, with their market communism, or Cuba.
Or, you can always just believe what all the Neo-McCarthyists tell you (socialists eat your babies!) and live in ignorance. Your choice.
Yes, by definition. Just like Venus is full of Venus.