But the apps I actually use are, say, OOo, Mozilla, emacs, xpdf, GAIM (hey, that's Gnome, isn't it?), eboard, Scid, mplayer, some mp3/ogg player... and a bunch of development stuff. That's about it. A lot of terminal windows, too.
Those are fine, I don't really see the point of switching to similar-but-probably-inferior apps that do similar things but that happen to be part of Gnome (or KDE).
Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.
That 10% that you're thinking of (window management, applet baubles, desktop layout, file management, changing the root background, etc.) is nice, but if you still have to have all of Gnome around for the important parts (the applications that integrate with the desktop), what exactly is the point.
Do people actually use that 90% part though? I've been using Gnome for years, but all I use it for is a bar with a few easy to click icons on the top, and system monitor and workspace switcher applets.
What applications are there that 'integrate with the desktop'? That's a serious question, I don't think I've ever used any. That Xfce thing sounds pretty much OK to me (except that Gnome does everything I need, even if that's only 10% of what Gnome does).
Yes, it is infringing, but as far as I know, if you didn't know about it, get informed and immediately change your code, you are liable for much less damage (if any) than in the case where you did know about the patent.
Which is the point that the poster x posts up was making (and which Linus Torvalds, for instance, has also made - he doesn't want to know about specific patents).
You need to get through technology development as quickly as possible. If you disagree with this statement, you care about something else besides finishing your game.
Of course we care about something else - it's a hobby project, isn't it? Having fun is more important. And the technology development is the best part! Who cares about finishing this stuff, that's work.
If you think Google is going to grow to be a $30 billion company in the next decade, then it is a very good investment.
Now it's not. For it to be worth $30 billion at the moment, it should be worth $30 billion now. If it grows to that size in ten years, you have a profit of 0% over ten years, which is miserable.
Every time someone asks me for advice on buying a computer, I ask "do you want to play games?", and if the answer is no then my answer is "buy the slowest CPU model they sell and spend any extra money on RAM".
Another good thing to spend the extra money on is monitor, keyboard, mouse - the things you actually interact with. I've seen people pay through the nose for the absolute latest Pentium, then buy a shitty mouse with it...
These are things you look at and touch all the time when using the computer, improving them improves your whole experience a lot.
There are litterally tens of thousands of albums in-store, but you only get to hear a dozen of the latest, most overhyped teen pukes.
That's interesting, I never realized that. In the Netherlands it's perfectly normal in a CD store to ask at the counter if you can listen to a CD, then they put it in a CD player for you and you can use some headphones to listen to it. There are some big department stores that do have a few CDs, and it's probably not possible there, but then nobody buys CDs there...
And, reading through those comments, that wasn't the first time either... That's actually what I thought, but I couldn't find the link to the even older article quick enough.
I'd much rather have a few gadgets which do their job excellently than one which does several jobs in a slip-shod manner.
I'm the opposite. I can handle carrying one cell-phone size gadget with me at all times. Two, and it becomes annoying. Right pants pocket is for the phone, left pocket is for my keys, I don't want to lug around more stuff all day.
I haven't got a camera yet, but I would like to have one at some point, make some pictures for on the web or something. I won't need great quality.
So I could pay hundred euro for a camera, or I wait until I upgrade my phone some time next year, and at that time there will be phones with around 1 megapixel, which should be plenty. And then I have the benefit of having my camera with me at all times, which sounds like fun.
Same for PDAs. I've been working a bit with the book "Getting Things Done", getting a bit more organized, it's working well for me. To do it right, I should really carry something with me where I can look at action lists etc at all times. A PDA would work fine. But there's no way I'm going to carry around a PDA at all times while I'm also already carrying a phone. So I'll wait until I can get them in a single gadget.
For my yankee edification, please explain how pot is regulated and taxed.
The current laws are pretty absurd, because we can't really legalize it 100% without getting into trouble with many other countries, so we have a half-assed system.
In practice, so-called "coffee shops" sell marihuana/cannabis to people over 18, and this is tolerated and totally accepted. Amsterdam (the capital) is famous for it, but it's the same everywhere else in the Netherlands.
If any hard drugs are ever found (or alcohol is sold) in a coffee shop, it's in deep trouble, and will probably be closed.
Legally, the shops aren't actually allowed. That's why they're "tolerated". Really legalizing them would have many benefits, but would be a problem with, for instance, France, who hates our soft drugs policy. As said, in practice selling cannabis is basically legal, but buying it is illegal for these shops! Especially growing (in huge quantities) is illegal. It's an absurd situation.
The shops are taxed via normal VAT (which is as high as 19.5% around here).
The idea is that people will smoke cannabis, that this is mostly harmless anyway, and that bad effects come mostly from combination with alcohol (selling both isn't allowed) and from later "upgrading" to hard drugs because they would be sold by the same dealers (but not in coffee shops).
And you know, it just works. For the record, I don't smoke at all, so no cannabis either.
Forget about replacing HTTP - let's deal with the real problem protocol first: SMTP.
What, work on SMTP, while there are children starving somewhere in the world?
If we listened to people like you, nothing would ever get done. Well, perhaps some starving people would be saved. But that's besides the point, sheesh.
Please explain to me what precludes a GUI from offering an advanced search tool, in which you can open up a property info dialog for the results and do bulk permission/property changes for. (Hint: nothing stops this from happening.)
What you will end up with is a huge dialog with all kinds of checkboxes and text fields for the same things the command has. Making it more irritating and slower for the purpose of turning it into a shiny GUI, no thanks.
Even if you somehow make a magically really useful GUI widget that makes me enter all the necessary information in a completely natural and quick way and achieve perfection, I cannot believe you can do that automatically for every command ever. Which means there'll be a neat widget for some commands, and the command line for the rest.
That way lies hell. We have a perfectly good command line, thank you. If you want to make GUI frontends, perfectly fine, but don't expect us to use them.
Re:People still use a shell for Linux?
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Starting up that explorer, selecting the files (manually checking if I have all of them, and only the right ones, perhaps, or having to scroll), then doing right click, is slower for me than typing in that command line.
Besides, I can still do the command line thing logged in over ssh, which is regularly.
Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
It's not like the writers of those scripts owed it to you to write them your way.
If the script starts with '#!/bin/sh', that's the author saying "This here script is written in sh", as far as I'm concerned. From that moment on he owes it to his users to make it work in sh.
If he wanted to make a bash script he should have used/bin/bash.
And that's rather logical, too. Once their fixes have been accepted by the main project, they're automatically ported forward from then on. If they kept them an internal secret, they'd be continously checking them against the latest versions.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
This is what the Netherlands does: good education that explains sex to kids, free access to anti-conception pills, even anonymously for children as young as 12 or 13 (can't remember). As you say, they will have sex, better prevent the problems that come with it. We have the lowest number of teenage pregnancies per capita in Europe, last I heard, and the number of young people actually having sex is not different from other places.
It's a bit like our drug laws - some people will smoke pot, let's seperate it from the actually evil stuff by making only pot legal, and besides we can tax it then. I love realism and pragmatism.
Unfortunately, our current sometimes very boneheaded government (that I even voted for...) seems to want to do away with things like this.
And what is this fascination with OOP? The only task I can think of (please name some more if can think of any) that lends itself naturally towards OOP is GUI/Widget handling.
(Some) games. I learned OO when programming a MUD, back in the day. LPC is a beautiful, object-oriented variant of C, in which every source file is automatically a class, every function in it automatically a method of that class, etc.
In a MUD, you have rooms, players, weapons, monsters, items inside the rooms, items in inventories (actually that's inside the player)... it's just very natural.
Different areas of the game were written by different people, but I could make the armour I made resistant against the poison someone else had made, because I knew he would call the is_poison_resistant() method in all the armour a player had (in LPC, a call to a non-existing method in an object would just return 0 - so armour that didn't have the method was not poison resistant by default).
Since coding that for a few years, I have trouble explaining OO to people who don't quite grasp it.
Being Dutch, I never heard the original, but the parodies are a great read:-)
And I said, ``Littering...'' And they all moved away from me on
the bench there, with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean,
nasty things, till I said, ``And making gratuitous modifications
to Net-2 sources...'' And they all came back, shook my hand, and
we had a great time on the bench talkin' about microkernels, Spritely
file systems, IP version 6 routing,... and all kinds of groovy things
that we was talkin' about on the bench, and everything was fine.
This picture is by Voyager, in 1980: APOD 990425. Doesn't look much worse to me (IANAA). No idea how close to Mimas Voyager was compared to Cassini, of course.
We haven't got a FREAKING CLUE what's out there. We haven't gota FREAKING CLUE what we will or won't learn, can or can't learn, by space exploration.
True. So we have to find out. But currently, sending a human there seems to me to be an extremely inefficient use of resources. For the cost of sending one human, you can probably send a few hundred Cassini style missions...
Slashdot Mirror
They probably meant the Usenet-september. You know, the one that started in 1993 and that will never end.
Ok, I see.
But the apps I actually use are, say, OOo, Mozilla, emacs, xpdf, GAIM (hey, that's Gnome, isn't it?), eboard, Scid, mplayer, some mp3/ogg player... and a bunch of development stuff. That's about it. A lot of terminal windows, too.
Those are fine, I don't really see the point of switching to similar-but-probably-inferior apps that do similar things but that happen to be part of Gnome (or KDE).
Gnome is 90% the application libraries that manage inter-process data, configuration, internationalization, accessibility, theming, common invocation semantics, error reporting, etc, etc.
That 10% that you're thinking of (window management, applet baubles, desktop layout, file management, changing the root background, etc.) is nice, but if you still have to have all of Gnome around for the important parts (the applications that integrate with the desktop), what exactly is the point.
Do people actually use that 90% part though? I've been using Gnome for years, but all I use it for is a bar with a few easy to click icons on the top, and system monitor and workspace switcher applets.
What applications are there that 'integrate with the desktop'? That's a serious question, I don't think I've ever used any. That Xfce thing sounds pretty much OK to me (except that Gnome does everything I need, even if that's only 10% of what Gnome does).
Yes, it is infringing, but as far as I know, if you didn't know about it, get informed and immediately change your code, you are liable for much less damage (if any) than in the case where you did know about the patent.
Which is the point that the poster x posts up was making (and which Linus Torvalds, for instance, has also made - he doesn't want to know about specific patents).
You need to get through technology development as quickly as possible. If you disagree with this statement, you care about something else besides finishing your game.
Of course we care about something else - it's a hobby project, isn't it? Having fun is more important. And the technology development is the best part! Who cares about finishing this stuff, that's work.
If you think Google is going to grow to be a $30 billion company in the next decade, then it is a very good investment.
Now it's not. For it to be worth $30 billion at the moment, it should be worth $30 billion now. If it grows to that size in ten years, you have a profit of 0% over ten years, which is miserable.
If there's copyright infringing code that you're using, you're liable, period.
We're talking about patents.
Every time someone asks me for advice on buying a computer, I ask "do you want to play games?", and if the answer is no then my answer is "buy the slowest CPU model they sell and spend any extra money on RAM".
Another good thing to spend the extra money on is monitor, keyboard, mouse - the things you actually interact with. I've seen people pay through the nose for the absolute latest Pentium, then buy a shitty mouse with it...
These are things you look at and touch all the time when using the computer, improving them improves your whole experience a lot.
There are litterally tens of thousands of albums in-store, but you only get to hear a dozen of the latest, most overhyped teen pukes.
That's interesting, I never realized that. In the Netherlands it's perfectly normal in a CD store to ask at the counter if you can listen to a CD, then they put it in a CD player for you and you can use some headphones to listen to it. There are some big department stores that do have a few CDs, and it's probably not possible there, but then nobody buys CDs there...
I tried "games.it.slashdot.org", and it shows the normal Slashdot colours. Bit disappointing, that.
I thought it would summon Cthulhu.
This reminds me, it's the weekend, need to run emerge -uUD world...
And, reading through those comments, that wasn't the first time either... That's actually what I thought, but I couldn't find the link to the even older article quick enough.
In fact, I first heard about it here...
I'd much rather have a few gadgets which do their job excellently than one which does several jobs in a slip-shod manner.
I'm the opposite. I can handle carrying one cell-phone size gadget with me at all times. Two, and it becomes annoying. Right pants pocket is for the phone, left pocket is for my keys, I don't want to lug around more stuff all day.
I haven't got a camera yet, but I would like to have one at some point, make some pictures for on the web or something. I won't need great quality.
So I could pay hundred euro for a camera, or I wait until I upgrade my phone some time next year, and at that time there will be phones with around 1 megapixel, which should be plenty. And then I have the benefit of having my camera with me at all times, which sounds like fun.
Same for PDAs. I've been working a bit with the book "Getting Things Done", getting a bit more organized, it's working well for me. To do it right, I should really carry something with me where I can look at action lists etc at all times. A PDA would work fine. But there's no way I'm going to carry around a PDA at all times while I'm also already carrying a phone. So I'll wait until I can get them in a single gadget.
For my yankee edification, please explain how pot is regulated and taxed.
The current laws are pretty absurd, because we can't really legalize it 100% without getting into trouble with many other countries, so we have a half-assed system.
In practice, so-called "coffee shops" sell marihuana/cannabis to people over 18, and this is tolerated and totally accepted. Amsterdam (the capital) is famous for it, but it's the same everywhere else in the Netherlands.
If any hard drugs are ever found (or alcohol is sold) in a coffee shop, it's in deep trouble, and will probably be closed.
Legally, the shops aren't actually allowed. That's why they're "tolerated". Really legalizing them would have many benefits, but would be a problem with, for instance, France, who hates our soft drugs policy. As said, in practice selling cannabis is basically legal, but buying it is illegal for these shops! Especially growing (in huge quantities) is illegal. It's an absurd situation.
The shops are taxed via normal VAT (which is as high as 19.5% around here).
The idea is that people will smoke cannabis, that this is mostly harmless anyway, and that bad effects come mostly from combination with alcohol (selling both isn't allowed) and from later "upgrading" to hard drugs because they would be sold by the same dealers (but not in coffee shops).
And you know, it just works. For the record, I don't smoke at all, so no cannabis either.
Forget about replacing HTTP - let's deal with the real problem protocol first: SMTP.
What, work on SMTP, while there are children starving somewhere in the world?
If we listened to people like you, nothing would ever get done. Well, perhaps some starving people would be saved. But that's besides the point, sheesh.
Please explain to me what precludes a GUI from offering an advanced search tool, in which you can open up a property info dialog for the results and do bulk permission/property changes for. (Hint: nothing stops this from happening.)
What you will end up with is a huge dialog with all kinds of checkboxes and text fields for the same things the command has. Making it more irritating and slower for the purpose of turning it into a shiny GUI, no thanks.
Even if you somehow make a magically really useful GUI widget that makes me enter all the necessary information in a completely natural and quick way and achieve perfection, I cannot believe you can do that automatically for every command ever. Which means there'll be a neat widget for some commands, and the command line for the rest.
That way lies hell. We have a perfectly good command line, thank you. If you want to make GUI frontends, perfectly fine, but don't expect us to use them.
Starting up that explorer, selecting the files (manually checking if I have all of them, and only the right ones, perhaps, or having to scroll), then doing right click, is slower for me than typing in that command line.
Besides, I can still do the command line thing logged in over ssh, which is regularly.
It's not like the writers of those scripts owed it to you to write them your way.
If the script starts with '#!/bin/sh', that's the author saying "This here script is written in sh", as far as I'm concerned. From that moment on he owes it to his users to make it work in sh.
If he wanted to make a bash script he should have used /bin/bash.
And that's rather logical, too. Once their fixes have been accepted by the main project, they're automatically ported forward from then on. If they kept them an internal secret, they'd be continously checking them against the latest versions.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
This is what the Netherlands does: good education that explains sex to kids, free access to anti-conception pills, even anonymously for children as young as 12 or 13 (can't remember). As you say, they will have sex, better prevent the problems that come with it. We have the lowest number of teenage pregnancies per capita in Europe, last I heard, and the number of young people actually having sex is not different from other places.
It's a bit like our drug laws - some people will smoke pot, let's seperate it from the actually evil stuff by making only pot legal, and besides we can tax it then. I love realism and pragmatism.
Unfortunately, our current sometimes very boneheaded government (that I even voted for...) seems to want to do away with things like this.
And what is this fascination with OOP? The only task I can think of (please name some more if can think of any) that lends itself naturally towards OOP is GUI/Widget handling.
(Some) games. I learned OO when programming a MUD, back in the day. LPC is a beautiful, object-oriented variant of C, in which every source file is automatically a class, every function in it automatically a method of that class, etc.
In a MUD, you have rooms, players, weapons, monsters, items inside the rooms, items in inventories (actually that's inside the player)... it's just very natural.
Different areas of the game were written by different people, but I could make the armour I made resistant against the poison someone else had made, because I knew he would call the is_poison_resistant() method in all the armour a player had (in LPC, a call to a non-existing method in an object would just return 0 - so armour that didn't have the method was not poison resistant by default).
Since coding that for a few years, I have trouble explaining OO to people who don't quite grasp it.
There are some great Hacker variants on it as well, hard to find, I used to collect them:
Alice's Usenet Flame
Alice's NNTP Server
Alice's AI Lab
Alice's PDP 10
Being Dutch, I never heard the original, but the parodies are a great read :-)
And I said, ``Littering...'' And they all moved away from me on the bench there, with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean, nasty things, till I said, ``And making gratuitous modifications to Net-2 sources...'' And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench talkin' about microkernels, Spritely file systems, IP version 6 routing, ... and all kinds of groovy things
that we was talkin' about on the bench, and everything was fine.
This picture is by Voyager, in 1980: APOD 990425. Doesn't look much worse to me (IANAA). No idea how close to Mimas Voyager was compared to Cassini, of course.
We haven't got a FREAKING CLUE what's out there. We haven't gota FREAKING CLUE what we will or won't learn, can or can't learn, by space exploration.
True. So we have to find out. But currently, sending a human there seems to me to be an extremely inefficient use of resources. For the cost of sending one human, you can probably send a few hundred Cassini style missions...