I don't see a good reason to keep a feature (in it's current state, that is) that is no longer relevant. It is, for the most part, obsolete and the team's working on different ways to handle "hidden" windows in the Shell.
Except that H*R hasn't seen consistent updates since over a year ago. It's dead, and may it rest in peace.
("Shut up, lady! Peaceful is not how I roll.")
If I'm not mistaken, they released three updates in the past year: A Decemberween special, an after-Decemberween Halloween special (they joked about how they were a little late), and the April Fools Day toon last year. That's not counting the sales and other related things. Matt Chapman and Craig Zobel have been busy writing a movie called Monster Safari and a new site called Ron Planet.
Wonderful link! Mod this AC up; all of the GNOME-haters really need to read this before they make hasty assumptions that GNOME simply doesn't want to collaborate with Canonical.
Now Gnome is looking into the horrible travesty that is Gnome Shell 3, and recently has decided (in one of the most WTF moves in history) to kill off Minimize and Maximize buttons.
If you actually read their reasoning, they removed the maximize window because there's two other ways to maximize: double-clicking and dragging windows to the top. They removed the minimize button, not the feature, because workspaces (in most cases) negate the need for it (the desktop doesn't even draw icons by default, so minimizing to see things on the desktop is no longer a good reason). Even still, if you HAVE to minimize, there are still many other ways to do it (right-click, etc.). They didn't want a feature that was only half-finished and they didn't experiment much with how minimized windows should be handled in GNOME Shell. Cut them some slack.
Because that's all I want or care to know. Homestar is pretty much the only thing I need Flash for anymore. And yes I know that Smokescreen exists but this sounds much better.
Re:If I wanted something that looked ugly like Chr
on
Firefox 4 RC1 Released
·
· Score: 1
You can move tabs back on the bottom, restore the bookmarks bar, and change the Firefox button back to the menu bar. You can restore the statusbar with Status 4 Evar, and you can move and add any buttons you want with a simple right-click. All of these are very trivial to do, and if you don't like customizing your browser there's always Seamonkey, which is pretty much just Firefox without the shiny-ness and a more classic UI.
Correction: the first test build of RC1 has been out for a week now. They had to test it and make sure it was good enough for the official RC release, which is a huge deal considering the time and effort put into this release (3.6 was released in January 2010).
To be fair, there are a lot of things that could be considered "feature bloat" in a browser. The download manager, bookmarks, heck, even tabs could be bloat depending on how you look at it. Tab Groups was included because Firefox knows that it has a large share of power users as well as normal users. For those people with hundreds of tabs, Tab Groups are a godsend. For those who rarely go over 5, simply don't use it. While you might say that this is better as an add-on than a default feature (and to a point I agree with you), the reason they included it is so that Add-ons can integrate themselves with the feature. Providing information at a glance, adding their own buttons to it, and things like that. In fact, if you get the Read It Later extension and open Tab Groups, you'll see a place where you can simply drag-and-drop websites so they'll be added to a "read it later" list. I for one think that's a very useful feature; whether or not you do is completely relative;)
Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?
Um... wget/curl? Any download manager + VLC/MPlayer? It's not hard. There's a million different ways to play H.264-encoded content outside of Firefox. Inside, though, I'm sure it's possible to write a plugin that replaces embedded H.264 HTML5 tags with an external player (like Microsoft did).
Regardless of the possible workarounds, this isn't a battle of functionality, this is a battle of rights. Mozilla isn't supporting H.264 even if it's a system codec because it wants to make sure that all Firefox forks and related projects can use the codecs without fear of patent infringement. Then there's also patent licensing and things like that, which are a huge hurdle for open source software in the USA. VLC, for example, is based in France so there's no fear of patent infringement (software patents don't exist over there). Firefox/Mozilla is based in the USA, so anything that they distribute must be legal. Including H.264 would cost Mozilla $5,000,000 per year, content creators would still have to pay license fees (eventually) for H.264-encoded content, and any and all forks/related projects of Firefox would not be able to include H.264 without breaking the law (unless they're based where software patents don't exist).
Mozilla supports WebM/Theora/Vorbis not for technical reasons; it supports them for ideological and economic reasons. I completely agree with their decision and I hope that software patents are abolished in the USA as well someday so we can get H.264 playback...:/
'Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.'
That is probably the worst analogy I've ever heard in a Slashdot summary (to be fair I've only been here a few years). It's just... Why would... Ugh, there's so much wrong with it:
First of all, is there any reason why the analogy needed to be religious? You'll only alienate readers by making these kinds of analogies... Salvation has nothing to do with iDevices and making such a connection implies that people chose iDevices religiously (which some people do but that's besides the point). iDevices are superficial, as are pretty much every other tech gadget on the market. People don't pick one for salvation, they pick one for fun and entertainment and whatnot! Sheesh...
He has the whole salvation thing mixed up: the Catholic doctrine on salvation says that to be saved you must know/love God (if you're given a chance) and follow his commands. The Protestant (for the most part) idea of salvation is that all you need is to know God (as in, being "born again") and that you can't lose your salvation. The article's analogy has the respective ideas of salvation totally swapped (to be factually accurate; I'm not promoting one over the other, though I will tell you that I'm Catholic).
"The Apple Way"? Give me a break...
Somebody has a religious agenda here and it's definitely not me...
Sorry Junior, but by that logic you're not you; you're just compatible with yourself. Try it in a philosophy 101 class, you'll get better results there than in real life.
...Are we talking about totally different things here? If the software on CentOS is EXACTLY THE SAME as RHEL, it's essentially the same thing. The only things changed are artwork and references to Red Hat. Why wouldn't that be binary compatible with RHEL? Explain it to me in a good example why a program that was written exclusively for Red Hat won't work in CentOS (doesn't RHEL follow the Linux Standard Base anyways?). Mere and minor aesthetic changes, if you don't change the code itself severely, should mean that something is binary compatible... right?
CentOS is not binary compatible with RHEL, CentOS is RHEL, sans RH branding stuff.
That's exactly what binary compatibility means... If the software is essentially the same as RHEL but without branding, any software made for RHEL should work/compile on CentOS (same with most other Linux distros but that's besides the point).
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
*cough* Appleseed, StatusNet/Identica (which is an official StatusNet instance on the bleeding edge, popular among open-source types like myself).
Not to forget that StatusNet is one of the many social networks that supports the OStatus protocol, a way to follow people on different networks and websites.
Light Peak looks like it will be called Thunderbolt.
If that seriously is the final name for Light Peak, then I don't quite agree with their decision. What exactly does it have to do with thunder or bolts? "Thunderbolt port" sounds more like innuendo than an actual port you'd use, as opposed to "Light Peak port". At least "Light Peak" gave me a vague idea of how the tech works by the name alone, whereas Thunderbolt just sounds completely unrelated to the technology.
I swear, marketing comes up with the worst names for everything these days. "Xfinity" et al.
A bunch of confused, hypocritical, self-contradictory, whining assholes. If you don't like a distro, FFS don't use it - it's really quite that simple. There's a distro out there for everyone.
You make it look so simple when in reality it's not; there are many, many valid reasons to dislike Ubuntu (excessive patching, bugs, questionable design decisions). Claiming that all of the "Ubuntu haters" are simply disliking it because it's popular is completely untrue.
Don't forget how Ubuntu is absolutely patch-crazy, whereas Arch only patches when absolutely necessary (like the recent python3-becoming-default incident)
"It's popular, so it sucks" is the mantra here. Some fanboys just want to make their e-penis bigger by saying they use obscure, obfuscated distro X all the time. Nothing new here.
Not all the time. I used to use Ubuntu, and I loved it at first because it was my first Linux distro, but it kept breaking when I did auto-upgrades to new versions and some of the decisions they made really make little sense. The window buttons issue where they moved them over to the left side for some obscure "feature" that never even got implemented (and I'm not sure if it will ever be) was absolutely awful, and I shouldn't have to explain why. Not to forget that they have a sort of obsession with patching perfectly fine software, introducing incompatibilities, inconsistencies and bugs almost everywhere.
I switched over to Arch Linux, which, while not being nearly as simple to set up if you're a "n00b", only patches applications when absolutely necessary and lets you build your desktop how you want it from near-scratch. No annoying "click here to upgrade and break your system" situations every six months, the newest versions of every package, no unnecessary patches, no awkward interfaces, and no bloat (for some reason, XFCE on Ubuntu is more bloated than vanilla XFCE... weird)! Of course this isn't specific to Arch, and Fedora/Debian/etc. are also very great in this respect. Ubuntu, however, is an absolutely bloated mess with stupid design decisions that I wouldn't recommend to anybody any longer.
Indulgences were sold, AND the church purposely kept the bible away from the masses by keeping it in latin and in limited distribution. Johannes Gutenberg got in trouble with the church by publishing a readable translation of the Bible
Gutenberg published the only approved Bible at the time, the Vulgate. And, just so you know, the Douay-Rheims translation of the bible, which is in English, was published by the Catholic Church before the King James Version was published. The only excuse they have relating to "keeping the Bible from the People" is that there was no printing press until Gutenberg invented it!
The mere approval of a doctrine as official does not mean that it was "invented". It means that there is enough evidence to show that it does not contradict tradition, including scripture.
So as long as an idea doesn't contradict tradition or scripture, we're all good with it?
Of course. And don't misunderstand what I said: by "doesn't contradict tradition", I mean that it is an accepted Catholic belief that the original Church Fathers believed, OR it can be shown to logically follow from those beliefs. For example, "limbo", while not an official Catholic doctrine, is a belief that logically descends from belief in purgatory (depending on who you ask).
Gutenberg published a Latin Bible, the Vulgate. He's the main reason we have the printing press, and the first officially approved English Bible was completed in 1582, the Douay-Rheims Bible, which was published 31 years before the King James Version that is so widely read today by protestants.
Also, Martin Luther had a skewed view on indulgences. Virtually every single indulgence abuse was no different than selling a counterfeit iPhone; it isn't the real thing and it didn't do what they said it did. Martin Luther mainly opposed indulgences because they contradicted what he personally thought the Christian faith should be, completely regardless of abuses that make no difference in the validity of the theory behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see a good reason to keep a feature (in it's current state, that is) that is no longer relevant. It is, for the most part, obsolete and the team's working on different ways to handle "hidden" windows in the Shell.
Except that H*R hasn't seen consistent updates since over a year ago. It's dead, and may it rest in peace.
("Shut up, lady! Peaceful is not how I roll.")
If I'm not mistaken, they released three updates in the past year: A Decemberween special, an after-Decemberween Halloween special (they joked about how they were a little late), and the April Fools Day toon last year. That's not counting the sales and other related things. Matt Chapman and Craig Zobel have been busy writing a movie called Monster Safari and a new site called Ron Planet.
Wonderful link! Mod this AC up; all of the GNOME-haters really need to read this before they make hasty assumptions that GNOME simply doesn't want to collaborate with Canonical.
Now Gnome is looking into the horrible travesty that is Gnome Shell 3, and recently has decided (in one of the most WTF moves in history) to kill off Minimize and Maximize buttons.
If you actually read their reasoning, they removed the maximize window because there's two other ways to maximize: double-clicking and dragging windows to the top. They removed the minimize button, not the feature, because workspaces (in most cases) negate the need for it (the desktop doesn't even draw icons by default, so minimizing to see things on the desktop is no longer a good reason). Even still, if you HAVE to minimize, there are still many other ways to do it (right-click, etc.). They didn't want a feature that was only half-finished and they didn't experiment much with how minimized windows should be handled in GNOME Shell. Cut them some slack.
If I had asked my customers what they'd wanted, they would have said a faster horse
- Henry Ford (supposedly) (paraphrased)
Because that's all I want or care to know. Homestar is pretty much the only thing I need Flash for anymore. And yes I know that Smokescreen exists but this sounds much better.
You can move tabs back on the bottom, restore the bookmarks bar, and change the Firefox button back to the menu bar. You can restore the statusbar with Status 4 Evar, and you can move and add any buttons you want with a simple right-click. All of these are very trivial to do, and if you don't like customizing your browser there's always Seamonkey, which is pretty much just Firefox without the shiny-ness and a more classic UI.
RC1 has been out for a week now
Correction: the first test build of RC1 has been out for a week now. They had to test it and make sure it was good enough for the official RC release, which is a huge deal considering the time and effort put into this release (3.6 was released in January 2010).
To be fair, there are a lot of things that could be considered "feature bloat" in a browser. The download manager, bookmarks, heck, even tabs could be bloat depending on how you look at it. Tab Groups was included because Firefox knows that it has a large share of power users as well as normal users. For those people with hundreds of tabs, Tab Groups are a godsend. For those who rarely go over 5, simply don't use it. While you might say that this is better as an add-on than a default feature (and to a point I agree with you), the reason they included it is so that Add-ons can integrate themselves with the feature. Providing information at a glance, adding their own buttons to it, and things like that. In fact, if you get the Read It Later extension and open Tab Groups, you'll see a place where you can simply drag-and-drop websites so they'll be added to a "read it later" list. I for one think that's a very useful feature; whether or not you do is completely relative ;)
Oh yeah, and Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support H.264 even if it's installed in the system. How am I supposed to watch those HTML5 H.264 videos?
Um... wget/curl? Any download manager + VLC/MPlayer? It's not hard. There's a million different ways to play H.264-encoded content outside of Firefox. Inside, though, I'm sure it's possible to write a plugin that replaces embedded H.264 HTML5 tags with an external player (like Microsoft did).
Regardless of the possible workarounds, this isn't a battle of functionality, this is a battle of rights. Mozilla isn't supporting H.264 even if it's a system codec because it wants to make sure that all Firefox forks and related projects can use the codecs without fear of patent infringement. Then there's also patent licensing and things like that, which are a huge hurdle for open source software in the USA. VLC, for example, is based in France so there's no fear of patent infringement (software patents don't exist over there). Firefox/Mozilla is based in the USA, so anything that they distribute must be legal. Including H.264 would cost Mozilla $5,000,000 per year, content creators would still have to pay license fees (eventually) for H.264-encoded content, and any and all forks/related projects of Firefox would not be able to include H.264 without breaking the law (unless they're based where software patents don't exist).
Mozilla supports WebM/Theora/Vorbis not for technical reasons; it supports them for ideological and economic reasons. I completely agree with their decision and I hope that software patents are abolished in the USA as well someday so we can get H.264 playback... :/
'Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.'
That is probably the worst analogy I've ever heard in a Slashdot summary (to be fair I've only been here a few years). It's just... Why would... Ugh, there's so much wrong with it:
He has the whole salvation thing mixed up: the Catholic doctrine on salvation says that to be saved you must know/love God (if you're given a chance) and follow his commands. The Protestant (for the most part) idea of salvation is that all you need is to know God (as in, being "born again") and that you can't lose your salvation. The article's analogy has the respective ideas of salvation totally swapped (to be factually accurate; I'm not promoting one over the other, though I will tell you that I'm Catholic).
"The Apple Way"? Give me a break...
Somebody has a religious agenda here and it's definitely not me...
Sorry Junior, but by that logic you're not you; you're just compatible with yourself. Try it in a philosophy 101 class, you'll get better results there than in real life.
...Are we talking about totally different things here? If the software on CentOS is EXACTLY THE SAME as RHEL, it's essentially the same thing. The only things changed are artwork and references to Red Hat. Why wouldn't that be binary compatible with RHEL? Explain it to me in a good example why a program that was written exclusively for Red Hat won't work in CentOS (doesn't RHEL follow the Linux Standard Base anyways?). Mere and minor aesthetic changes, if you don't change the code itself severely, should mean that something is binary compatible... right?
CentOS is not binary compatible with RHEL, CentOS is RHEL, sans RH branding stuff.
That's exactly what binary compatibility means... If the software is essentially the same as RHEL but without branding, any software made for RHEL should work/compile on CentOS (same with most other Linux distros but that's besides the point).
PS: Diaspora is planned to support OStatus as well (if it doesn't already).
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
*cough* Appleseed, StatusNet/Identica (which is an official StatusNet instance on the bleeding edge, popular among open-source types like myself).
Not to forget that StatusNet is one of the many social networks that supports the OStatus protocol, a way to follow people on different networks and websites.
...and now I just read the article and it seems that "Thunderbolt" is just a variant of Light Peak. Not the "final name", hopefully.
Light Peak looks like it will be called Thunderbolt.
If that seriously is the final name for Light Peak, then I don't quite agree with their decision. What exactly does it have to do with thunder or bolts? "Thunderbolt port" sounds more like innuendo than an actual port you'd use, as opposed to "Light Peak port". At least "Light Peak" gave me a vague idea of how the tech works by the name alone, whereas Thunderbolt just sounds completely unrelated to the technology.
I swear, marketing comes up with the worst names for everything these days. "Xfinity" et al.
A bunch of confused, hypocritical, self-contradictory, whining assholes. If you don't like a distro, FFS don't use it - it's really quite that simple. There's a distro out there for everyone.
You make it look so simple when in reality it's not; there are many, many valid reasons to dislike Ubuntu (excessive patching, bugs, questionable design decisions). Claiming that all of the "Ubuntu haters" are simply disliking it because it's popular is completely untrue.
Don't forget how Ubuntu is absolutely patch-crazy, whereas Arch only patches when absolutely necessary (like the recent python3-becoming-default incident)
"It's popular, so it sucks" is the mantra here.
Some fanboys just want to make their e-penis bigger by saying they use obscure, obfuscated distro X all the time. Nothing new here.
Not all the time. I used to use Ubuntu, and I loved it at first because it was my first Linux distro, but it kept breaking when I did auto-upgrades to new versions and some of the decisions they made really make little sense. The window buttons issue where they moved them over to the left side for some obscure "feature" that never even got implemented (and I'm not sure if it will ever be) was absolutely awful, and I shouldn't have to explain why. Not to forget that they have a sort of obsession with patching perfectly fine software, introducing incompatibilities, inconsistencies and bugs almost everywhere.
I switched over to Arch Linux, which, while not being nearly as simple to set up if you're a "n00b", only patches applications when absolutely necessary and lets you build your desktop how you want it from near-scratch. No annoying "click here to upgrade and break your system" situations every six months, the newest versions of every package, no unnecessary patches, no awkward interfaces, and no bloat (for some reason, XFCE on Ubuntu is more bloated than vanilla XFCE... weird)! Of course this isn't specific to Arch, and Fedora/Debian/etc. are also very great in this respect. Ubuntu, however, is an absolutely bloated mess with stupid design decisions that I wouldn't recommend to anybody any longer.
Indulgences were sold, AND the church purposely kept the bible away from the masses by keeping it in latin and in limited distribution. Johannes Gutenberg got in trouble with the church by publishing a readable translation of the Bible
Gutenberg published the only approved Bible at the time, the Vulgate. And, just so you know, the Douay-Rheims translation of the bible, which is in English, was published by the Catholic Church before the King James Version was published. The only excuse they have relating to "keeping the Bible from the People" is that there was no printing press until Gutenberg invented it!
The mere approval of a doctrine as official does not mean that it was "invented". It means that there is enough evidence to show that it does not contradict tradition, including scripture.
So as long as an idea doesn't contradict tradition or scripture, we're all good with it?
Of course. And don't misunderstand what I said: by "doesn't contradict tradition", I mean that it is an accepted Catholic belief that the original Church Fathers believed, OR it can be shown to logically follow from those beliefs. For example, "limbo", while not an official Catholic doctrine, is a belief that logically descends from belief in purgatory (depending on who you ask).
I'm sorry, small correction: 29 years, not 31. I did the math in my head wrong. My apologies.
Look up "Johannes Gutenburg" and "Martin Luther".
Gutenberg published a Latin Bible, the Vulgate. He's the main reason we have the printing press, and the first officially approved English Bible was completed in 1582, the Douay-Rheims Bible, which was published 31 years before the King James Version that is so widely read today by protestants.
Also, Martin Luther had a skewed view on indulgences. Virtually every single indulgence abuse was no different than selling a counterfeit iPhone; it isn't the real thing and it didn't do what they said it did. Martin Luther mainly opposed indulgences because they contradicted what he personally thought the Christian faith should be, completely regardless of abuses that make no difference in the validity of the theory behind them.
Your point is?
Thank you for actually making some sense as opposed to most of the trolls here! Everything you've said is true and to-the-point. :)