It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares.
Since when was javascript performance the most important feature in a web browser? If you compare all of the features Firefox 4 has to Chrome/IE/Safari besides javascript performance (which is very comparable anyways), you'll see that Firefox isn't lagging at all.
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all.
You're lucky I found you! You see, I was informed by God himself that if you only believe out of fear, then you cease to exist. He doesn't want cowardly sycophants populating His plane.
The point is not which choice is best; the point is that there is not enough information to make a choice that is certainly better than the others. And this is what the original poster would have you disagreeing with.
Take a look at all of the other religions out there and see what they say. They all have their "dos" and "do-nots", but it's not just as simple as "do what [insert deity here] says or you go to hell". Christianity is unique in the aspect that we are loved by God and He wants us to love Him back by sharing His love with everyone else. God doesn't "command" people to do things, He asks us nicely. He generously gave us the gift of choice so we don't feel forced to follow Him. Many things that God asks of us may seem "oppressive" or "unrealistic" at first, but if you bother to dig deeper than the arguments the world has, you'll find liberation, freedom from the "laws" that God asks us to follow because we wouldn't want to do otherwise.
With that said, I can't possibly imagine how someone would ever want to turn down this invitation without at least critically analyzing everything from both points of view. I'm not stubbornly dogmatic; the Catholic church even says that questioning your beliefs is a good thing (*gasp*!) so that you can understand what God asks of us better instead of blindly following His teachings.
Of every other religion out there, this one makes the most sense to me, sounds the most reasonable, and asks of us things in a non-oppressive manner. I have never seen a religion like this before in my whole life, and this is why I am a Catholic; not of fear or because I'm stubborn/bigoted/crazy, but because the love God shows us is unlike anything I've ever seen and it amazes me that people willingly refuse to go any further than generic stereotyping when it comes to understanding God.
Since we are talking about unprovable matters, I could also postulate there is a god that will send you to hell for being a nice person. This god is as likely to exist as yours. In fact, as long as there is more than one religion in the world, there are potentially many gods, who, once you die, will send you straight to hell for not believing in them. Surely, by being a practitioner of religion X, you are staking your eternal future too?
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all. Better to live life being the nice person that God supposedly wants me to be than just do whatever I "think is right" for my whole life just to die, thus exiting from my meaningless existence into a possible nothingness...
All this bitching probably comes from a bunch of super-religious nuts who are trying to make people feel bad about their bodies, so they can keep telling them god will save them.
Read "Theology of the Body for Beginners" by Christopher West. It's a summary of a summary of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" lectures, and less than 150 pages so it's simple enough. What you're saying is completely false. God doesn't want us to be ashamed of our bodies. The shame comes from the fact that because of sin, we're seen as sex objects by nearly everyone and we need to cover that up to prevent us from being used as such. That "shame" should not exist at all; Adam and Eve, as you most likely know, were made naked and they were fine with that. As soon as they started being sinful they grew ashamed and covered themselves up. God will save us if we care enough, but there's so many different screwed-up definitions of Christianity we have now that it's nearly impossible to tell what God truly wants from us (Pope John Paul II is a master at explaining what God wants from us). If you want a more detailed explanation of how special the body is, "Theology of the Body Explained", also by Christopher West, is about 500 pages. You could also read the original "Theology of the Body", but you would need to be very patient.
Belief in a higher power is bad, horrible and destructive. Whether the higher power is a God, or an unquestioning faith in the government.
Religion doesn't encourage stupidity. Religion enables stupidity just as everything else in the world does. If you'd like to pretend that atheists can't be crazy then go ahead. I'm a Christian who actually knows what God wants from us, mind you, and killing is not even close to being on the list. There will always be idiots, and you just have to deal with them. Religion doesn't change how idiotic someone is, rather it can make them less idiotic. The ones that will always stay idiots and don't care about not being an idiot will always do idiotic things, such as killing people "in the name of God".
Also, how exactly do these activities benefit from a windows-like visual environment?
Fewer tech support phone calls from family members to the effect "Why does this look different? Did I screw something up? Did I get hacked? Do I have a virus?"
Unless you switch them to GNOME without telling them first or guiding them through it, that shouldn't be a problem.
Ubuntu is not Linux. Ubuntu is not GNOME. This is not Ubuntu specific and it should not be posted as such.
Also, scripts like this have existed for months and even years. I remember a recent story about getting GNOME to look like Windows XP as well. Exactly how is this news, and even if it is news, how is it Slashdot-worthy?
It's particularly suitable for reviving older PCs or laptops on which the main activities will be web-browsing, email, document writing, and streaming music and videos from from the web.
Exactly how is Windows more usable than GNOME? Yes, more people are used to Windows than GNOME and GNOME-based operating systems, but I find GNOME to be much, much, much more usable than Windows has ever been to me for various reasons. Also, how exactly do these activities benefit from a windows-like visual environment? They're just as easy to do in vanilla GNOME (if not easier) compared to Windows. As the great Wikipedia has often said, [citation needed], and I'm saying this to the original article, not the poster himself.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... If Microsoft doesn't make Windows or most of its core products libre/open-source, then they are talking out of their ass and just want people to stop hating them so much for their obvious anti-free stance.
Personally, I have no quarrel with the way Steam is run. It offers me a great deal of convenience, some excellent sales, and the ability to download and play my games on just about any computer I want to. When I buy games digitally, I buy through Steam because I feel that they've done DRM "right", or at least well enough that I don't have any problems.
Wait until you lose your account or they shut down their servers...
Sorry guys. I submitted this article before I realized this. libaacs has been around for a while and was a project started at Doom9. It was just adopted by VideoLAN. My bad!
Lets look at the mobile broadband agreement differently, shall we? Verizon is a mobile phone carrier, correct? As of right now, their main focus is mobile communications. Bandwidth for data that isn't a phone call is very high, correct? They need to keep their quality as a communications company up, and to do that, they would have to make sure that phone calls are prioritized. How is this so bad? If I sign up for something like Comcast or AT&T for my house's internet connection, they would still be required to let me handle my own QoS settings. On a mobile network, where the main thing being sold is phone access, it makes sense to prioritize this type of data.
As for the "Lawful" types of data transfer, this could only exclude types of data that are illegal to transfer. Peer-to-peer networks aren't (at the moment, at least) illegal because, just like any other form of data transfer, it can be used for legal and illegal transfer. I just hope the government realizes that... or we could be in trouble.
I'm beginning to think you fear your own people, and you have lost all hope of control of your church.
There isn't a church. There's lots of them, many without leaders. I'm a Catholic, and while I have a "leader" (the Pope), many other Christian denominations (especially Baptists) operate on an entirely voluntary and individual basis. This is where a lot of the problems with Christian extremists come in because there isn't a clear idea of how things should be interpreted, used in context, etc. compared to the Catholic church.
PS: Note that it's VERY easy to call yourself a Christian, but very hard to be one. For all I know, I'm not even a true Christian!
I'm confronted with people who try and force their beliefs down my throat all the time.
Or, more likely, when confronted by a Christian "forcing their beliefs down your throat," you just don't notice, because it doesn't bother you as much as one of those damn gays trying to force you to not persecute or discriminate against them.
--Jeremy
God loves everybody. Gays and straight people alike. Homosexuality is a sin (because relationships based on sexual preference are, naturally, sinful), but God still loves them. The Bible, last I checked, says we shouldn't be mean to people; why would homosexuals be an exception? The "Christians" you're talking about aren't Christians at all, and it's extremely unfair and short-sighted to assume that all Christians (not to forget Atheists) support such extremist (and un-Godly) views.
I get harassed for eating meat by vegans 50 times for every one time I get harassed by a Christian.
Shame on them for trying to change your ignorant worldview, eh? Maybe there's something in it, given that their views are based on cold, hard, bloody, rotting, diseased evidence...
And you are only proving his point by saying that. Calling somebody ignorant, regardless what you're calling them that over, isn't going to get you any converts, nor will it make anybody like you more.
Um...Flattr is a way of paying for the cool stuff. You just pay a flat rate each month.
Sort-of. The stuff itself is free, but the service isn't. You aren't paying for the things you get, only the service. The service is just donations on steroids. Watch the video on the page; it says the same thing. With Flattr, you're giving your things away for free and people can choose to pay, and it's effortless to do so because it's all linked to your monthly Flattr payment.
I am really surprised that Apple hasn't tried to sue Gnome.
Probably because they aren't infringing on any of Apple's property if I remember correctly. I prefer the term "inspired by" instead of "ripped-off". Does GNOME 3 use Mac's icons, sounds, artwork, themes, etc.? If not, they aren't doing anything worse than OpenOffice.org "ripping-off" MS Office or Firefox "ripping-off" IE/Opera/Chrome.
What is it with Mac users and their eagerness to repeat ad slogans over and over again?
For the record, I use Linux almost exclusively. I am an Apple hater, not a user. I have tried a macbook before, though, and the hardware and software for it was very intuitive; I can see why people like it. To somebody like my mom that doesn't want to be bothered with updates and interruptions out the wazoo and just user her camera/photos/Facebook, Macs are perfect. Linux, IMO, is in-between Mac and Windows in terms of usability, and GNOME 3 looks very much like it could surpass Mac in terms of usability.
Have you ever used a Mac? Do you know somebody who has? Macs have a tendency to "just work" much, much more than Windows or most Linux distributions. GNOME 3's their own version of that. See the GNOME Shell design page and the latest mockups for more information.
Another reason they're pushing GNOME 3 back is that Shell's design isn't quite usable yet. I would know because I frequently use daily builds of GNOME Shell for testing purposes. I mean, look at it. It's so... blah and thrown-together. The design team is working on the design, and the final design will look much different. If you clone the gnome-shell-design git repository, you'll get the most current mockups. Here's a link to those of you unable to use git including the latest mockups as of today. These mockups look amazing and make the shell much easier on the eyes as well as usable. Ever since they announced this new design, I've been looking forward to it much more than I already have.
...is most people I know use their eyes instead of their mouse to see. Why would you need to move your mouse over to a certain part of the screen when you can just look there? Also, there's times where the mouse is just sitting in a portion of the screen idly, or sometimes people randomly move their mouse around to fulfill their OCD-ish needs (I'd know, I do that). A better alternative would simply be to see which links people end up clicking, which I'm pretty sure lots of search engines already do, and it works very well from what I've seen.
Yes, but what this guy doesn't understand is that the DMCA forbids this! yes, its perfectly fair that I should be able to play a legally bought Wii game on a Wii emulator on my PC but yet since I would be removing DRM it isn't allowed! Format shifting is a basic right, but thanks to the DMCA and the like you can't do that.
Actually you're somewhat wrong. Standard music CDs don't have DRM on them, just raw music. Ripping them is perfectly legal since you don't remove the DRM. Same for backing up video games. If you back up the raw game, you don't break any laws. DS games, Wii games, PS2 games, PS1 games, everything can be backed up without breaking laws at all (especially PS1/Wii/DS games, which have no copy protection at all if I remember correctly except their awkward, non-standard format). You can still back-up things with DRM without format-shifting without breaking DRM, and it's still perfectly legal.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that FOSS can't compete head to head with corporate backed projects, if the corporation actually cares.
Since when was javascript performance the most important feature in a web browser? If you compare all of the features Firefox 4 has to Chrome/IE/Safari besides javascript performance (which is very comparable anyways), you'll see that Firefox isn't lagging at all.
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all.
You're lucky I found you! You see, I was informed by God himself that if you only believe out of fear, then you cease to exist. He doesn't want cowardly sycophants populating His plane.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1774738&cid=33452284
The point is not which choice is best; the point is that there is not enough information to make a choice that is certainly better than the others. And this is what the original poster would have you disagreeing with.
Take a look at all of the other religions out there and see what they say. They all have their "dos" and "do-nots", but it's not just as simple as "do what [insert deity here] says or you go to hell". Christianity is unique in the aspect that we are loved by God and He wants us to love Him back by sharing His love with everyone else. God doesn't "command" people to do things, He asks us nicely. He generously gave us the gift of choice so we don't feel forced to follow Him. Many things that God asks of us may seem "oppressive" or "unrealistic" at first, but if you bother to dig deeper than the arguments the world has, you'll find liberation, freedom from the "laws" that God asks us to follow because we wouldn't want to do otherwise.
With that said, I can't possibly imagine how someone would ever want to turn down this invitation without at least critically analyzing everything from both points of view. I'm not stubbornly dogmatic; the Catholic church even says that questioning your beliefs is a good thing (*gasp*!) so that you can understand what God asks of us better instead of blindly following His teachings.
Of every other religion out there, this one makes the most sense to me, sounds the most reasonable, and asks of us things in a non-oppressive manner. I have never seen a religion like this before in my whole life, and this is why I am a Catholic; not of fear or because I'm stubborn/bigoted/crazy, but because the love God shows us is unlike anything I've ever seen and it amazes me that people willingly refuse to go any further than generic stereotyping when it comes to understanding God.
Since we are talking about unprovable matters, I could also postulate there is a god that will send you to hell for being a nice person. This god is as likely to exist as yours. In fact, as long as there is more than one religion in the world, there are potentially many gods, who, once you die, will send you straight to hell for not believing in them. Surely, by being a practitioner of religion X, you are staking your eternal future too?
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all. Better to live life being the nice person that God supposedly wants me to be than just do whatever I "think is right" for my whole life just to die, thus exiting from my meaningless existence into a possible nothingness...
All this bitching probably comes from a bunch of super-religious nuts who are trying to make people feel bad about their bodies, so they can keep telling them god will save them.
Read "Theology of the Body for Beginners" by Christopher West. It's a summary of a summary of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" lectures, and less than 150 pages so it's simple enough. What you're saying is completely false. God doesn't want us to be ashamed of our bodies. The shame comes from the fact that because of sin, we're seen as sex objects by nearly everyone and we need to cover that up to prevent us from being used as such. That "shame" should not exist at all; Adam and Eve, as you most likely know, were made naked and they were fine with that. As soon as they started being sinful they grew ashamed and covered themselves up. God will save us if we care enough, but there's so many different screwed-up definitions of Christianity we have now that it's nearly impossible to tell what God truly wants from us (Pope John Paul II is a master at explaining what God wants from us). If you want a more detailed explanation of how special the body is, "Theology of the Body Explained", also by Christopher West, is about 500 pages. You could also read the original "Theology of the Body", but you would need to be very patient.
Belief in a higher power is bad, horrible and destructive. Whether the higher power is a God, or an unquestioning faith in the government.
Religion doesn't encourage stupidity. Religion enables stupidity just as everything else in the world does. If you'd like to pretend that atheists can't be crazy then go ahead. I'm a Christian who actually knows what God wants from us, mind you, and killing is not even close to being on the list. There will always be idiots, and you just have to deal with them. Religion doesn't change how idiotic someone is, rather it can make them less idiotic. The ones that will always stay idiots and don't care about not being an idiot will always do idiotic things, such as killing people "in the name of God".
Also, how exactly do these activities benefit from a windows-like visual environment?
Fewer tech support phone calls from family members to the effect "Why does this look different? Did I screw something up? Did I get hacked? Do I have a virus?"
Unless you switch them to GNOME without telling them first or guiding them through it, that shouldn't be a problem.
Ubuntu is not Linux. Ubuntu is not GNOME. This is not Ubuntu specific and it should not be posted as such.
Also, scripts like this have existed for months and even years. I remember a recent story about getting GNOME to look like Windows XP as well. Exactly how is this news, and even if it is news, how is it Slashdot-worthy?
It's particularly suitable for reviving older PCs or laptops on which the main activities will be web-browsing, email, document writing, and streaming music and videos from from the web.
Exactly how is Windows more usable than GNOME? Yes, more people are used to Windows than GNOME and GNOME-based operating systems, but I find GNOME to be much, much, much more usable than Windows has ever been to me for various reasons. Also, how exactly do these activities benefit from a windows-like visual environment? They're just as easy to do in vanilla GNOME (if not easier) compared to Windows. As the great Wikipedia has often said, [citation needed], and I'm saying this to the original article, not the poster himself.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... If Microsoft doesn't make Windows or most of its core products libre/open-source, then they are talking out of their ass and just want people to stop hating them so much for their obvious anti-free stance.
Personally, I have no quarrel with the way Steam is run. It offers me a great deal of convenience, some excellent sales, and the ability to download and play my games on just about any computer I want to. When I buy games digitally, I buy through Steam because I feel that they've done DRM "right", or at least well enough that I don't have any problems.
Wait until you lose your account or they shut down their servers...
...if so many of the favicons didn't involve tits or sex-related imagery. Seriously, zoom in and scroll around. Absolutely fapulous... :S
Firefox 4 Beta 2 is so yesterday, today Firefox 4 Beta 3 is all the rage.
True: 4b2 is outdated. 4b3 is much more recent. And who modded him as funny? This is informative.
Sorry guys. I submitted this article before I realized this. libaacs has been around for a while and was a project started at Doom9. It was just adopted by VideoLAN. My bad!
Lets look at the mobile broadband agreement differently, shall we? Verizon is a mobile phone carrier, correct? As of right now, their main focus is mobile communications. Bandwidth for data that isn't a phone call is very high, correct? They need to keep their quality as a communications company up, and to do that, they would have to make sure that phone calls are prioritized. How is this so bad? If I sign up for something like Comcast or AT&T for my house's internet connection, they would still be required to let me handle my own QoS settings. On a mobile network, where the main thing being sold is phone access, it makes sense to prioritize this type of data.
As for the "Lawful" types of data transfer, this could only exclude types of data that are illegal to transfer. Peer-to-peer networks aren't (at the moment, at least) illegal because, just like any other form of data transfer, it can be used for legal and illegal transfer. I just hope the government realizes that... or we could be in trouble.
I'm beginning to think you fear your own people, and you have lost all hope of control of your church.
There isn't a church. There's lots of them, many without leaders. I'm a Catholic, and while I have a "leader" (the Pope), many other Christian denominations (especially Baptists) operate on an entirely voluntary and individual basis. This is where a lot of the problems with Christian extremists come in because there isn't a clear idea of how things should be interpreted, used in context, etc. compared to the Catholic church.
PS: Note that it's VERY easy to call yourself a Christian, but very hard to be one. For all I know, I'm not even a true Christian!
Or, more likely, when confronted by a Christian "forcing their beliefs down your throat," you just don't notice, because it doesn't bother you as much as one of those damn gays trying to force you to not persecute or discriminate against them.
--Jeremy
God loves everybody. Gays and straight people alike. Homosexuality is a sin (because relationships based on sexual preference are, naturally, sinful), but God still loves them. The Bible, last I checked, says we shouldn't be mean to people; why would homosexuals be an exception? The "Christians" you're talking about aren't Christians at all, and it's extremely unfair and short-sighted to assume that all Christians (not to forget Atheists) support such extremist (and un-Godly) views.
I get harassed for eating meat by vegans 50 times for every one time I get harassed by a Christian.
Shame on them for trying to change your ignorant worldview, eh? Maybe there's something in it, given that their views are based on cold, hard, bloody, rotting, diseased evidence...
And you are only proving his point by saying that. Calling somebody ignorant, regardless what you're calling them that over, isn't going to get you any converts, nor will it make anybody like you more.
Um...Flattr is a way of paying for the cool stuff. You just pay a flat rate each month.
Sort-of. The stuff itself is free, but the service isn't. You aren't paying for the things you get, only the service. The service is just donations on steroids. Watch the video on the page; it says the same thing. With Flattr, you're giving your things away for free and people can choose to pay, and it's effortless to do so because it's all linked to your monthly Flattr payment.
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
Why not?
I am really surprised that Apple hasn't tried to sue Gnome.
Probably because they aren't infringing on any of Apple's property if I remember correctly. I prefer the term "inspired by" instead of "ripped-off". Does GNOME 3 use Mac's icons, sounds, artwork, themes, etc.? If not, they aren't doing anything worse than OpenOffice.org "ripping-off" MS Office or Firefox "ripping-off" IE/Opera/Chrome.
What is it with Mac users and their eagerness to repeat ad slogans over and over again?
For the record, I use Linux almost exclusively. I am an Apple hater, not a user. I have tried a macbook before, though, and the hardware and software for it was very intuitive; I can see why people like it. To somebody like my mom that doesn't want to be bothered with updates and interruptions out the wazoo and just user her camera/photos/Facebook, Macs are perfect. Linux, IMO, is in-between Mac and Windows in terms of usability, and GNOME 3 looks very much like it could surpass Mac in terms of usability.
Have you ever used a Mac? Do you know somebody who has? Macs have a tendency to "just work" much, much more than Windows or most Linux distributions. GNOME 3's their own version of that. See the GNOME Shell design page and the latest mockups for more information.
Another reason they're pushing GNOME 3 back is that Shell's design isn't quite usable yet. I would know because I frequently use daily builds of GNOME Shell for testing purposes. I mean, look at it. It's so... blah and thrown-together. The design team is working on the design, and the final design will look much different. If you clone the gnome-shell-design git repository, you'll get the most current mockups. Here's a link to those of you unable to use git including the latest mockups as of today. These mockups look amazing and make the shell much easier on the eyes as well as usable. Ever since they announced this new design, I've been looking forward to it much more than I already have.
...is most people I know use their eyes instead of their mouse to see. Why would you need to move your mouse over to a certain part of the screen when you can just look there? Also, there's times where the mouse is just sitting in a portion of the screen idly, or sometimes people randomly move their mouse around to fulfill their OCD-ish needs (I'd know, I do that). A better alternative would simply be to see which links people end up clicking, which I'm pretty sure lots of search engines already do, and it works very well from what I've seen.
Yes, but what this guy doesn't understand is that the DMCA forbids this! yes, its perfectly fair that I should be able to play a legally bought Wii game on a Wii emulator on my PC but yet since I would be removing DRM it isn't allowed! Format shifting is a basic right, but thanks to the DMCA and the like you can't do that.
Actually you're somewhat wrong. Standard music CDs don't have DRM on them, just raw music. Ripping them is perfectly legal since you don't remove the DRM. Same for backing up video games. If you back up the raw game, you don't break any laws. DS games, Wii games, PS2 games, PS1 games, everything can be backed up without breaking laws at all (especially PS1/Wii/DS games, which have no copy protection at all if I remember correctly except their awkward, non-standard format). You can still back-up things with DRM without format-shifting without breaking DRM, and it's still perfectly legal.