A true Linux geek uses a tilling WM. Right now I use Awesome, and the name doesn't mislead anyone!
My favorite tiling window manager is "emacs" -- I do tend to use it inside of icewm, however, which at least has decent keyboard alternates for the window controls.
From cursory inspection only, I've tended to favor KDE over Gnome, but I'm getting the sense that KDE is losing it. KDE4 looks all whizzy, but there doesn't seem much real point, and the last time I tried to do something basic with it (do a wireless connection) I couldn't figure out what to do.
Oh, and I just went through a couple of days of upgrade hell, going from the kubuntu hardy-kde4 remix to intrepid. Couldn't get kdm to work -- zapped it all and switched to gdm, and it Just Worked.
Google's zeitgeist doesn't mention any sexual terms, so I guess we've all stopped thinking about sex, eh? They claim that the sexual filter doesn't matter because searches on sexual terms always remain constant and zeitgeist reports only on changes... but there's no way for us to know if this is correct, because we don't get to see the raw information. I'm very skeptical of this myself, because the porn-hounds and sexperts seem to be constantly coming up with new terminology (How are we supposed to know if "pegging" spiked this year?).
In any case, I'd argue that if the top 100 search terms are constant, unchanging, sexual terms, that would definitely change your understanding of the "zeitgeist" (e.g. if Sarah Palin were ranked way below Masumi Max, that changes your impression of what people are thinking about. Or at least improves your impression of their taste).
So where's the "turn off 'safe zeitgeist'" setting?
Is it dead now with him in prison, or is someone else taking it over?
There's one or two guys still working on it, but if all anyone sees are lame benchmark sets like this, interest in it is definitely going to trickle away.
Myself, I continue to use Reiser 3. It's essentially mature code at this point that isn't likely
to need a lot of attention.
Reiser 4 isn't quite "dead", but it's certainly limping. Someone with some serious balls is going to have to get involved with it for it to keep going -- it's going to take work at the distro level, possibly with a forked linux kernel.
My usual editorial: unix file systems have been crippled for so long, people have gotten used to dancing around the limitations ("don't treat the file system as a database!"), and have trouble grasping why you would want to remove the limitations. The concentrate on optimizing for "real world cases", and think it's weird if you want to add capabilities to do anything else.
How come all these 'real world' benchmarks they did are for 2GB files only? Why not thousands of small files instead?
Because then ReiserFS 3 would kick their asses, since it's the only one that was designed to scale down as well as up.
And if you actually look at the results on these, with the exception of a few of the tests it was a dead-heat between all the file systems -- and if we're talking "real world" usage, how many applications are actually bound by disk performance rather than network?
But then, "it doesn't much matter what you use, get a life" doesn't make a very exciting head line.
I'm not accusing you of being lazy, I'm accusing the field of "computer science" as a whole of shrugging off the admittedly hard job of trying to answer these questions.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the difficulty of the problem:
there are ways these things can be hashed out, however crudely, and the links I provided should at least suggest some ways they might be hashed out.
Nearly every objection you raise can be dealt with by (a) by abandoning the quest for perfect certainty and just trying to be reasonable about it and (b) an increased number of trials -- hundreds probably wouldn't be strictly necessary, but it's not like a hundred trials is all that much really.
I perceive (and am gratified) by the "rightness" in what you are saying. These people really do propose to screw their former employer. If this were a world with reciprocal conventions of honor, I would agree with you entirely and call them treacherous scumbags.
Once upon a time, Mitch Kapor was working for Visicalc -- he couldn't get management interested in his ideas for integrating graphics with the spreadsheet, and so he gave up an left to found Lotus 1-2-3, which became one of the great sucesses in the software world -- it's the product that Microsoft imitated to create Excel.
I submit that this kind of "fork" of a project is one of the ways that progress happens, it's one of the checks on the stupidty of management. Someone engaging in this sort of fork is hardly traveling an easy path, this isn't a decision anyone would make lightly. "Stealing" an idea is the easy part. The hard parts are getting the code written and getting the product marketed.
Not if they live in California, which is a "Right to Work" state. Non-competition clauses are included in contracts here only as a "scarecrow" -- if you see one, it means that the company's legal department and possibly it's upper management is a bunch of weasels, and other things equal, I'd choose an offer from a company that wasn't trying to con it's employees.
Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents,' this might not be all that dumb an idea."
I see: so the problem in Iraq is with those grunts on the ground, not with the people who trained them, and certainly not with those geniuses who got us in there in the first place.
That is very irritating. There's all sorts of legitimately crappy stuff that Bush did... but there is nothing wrong with that banner. The carrier was returning home after completing the longest mission a nuclear carrier had ever made. Everybody using it as a 'bash Bush' image either doesn't know the truth, or doesn't care about the truth.
Irrespective of why that banner was there, the Bush regime made a very conscious, pointed use of it for propaganda purposes. It was a staged event (remember the damn flight suit?), in one of a series of staged events (remember pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein?). If this simple fact can't penetrate your thick skull, then you don't have any business making pronouncements about "truth".
By the way, just to save you from following that link supplied by mr100percent:
Bush said in October that the White House had nothing to do with the banner; a spokesman later clarified that the ship's crew asked for the sign and that the White House staff had it made by a private vendor. It was not clear who paid for the sign.
This is no different than a toddler wandering into freeway traffic.
Yes it is. Because no one has claimed that such an event would be "ethical".
That would be termed an "accident". The same if ANYONE accidentally wandered into freeway traffic.
Maybe this is a side-issue (but then, maybe it isn't), but this usage of the word "accident" drives people like me crazy... if you spend any time thinking about pedestrian rights or bicycle advocacy, the way people accept and shrug off deaths inflicted by automobiles as mere, unplanned "accidents" seems pretty evil.
This year, just like every year, we can expect around 50,000 people to die in automobile "accidents" in the United States. There's nothing surprising or unavoidable about this. It happens because we design and build the places we live in a certain way; we've made public policy decisions that have that number of deaths built-in as an unspoken price tag (and we're not even talking about air pollution or oil wars yet).
If we wanted to reduce or eliminate these deaths, it would be pretty obvious what to do about.
And yet, we shrug off all responsibility for them:
Accidents will happen.
Nice buzzword ("inner-platform effect"), but I fail to see how emacs is an example of it. Emacs is not about re-implementing the operating system inside the editor. Maybe you're thinking it's odd that emacs has a windowing system of it's own when you already have a windowing system (e.g. X windows), but you've got your history backwards: Emacs preceded X windows.
Just give the same projects to 2 teams,
with randomly given different methodologies,
and then see how often and how fast they succeed.
Yes, I'm inclined to agree... the people who are arguing with you are essentially quibbling about details. There are different ways you could do tests like this with different populations -- the results would certainly differ for the different populations, but that's also something worth knowing about.
If you do your experiments with teams of undergraduate volunteers, then you've got a sample set of relative beginners, albiet young, energetic, and mentally flexible ones. If you do it with more experienced programmers, then you have a different selection, and ideally you'd do the same tests with both.
The one impediment to this, as far as I can tell, is that it's "social science", and computer geeks don't like social science (or social anything). You're average "computer scientist" is a mathematician that doesn't want to hear about doing anything but math.
Our biggest problem in process improvement is that we can't easily measure productivity. If we could, then it would be a walk in the park to determine if one way of doing things was better than another. Instead we can say that project A was successful at meeting its targets while project B was not. Even then management always games the system to claim that their projects were successful.
Actually, I think this is a lazy cop-out by people who don't want to do the work of getting the answer.
Myself, i can think of ways to get real data on these questions:
MODEST_PROPOSAL.
Meanwhile, those of us who have to work for a living are creating useful products using mere "free as in beer" Open Source.
You "pragmatists" have trouble seeing where the juice is coming from that's flowing into your mouth, and can't look far enough down the pipeline to worry about someone turning off the pigot.
IE8 will not include support for SVG. If it is supported by IE9, we are looking at a minimum of 2-3 years before it is available on all major browsers. Add another year for browser penetration.
That's a point... but then it might just speed the adoption of Firefox on Windows.
The vast majority of users aren't going to cut off their nose to spite their face by refusing to use "non-free" software, and nor should they.
I would rephrase this as "the vast majority of users are short-sighted, and have no clue as to why they should be concerned with open standards".
But hey, don't let me bug you with something that's uncomfortably close to a moral injunction. We don't need no stinking ethics when we've got self-interest to guide us. It's never let us down before.
The complaint is not directed at Adobe, but against the idiots that are happily destroying the open nature of the web by embracing a closed product.
If you think it's impossible for anyone to make any money with software based on open standards,
then you haven't been paying any attention to the development of the web.
If you don't get the problem that closed architectures are vulnerable to manipulation by the agencies that own the architectures, then you need some history lessons (start by searching for "Microsoft").
But this is all a fucking waste of breath, I'm afraid. On the one hand, you have an abstract argument about the long-term advantages of open architectures, and on the other, you have "look at the fonnny kittens!".
The web is doomed. Oh well, it's been an interesting few decades.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite tiling window manager is "emacs" -- I do tend to use it inside of icewm, however, which at least has decent keyboard alternates for the window controls.
From cursory inspection only, I've tended to favor KDE over Gnome, but I'm getting the sense that KDE is losing it. KDE4 looks all whizzy, but there doesn't seem much real point, and the last time I tried to do something basic with it (do a wireless connection) I couldn't figure out what to do.
Oh, and I just went through a couple of days of upgrade hell, going from the kubuntu hardy-kde4 remix to intrepid. Couldn't get kdm to work -- zapped it all and switched to gdm, and it Just Worked.
Google's zeitgeist doesn't mention any sexual terms, so I guess we've all stopped thinking about sex, eh? They claim that the sexual filter doesn't matter because searches on sexual terms always remain constant and zeitgeist reports only on changes... but there's no way for us to know if this is correct, because we don't get to see the raw information. I'm very skeptical of this myself, because the porn-hounds and sexperts seem to be constantly coming up with new terminology (How are we supposed to know if "pegging" spiked this year?).
In any case, I'd argue that if the top 100 search terms are constant, unchanging, sexual terms, that would definitely change your understanding of the "zeitgeist" (e.g. if Sarah Palin were ranked way below Masumi Max, that changes your impression of what people are thinking about. Or at least improves your impression of their taste).
So where's the "turn off 'safe zeitgeist'" setting?
There's one or two guys still working on it, but if all anyone sees are lame benchmark sets like this, interest in it is definitely going to trickle away.
Myself, I continue to use Reiser 3. It's essentially mature code at this point that isn't likely to need a lot of attention.
Reiser 4 isn't quite "dead", but it's certainly limping. Someone with some serious balls is going to have to get involved with it for it to keep going -- it's going to take work at the distro level, possibly with a forked linux kernel.
My usual editorial: unix file systems have been crippled for so long, people have gotten used to dancing around the limitations ("don't treat the file system as a database!"), and have trouble grasping why you would want to remove the limitations. The concentrate on optimizing for "real world cases", and think it's weird if you want to add capabilities to do anything else.
Using ext2 for /boot is an older practice, from the days when a recovery disk (e.g. BBC) might not have any other file-system.
An obsolete practice since knoppix, I'd say.
Because then ReiserFS 3 would kick their asses, since it's the only one that was designed to scale down as well as up.
And if you actually look at the results on these, with the exception of a few of the tests it was a dead-heat between all the file systems -- and if we're talking "real world" usage, how many applications are actually bound by disk performance rather than network?
But then, "it doesn't much matter what you use, get a life" doesn't make a very exciting head line.
Memorably covered by William Shatner.
(Hey Geoffrey.)
I'm not accusing you of being lazy, I'm accusing the field of "computer science" as a whole of shrugging off the admittedly hard job of trying to answer these questions.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the difficulty of the problem: there are ways these things can be hashed out, however crudely, and the links I provided should at least suggest some ways they might be hashed out.
Nearly every objection you raise can be dealt with by (a) by abandoning the quest for perfect certainty and just trying to be reasonable about it and (b) an increased number of trials -- hundreds probably wouldn't be strictly necessary, but it's not like a hundred trials is all that much really.
Once upon a time, Mitch Kapor was working for Visicalc -- he couldn't get management interested in his ideas for integrating graphics with the spreadsheet, and so he gave up an left to found Lotus 1-2-3, which became one of the great sucesses in the software world -- it's the product that Microsoft imitated to create Excel.
I submit that this kind of "fork" of a project is one of the ways that progress happens, it's one of the checks on the stupidty of management. Someone engaging in this sort of fork is hardly traveling an easy path, this isn't a decision anyone would make lightly. "Stealing" an idea is the easy part. The hard parts are getting the code written and getting the product marketed.
Not if they live in California, which is a "Right to Work" state. Non-competition clauses are included in contracts here only as a "scarecrow" -- if you see one, it means that the company's legal department and possibly it's upper management is a bunch of weasels, and other things equal, I'd choose an offer from a company that wasn't trying to con it's employees.
I see: so the problem in Iraq is with those grunts on the ground, not with the people who trained them, and certainly not with those geniuses who got us in there in the first place.
Irrespective of why that banner was there, the Bush regime made a very conscious, pointed use of it for propaganda purposes. It was a staged event (remember the damn flight suit?), in one of a series of staged events (remember pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein?). If this simple fact can't penetrate your thick skull, then you don't have any business making pronouncements about "truth".
By the way, just to save you from following that link supplied by mr100percent:
Maybe this is a side-issue (but then, maybe it isn't), but this usage of the word "accident" drives people like me crazy... if you spend any time thinking about pedestrian rights or bicycle advocacy, the way people accept and shrug off deaths inflicted by automobiles as mere, unplanned "accidents" seems pretty evil.
This year, just like every year, we can expect around 50,000 people to die in automobile "accidents" in the United States. There's nothing surprising or unavoidable about this. It happens because we design and build the places we live in a certain way; we've made public policy decisions that have that number of deaths built-in as an unspoken price tag (and we're not even talking about air pollution or oil wars yet). If we wanted to reduce or eliminate these deaths, it would be pretty obvious what to do about.
And yet, we shrug off all responsibility for them: Accidents will happen.
Well, if you care, I use X largely just to run Firefox, and mostly live inside of emacs (MH-E for mail, ESC-x shell, sometimes gnus for usenet).
Nice buzzword ("inner-platform effect"), but I fail to see how emacs is an example of it. Emacs is not about re-implementing the operating system inside the editor. Maybe you're thinking it's odd that emacs has a windowing system of it's own when you already have a windowing system (e.g. X windows), but you've got your history backwards: Emacs preceded X windows.
Here's a famous case.
No, not easy, but certainly doable.
Yes, I'm inclined to agree... the people who are arguing with you are essentially quibbling about details. There are different ways you could do tests like this with different populations -- the results would certainly differ for the different populations, but that's also something worth knowing about.
If you do your experiments with teams of undergraduate volunteers, then you've got a sample set of relative beginners, albiet young, energetic, and mentally flexible ones. If you do it with more experienced programmers, then you have a different selection, and ideally you'd do the same tests with both.
The one impediment to this, as far as I can tell, is that it's "social science", and computer geeks don't like social science (or social anything). You're average "computer scientist" is a mathematician that doesn't want to hear about doing anything but math.
Actually, I think this is a lazy cop-out by people who don't want to do the work of getting the answer.
Myself, i can think of ways to get real data on these questions: MODEST_PROPOSAL.
And there are other methods that could be applied: Plat_forms Contest.
Whoa. You want people to actually prove their claims? The next thing you know you're going to demand that Computer Scientists learn how to do science.
Anyway, see you at the next "my language is better than yours" flamefest.
You're being generous. It was more like "fix it in 3.0", and that strategy has never worked for anyone but Microsoft.
" ... is designed to make Mathematica as invaluable for scientific research as it is for mathematics"
The last time I talked to any mathematicians about Mathematica, they rolled their eyes and said that their primary tool was pencil and paper.
You "pragmatists" have trouble seeing where the juice is coming from that's flowing into your mouth, and can't look far enough down the pipeline to worry about someone turning off the pigot.
That's a point... but then it might just speed the adoption of Firefox on Windows.
I would rephrase this as "the vast majority of users are short-sighted, and have no clue as to why they should be concerned with open standards".
But hey, don't let me bug you with something that's uncomfortably close to a moral injunction. We don't need no stinking ethics when we've got self-interest to guide us. It's never let us down before.
The complaint is not directed at Adobe, but against the idiots that are happily destroying the open nature of the web by embracing a closed product.
If you think it's impossible for anyone to make any money with software based on open standards, then you haven't been paying any attention to the development of the web.
If you don't get the problem that closed architectures are vulnerable to manipulation by the agencies that own the architectures, then you need some history lessons (start by searching for "Microsoft").
But this is all a fucking waste of breath, I'm afraid. On the one hand, you have an abstract argument about the long-term advantages of open architectures, and on the other, you have "look at the fonnny kittens!".
The web is doomed. Oh well, it's been an interesting few decades.
Yes, computer philosophy is important, but it's not like it's unusual these days:
But I submit that what we really could use is some "computer social science":