Is it a copyright issue? Might it be a trademark issue if they registered the movie title? Are we even talking US law or British? The article doesn't seem to address any of this.
If this is in fact copyright, then MGM is in the wrong as parody is fair use in US law from what I understand of it. As an earlier poster mentioned, there's a ton of porn movies that take advantage of this. You can make fun of an original work all you like. If this is British law, who knows?
If we're talking a trademark issue, different rules apply. Again, I don't see how MGM has a legal leg to stand on as this obviously isn't going to create any more confusion in the market place then the last Austin Powers flick.
There's a stack of unanswered questions this article raises but doesn't address. Anybody know where more information on this might be located?
I agree with your main point, but Doom was definitely a pure-DOS game.:)
DOS4GW as I recall. This was my point, games meant very little to the acceptance of Windows as the default desktop. Once Microsoft won the hearts and minds of corporate America, the consumer arena was sure to fall in line as well. Games were something that came about some time after folks were wanting to do work at home.
The desktop market would add so much more credibility in the marketplace too. I am not saying to hell with gamers, just learn to crawl before you walk.
Why is it I never have moderator points when something REALLY needs bumped up.
Jump back in time to Windows 3.1 if you will. Even Solitaire didn't play well on it, much less the bulk of the gaming market that was designed for DOS. Once it was readily apparent to even the most obtuse gaming company that Windows was going to be the future of the desktop, games started coming out for it. The best place to establish this is at the corporate level, much like Windows did way back when.
Folks seem to forget that the killer app for Windows 3.1 was not Doom, it was Excel. Only by focusing on the corporate desktop will *nix OS's have a serious chance at going after the broader consumer market.
Prepress shops have mixed feelings for PDF, most that I talked to see it as a constructive technology.
First off, this is not meant to be flamebait, which I guess is the surest way to get modded down. From what I understand of PDF at professional printing houses is they don't much care for it at the moment at all. Most of the ones my company has worked with definitely prefer Quark, or some other type of raw file format. Apparently PDF is still way too clever to get a proper output to the press machines, and tends to cause a lot of glitches.
Most of that realm is way outside my personal understanding of printing. PDF has always done a really outstanding of job of printing to a laser printer for me from either FreeBSD or Windows. The only thing I know for sure is that there's quite a difference between a professional level print house and a laser printer.
The only reason I mention this here is that I know Adobe wants to make PDF "the" file format for professional level needs. It would be nice to see them succeed in getting PDF working as nicely at both the user and professional level. It'd simplify a lot of processes. Especially keeping fonts together with documents.
Another clue can be found in how Photoshop wasn't developed at Adobe. The original developers for Photoshop had gone to Apple before approaching that printer font company known as Adobe.
Not if you couldn't predict which machines on the net would act as those supernodes. If, like another poster mentioned, machines that met a certain criteria (bandwidth, storage, time on line, whatever) simply won an election to act as a node, there's no single point to shut down. Shut down one supernode, the others are informed that a replacement is needed and another election is called for.
Following an election, the supernodes update the clients as to the lookup machines. I suppose you could even have it where if all the supernodes were shut down that an entirely new election process takes place creating a new set of supernodes. Kind of like having a DNS server setup where any machine can act as one of the root servers based on a criteria based election by those machines doing a lookup.
Way too much for my wee brain to work out all the details on. Sounds good in theory anyway:)
This is just a replacement electron gun, so it won't do anything about the deflection power waste.
Maybe I didn't fully get what all they were doing from reading the article, but it seemed to me that they weren't using deflection plates to direct the electron flow. Wasn't that the point of having 100,000 of them little diamond things?
From the article...
Cold-cathode guns are under electronic control and can more easily shape an electron beam, and achieve wider deflection angles, Extreme Devices said.
That's the part that is throwing me. Well duh! Hot-cathode guns are under electronic control. Seems they were alluding to some different method of moving the beam around. Heck, I dunno.
The last time I was at Fry's, the fastest computers they had were all in the "games" area and not the "server" area.
Fry's has a different area for servers and gaming computers?? Which Fry's is this? I've been to pretty much every one in California and I've never seen that.
...and conceivably eventually allow Microsoft to influence what is actually shown on television.
Please put down the tin foil hat and step away from the wacko!
As to why Microsoft is willing to lose money on them Xboxes? PC sales oddly enough.
A game written for the Xbox is for all intents and purposes a PC game. As we should all realize by now, it doesn't take a multi gigahertz machine to balance your checkbook. Gaming drives the PC industry, pushing for constant upgrades. An upgrade usually means a replacement PC for most folks, which subsequently means the customer is getting billed for some version of that OS them folks sell.
On the other hand, if all the really good gaming titles start to only come out for console systems that have no relationship to the PC, upgraded computers aren't needed nearly as much. No upgrades, fewer copies of Windows sold. Also, fewer copies of all that other software that can also be sold for Windows.
This is a way out there long term strategy that few companies could manage to finance. MS is not only working on eventually making the XBox profitable, they're also defending their core market.
Oddly enough, I see Microsoft's success in this area as being very beneficial to Linux as well. If for only the notion that it is far more likely to see Xbox games ported to the PC as both Windows and Linux games than titles found on more proprietary hardware.
Re:[mod parent up, please] Re:"L" is the problem
on
The LSB Delivers Again
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...it all lives in one file.
Okay, some serious clarification needed for folks who don't normally use FreeBSD. The "one file" in question is "rc.conf". This file has no scripting at all in it. It looks far more like a simple config file, with variables and values, then an rc.d startup script.
This file only affects core OS kinds of things, like basic network settings, host name, and stuff like that. For most folks this file is something like 10 lines long. It can get a healthy bit longer depending on what you're doing. Without looking, I'd guess mine is about 20 lines with comments and such added.
For daemons not expressly part of FreeBSD there are still start up scripts. They live in/usr/local/etc/rc/ and are just simple shell scripts. They can be as simple as 2 lines, or as complex as any shell script can get. Every shell script in this directory is run in alphabetical order. This is where stuff like Apache, MySQL, and the like would keep it's start up stuff.
I personally found the FreeBSD far simpler for me to grasp what all was going on then the sysv startup. On RedHat those scripts looked so darn complex for a newbie not then familiar with shell scripting (a bit smarter about that these days) that I was forever afraid to alter them. The whole time I had RedHat installed I just started up Apache manually rather than try to tackle where in them rc.x files I needed to add the stuff I wanted. Even as a relatively new Unix user I totally "got" what was going on with FreeBSD, and had very little trouble altering which services started, or didn't.
I've just heard this "one file" argument against FreeBSD too many times now as though there was some sort of monstrous 1000 line file a user had to figure out. This simply isn't the case at all. Regardless of your preference I felt that a fair comparison of the two systems needed some clarification from the other side.
...however I don't think the argument that they keep authority in the hands of citizens has been valid since the early 20th century.
All the high-tech military toys didn't stop a turn over of the Soviet government.
Having one of the finest military forces at the time didn't manage to subdue those Jews that armed themselves. Great book out about this BTW.
Regardless of the technology involved, urban warfare is especially nasty for the aggressor trying to subdue a determined armed populace. The world hasn't changed that much.
A couple of replies to statements made. Let's see if this makes any sense:)
Granted there may be a gui app installed in that particular distribution, but can you guarantee that if you move to a different distro? The consistency is not there.
So if a single distro provided kick ass utilities to tweak on X settings this isn't good enough unless anything labeled Linux has it? Because Suse and Mandrake might do something differently is by no means a hit against it. Is OSX that much less on OS because it put settings in different places than OS9? What about comparing 98 to XP? Settings for all kinds of things moved to entirely new places.
I like this idea, but it means that every single unix GUI setup has different settings and applications, and this is not a good thing for the end-user.
So why not set up a new user on a single window manager and leave him/her there for a while? When you are in KDE, KDE is in control of all aspects of the visual display. Set the newbie up, and leave them there. The paradigm is only different because on Linux a user actually has a choice if they wish. If the user decides they don't like KDE, they haven't far to go to change their environment.
Continuing the old refresh rate theme, what happens if the user's monitor isn't detected properly and the horizontal refresh range is set too high.
Indeed. So what exactly happens if for some reason OSX can't bring up a GUI at all? How about XP or even Win2k for that matter? No GUI, no way to edit the system. Reinstall. With a *nix system a user at least has a chance to correct something gone horribly wrong.
The differences between OS X and Linux are huge: The Linux GUIs are programmed (mostly) for hackers by hackers.
I'm sure the groups who are dedicated to usability issues within both KDE and Gnome might take some exception to this.
They're based on the huge estoteric heap of junk known as XFree. Whether it's the appropriate solution is not the point.
Not the point? Huh? How can you not judge a solution based on whether it was appropriate? Should Linux have used an inappropriate solution?
The point is, it's yet another layer of complexity onto an already complex OS.
Complexity? You want complexity? How about an OS that's got an OS on top of it, a translation layer in the middle, and a low level system that's otherwise unrelated to the other two. Oh, then to get the vast majority of key apps to work under it you have to install it's previous version to ride along side that as well. Every interaction is going through all kinds of translations and emulations on there. OTOH, KDE is running native on this machine here.
And most importantly, it's designed so the user should never see the command line, unless they want to. Oh, and it's bloody gorgeous:)
So are as talking about the pure look of the environment I would still put KDE using Mosfet'stweaks well above what was done with Aqua. I did rather like the notion of drop shadows for windows though. Outside of that, there were a ton of effects that were very cool to look at for about 20 minutes. After that, when it got time to do some work having warped magnifying glass views got real old, real fast.
Hence, we discussed the matter with Sun and (IMHO) compromised our principles (unrestricted distribution in source and binary forms) in order to get the project done.
Certainly a fully open and free version of Java would have been preferrable and all. Even still, is this really that much different then having the Netscape 4.x browser included? For years this has gone along with both Linux and FreeBSD to provide what the community couldn't, a functioning browser.
Just because Netscape provided a browser didn't mean that work wasn't done to produce a more open product. The folks over at KDE stepped up to the plate and knocked one outta the park with Konqueror. And of course we now have Mozilla going pretty nicely. Two great apps displacing the closed source version that preceded it.
All I'm getting at here is that Sun need not displace any and all efforts that might look to go into a JVM for FreeBSD. Maybe it fills the role needed for a couple of years until interest in doing a fresh version as you described gets enough going to actually make it happen.
To change the background graphic, could it be more intuitive than opening "System Preferences", and then selecting the "Desktop" control?
Yeah it could, as OSX provided no options for selecting your own background graphic. I understand that this got fixed in the newer release. At that time you could only pick from the themes that Apple put together from anywhere in the control panels.
This may sound like minor nit picking, but the person this was going to had a very specific requirement to have a 50% gray background so as not to influence on screen colors.
I left out the really fun part about actually installing OSX on a G3. Spent hours dinking around with it. I finally called up Apple tech support about this. According to Apple I had to create an 8gig partition in order for it to work. No more, no less. Nothing in any of the documentation could I find information about this, and I would have thought others would have different partition sizes. Didn't explore it further after that.
In contrast, I slapped a Mandrake install in a blank PC and it was the single sweetest installation routine I've ever seen. Picked up on all the hardware, handled the partitioning, and essentially held my hand all the way through.
Heck, Linux even has more apps NATIVE to it. Until Adobe starts porting apps to OSX like Photoshop and Illustrator I'm not even going to bother looking at another version of OSX. What's the point?
Why do people think the Mac is easy? Because user-friendlyness is the main point of Apple marketing.
I suppose my post up above is destined for Flamebait moderation for not joining into the group think that all things Apple are automatically the standard for ease of use.
For what it's worth, your dead on with your assessment. KDE is a far better, easier, and more flexible environment to work in. Yes, I am including newbies. I'll never forget trying to explain the whole drag the CD to the trash bit to someone new to the Mac. Or how about why the app is still running even after all the windows are closed?
I guess if you say something often enough it must be true.
Please excuse me from the "we" in your comment. I quite honestly don't know that OSX has a better interface than what is available for Linux. In a head to head comparison of both Aqua and KDE, for instance, where does Aqua excel exactly?
When evaluating OSX for some Mac users I support I ran into serious difficulties in how to make basic changes to the GUI. Dumb things, like the background graphic, system colors, and other stuff along them lines.
On the other hand, my first experience with KDE (back on 1.12 as I recall) I managed to locate all kinds of tweaks to the UI with mostly all the control center objects being where I expected to find them. Add to this seemless multiple desktop support and I just don't see the all the phu phu graphical effects from Aqua comparing.
I guess I may be trolling a bit here, but I get a little irritated at comments that suggest that either KDE or Gnome are somehow inferior products to what MS or Apple shell out. If anything it seems that both those companies have a ways to go to work in even a portion of the real usability features found on the *nix desktop.
The other thing to keep in mind here is the amount of time involved with creating a port. Especially one like Mozilla. Don't know about you, but on here Mozilla takes ages to compile. Far longer than even a make world procedure. In order to make the port, the maintainer has to essentially compile it twice over at least. Once to create the proper pkg-plist file, and the other for testing it out. If that wasn't enough, then you need to make sure the "make deinstall" works properly to remove all the installed files. None of this includes the time to work in any patches, or what happens when things don't work as expected the first time.
It's clever stuff, even for the very experienced folks putting out most of the ports. sobomax is the fella that normally does up Mozilla, as well as a huge chunk of the FreeBSD ports tree. Busy darn fella from the looks of things. He used to be the sole maintainer for all of the Gnome install.
Anyway, I thought I'd mention some of this here as it's common to be a little impatient with the time it takes to get a port out. I know I sure can be! Thing is, with these rather complex ports there's a lot of testing and such that needs to go into them. Let's also not forget what time of the year it is.
sadly, they dont yet have a freebsd binary download, as they did for 0.9.6
Umm, so why not just pull down the latest nightly build for FreeBSD? Moz is getting them up there perty darn regular now. Heck, it's more up to date then 0.9.7! Just untar that bugger into your home directory.
gzip -dc mozilla-i386-unknown-freebsd4.4.tar.gz | gzip -xvf -
cd ~/mozilla ./run-mozilla
It's even a faster install then a package. This is what I'm using at this very moment until the port gets completed. Wanna work 0.9.7 into Galeon's compile and all when it's ready.
Actually, he didn't say this. He said, "CORBA is good when you define coarse interfaces, and most Bonobo interfaces are coarse. The only problem is that Bonobo/CORBA interfaces are not good for small interfaces. For example, an XML parsing Bonobo/CORBA component would be inefficient compared to a C API."
Those were the kinds of complaints that the KDE folks had, as I recall. The notion that CORBA is essentially good stuff, but too much for most uses. I realize this is paraphrasing, but the only thing I was getting at was the similarity in the comments.
KDE's DCOP and KParts are rather incomplete imitations of CORBA.
First off, I'm not a developer. At best I just read a fair amount about what folks are doing. One of the things I personally found interesting about this interview was Miguel listing problems with Bonobo and CORBA that sounded a LOT like the reasons KDE doesn't use those technologies. Essentially that bindings such as CORBA are like swatting a fly with a hammer for desktop apps, thus a simpler approach was taken with things like DCOP.
Again, I'm not in the trenches, but from an observers point of view it seems that Gnome is just needing that next set of bindings to be developed sometime later over and over again. Everything was going to be better with CORBA and Bonobo linking everything. Now that's all the wrong approach, and Mono is needed. I may be way of base here, it just seems like it's the "bindings to be developed" of the month club.
On the other hand, KDE made the call to move things to DCOP a while ago and they seem to be sticking to their guns on it. The developers are extending where needed, but leaving the core intact as it's doing what they intended from the onset. I honestly don't know if this is a good or bad thing in practice. It seems like a more reasoned approach, and it's certainly produced a wonderful desktop environment.
Early into next year both projects are looking to have major releases. I guess we'll see which approach provides the payoff of a more robust environment that developers prefer to work on.
Presumably they are caught in the next backup cycle. Anyone have a better idea?
Yeah, shut down networking. On an NT box bring to a halt both the workstation and server services with the net command. For Linux simply kill Samba or NFS, depending on what you're doing. The idea is to bring the box to a "restricted state" so every darn thing gets backed up.
This kind of networking shutdown is easily scripted, and is the only reasonable way I know of to work around file locks on a live server. Mind you, doing this in the middle of the day will most likely get torches lit and pitch forks sharpened as the natives tend to get a wee bit restless on ya.
They could not figure out a way to utilize Navigator for profit, but kept developing it. It would have probably been a good idea to release the source code then, while MS would only have been comfortable going as far as no-charge with IE (thus, giving Netscape the upper-hand).
Perhaps this might have been a good idea, but not at all possible unfortunately. There were simply too many key components of Communicator that Netscape didn't own. Even relatively simple stuff like the address book for E-Mail was using a licensed DB. There just wasn't a usable product without these other bits of code that were owned by others.
By no means does that justify the total re-write effort gone into Mozilla. I'm personally still baffled by the fact that they didn't just focus on Gecko's rendering within the existing GUI framework they had. XUL and all the other stuff could have come later down the road, but not if you make the call to throw the baby, the bath water, and the tub all out the window.
Re:Prettier outside, same junk inside
on
Concept PC 2001
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· Score: 2
I do so much crap with that stuff that I just rip it open right on the floor.
Ohhh, you had a floor?? Why, when I had to go about pulling apart MFM drives to count the platters there was nothing but a patch of mud to work with along the side of the road. You'd just get the case off, then WOOOSH, a truck would come by and splash your components with mud.
Trying telling that to kids today... they won't believe you.
Drove way outta the LA city lights up to Wrightwood. Got the families and kids together with lawn chairs, munchies, and good hot coffee. Great show! Saw quite a few leaving a serious trail of sparks behind them. Stayed up there until about 2:30am.
Heck, on the way home passing by the lights of the San Fernando Valley (a bit north of LA) I could see them still coming down through the windshield of the car. This is with a ton of light from the city lights, not to mention the other cars.
After everyone else went to bed I went back outside and could still see a tremendous show, again even with the lights of the city near by. It was still worth it to drive out to the darker parts as the show was just that much better.
Next time (2099) I've got plans to bring more coffee along!
Slashdot Mirror
Is it a copyright issue? Might it be a trademark issue if they registered the movie title? Are we even talking US law or British? The article doesn't seem to address any of this.
If this is in fact copyright, then MGM is in the wrong as parody is fair use in US law from what I understand of it. As an earlier poster mentioned, there's a ton of porn movies that take advantage of this. You can make fun of an original work all you like. If this is British law, who knows?
If we're talking a trademark issue, different rules apply. Again, I don't see how MGM has a legal leg to stand on as this obviously isn't going to create any more confusion in the market place then the last Austin Powers flick.
There's a stack of unanswered questions this article raises but doesn't address. Anybody know where more information on this might be located?
I agree with your main point, but Doom was definitely a pure-DOS game. :)
DOS4GW as I recall. This was my point, games meant very little to the acceptance of Windows as the default desktop. Once Microsoft won the hearts and minds of corporate America, the consumer arena was sure to fall in line as well. Games were something that came about some time after folks were wanting to do work at home.
The desktop market would add so much more credibility in the marketplace too. I am not saying to hell with gamers, just learn to crawl before you walk.
Why is it I never have moderator points when something REALLY needs bumped up.
Jump back in time to Windows 3.1 if you will. Even Solitaire didn't play well on it, much less the bulk of the gaming market that was designed for DOS. Once it was readily apparent to even the most obtuse gaming company that Windows was going to be the future of the desktop, games started coming out for it. The best place to establish this is at the corporate level, much like Windows did way back when.
Folks seem to forget that the killer app for Windows 3.1 was not Doom, it was Excel. Only by focusing on the corporate desktop will *nix OS's have a serious chance at going after the broader consumer market.
Prepress shops have mixed feelings for PDF, most that I talked to see it as a constructive technology.
First off, this is not meant to be flamebait, which I guess is the surest way to get modded down. From what I understand of PDF at professional printing houses is they don't much care for it at the moment at all. Most of the ones my company has worked with definitely prefer Quark, or some other type of raw file format. Apparently PDF is still way too clever to get a proper output to the press machines, and tends to cause a lot of glitches.
Most of that realm is way outside my personal understanding of printing. PDF has always done a really outstanding of job of printing to a laser printer for me from either FreeBSD or Windows. The only thing I know for sure is that there's quite a difference between a professional level print house and a laser printer.
The only reason I mention this here is that I know Adobe wants to make PDF "the" file format for professional level needs. It would be nice to see them succeed in getting PDF working as nicely at both the user and professional level. It'd simplify a lot of processes. Especially keeping fonts together with documents.
How could the above be a troll?
Another clue can be found in how Photoshop wasn't developed at Adobe. The original developers for Photoshop had gone to Apple before approaching that printer font company known as Adobe.
Not if you couldn't predict which machines on the net would act as those supernodes. If, like another poster mentioned, machines that met a certain criteria (bandwidth, storage, time on line, whatever) simply won an election to act as a node, there's no single point to shut down. Shut down one supernode, the others are informed that a replacement is needed and another election is called for.
:)
Following an election, the supernodes update the clients as to the lookup machines. I suppose you could even have it where if all the supernodes were shut down that an entirely new election process takes place creating a new set of supernodes. Kind of like having a DNS server setup where any machine can act as one of the root servers based on a criteria based election by those machines doing a lookup.
Way too much for my wee brain to work out all the details on. Sounds good in theory anyway
Maybe I didn't fully get what all they were doing from reading the article, but it seemed to me that they weren't using deflection plates to direct the electron flow. Wasn't that the point of having 100,000 of them little diamond things?
From the article...
That's the part that is throwing me. Well duh! Hot-cathode guns are under electronic control. Seems they were alluding to some different method of moving the beam around. Heck, I dunno.
The last time I was at Fry's, the fastest computers they had were all in the "games" area and not the "server" area.
Fry's has a different area for servers and gaming computers?? Which Fry's is this? I've been to pretty much every one in California and I've never seen that.
...and conceivably eventually allow Microsoft to influence what is actually shown on television.
Please put down the tin foil hat and step away from the wacko!
As to why Microsoft is willing to lose money on them Xboxes? PC sales oddly enough.
A game written for the Xbox is for all intents and purposes a PC game. As we should all realize by now, it doesn't take a multi gigahertz machine to balance your checkbook. Gaming drives the PC industry, pushing for constant upgrades. An upgrade usually means a replacement PC for most folks, which subsequently means the customer is getting billed for some version of that OS them folks sell.
On the other hand, if all the really good gaming titles start to only come out for console systems that have no relationship to the PC, upgraded computers aren't needed nearly as much. No upgrades, fewer copies of Windows sold. Also, fewer copies of all that other software that can also be sold for Windows.
This is a way out there long term strategy that few companies could manage to finance. MS is not only working on eventually making the XBox profitable, they're also defending their core market.
Oddly enough, I see Microsoft's success in this area as being very beneficial to Linux as well. If for only the notion that it is far more likely to see Xbox games ported to the PC as both Windows and Linux games than titles found on more proprietary hardware.
...it all lives in one file.
/usr/local/etc/rc/ and are just simple shell scripts. They can be as simple as 2 lines, or as complex as any shell script can get. Every shell script in this directory is run in alphabetical order. This is where stuff like Apache, MySQL, and the like would keep it's start up stuff.
Okay, some serious clarification needed for folks who don't normally use FreeBSD. The "one file" in question is "rc.conf". This file has no scripting at all in it. It looks far more like a simple config file, with variables and values, then an rc.d startup script.
This file only affects core OS kinds of things, like basic network settings, host name, and stuff like that. For most folks this file is something like 10 lines long. It can get a healthy bit longer depending on what you're doing. Without looking, I'd guess mine is about 20 lines with comments and such added.
For daemons not expressly part of FreeBSD there are still start up scripts. They live in
I personally found the FreeBSD far simpler for me to grasp what all was going on then the sysv startup. On RedHat those scripts looked so darn complex for a newbie not then familiar with shell scripting (a bit smarter about that these days) that I was forever afraid to alter them. The whole time I had RedHat installed I just started up Apache manually rather than try to tackle where in them rc.x files I needed to add the stuff I wanted. Even as a relatively new Unix user I totally "got" what was going on with FreeBSD, and had very little trouble altering which services started, or didn't.
I've just heard this "one file" argument against FreeBSD too many times now as though there was some sort of monstrous 1000 line file a user had to figure out. This simply isn't the case at all. Regardless of your preference I felt that a fair comparison of the two systems needed some clarification from the other side.
...however I don't think the argument that they keep authority in the hands of citizens has been valid since the early 20th century.
All the high-tech military toys didn't stop a turn over of the Soviet government.
Having one of the finest military forces at the time didn't manage to subdue those Jews that armed themselves. Great book out about this BTW.
Regardless of the technology involved, urban warfare is especially nasty for the aggressor trying to subdue a determined armed populace. The world hasn't changed that much.
A couple of replies to statements made. Let's see if this makes any sense :)
:)
Granted there may be a gui app installed in that particular distribution, but can you guarantee that if you move to a different distro? The consistency is not there.
So if a single distro provided kick ass utilities to tweak on X settings this isn't good enough unless anything labeled Linux has it? Because Suse and Mandrake might do something differently is by no means a hit against it. Is OSX that much less on OS because it put settings in different places than OS9? What about comparing 98 to XP? Settings for all kinds of things moved to entirely new places.
I like this idea, but it means that every single unix GUI setup has different settings and applications, and this is not a good thing for the end-user.
So why not set up a new user on a single window manager and leave him/her there for a while? When you are in KDE, KDE is in control of all aspects of the visual display. Set the newbie up, and leave them there. The paradigm is only different because on Linux a user actually has a choice if they wish. If the user decides they don't like KDE, they haven't far to go to change their environment.
Continuing the old refresh rate theme, what happens if the user's monitor isn't detected properly and the horizontal refresh range is set too high.
Indeed. So what exactly happens if for some reason OSX can't bring up a GUI at all? How about XP or even Win2k for that matter? No GUI, no way to edit the system. Reinstall. With a *nix system a user at least has a chance to correct something gone horribly wrong.
The differences between OS X and Linux are huge: The Linux GUIs are programmed (mostly) for hackers by hackers.
I'm sure the groups who are dedicated to usability issues within both KDE and Gnome might take some exception to this.
They're based on the huge estoteric heap of junk known as XFree. Whether it's the appropriate solution is not the point.
Not the point? Huh? How can you not judge a solution based on whether it was appropriate? Should Linux have used an inappropriate solution?
The point is, it's yet another layer of complexity onto an already complex OS.
Complexity? You want complexity? How about an OS that's got an OS on top of it, a translation layer in the middle, and a low level system that's otherwise unrelated to the other two. Oh, then to get the vast majority of key apps to work under it you have to install it's previous version to ride along side that as well. Every interaction is going through all kinds of translations and emulations on there. OTOH, KDE is running native on this machine here.
And most importantly, it's designed so the user should never see the command line, unless they want to. Oh, and it's bloody gorgeous
So are as talking about the pure look of the environment I would still put KDE using Mosfet's tweaks well above what was done with Aqua. I did rather like the notion of drop shadows for windows though. Outside of that, there were a ton of effects that were very cool to look at for about 20 minutes. After that, when it got time to do some work having warped magnifying glass views got real old, real fast.
Hence, we discussed the matter with Sun and (IMHO) compromised our principles (unrestricted distribution in source and binary forms) in order to get the project done.
Certainly a fully open and free version of Java would have been preferrable and all. Even still, is this really that much different then having the Netscape 4.x browser included? For years this has gone along with both Linux and FreeBSD to provide what the community couldn't, a functioning browser.
Just because Netscape provided a browser didn't mean that work wasn't done to produce a more open product. The folks over at KDE stepped up to the plate and knocked one outta the park with Konqueror. And of course we now have Mozilla going pretty nicely. Two great apps displacing the closed source version that preceded it.
All I'm getting at here is that Sun need not displace any and all efforts that might look to go into a JVM for FreeBSD. Maybe it fills the role needed for a couple of years until interest in doing a fresh version as you described gets enough going to actually make it happen.
To change the background graphic, could it be more intuitive than opening "System Preferences", and then selecting the "Desktop" control?
Yeah it could, as OSX provided no options for selecting your own background graphic. I understand that this got fixed in the newer release. At that time you could only pick from the themes that Apple put together from anywhere in the control panels.
This may sound like minor nit picking, but the person this was going to had a very specific requirement to have a 50% gray background so as not to influence on screen colors.
I left out the really fun part about actually installing OSX on a G3. Spent hours dinking around with it. I finally called up Apple tech support about this. According to Apple I had to create an 8gig partition in order for it to work. No more, no less. Nothing in any of the documentation could I find information about this, and I would have thought others would have different partition sizes. Didn't explore it further after that.
In contrast, I slapped a Mandrake install in a blank PC and it was the single sweetest installation routine I've ever seen. Picked up on all the hardware, handled the partitioning, and essentially held my hand all the way through.
Heck, Linux even has more apps NATIVE to it. Until Adobe starts porting apps to OSX like Photoshop and Illustrator I'm not even going to bother looking at another version of OSX. What's the point?
Why do people think the Mac is easy? Because user-friendlyness is the main point of Apple marketing.
I suppose my post up above is destined for Flamebait moderation for not joining into the group think that all things Apple are automatically the standard for ease of use.
For what it's worth, your dead on with your assessment. KDE is a far better, easier, and more flexible environment to work in. Yes, I am including newbies. I'll never forget trying to explain the whole drag the CD to the trash bit to someone new to the Mac. Or how about why the app is still running even after all the windows are closed?
I guess if you say something often enough it must be true.
We know OSX has a better interface than Linux.
Please excuse me from the "we" in your comment. I quite honestly don't know that OSX has a better interface than what is available for Linux. In a head to head comparison of both Aqua and KDE, for instance, where does Aqua excel exactly?
When evaluating OSX for some Mac users I support I ran into serious difficulties in how to make basic changes to the GUI. Dumb things, like the background graphic, system colors, and other stuff along them lines.
On the other hand, my first experience with KDE (back on 1.12 as I recall) I managed to locate all kinds of tweaks to the UI with mostly all the control center objects being where I expected to find them. Add to this seemless multiple desktop support and I just don't see the all the phu phu graphical effects from Aqua comparing.
I guess I may be trolling a bit here, but I get a little irritated at comments that suggest that either KDE or Gnome are somehow inferior products to what MS or Apple shell out. If anything it seems that both those companies have a ways to go to work in even a portion of the real usability features found on the *nix desktop.
The other thing to keep in mind here is the amount of time involved with creating a port. Especially one like Mozilla. Don't know about you, but on here Mozilla takes ages to compile. Far longer than even a make world procedure. In order to make the port, the maintainer has to essentially compile it twice over at least. Once to create the proper pkg-plist file, and the other for testing it out. If that wasn't enough, then you need to make sure the "make deinstall" works properly to remove all the installed files. None of this includes the time to work in any patches, or what happens when things don't work as expected the first time.
It's clever stuff, even for the very experienced folks putting out most of the ports. sobomax is the fella that normally does up Mozilla, as well as a huge chunk of the FreeBSD ports tree. Busy darn fella from the looks of things. He used to be the sole maintainer for all of the Gnome install.
Anyway, I thought I'd mention some of this here as it's common to be a little impatient with the time it takes to get a port out. I know I sure can be! Thing is, with these rather complex ports there's a lot of testing and such that needs to go into them. Let's also not forget what time of the year it is.
sadly, they dont yet have a freebsd binary download, as they did for 0.9.6
Umm, so why not just pull down the latest nightly build for FreeBSD? Moz is getting them up there perty darn regular now. Heck, it's more up to date then 0.9.7! Just untar that bugger into your home directory.
It's even a faster install then a package. This is what I'm using at this very moment until the port gets completed. Wanna work 0.9.7 into Galeon's compile and all when it's ready.
Actually, he didn't say this. He said, "CORBA is good when you define coarse interfaces, and most Bonobo interfaces are coarse. The only problem is that Bonobo/CORBA interfaces are not good for small interfaces. For example, an XML parsing Bonobo/CORBA component would be inefficient compared to a C API."
Those were the kinds of complaints that the KDE folks had, as I recall. The notion that CORBA is essentially good stuff, but too much for most uses. I realize this is paraphrasing, but the only thing I was getting at was the similarity in the comments.
KDE's DCOP and KParts are rather incomplete imitations of CORBA.
First off, I'm not a developer. At best I just read a fair amount about what folks are doing. One of the things I personally found interesting about this interview was Miguel listing problems with Bonobo and CORBA that sounded a LOT like the reasons KDE doesn't use those technologies. Essentially that bindings such as CORBA are like swatting a fly with a hammer for desktop apps, thus a simpler approach was taken with things like DCOP.
Again, I'm not in the trenches, but from an observers point of view it seems that Gnome is just needing that next set of bindings to be developed sometime later over and over again. Everything was going to be better with CORBA and Bonobo linking everything. Now that's all the wrong approach, and Mono is needed. I may be way of base here, it just seems like it's the "bindings to be developed" of the month club.
On the other hand, KDE made the call to move things to DCOP a while ago and they seem to be sticking to their guns on it. The developers are extending where needed, but leaving the core intact as it's doing what they intended from the onset. I honestly don't know if this is a good or bad thing in practice. It seems like a more reasoned approach, and it's certainly produced a wonderful desktop environment.
Early into next year both projects are looking to have major releases. I guess we'll see which approach provides the payoff of a more robust environment that developers prefer to work on.
Presumably they are caught in the next backup cycle. Anyone have a better idea?
Yeah, shut down networking. On an NT box bring to a halt both the workstation and server services with the net command. For Linux simply kill Samba or NFS, depending on what you're doing. The idea is to bring the box to a "restricted state" so every darn thing gets backed up.
This kind of networking shutdown is easily scripted, and is the only reasonable way I know of to work around file locks on a live server. Mind you, doing this in the middle of the day will most likely get torches lit and pitch forks sharpened as the natives tend to get a wee bit restless on ya.
No need to put away that PDP-11 just yet, they've got a text friendly version too.
There's always a whiner in the crowd.
They could not figure out a way to utilize Navigator for profit, but kept developing it. It would have probably been a good idea to release the source code then, while MS would only have been comfortable going as far as no-charge with IE (thus, giving Netscape the upper-hand).
Perhaps this might have been a good idea, but not at all possible unfortunately. There were simply too many key components of Communicator that Netscape didn't own. Even relatively simple stuff like the address book for E-Mail was using a licensed DB. There just wasn't a usable product without these other bits of code that were owned by others.
By no means does that justify the total re-write effort gone into Mozilla. I'm personally still baffled by the fact that they didn't just focus on Gecko's rendering within the existing GUI framework they had. XUL and all the other stuff could have come later down the road, but not if you make the call to throw the baby, the bath water, and the tub all out the window.
I do so much crap with that stuff that I just rip it open right on the floor.
Ohhh, you had a floor?? Why, when I had to go about pulling apart MFM drives to count the platters there was nothing but a patch of mud to work with along the side of the road. You'd just get the case off, then WOOOSH, a truck would come by and splash your components with mud.
Trying telling that to kids today... they won't believe you.
Drove way outta the LA city lights up to Wrightwood. Got the families and kids together with lawn chairs, munchies, and good hot coffee. Great show! Saw quite a few leaving a serious trail of sparks behind them. Stayed up there until about 2:30am.
Heck, on the way home passing by the lights of the San Fernando Valley (a bit north of LA) I could see them still coming down through the windshield of the car. This is with a ton of light from the city lights, not to mention the other cars.
After everyone else went to bed I went back outside and could still see a tremendous show, again even with the lights of the city near by. It was still worth it to drive out to the darker parts as the show was just that much better.
Next time (2099) I've got plans to bring more coffee along!