There were long, arduous debates on the various, related lists about the UI and API and various use-cases for both beginner and advanced users.
Well, I'll reserve judgement until gtk 2.4 hits the streets.
However long and arduous debates are not a guarantee of anything. The gtk/gnome hackers have never shown any particularly great judgement at UI design though, so I'm not really all that optimistic.
Please tell me that isn't really the `new file selector'.
The old selector was pretty basic, but also pretty straight-forward, and super-fast to use with the keyboard because of the great completion functionality.
This new dialog is not only much more confusing looking, but seems bloated, rather ugly, and doesn't have the text entry box -- i.e, they removed the one great feature they used to have!
I know they're attempting to appeal to inexperienced users, but they always seem to (1) do so in a way that pisses off experienced users, and (2) botch things up in the inexperienced-user case anyway.
Hopefully someone will come up with a less crappy file-selector and all the major distros (at least debian) will use it.
So what if they have a choke hold on OS market? Monopolies eventually topple on their own.... It might be 15 years from now, but it'll happen eventually and without the help of government oppression.
Yeah, and the guy on the clock-tower with a machine-gun will eventually run out of ammo. Great.
I'd guess it will resemble typical `Starbucks Music', that is:
Inoffensive (it is, after all, essentially muzack)
Attempts to reinforce Starbuck's corporate image goals, that is, make their whitebread suburban customers feel Funky(tm), Intellectual(tm), Artsy(tm), etc.
A dash of nostalgia
Following this formula, `Starbucks Music' usually seems to focus on bland 50's pop (hey, if it's from the 50s, it must be Funky(tm) and maybe even Intellectual(tm), right?), with a smattering of more modern songs, as long as they're acceptably bland.
An odd contrast with Starbucks is that for some reason, an astonishing number of the small bentou (lunchbox) stands I've seen in Tokyo seem to play mostly death metal -- especially odd when you consider the employees are almost exclusively old women! I always thought that was sort of cool...
I think this is a great thing, not because the marketeers will stop lying (they won't), or consumer will be any less confused (they won't), but because at least it will take a bit of pressure off of Intel's engineers to keep ramping up the clock speed.
Currently, when faced with a choice of implementation strategies, there's got to be enormous pressure from marketing to choose the one which increases the base clock speed, even if it's the poorer choice for actually improving average performance.
Of course, if they start using some benchmark to name their chips, then there'll be huge pressure to choose the strategy that makes `the number go up' (since it's basically `the number' that consumers look that, they haven't a clue what it means) -- even if technically another strategy might be better for the future -- but surely that's got to at least be better than the current farce!
I didn't know about "tr"; I've been a unix user since 1988. The man page seems to suggest that it's a relatively new command.
Um, no. It was certainly there when I started using unix (BSD 4.1c) circa 1983, and I believe it was in earlier Bell Labs distributions from the '70s (e.g., v7 or whatever).
Sony's won the next-gen "console wars" before they've even started because they're going to sell a lot of PS3's, er, because, uh... this analyst company... um, says so.
Has there ever been an `analyst' that did anything more than guess wildly, or (on alternate tuesdays) try to dress up the obvious as insight?
As far as I can figure the main point of such companies is to make plain the cluelessness of business and the press.
Too bad green tea tastes like rancid lawn clippings
No -- bad green tea tastes like rancid lawn clippings.
Good green tea, well prepared, is incredibly delicious. It's obviously very different than black tea or coffee, but in fact I find it has a sort of `weight', like coffee -- and unlike black tea -- which makes it a lot easier to drink in the morning especially.
If you're talking about Japanese green tea, it should be fresh, and there's lots of old crap green tea out there. It's usually pretty obvious though, if you just smell it when you open the container: if it smells a bit sour, it's cheap or old tea, but if it smells like spring exploding in your face, that's what you want!
As for preparing it, the main points, in my experience are:
Don't use water that's too hot (it's not like black tea)! The number you often see bandied about is 60 degrees celsius, but basically let it cool from boiling in an open container (the cup you'll drink it in will do nicely), until it's cool enough you can pick up the cup for a short while without burning yourself. Better too cool than too hot (you can make quite nice green tea with cold water actually!).
Only let it steep for a short while, like 30-40 seconds. This depends on personal taste and the amount of tea you use, but as with temperature, less is generally better.
There are many, many, different sorts of Japanese green tea, and I'm very bad at remembering names -- since production is very seasonal, by the time I figure out I like something, they're usually not selling it any longer! -- so I generally just buy from stores I trust, who's owner knows my taste and can recommend something to suit it.
There does seem to be a basic division into `sweet' and `strong' types, where the latter is often a bit more bitter (though if you use too hot water, or steep it for too long, any green tea can get pretty bitter).
But basically: (1) fresh, (2) cool, and (3) quick.
BTW, one cool thing about green tea is that if it's good quality, you can re-use the same leaves many times, the taste only gradually diminishes. Since I'm kinda cheap and lazy, I often just put fresh leaves in my little pot in the morning, and re-use them all day! [This makes the effective price of good quality tea somewhat less that it may seem at first glance.]
So... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far.
Yeah, right. That sounds clunky as hell, and if it's anything like windows, is clunky as hell.
As a previous poster said, the excellent TAB-completing text-entry box was one of the gnome/gtk file selector's great kick-ass features (far nicer than e.g. windows or kde) -- using it is simple, easy to understand, and fast -- and they went and removed it?!?
I usually look forward to new Gnome releases because they always seem to thrown in a fair a mount of new eye candy, but cringe too because I know they always manage to make some horrendously bad UI decisions as well.
The old/original BSD license had 4 `clauses' of which one required you to mention Berkeley in any advertising/documentation for the end product. This `advertising clause' was, as you might imagine, not only a huge practical problem, but incompatible with the GPL.
The revised BSD license -- which almost all current `BSD licensed' software uses -- deleted the advertising clause, removing the conflict with the GPL.
Windows users haven't had to worry about lack of useful documentation or easy configuration for years, so they can afford to obsess over eye candy
Hmmm, where is this `useful documentation' you speak of? The windows documentation I'm familiar with (not happily, but sometimes you gotta do unpalatable things) is for the most part completely useless, e.g., it simply restates what is already obvious, without giving any deeper insight or addressing common problems...
Re:And XFree86 Inc. has shown to be willing to tal
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is not clear why XFree86 has to modify their license to suit a Linux distribution, which is suppose to be a compilation of Free/Open Source Linux software, not a dictator of Open Source.
Of course they don't `have to' do anything. But whether they (or you) like it or not, Debian and other distros have a fair amount of influence, and if they all move to some other system, the XFree86 project could end up being marginalized, and I doubt they want that.
If these arm chair lawyers are so concerned about GPL, why don't they write a new X Window System from scratch, and release it for free/Free under the GPL.
Because they don't have to -- they can just take XFree86 4.3.xxx and fork it. Easy!
[and thus the beauty of free software is illustrated.]
It is well known that you cannot freely mix BSD (old 4 clause or new 3 clause) licensed code with GPL code in the same code base.
No, it's not `well known', and in fact, it's not true!
The revised (`3 clause') BSD license is perfectly compatible with the GPL. Since 99.9% of all `BSD licensed' code uses the revised BSD license, there's basically no problem at all.
Of course the resulting aggregate program must have its source distributed (&c) as part of its source uses the GPL, but that's pretty obvious if you're using GPL'd source code.
[The original (`4 clause') BSD license is indeed incompatible with the GPL, but that's largely academic, as no one actually uses that anymore.]
Someone should port GIMP to OS X using Cocoa, following Apple's UI Guidelines and see just how much broader the appeal will be.
Does Apple even follow them these days?
Er, jokes aside, my impression was that programs like the gimp tended to be treated rather specially, in that many users were `professionals' who prefer a highly efficient/productive interface over one that is easy for newbies to come to grips with.
Since such an interface often entails many highly application-specific tweaks and optimizing for speed rather than obviousness, it seems doubtful that simply following some general-purpose UI guidelines would make much difference, no matter how good they are for `average' programs.
Indeed, my personal impression is that classic mac behavior tends to emphasize clarity at the expense of efficiency in some (many?) cases, which just Isn't Going to Fly in this case, I think.
I simply trashbag any mail that's in html (with slightly pickier handling of multipart/alternative), which seems to get rid of about 90% of the spam I receive. I can do this because basically everybody I know, and every mailing list I'm on, is clueful enough to not send html mail (even those who aren't computer types).
However this strategy wouldn't work very well for people that have ditzier friends.
The moral? Choose your friends well to avoid spam...
Well the initials ESR show up quite a bit in the software that I tend to use. Huge portions of Emacs were done by him (at one point he was the single largest contributor besides RMS, I don't know if that is true today)
No, it's completely off-base to say `Huge portions of Emacs were done by him.' ESR is at best a minor contributor to emacs; his biggest contribution was probably the GUD (Grand Unified Debugger) mode. You can see for yourself, all the ChangeLog entries are still there.
ESR is not stupid, and he does know how to program, but he doesn't seem to have ever done anything truly significant (especially compared to fellow `FOSS leaders' like RMS and Linus). Obviously that's true of most people, but in ESR's case it's particularly striking because he tends to be in the public eye so much.
Actually Intel's behavior in this regard is far worse than AMD's.
With AMD, the bullshit is just a thin (and obvious) marketing layer, which is easy enough to ignore. Intel, on the other hand, release slow chips with high clock speeds because they know the vast majority of morons out there will only pay attention to the MHz rating.
As a case in point, the infamous P4 Celeron. High-ish clock speed, crap performance, completely destroyed by similarly priced AMD processors.
I think AMD's naming makes a lot of clueful people a bit uncomfortable, but seems justifiable in a market dominated by a world-class bullshit artist like Intel.
it's an accepted spelling of a hononyom of "light" that means smaller and airy, as opposed to the object of luminescence
`Lite' usually seems to be used instead of `light' in an attempt to connote informality and playfulness, but about 95% of the time just comes off as `tacky attempt to appeal to people that live in trailers.' Naturally this means that it really ends up meaning `light, and especially suited for people that live in trailers.'
The point, I think, is that `telling the time' usually isn't just knowing the exact hour and minute, it's judging where now is in relation to something.
An analogue watch shows you this relationship directly for many useful somethings. A digital watch does not, you must think about it for a bit first.
Morever, a very common task is to repeatedly look at your watch while approaching some deadline, trying to judge how much you've got to hurry. In this sort of situation, watching the gap closing on an analogue dial and getting a feeling for the speed of approach is almost effortless, but the digital watch requires the mental work be repeated each time, with an arguably less useful result (you can't feel the advance).
If someone asks you `what time is it', of course you're going to be quicker with a digital watch -- it's just reading. But for the real daily tasks people use a watch for, an analogue watch is often a faster and more intuitive tool.
The KDE `fans' on slashdot can be pretty um, vocal about their preference, but in general there seems to be a preference for Gnome/GTK.
Indeed, Gnome's influence seems to be increasing rapidly; to the extent that it matters, KDE's license change appears to have happened a little too late.
[This mirrors what I see in the non-slashdot world, BTW.]
1) At the end of every one of these viruses, just add fdisk.
Now that would be funny!
I can just imagine the fresh, clean feeling the world would have for a short time afterwards...
[I hate viruses not just because of all the stupid AV marketing spam that results, but because my company (like many I suppose) is obsessed with anti-virus crap. I have windows on a few machines at work, which are never ever used for anything except local debugging, but none-the-less I'm required to run four anti-virus programs on them simultaneously, which sit there and thrash the disk for an hour at ever bootup, and my manager is constantly coming and nattering at me "did you check your anti-virus for updates today"; I get the feeling he's a big victim....]
A company like MS, as dirty as they can be, I don't believe would engage in this kind of criminal behavior.
Ha ha ha HA HA ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Right.
Of course a company usually has a PR department (and if they're big, loads of cash, a bunch of bought politicians, and beholden news organizations) to try to put a better spin on it, should they get caught.
Slashdot Mirror
There were long, arduous debates on the various, related lists about the UI and API and various use-cases for both beginner and advanced users.
Well, I'll reserve judgement until gtk 2.4 hits the streets.
However long and arduous debates are not a guarantee of anything. The gtk/gnome hackers have never shown any particularly great judgement at UI design though, so I'm not really all that optimistic.
My god.
Please tell me that isn't really the `new file selector'.
The old selector was pretty basic, but also pretty straight-forward, and super-fast to use with the keyboard because of the great completion functionality.
This new dialog is not only much more confusing looking, but seems bloated, rather ugly, and doesn't have the text entry box -- i.e, they removed the one great feature they used to have!
I know they're attempting to appeal to inexperienced users, but they always seem to (1) do so in a way that pisses off experienced users, and (2) botch things up in the inexperienced-user case anyway.
Hopefully someone will come up with a less crappy file-selector and all the major distros (at least debian) will use it.
So what if they have a choke hold on OS market? Monopolies eventually topple on their own. ... It might be 15 years from now, but it'll happen eventually and without the help of government oppression.
Yeah, and the guy on the clock-tower with a machine-gun will eventually run out of ammo. Great.
Following this formula, `Starbucks Music' usually seems to focus on bland 50's pop (hey, if it's from the 50s, it must be Funky(tm) and maybe even Intellectual(tm), right?), with a smattering of more modern songs, as long as they're acceptably bland.
An odd contrast with Starbucks is that for some reason, an astonishing number of the small bentou (lunchbox) stands I've seen in Tokyo seem to play mostly death metal -- especially odd when you consider the employees are almost exclusively old women! I always thought that was sort of cool...
I think this is a great thing, not because the marketeers will stop lying (they won't), or consumer will be any less confused (they won't), but because at least it will take a bit of pressure off of Intel's engineers to keep ramping up the clock speed.
Currently, when faced with a choice of implementation strategies, there's got to be enormous pressure from marketing to choose the one which increases the base clock speed, even if it's the poorer choice for actually improving average performance.
Of course, if they start using some benchmark to name their chips, then there'll be huge pressure to choose the strategy that makes `the number go up' (since it's basically `the number' that consumers look that, they haven't a clue what it means) -- even if technically another strategy might be better for the future -- but surely that's got to at least be better than the current farce!
I didn't know about "tr"; I've been a unix user since 1988. The man page seems to suggest that it's a relatively new command.
Um, no. It was certainly there when I started using unix (BSD 4.1c) circa 1983, and I believe it was in earlier Bell Labs distributions from the '70s (e.g., v7 or whatever).
Sony's won the next-gen "console wars" before they've even started because they're going to sell a lot of PS3's, er, because, uh... this analyst company... um, says so.
Has there ever been an `analyst' that did anything more than guess wildly, or (on alternate tuesdays) try to dress up the obvious as insight?
As far as I can figure the main point of such companies is to make plain the cluelessness of business and the press.
No -- bad green tea tastes like rancid lawn clippings.
Good green tea, well prepared, is incredibly delicious. It's obviously very different than black tea or coffee, but in fact I find it has a sort of `weight', like coffee -- and unlike black tea -- which makes it a lot easier to drink in the morning especially.
If you're talking about Japanese green tea, it should be fresh, and there's lots of old crap green tea out there. It's usually pretty obvious though, if you just smell it when you open the container: if it smells a bit sour, it's cheap or old tea, but if it smells like spring exploding in your face, that's what you want!
As for preparing it, the main points, in my experience are:
- Don't use water that's too hot (it's not like black tea)! The number you often see bandied about is 60 degrees celsius, but basically let it cool from boiling in an open container (the cup you'll drink it in will do nicely), until it's cool enough you can pick up the cup for a short while without burning yourself. Better too cool than too hot (you can make quite nice green tea with cold water actually!).
- Only let it steep for a short while, like 30-40 seconds. This depends on personal taste and the amount of tea you use, but as with temperature, less is generally better.
There are many, many, different sorts of Japanese green tea, and I'm very bad at remembering names -- since production is very seasonal, by the time I figure out I like something, they're usually not selling it any longer! -- so I generally just buy from stores I trust, who's owner knows my taste and can recommend something to suit it.There does seem to be a basic division into `sweet' and `strong' types, where the latter is often a bit more bitter (though if you use too hot water, or steep it for too long, any green tea can get pretty bitter).
But basically: (1) fresh, (2) cool, and (3) quick.
BTW, one cool thing about green tea is that if it's good quality, you can re-use the same leaves many times, the taste only gradually diminishes. Since I'm kinda cheap and lazy, I often just put fresh leaves in my little pot in the morning, and re-use them all day! [This makes the effective price of good quality tea somewhat less that it may seem at first glance.]
So ... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far.
Yeah, right. That sounds clunky as hell, and if it's anything like windows, is clunky as hell.
As a previous poster said, the excellent TAB-completing text-entry box was one of the gnome/gtk file selector's great kick-ass features (far nicer than e.g. windows or kde) -- using it is simple, easy to understand, and fast -- and they went and removed it?!?
I usually look forward to new Gnome releases because they always seem to thrown in a fair a mount of new eye candy, but cringe too because I know they always manage to make some horrendously bad UI decisions as well.
Bad Gnome team, bad!
The old/original BSD license had 4 `clauses' of which one required you to mention Berkeley in any advertising/documentation for the end product. This `advertising clause' was, as you might imagine, not only a huge practical problem, but incompatible with the GPL.
The revised BSD license -- which almost all current `BSD licensed' software uses -- deleted the advertising clause, removing the conflict with the GPL.
Windows users haven't had to worry about lack of useful documentation or easy configuration for years, so they can afford to obsess over eye candy
Hmmm, where is this `useful documentation' you speak of? The windows documentation I'm familiar with (not happily, but sometimes you gotta do unpalatable things) is for the most part completely useless, e.g., it simply restates what is already obvious, without giving any deeper insight or addressing common problems...
It is not clear why XFree86 has to modify their license to suit a Linux distribution, which is suppose to be a compilation of Free/Open Source Linux software, not a dictator of Open Source.
Of course they don't `have to' do anything. But whether they (or you) like it or not, Debian and other distros have a fair amount of influence, and if they all move to some other system, the XFree86 project could end up being marginalized, and I doubt they want that.
If these arm chair lawyers are so concerned about GPL, why don't they write a new X Window System from scratch, and release it for free/Free under the GPL.
Because they don't have to -- they can just take XFree86 4.3.xxx and fork it. Easy!
[and thus the beauty of free software is illustrated.]
It is well known that you cannot freely mix BSD (old 4 clause or new 3 clause) licensed code with GPL code in the same code base.
No, it's not `well known', and in fact, it's not true!
The revised (`3 clause') BSD license is perfectly compatible with the GPL. Since 99.9% of all `BSD licensed' code uses the revised BSD license, there's basically no problem at all.
Of course the resulting aggregate program must have its source distributed (&c) as part of its source uses the GPL, but that's pretty obvious if you're using GPL'd source code.
[The original (`4 clause') BSD license is indeed incompatible with the GPL, but that's largely academic, as no one actually uses that anymore.]
Hmmm, you seem fixated on the concept that (F)OSS is a "hobby." Do you feel threatened by it?
It clearly isn't "just a hobby" for me -- my company pays me to work on it...
Someone should port GIMP to OS X using Cocoa, following Apple's UI Guidelines and see just how much broader the appeal will be.
Does Apple even follow them these days?
Er, jokes aside, my impression was that programs like the gimp tended to be treated rather specially, in that many users were `professionals' who prefer a highly efficient/productive interface over one that is easy for newbies to come to grips with.
Since such an interface often entails many highly application-specific tweaks and optimizing for speed rather than obviousness, it seems doubtful that simply following some general-purpose UI guidelines would make much difference, no matter how good they are for `average' programs.
Indeed, my personal impression is that classic mac behavior tends to emphasize clarity at the expense of efficiency in some (many?) cases, which just Isn't Going to Fly in this case, I think.
I simply trashbag any mail that's in html (with slightly pickier handling of multipart/alternative), which seems to get rid of about 90% of the spam I receive. I can do this because basically everybody I know, and every mailing list I'm on, is clueful enough to not send html mail (even those who aren't computer types).
However this strategy wouldn't work very well for people that have ditzier friends.
The moral? Choose your friends well to avoid spam...
Well the initials ESR show up quite a bit in the software that I tend to use. Huge portions of Emacs were done by him (at one point he was the single largest contributor besides RMS, I don't know if that is true today)
No, it's completely off-base to say `Huge portions of Emacs were done by him.' ESR is at best a minor contributor to emacs; his biggest contribution was probably the GUD (Grand Unified Debugger) mode. You can see for yourself, all the ChangeLog entries are still there.
ESR is not stupid, and he does know how to program, but he doesn't seem to have ever done anything truly significant (especially compared to fellow `FOSS leaders' like RMS and Linus). Obviously that's true of most people, but in ESR's case it's particularly striking because he tends to be in the public eye so much.
And I think that to a lot of people, that mysterious something is worth the Apple premium.
...
Thoughts?
C'mon, admit it -- it's the black turtlenecks that really turn you on.
Actually Intel's behavior in this regard is far worse than AMD's.
With AMD, the bullshit is just a thin (and obvious) marketing layer, which is easy enough to ignore. Intel, on the other hand, release slow chips with high clock speeds because they know the vast majority of morons out there will only pay attention to the MHz rating.
As a case in point, the infamous P4 Celeron. High-ish clock speed, crap performance, completely destroyed by similarly priced AMD processors.
I think AMD's naming makes a lot of clueful people a bit uncomfortable, but seems justifiable in a market dominated by a world-class bullshit artist like Intel.
it's an accepted spelling of a hononyom of "light" that means smaller and airy, as opposed to the object of luminescence
`Lite' usually seems to be used instead of `light' in an attempt to connote informality and playfulness, but about 95% of the time just comes off as `tacky attempt to appeal to people that live in trailers.' Naturally this means that it really ends up meaning `light, and especially suited for people that live in trailers.'
Great, `Mozilla for trailers'...
The Boeing/Microsoft SpaceCruiser XP is not even in development yet
Lemme guess -- Boeing makes the mechanism for going up, and Microsoft makes the mechanism for going down...
The point, I think, is that `telling the time' usually isn't just knowing the exact hour and minute, it's judging where now is in relation to something.
An analogue watch shows you this relationship directly for many useful somethings. A digital watch does not, you must think about it for a bit first.
Morever, a very common task is to repeatedly look at your watch while approaching some deadline, trying to judge how much you've got to hurry. In this sort of situation, watching the gap closing on an analogue dial and getting a feeling for the speed of approach is almost effortless, but the digital watch requires the mental work be repeated each time, with an arguably less useful result (you can't feel the advance).
If someone asks you `what time is it', of course you're going to be quicker with a digital watch -- it's just reading. But for the real daily tasks people use a watch for, an analogue watch is often a faster and more intuitive tool.
Hmmm, I don't find that to be the case at all.
The KDE `fans' on slashdot can be pretty um, vocal about their preference, but in general there seems to be a preference for Gnome/GTK.
Indeed, Gnome's influence seems to be increasing rapidly; to the extent that it matters, KDE's license change appears to have happened a little too late.
[This mirrors what I see in the non-slashdot world, BTW.]
1) At the end of every one of these viruses, just add fdisk.
Now that would be funny!
I can just imagine the fresh, clean feeling the world would have for a short time afterwards...
[I hate viruses not just because of all the stupid AV marketing spam that results, but because my company (like many I suppose) is obsessed with anti-virus crap. I have windows on a few machines at work, which are never ever used for anything except local debugging, but none-the-less I'm required to run four anti-virus programs on them simultaneously, which sit there and thrash the disk for an hour at ever bootup, and my manager is constantly coming and nattering at me "did you check your anti-virus for updates today"; I get the feeling he's a big victim....]
A company like MS, as dirty as they can be, I don't believe would engage in this kind of criminal behavior.
Ha ha ha HA HA ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Right.
Of course a company usually has a PR department (and if they're big, loads of cash, a bunch of bought politicians, and beholden news organizations) to try to put a better spin on it, should they get caught.
A lone cracker has to do with just 1337-5p34|.