I beg to differ with you that "it is awful." On a LAN, X11 over ssh just works, works fast, and is the most transparent of the solutions you mention. I use it every day to access apps on my virtual machine, my server, and other machines in the house. And when I worked for a university, we used it all the time and it was plenty fast. Just as fast as VNC or NX (on a LAN mind you).
If you need to run remote X11 apps over anything less than 100 Mbit LAN, then yes NX is the ticket. It can display individual apps or a full desktop, and it's fast. It's really an optimization of the X11 protocol to eliminate round-trips, though to do this it has to run an X server proxy (an X server really) on the remote system. I use NX frequently to access a graphical app on a server half way around the world.
Until VNC is per-window (application aware), it's simply not a solution. RDP is decent, but of course windows-centric.
My favorite is the ads for TVs that talk about the crisp, clear, and vibrant color while showing you that TV showing said crisp, clear vibrant color video, all shown on your own inferior TV. Yeah, I can really see the difference in that video. That's so amazing!
If you have ever watched the Ubuntu for Android videos you'll see they are on to something. Integration between normal Linux and Android is not only super cool, it's very useful too. Getting the Dalvik stack to run on a stock Linux kernel should be possible (soon), and I think having Android on the desktop would really be a good thing. I'm not talking running Android as the OS, but Android under Ubuntu or Fedora, on x86 as well as ARM. Particularly on Arm a netbook just might look attractive to someone when you can say, it runs a full office suite and firefox, and you can install angry birds and any app in Google Play as well.
Off topic, but I think it would be in Microsoft's best interests as well to port Android's VM to run on Windows Phone. Blackberry too (did they actually do this; they talked about it). They could promote Windows Phone as a business phone with full sharepoint and exchange integration, and you can also run your favorite android app. Heck Apple could too.
Really Android isn't so much as OS as a software stack. The kernel is not that relevant.
I won't disagree with you, but I will say that humans are the only species I know of that are actually much stupider in large numbers than individually. There really is no collective intelligence in humans, especially when moral hazards are involves.
Are you just making assumptions based on statistics and demographics of slashdot readers, or do you know something that none of the rest of us do? Are you a paid subscriber?
As for shutting off ads, slashdot has been offering to do that for me for the last year or two.
That would be true if he was facing charges. What is so bizarre is that he isn't facing charges. The Swedes have had many opportunities to come to Britain and interview him so that they can charge him, but they have refused. So in the meantime, no, Assange does not have to face any charges in Sweden since there simply aren't any. I'm still baffled on what grounds the UK thinks they can extradite him given this fact.
Think about the type of user that Amarok is going to be used by. Think iTunes refugee. Somehow I doubt they will be impressed by a client/server architecture or nice programming API.
Dang right. That's why I'm going to vote for the guy promising change and hope. Oh wait. Yeah that will just be more of the same.
Too funny all the people falling for Romney's talk of change. Obama is no better than Bush, and I see no evidence that Romney is any better than Obama. In fact there's a lot of evidence to the contrary even. All this makes me laugh whenever people get excited about the tea party. Any one who runs for government saying "I'm not one of them" and how "government is too big; I'm going to shrink it" makes me cringe as they inevitably will become "one of them," and no politician is going to willingly eliminate his own job, and certainly is not going to stop pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare for the corrupt souls who bought his election in the first place. I am also amused by Romney claiming that Obama has increased the size of government to unprecedented levels and will continue to do so. Memory is so short these days. Sadly Obama has done nothing to reduce the bloat that Bush added. I'm a bit morbidly curious to find out what happens when Romney wins and things continue to fail. The dems and Obama will continue to be blamed of course. Though of course they forget that the causes of today's problems go back a long time, back to Bush, Clinton, and all the way to Reagan even.
Nice try with the FUD. rootbeer is simply a bytecode translator. The Java API isn't involved here at all. And the place where the translated bytecodes execute is the graphics card, not some Java JRE-derived virtual machine and runtime API implementation. There is no runtime involved at all. The Java code is simply math that gets translated directly to GPU instructions.
This is no different than Google's Web Toolkit which translates Java (not necessarily bytecode though) to javascript, which has never been under any kind of attack.
So let's be clear. To think that rootbeer would be under some kind of threat from Oracle because it involves Java is pretty silly.
Yes people keep saying this like it's somehow a useful feature. What good will running an X server on wayland be if all my apps are wayland apps? The X Server would only be useful for connecting to other legacy X11-based OS's out there.
Wayland is capable of network transparency if someone adds it. The framework is capable of accommodating such things.
I'm not opposed to something like VNC for network transparency, provided it was per-app (individual windows) and had good integration with the clipboards. Having transparent file system integration and device integration (sound, printers) would be slick too.
While the interfaces look and work similarly, somehow Samsung's implentation, combined with some of the more nice things about android like a proper back button (though android uses it inconsistently), is superior to the iOS experience, at least for me. I guess it's only fair. Apple has stolen plenty of their ideas for the UI from others and enhanced and extended them. Seems only fair that others should do the same to Apple's implementation.
Of all Python's warts, white space syntax is not one of them. I also question as to how that makes the language inaccessible. Any decent programmer's editor should make it no harder than any other method of defining blocks. In fact, if one's disability involved hand motor control, I'd say white space blocks are far far more accessible than curly braces.
Python's incredible development speed and ease of use comes from, in my opinion, its white space formatting. It's really truly executable pseudo-code. I think you grossly underestimate how incredibly useful that is.
I did computer support for a university department (Chemistry). I used to cringe every time a student would come to me with problems in Microsoft Word (2003 or 2007 typically) and their 100 page dissertation. Word just isn't designed for that kind of thing, and it's just a disaster waiting to happen, especially since Word's default is not to make headings having any information the auto table of contents generator or index generator can use. Corrupt documents, pagination problems (changing default printers can change pagination). And Endnote... sigh. Sadly asking most students to learn LaTex and Bibtex is probably out of the question since we can't even teach Word users how to use master documents, proper headings, etc.
Some people have found Zotero and LibreOffice to work quite nicely for dissertations. LO/OO's use of styles to define document structure makes it very easy to go back through and simultaneously apply a style and define a logical unit of the document after the fact, or on the fly. More sensible than Word's typewriter mode that it seems to default to. If all you care about is the PDF output for publishing, then any MS Word incompatibilities are non-issues.
Ask any good backhoe operator about how he operates the machine and you'll find he doesn't think about the mechanics of his arms and feet interacting with the control levers. His brain abstracts all that and treats the hoe as an extension of his body. Once you've been trained how to move the controls, you stop thinking about it. You just dig.
A similar feeling could be generated simply by video goggles and a joystick. In fact when I fly my airplane using a video downlink, it feels like "I'm there." Seeing yourself on the ground is a bit weird! I can look down at something, turn the plane to look at something all without really thinking about what my hands need to do, since they've been trained and my brain just does that automatically in response to what I want to do. This is true of normal RC airplane flying as well. People often ask me how I can remember to move my fingers in the opposite direction as the plane is flying towards me but the truth is I don't think about it at all very much. I just move the airplane where I want it to be.
The exciting goal of thought control, though, is obviously to enable people who don't have the use of limbs or fingers to control and interact with robotics, such as an artificial limb, as if it is part of the body. And as the test subject can attest, that's pretty much what happens with training. Now if they can just get the sensor equipment to weight less than a few tons and not draw metal objects towards it...
Gnome 2 is still available in a pretty stable form of the Mate Desktop. There are repos available for quite a few distros now. Check the mate desktop's web page. http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download
Star Trek Insurrection is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek movies ever. And it's accessible to non-trekkies. It's modern, yet is fairly true to the Roddenberry vision, which is odd as it is a Rick Berman production (he single-handedly destroyed Roddenberry's baby). It has a simple plot, but that plot is the essence of Star Trek over the years. Lots of action, a romantic subplot, and classic "do the right thing consequences be damned" Star Trek attitude.
This "prefab" technique they are referring to is a technique for erecting steel frame beams and such without having to weld on site. It's not "prefab" as in a prefab house, or standing up prefab panels, though the Chinese system does appear to incorporate more things (tiles, plumbing, etc) into the panels.
An American company that has been pioneering in this area is is ConXtech. The Watch ConXtech's videos on how it all works. It is pretty amazing. The Chinese system appears to be more labor intensive, but still gets the job done in a similar way. And while the ConXtech system requires no bolting whatsoever to place the beams at first and to carry real load, the Chinese method does involve a lot of bolting down. But still, no structural welders are needed on site, no additional, temporary braces. The exterior is clad in the usual way, and the interiors can be done normally, though the Chinese system does pre-fab some of the plumbing, floor, and ceiling onto the panels. Both the ConXtech and Chinese Broad system allow interior and exterior finishing to occur while the steel frame part is being erected. This is part of what makes it so darn fast.
Either way you look at it, the time to manufacture the beams, panels, etc, and ship them to the site, and then erect them is still a fraction of the time that conventional steel frame construction takes. So no, its not cheating. It really is a better way to do construction. And potentially cheaper too, or at least not any more expensive than traditional.
Anyway, I'm glad to see the technology demonstrated. And just to remind slashdotters who haven't read the blog post, this chinese construction company has already used the technology to build a 30 story hotel in 360 hours (the entire structural frame) from foundation up. And it also survived an earthquake quite nicely. ConXtech's system (which I think is superior to the chinese system) similarly can withstand earthquakes, and can do so before its even bolted down!
People keep saying it's "buggy," but it's really not, any more than Gnome 2 was. It is quirky, though, as a result of a fork in progress. What I mean is that most mate apps have migrated to mateconf instead of gconf, but some things like compiz are still going to be using gconf, so you have to use both gconf and mateconf at times. But this is no worse than Gnome 3 which is half ported to gnome-settings and half still gconf.
Now that Mate is available on a somewhat stable basis for Fedora 16 and 17 (external repo), I have no reason to change. Gnome 2 worked well for me, and I like the look and feel.
KDE still doesn't feel right to me somehow. Personal preference, obviously. And part of it might just be the way Fedora packages it. Oddly enough KDE apps look and feel great with the Gtk theme when run under the Mate desktop.
If I was stuck with Gnome 3, I'd give KDE a serious look, but since there are now good alternatives (XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon), I'll be trying them first.
Wish I had mod points to mod you up. The Ubuntu idea, combined with this sort of laptop dock would actually be able to completely replace my laptop. In fact I know that for several uni professors, they would love to be able to stick their phone in a dock on their desk, use it as a full desktop system (keyboard, mouse, 2 screens, printers, etc), then while traveling or at home use a laptop-like dock. With the full desktop OS being available (Linux in this case), they would have everything they need and more. Android would really only be interacted with when undocked, or in a little android window on the desktop.
If any of you haven't seen the Ubuntu for Android videos, check it out. it's pretty slick. Complete phone integration in the linux desktop (notifications, access to android apps, cell radio etc). Honestly, it's the only mobile OS development that's got my attention in recent memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ with you that "it is awful." On a LAN, X11 over ssh just works, works fast, and is the most transparent of the solutions you mention. I use it every day to access apps on my virtual machine, my server, and other machines in the house. And when I worked for a university, we used it all the time and it was plenty fast. Just as fast as VNC or NX (on a LAN mind you).
If you need to run remote X11 apps over anything less than 100 Mbit LAN, then yes NX is the ticket. It can display individual apps or a full desktop, and it's fast. It's really an optimization of the X11 protocol to eliminate round-trips, though to do this it has to run an X server proxy (an X server really) on the remote system. I use NX frequently to access a graphical app on a server half way around the world.
Until VNC is per-window (application aware), it's simply not a solution. RDP is decent, but of course windows-centric.
The Mate desktop runs great on Fedora 17 with a third-party repo, and will be in the 18 repos. You can still have Gnome 2.
My favorite is the ads for TVs that talk about the crisp, clear, and vibrant color while showing you that TV showing said crisp, clear vibrant color video, all shown on your own inferior TV. Yeah, I can really see the difference in that video. That's so amazing!
If you have ever watched the Ubuntu for Android videos you'll see they are on to something. Integration between normal Linux and Android is not only super cool, it's very useful too. Getting the Dalvik stack to run on a stock Linux kernel should be possible (soon), and I think having Android on the desktop would really be a good thing. I'm not talking running Android as the OS, but Android under Ubuntu or Fedora, on x86 as well as ARM. Particularly on Arm a netbook just might look attractive to someone when you can say, it runs a full office suite and firefox, and you can install angry birds and any app in Google Play as well.
Off topic, but I think it would be in Microsoft's best interests as well to port Android's VM to run on Windows Phone. Blackberry too (did they actually do this; they talked about it). They could promote Windows Phone as a business phone with full sharepoint and exchange integration, and you can also run your favorite android app. Heck Apple could too.
Really Android isn't so much as OS as a software stack. The kernel is not that relevant.
Interestingly enough, after 40 odd years, one of these signed covers is now worth nearly $30,000 to a collector.
I won't disagree with you, but I will say that humans are the only species I know of that are actually much stupider in large numbers than individually. There really is no collective intelligence in humans, especially when moral hazards are involves.
Are you just making assumptions based on statistics and demographics of slashdot readers, or do you know something that none of the rest of us do? Are you a paid subscriber?
As for shutting off ads, slashdot has been offering to do that for me for the last year or two.
Here's a more official news link: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120819b.html. I hope they will announce soon the actual results of the spectroscopy somewhere.
Also a reminder that NASA's official page for this mission is:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl/. This is probably a better source for MSL news than wired.
Would it hurt slashdot editors to post the official NASA links as well as the submitted, third-party news links? We pay them to be editors after all.
That would be true if he was facing charges. What is so bizarre is that he isn't facing charges. The Swedes have had many opportunities to come to Britain and interview him so that they can charge him, but they have refused. So in the meantime, no, Assange does not have to face any charges in Sweden since there simply aren't any. I'm still baffled on what grounds the UK thinks they can extradite him given this fact.
I think you answered your own question.
Think about the type of user that Amarok is going to be used by. Think iTunes refugee. Somehow I doubt they will be impressed by a client/server architecture or nice programming API.
Dang right. That's why I'm going to vote for the guy promising change and hope. Oh wait. Yeah that will just be more of the same.
Too funny all the people falling for Romney's talk of change. Obama is no better than Bush, and I see no evidence that Romney is any better than Obama. In fact there's a lot of evidence to the contrary even. All this makes me laugh whenever people get excited about the tea party. Any one who runs for government saying "I'm not one of them" and how "government is too big; I'm going to shrink it" makes me cringe as they inevitably will become "one of them," and no politician is going to willingly eliminate his own job, and certainly is not going to stop pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare for the corrupt souls who bought his election in the first place. I am also amused by Romney claiming that Obama has increased the size of government to unprecedented levels and will continue to do so. Memory is so short these days. Sadly Obama has done nothing to reduce the bloat that Bush added. I'm a bit morbidly curious to find out what happens when Romney wins and things continue to fail. The dems and Obama will continue to be blamed of course. Though of course they forget that the causes of today's problems go back a long time, back to Bush, Clinton, and all the way to Reagan even.
Nice try with the FUD. rootbeer is simply a bytecode translator. The Java API isn't involved here at all. And the place where the translated bytecodes execute is the graphics card, not some Java JRE-derived virtual machine and runtime API implementation. There is no runtime involved at all. The Java code is simply math that gets translated directly to GPU instructions.
This is no different than Google's Web Toolkit which translates Java (not necessarily bytecode though) to javascript, which has never been under any kind of attack.
So let's be clear. To think that rootbeer would be under some kind of threat from Oracle because it involves Java is pretty silly.
Yes people keep saying this like it's somehow a useful feature. What good will running an X server on wayland be if all my apps are wayland apps? The X Server would only be useful for connecting to other legacy X11-based OS's out there.
Wayland is capable of network transparency if someone adds it. The framework is capable of accommodating such things.
I'm not opposed to something like VNC for network transparency, provided it was per-app (individual windows) and had good integration with the clipboards. Having transparent file system integration and device integration (sound, printers) would be slick too.
While the interfaces look and work similarly, somehow Samsung's implentation, combined with some of the more nice things about android like a proper back button (though android uses it inconsistently), is superior to the iOS experience, at least for me. I guess it's only fair. Apple has stolen plenty of their ideas for the UI from others and enhanced and extended them. Seems only fair that others should do the same to Apple's implementation.
Of all Python's warts, white space syntax is not one of them. I also question as to how that makes the language inaccessible. Any decent programmer's editor should make it no harder than any other method of defining blocks. In fact, if one's disability involved hand motor control, I'd say white space blocks are far far more accessible than curly braces.
Python's incredible development speed and ease of use comes from, in my opinion, its white space formatting. It's really truly executable pseudo-code. I think you grossly underestimate how incredibly useful that is.
I did computer support for a university department (Chemistry). I used to cringe every time a student would come to me with problems in Microsoft Word (2003 or 2007 typically) and their 100 page dissertation. Word just isn't designed for that kind of thing, and it's just a disaster waiting to happen, especially since Word's default is not to make headings having any information the auto table of contents generator or index generator can use. Corrupt documents, pagination problems (changing default printers can change pagination). And Endnote... sigh. Sadly asking most students to learn LaTex and Bibtex is probably out of the question since we can't even teach Word users how to use master documents, proper headings, etc.
Some people have found Zotero and LibreOffice to work quite nicely for dissertations. LO/OO's use of styles to define document structure makes it very easy to go back through and simultaneously apply a style and define a logical unit of the document after the fact, or on the fly. More sensible than Word's typewriter mode that it seems to default to. If all you care about is the PDF output for publishing, then any MS Word incompatibilities are non-issues.
Ask any good backhoe operator about how he operates the machine and you'll find he doesn't think about the mechanics of his arms and feet interacting with the control levers. His brain abstracts all that and treats the hoe as an extension of his body. Once you've been trained how to move the controls, you stop thinking about it. You just dig.
A similar feeling could be generated simply by video goggles and a joystick. In fact when I fly my airplane using a video downlink, it feels like "I'm there." Seeing yourself on the ground is a bit weird! I can look down at something, turn the plane to look at something all without really thinking about what my hands need to do, since they've been trained and my brain just does that automatically in response to what I want to do. This is true of normal RC airplane flying as well. People often ask me how I can remember to move my fingers in the opposite direction as the plane is flying towards me but the truth is I don't think about it at all very much. I just move the airplane where I want it to be.
The exciting goal of thought control, though, is obviously to enable people who don't have the use of limbs or fingers to control and interact with robotics, such as an artificial limb, as if it is part of the body. And as the test subject can attest, that's pretty much what happens with training. Now if they can just get the sensor equipment to weight less than a few tons and not draw metal objects towards it...
Gnome 2 is still available in a pretty stable form of the Mate Desktop. There are repos available for quite a few distros now. Check the mate desktop's web page. http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download
Star Trek Insurrection is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek movies ever. And it's accessible to non-trekkies. It's modern, yet is fairly true to the Roddenberry vision, which is odd as it is a Rick Berman production (he single-handedly destroyed Roddenberry's baby). It has a simple plot, but that plot is the essence of Star Trek over the years. Lots of action, a romantic subplot, and classic "do the right thing consequences be damned" Star Trek attitude.
This "prefab" technique they are referring to is a technique for erecting steel frame beams and such without having to weld on site. It's not "prefab" as in a prefab house, or standing up prefab panels, though the Chinese system does appear to incorporate more things (tiles, plumbing, etc) into the panels.
An American company that has been pioneering in this area is is ConXtech. The Watch ConXtech's videos on how it all works. It is pretty amazing. The Chinese system appears to be more labor intensive, but still gets the job done in a similar way. And while the ConXtech system requires no bolting whatsoever to place the beams at first and to carry real load, the Chinese method does involve a lot of bolting down. But still, no structural welders are needed on site, no additional, temporary braces. The exterior is clad in the usual way, and the interiors can be done normally, though the Chinese system does pre-fab some of the plumbing, floor, and ceiling onto the panels. Both the ConXtech and Chinese Broad system allow interior and exterior finishing to occur while the steel frame part is being erected. This is part of what makes it so darn fast.
Either way you look at it, the time to manufacture the beams, panels, etc, and ship them to the site, and then erect them is still a fraction of the time that conventional steel frame construction takes. So no, its not cheating. It really is a better way to do construction. And potentially cheaper too, or at least not any more expensive than traditional.
Anyway, I'm glad to see the technology demonstrated. And just to remind slashdotters who haven't read the blog post, this chinese construction company has already used the technology to build a 30 story hotel in 360 hours (the entire structural frame) from foundation up. And it also survived an earthquake quite nicely. ConXtech's system (which I think is superior to the chinese system) similarly can withstand earthquakes, and can do so before its even bolted down!
Is that the same bug? Looks like the bug that the post is talking about is here:
http://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2006-0744
Fixed a long time ago.
You own the phone or have actually used it? Or are you just going by screenshots and youtube videos?
Just in case anyone is too lazy to look it up, instructions for adding the repo and installing mate are here:
http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download
Scroll down to "fedora" and follow the instructions. It's very simple.
yum install http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49862637/Mate-desktop/fedora_17/mate-desktop-fedora/noarch/mate-desktop-release-17-1.fc17.noarch.rpm
yum groupinstall MATE-Desktop
People keep saying it's "buggy," but it's really not, any more than Gnome 2 was. It is quirky, though, as a result of a fork in progress. What I mean is that most mate apps have migrated to mateconf instead of gconf, but some things like compiz are still going to be using gconf, so you have to use both gconf and mateconf at times. But this is no worse than Gnome 3 which is half ported to gnome-settings and half still gconf.
Now that Mate is available on a somewhat stable basis for Fedora 16 and 17 (external repo), I have no reason to change. Gnome 2 worked well for me, and I like the look and feel.
KDE still doesn't feel right to me somehow. Personal preference, obviously. And part of it might just be the way Fedora packages it. Oddly enough KDE apps look and feel great with the Gtk theme when run under the Mate desktop.
If I was stuck with Gnome 3, I'd give KDE a serious look, but since there are now good alternatives (XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon), I'll be trying them first.
Wish I had mod points to mod you up. The Ubuntu idea, combined with this sort of laptop dock would actually be able to completely replace my laptop. In fact I know that for several uni professors, they would love to be able to stick their phone in a dock on their desk, use it as a full desktop system (keyboard, mouse, 2 screens, printers, etc), then while traveling or at home use a laptop-like dock. With the full desktop OS being available (Linux in this case), they would have everything they need and more. Android would really only be interacted with when undocked, or in a little android window on the desktop.
If any of you haven't seen the Ubuntu for Android videos, check it out. it's pretty slick. Complete phone integration in the linux desktop (notifications, access to android apps, cell radio etc). Honestly, it's the only mobile OS development that's got my attention in recent memory.