They're people like me, and they live all around you.
I live east of Pflugerville, and even during rush hour can usually get to anywhere downtown in 25-27 minutes (yes, we timed it -- in response to many and varied claims that one could not go to the grocery store without some kind of 45 minute trek at the very least).
The problem is twofold: people who live on the western side, for the longest time, lost their one good route north/south (MoPac) so they could add another lane. This has been "fixed" very recently, but I can't say if it's helped. And Two, you aren't "commuting" within Austin so much as you're driving _from_ outside of Austin, clear across austin, to what sounds like somewhere else outside of austin. That's... what, 30 miles? Hardly what I'd call an average commute for the area. An _average_ commute for the area is maybe a third of that.
This also fails to mention that every single tech company I've worked for in over a decade allows offset hours specifically to deal with rush hour. My typical eight hour stint, when I worked in an office, was 11-7, with a 20 minute commute either way because of the time of day (and that was south, on 71, to Lake Creek on 183). Also fails to mention the rise of telecommute options: even a couple days a week average a horrible commute out to something livable.
I do not know how it could take you an hour to get from Round Rock to North Austin. Our roads might be poorly structured, but it doesn't even take me twenty minutes to get from my version of BFE to the Arboritum, and that's at 8:30am.
Finally: people in Austin do quite frequently move to at least the side of the river their job is on. It's more the regular than it is not, and for reasons of commute.
I've never met anyone who has used Ubuntu and who likes Unity, power user, novice, script kiddie...
I'm a developer. I like Unity, and have actually come to prefer it - with a few caveats.
Mostly, I think its great after I: - Get rid of the hide-and-seek Launcher (make it always visible) - Get rid of the hide-and-seek scrollbars (make them always visible) - Get rid of the hide-and-seek global menu (which means no global menu - but that's better than having to reveal it all the time)
Basically, I think the ideas are sound - indicators, Launcher, Dash... but automagically hiding key parts of the UI from me is a pain in the ass. I came here to work, not play a fucking mini-game.
Of course, at THAT point, with all those customizations, it bears little difference from Gnome3 with a Docky dock on the left. Which is what I'm currently doing right now, because Unity is about a hundred megs heavier, and Gnome-Shell has some things in it that I actually like more (like built-in dessktop recording; in-shell messaging; interactive notifications; and SUCH a well-designed theme that I'm using it, even though I hate blue).
The worst feature of unity is changing the "start menu" to that stupid search box. We use UIs because we're not able to remember names and obscure commands and parameters, but now they give us a UI that may as well have been a command prompt with find / -name "$1" built in to it.
I don't think this complaint has a lot of merit, honestly, and for two reasons: - The "menu" system is still there, and somewhat easier to browse thanks to the icons being larger - You can search for FUNCTION instead of App name, and this actually works (example: "Music player" or "play music" or "zip a file")
Of course, I HATE the "Activities" "area" with the burning passion of a thousand suns. If you design your OS to be "distraction-free", you might not want to design your shell to require people to zoom out and go somewhere different every thirty seconds. I swear, without a Dock, Gnome-Shell is unusable for me.
You ARE aware that the OpenOffice people created the split, right? As in, kicked out all the LibreOffice people for even *thinking* about a more open-source friendly split?
Full disclosure: even before Unity, my setup was almost identical to it. Panel up top, dock-like thing on the left (for so, so many practical, HID-compliant, common-sensible reasons).
I *wanted* to use it in 11.04, but it simply wasn't technically ready. Memory leaks; lens tiles I didn't use but couldn't remove; crashes; no systray workaround; etc. etc.
So after suffering Gnome3 for a few months (made tolerable only by using Docky to get around that stupid ass "Activities" mistake), its like they addressed every single item of concern for me, even things on my wishlist. Take this for what its worth, but Unity is my OS of choice now; I prefer it to OS X and Windows-anything.
It's funny. I remember the one thing I thought when I first saw KDE 4.0, freshly released:
"You gotta be _kidding_ me... are they serious with this? What group of people thought this paradigm was a good idea? And who could possibly have actually thought this product was finished enough to release?"
Oh, how the tables have turned.
Gnome 3, as a concept, is simply made of fail for me. My job often requires me to work with several apps simultaneously, something G3 makes almost _impossible_. The whole idea behind Gnome 3 is that the G3 team knows more about how a user best works with a computer than the user his/herself, and the problem I have with it is that they are wrong. When I use Gnome 3, I am blind to how much space I have left, how busy my computer is, whether or not an app has crashed or gone zombie, or even what my other applications are doing. Its too constricting; in the struggle to be "distraction free" (although I don't recall Gnome 2 actually being "distracting"), they end up treating me like a horse and making me wear blinders so I can get things done "the Gnome way". Too bad if you are doing a task that requires peripheral vision.
Unity... I really wanted to like it. And to be fair, I do like it; but it is so unpolished, unadjustable, and riddled with fairly severe pixmap/memory leaks that I can't possibly use it for production purposes. I have a feeling the next release or two will be good, and even this one will be fine once they fix those leaks, but right now... not so much. And the crouching tiger, hidden menu thing is far more annoying than the concept of a Global Menu all by itself.
XFCE is good. Really good. But there are some problems with it, particularly with the Compositor, that made me look elsewhere.
So I bit the bullet and installed KDE 4.6.
I can not BELIEVE how much I like it. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am in complete control of my computer, and can do anything with it. Everything is configurable, and while that used to cause me headaches and hours of twiddling with knobs in the control center, things have changed. The options are organized so well and/or so easy to access (you can configure most objects by simply right-clicking on them) that I never really have to *find* the option to change. The hard-to-hit skinny scrollbars can be changed without hacking a gtkrc file. So can the window management buttons; it seems silly to me now that there was such an uproar when Ubuntu changed them to be on the left, since KDE 4 seems to have always allowed you to put them on any side and in any order you want, just as part of the package. The OpenGL composting is vsync'd by default, and this works *even with videos*, something Compiz still has yet to get right on the nVidia driver. The effects and animations have gone from "ridiculously excessive" to subtle, informative, effective, and at times, breathtakingly gorgeous.
If there are too many options, there is usually a text search bar to narrow things down.
And all of this comes without full machine hard-locks, or having that stupid dragon show up every twenty minutes to tell me something else core dumped. I can tell you that between 4.0 and 4.6, things seemed to have become very solid, very fast, and very reliable in a hurry.
And that's just the UI in general. The KDE apps are similarly well-done, and this time they've hired a designer to make them look as good as they work. Gone are the overbearing, wall-of-text-and-doodads interfaces; they seemed to have taken notes from Gnome 2 for a lot of apps (I swear Dolphin is like a clone of Nautilus Elemantary; reKonq looks almost indistinguishable from Chrome; Pidgin and Gaim bear more than a passing resemblance, etc). And while we're on the topic of Gnome apps, I'll never know if I'm actually using one, because Oxygen-GTK renders them in whatever KDE theme I happen to be using at the time.
Sure, there is an overabundance of strange and somewhat unnecessary toys ("Plasmoids"). The whole "deskto
The Gnome guys have completely lost the plot. This is evident with only two words: "Gnome Shell". Which is 1337 for "your workflow sucks, and so does multitasking."
"You have decided, without even hearing the argument."
The argument has been made, and proven untrue, by very, very intelligent people who make a lot of money to study just this small subset of things.
"Open Debate" does NOT mean "giving every single presented idea its fair shake". One would expect ideas like "the earth is flat" or "the earth is the center of the solar system" to be dismissed immediately, as well - becasue the evidence has already been heard for each, and the concepts have already proven to be false.
All he did is prove that Open Debate is not a license to waste time re-treading old and inflammatory ground; all you did was prove that you don't understand Open Debate at all.
> Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed.
Last I checked, no genuine, non-half-assed attempts have been made. Generally there's too much dissent about having to care for each other to put some sort of full system in place. (Note: this dissent is not entirely unwarranted in some cases).
> Not really. Go to a left wing meeting and say you think blacks are genetically less intelligent.
This is a red herring - at _best_ - and deserves no reply.
> "Bush is going to reintroduce conscription". "The Patriot Act will lead to concentration camps". "Global warming will kill us all". "Dominionists are going to introduce a 10 Commandments based theocracy".
This is a straw man, and deserves no reply. I _will_ say, though, that there are enough facts out there to make the evidence supporting each of those statements worrying, at best.
"Of course. There are idiots relying on blind faith comes on both sides"...just a whole lot _more_ of them on the right-hand-side of politics, than otherwise.
> See #2 and 4#.
A red herring and a straw man, respectively? Fallacies are not proper responses, sorry.
> I really fail to see the relevance here.
Because someone who makes impacting decisions based upon what citizens do with their wobbly bits in the privacy of their own homes is mentally unsound, unfit for public office, openly discriminatory with little reason, and an overall waste of humanity.
> (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does any one of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
Well, in the case of gay hate (homophobia), man hate (misandry), white hate (racism) - these ALL should be disqualifiers. No one should elect or pay any attention at all to the sort of person who'd profess such a thing, honestly.
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with hating Christianity (strikes me as a logical conclusion), and sometimes christians themselves make it nigh on impossible to NOT hate them. However, since mythology doesn't belong in public office, I kind of see that as a non-issue.
Hating one's own country is a complicated topic, but in short, sometimes its a valid response and sometimes it is not. Like above, though, its kind of a non-issue. One is certainly free to hate one's own country, and this should make no difference whatsoever. I'd almost expect it from someone who has a lot of disagreements with current public policy.
For some reason, cellphone users have earned a special place of annoyance with folks that they do not deserve. See, on a cell phone, the speaker is practically in your ear canal, and the mike is practically in your mouth. On my travels, I _very_ _often_ find cell phone conversations to be less loud and intrusive than standard, person-to-person conversations. Especially when a majority of those conversations seem to be between people on differing rows of the plane. And, what's worse: I have to listen to BOTH sides of the conversation when two people are yelling over engine noise to each other. At least with a cellphone conversation, if its loud enough for me to hear, I can make up the other side of the dialogue.
Frankly, if you're in favor of banning something due to annoyance? Ban children. On a six-hour flight, I'd MUCH rather a self-absorbed former-frat-boy deal-closing businessman on bluetooth ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over a two year old with a rash and a set of healthy lungs.
"Ironically, they did away with the applications:/// method of editing your Applications menu in GNOME without adding a workaround and that was the last straw."
They did add a workaround. It was called "Smeg", and now "alacarte".
"The fact that there's a whole profession centered around surgical measures to enforce weight-loss, surgical procedures which can have serious complications, means that for at least some people, it's not simply a matter of will power."
No, it doesn't mean that.
All it means is that some people would rather buy their way out of a problem instead of working their way through it.
I second one of the other posters: lock obese people in a room and feed them 1000 calories a day, and see how they come out in a few months. Betcha "thinner" would be a word.
"Do you have any idea what it would take to make a building that can sustain 275 sustained wind load??? The answer to that is easy. No you don't."... "I doubt that you could fined anyone that would even attempt to build a building rated at 265 MPH sustained winds."
Suggestion: Perhaps you shouldn't assume so much. That way, I won't have to paste links to buildings that can withstand the winds from very strong tornadoes.
"A levee that can take a 35 foot surge + 275MPH winds? Never have been done and would cost way to much. "
I was under the impression that a much larger one already existed.
"The only correct action in the face of a Category 5 storm is to evacuate."
Which is why I no longer live there - I essentially agree with this.
That's hardly an argument New Orleans gets to use. If New Orleans was interested in being a part of the United States, it would have stopped using Napoleonic code, stopped calling counties Parishes, and raised the drinking age to 21 much sooner than it did (and it would have done so of its own accord, instead of being pressured into it because of lack of Highway funds.) Among other things.
Not that I agree with any or all of those things; just saying that NOLA has had a long history of flipping off the USA in its past, and claiming solidarity now is more than a little hypocritical.
"And, while I can sympathize with your sentiments regarding say....someone right now, building a new home right on the beach somewhere along the coast."
Then how can you not sympathize with those same sentiments regarding, say, someone who is planning on moving back to The Parish (St. Bernard), New Orleans East, Lakeview, or Gentilly? Most if not all of those folks have to bulldoze and start from scratch if they choose to rebuild where they are. Effectively, that IS "someone right now, building a new home right on the beach somewhere along the coast" - or, at the very least, someone building in an area proven to be prone to total annihilation.
I have to wonder if seeing Katrina's damage as a lesson ("It is not physically safe to build a traditional a house here. Now we know.") is too much to ask.
"New Orleans is where it is for reasons"
Much of which can be attributed to rapid urban sprawl and genuine mistakes. Notice how the oldest areas of the city Proper (Uptown, French Quarter) made out considerably better. This is not a random thing - rather, New Orleans, when it was established and further on into its formative years, was built on the highest portions of the basin. Much of the rest of it (Lakeview and Gentilly are good examples) were some of the last additions, and rose fast enough to create an illusion of safety.
It was never intended to be a huge city - for much of its life it was little more than a very large port. The offshore oil industry more or less changed that.
"The US gets a lot from us down here...economically and culturally. (Jazz, blues, food)."
That's another smallish nit I'd like to pick. At least musically, New Orleans has been land of the cover band for the entire 31 years of my life. Nothing new - especially nothing new in the realms of Jazz and Blues - has happened here in a while.
I can't argue with the food, except to say that any uniquely New Orleans food offerings can't usually be found by outside visitors. A lot of places in, say, the French Quarter are nothing but burger joints with Cajun decorations on the walls.
"We ask for help now...and you turn your back on us? Why are we less important than other parts of the US?"
Ah. The meat of the discussion.
I don't think the US is turning its back on New Orleans because it is less important - I think the collective back is being turned because no one wants to spend capitol rebuilding in an area that is a sure target for destruction. It was a sure target before - surrounded by water and almost 20' below sea level in some areas - and everyone knew it, but the remarkable luck New Orleans had before led to a false sense of complacency. The meager levee protections NOLA had before Katrina did not hold to their reported specifications, Katrina was far stronger than those specifications, and the levee system is considerably weaker now. I think these facts, above everything else, have many people wondering exactly how smart an idea it would be to put things back to where they were before, because they are realizing that pre-Katrina New Orleans was an obviously vulnerable place.
Despite how much I miss my home, I wonder the same things. If I'm angry at the federal government, I am angry at it because I consider it to be a party to endanger
"Levee's for a CAT 5? Which CAT 5? 195mph? or 250mph? CAT 5 is doesn't have a maximum so saying it will withstand a CAT 5 is sort of wishful thinking."
In theory, you're right, but practically speaking, there must be half a million ways to figure out what to build.
A really good starting point would be to do the thirty minutes of research required and figure out what the biggest storm surge and highest wind speeds reported to have made landfall in the area (or, any of the gulf coast in general) were, and then plan for more than that. I.e., if the record-holding storm pushed 25' of storm-surge flooding into the Lake, the new levies should probably be build to withstand a 35' storm surge. Similarly, I believe the highest windspeed recorded was Camille's landfall (265mph in Mississippi coastal areas), so building codes should obviously be upped to withstand 275-300mph sustained winds.
Also, waiting for FEMA to assign new house-height standards is going to be functionally useless. It will be useful when it comes to getting a new insurance policy, sure, but when it comes to keeping your home safe, you'll be sorely disappointed. I know that in Gentilly, most houses got 5-9' of water (even though they are elevated 3' off the ground). FEMA's new standards in that area are 2-3' higher than before, which will get you insurance but still leave your house destroyed when the next storm blows through. Your best bet, again, is to surpass the record flood(s) that have hit in history: find out where the Katrina water line in your house is, and build 5-10' higher than that. You'll definitely fall within even the newest government guidelines, and actually do something constructive towards making sure you won't need aid in the future as well.
That is, if you stay in an area where this sort of thing is 100% likely to happen again, which I think is just a silly idea. (Hence, I moved). But I realize that some people are really attached to it, so I've been helping my friends and family who've chosen to stay make house plans that will last through a storm worse than Katrina.
On my stock Ubuntu Hoary system, I open the program called (oddly enough) "package manager". I type in the name of the program I want in the "search" field, or browse for a program from a list, click the little box on the side of it, and push the "go" button.
It does the rest.
I don't even have to find and then go to a 3rd party website to download a file - I just launch software that is built in to my OS, and it does the finding, downloading, installation, and menu generation for me. If I know the name of the program I want, its as good as installed.
From where I sit, not having to track down a.dmg or.exe is exactly one less thing I have to go through to install software (when compared to Mac or PC), which means I have most "mind-numbingly simple" time of it (out of the three options discussed here).
I would talk about things I can't find in the repositories, but I honestly haven't had need of a program that wasn't in the repositories... so I've no experience with that.
Now, if you're referring specifically to RPM based distribution, I'm not sure I can disagree with your synopsys. I do recall having some of these types of issues with RPM based distros before. (Source based distros are just out of the conversation, of course).
" So your idea of a free society is one where everybody is allowed act like an asshole?"
If everybody weren't able to act like assholes, you wouldn't be able to make this complaint without some form of governmental punishment coming your way.
Is it just me, or do the two most-hyped new applications in Tiger (Dashboard and Spotlight) bear a striking resemblance to two Linux apps that I've been using for some time already (Desklets and Beagle)?
And a continually decreasing level of configurability.
I have about four to five completely new configuration panels in 2.10 than I had in 2.8. And several more are unofficially available. How is this a decreasing level of configurability?
Slashdot Mirror
They're people like me, and they live all around you.
I live east of Pflugerville, and even during rush hour can usually get to anywhere downtown in 25-27 minutes (yes, we timed it -- in response to many and varied claims that one could not go to the grocery store without some kind of 45 minute trek at the very least).
The problem is twofold: people who live on the western side, for the longest time, lost their one good route north/south (MoPac) so they could add another lane. This has been "fixed" very recently, but I can't say if it's helped. And Two, you aren't "commuting" within Austin so much as you're driving _from_ outside of Austin, clear across austin, to what sounds like somewhere else outside of austin. That's... what, 30 miles? Hardly what I'd call an average commute for the area. An _average_ commute for the area is maybe a third of that.
This also fails to mention that every single tech company I've worked for in over a decade allows offset hours specifically to deal with rush hour. My typical eight hour stint, when I worked in an office, was 11-7, with a 20 minute commute either way because of the time of day (and that was south, on 71, to Lake Creek on 183). Also fails to mention the rise of telecommute options: even a couple days a week average a horrible commute out to something livable.
I do not know how it could take you an hour to get from Round Rock to North Austin. Our roads might be poorly structured, but it doesn't even take me twenty minutes to get from my version of BFE to the Arboritum, and that's at 8:30am.
Finally: people in Austin do quite frequently move to at least the side of the river their job is on. It's more the regular than it is not, and for reasons of commute.
Just a nitpick:
IntelliJ and Eclipse are both cross platform and available on Linux.
I've never met anyone who has used Ubuntu and who likes Unity, power user, novice, script kiddie...
I'm a developer. I like Unity, and have actually come to prefer it - with a few caveats.
Mostly, I think its great after I:
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek Launcher (make it always visible)
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek scrollbars (make them always visible)
- Get rid of the hide-and-seek global menu (which means no global menu - but that's better than having to reveal it all the time)
Basically, I think the ideas are sound - indicators, Launcher, Dash... but automagically hiding key parts of the UI from me is a pain in the ass. I came here to work, not play a fucking mini-game.
Of course, at THAT point, with all those customizations, it bears little difference from Gnome3 with a Docky dock on the left. Which is what I'm currently doing right now, because Unity is about a hundred megs heavier, and Gnome-Shell has some things in it that I actually like more (like built-in dessktop recording; in-shell messaging; interactive notifications; and SUCH a well-designed theme that I'm using it, even though I hate blue).
The worst feature of unity is changing the "start menu" to that stupid search box. We use UIs because we're not able to remember names and obscure commands and parameters, but now they give us a UI that may as well have been a command prompt with find / -name "$1" built in to it.
I don't think this complaint has a lot of merit, honestly, and for two reasons:
- The "menu" system is still there, and somewhat easier to browse thanks to the icons being larger
- You can search for FUNCTION instead of App name, and this actually works (example: "Music player" or "play music" or "zip a file")
Of course, I HATE the "Activities" "area" with the burning passion of a thousand suns. If you design your OS to be "distraction-free", you might not want to design your shell to require people to zoom out and go somewhere different every thirty seconds. I swear, without a Dock, Gnome-Shell is unusable for me.
the benighted ribbon interface.
What a nightmare that was.
If I were a Google developer, I would WANT anyone who thinks this is a deal-breaker to use a different browser.
I wouldn't care which, just so long as it wasn't the one I was helping develop.
You ARE aware that the OpenOffice people created the split, right? As in, kicked out all the LibreOffice people for even *thinking* about a more open-source friendly split?
Also, am I the only one that doesn't hate Unity?
No, you are not.
Full disclosure: even before Unity, my setup was almost identical to it. Panel up top, dock-like thing on the left (for so, so many practical, HID-compliant, common-sensible reasons).
I *wanted* to use it in 11.04, but it simply wasn't technically ready. Memory leaks; lens tiles I didn't use but couldn't remove; crashes; no systray workaround; etc. etc.
So after suffering Gnome3 for a few months (made tolerable only by using Docky to get around that stupid ass "Activities" mistake), its like they addressed every single item of concern for me, even things on my wishlist. Take this for what its worth, but Unity is my OS of choice now; I prefer it to OS X and Windows-anything.
golemite beat me to it, but the team making DE:HR has been developing Thi4f simultaneously.
It's coming, and the success of DE:HR gives me hope they won't totally bork it up.
Great!
Now maybe they can stop fooling around with this game and get to the franchise that's actually awesome (Thief) instead. ;-)
I wish I could upvote this.
and stupid "over the shoulder" camera where your character's back takes up 1/3 of the screen for no reason.
OMG so much THIS.
First game I'd ever seen where you get in your own way *by design*. Seriously, what idiot thought this was a good idea.
It's funny. I remember the one thing I thought when I first saw KDE 4.0, freshly released:
"You gotta be _kidding_ me... are they serious with this? What group of people thought this paradigm was a good idea? And who could possibly have actually thought this product was finished enough to release?"
Oh, how the tables have turned.
Gnome 3, as a concept, is simply made of fail for me. My job often requires me to work with several apps simultaneously, something G3 makes almost _impossible_. The whole idea behind Gnome 3 is that the G3 team knows more about how a user best works with a computer than the user his/herself, and the problem I have with it is that they are wrong. When I use Gnome 3, I am blind to how much space I have left, how busy my computer is, whether or not an app has crashed or gone zombie, or even what my other applications are doing. Its too constricting; in the struggle to be "distraction free" (although I don't recall Gnome 2 actually being "distracting"), they end up treating me like a horse and making me wear blinders so I can get things done "the Gnome way". Too bad if you are doing a task that requires peripheral vision.
Unity... I really wanted to like it. And to be fair, I do like it; but it is so unpolished, unadjustable, and riddled with fairly severe pixmap/memory leaks that I can't possibly use it for production purposes. I have a feeling the next release or two will be good, and even this one will be fine once they fix those leaks, but right now... not so much. And the crouching tiger, hidden menu thing is far more annoying than the concept of a Global Menu all by itself.
XFCE is good. Really good. But there are some problems with it, particularly with the Compositor, that made me look elsewhere.
So I bit the bullet and installed KDE 4.6.
I can not BELIEVE how much I like it. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am in complete control of my computer, and can do anything with it. Everything is configurable, and while that used to cause me headaches and hours of twiddling with knobs in the control center, things have changed. The options are organized so well and/or so easy to access (you can configure most objects by simply right-clicking on them) that I never really have to *find* the option to change. The hard-to-hit skinny scrollbars can be changed without hacking a gtkrc file. So can the window management buttons; it seems silly to me now that there was such an uproar when Ubuntu changed them to be on the left, since KDE 4 seems to have always allowed you to put them on any side and in any order you want, just as part of the package. The OpenGL composting is vsync'd by default, and this works *even with videos*, something Compiz still has yet to get right on the nVidia driver. The effects and animations have gone from "ridiculously excessive" to subtle, informative, effective, and at times, breathtakingly gorgeous.
If there are too many options, there is usually a text search bar to narrow things down.
And all of this comes without full machine hard-locks, or having that stupid dragon show up every twenty minutes to tell me something else core dumped. I can tell you that between 4.0 and 4.6, things seemed to have become very solid, very fast, and very reliable in a hurry.
And that's just the UI in general. The KDE apps are similarly well-done, and this time they've hired a designer to make them look as good as they work. Gone are the overbearing, wall-of-text-and-doodads interfaces; they seemed to have taken notes from Gnome 2 for a lot of apps (I swear Dolphin is like a clone of Nautilus Elemantary; reKonq looks almost indistinguishable from Chrome; Pidgin and Gaim bear more than a passing resemblance, etc). And while we're on the topic of Gnome apps, I'll never know if I'm actually using one, because Oxygen-GTK renders them in whatever KDE theme I happen to be using at the time.
Sure, there is an overabundance of strange and somewhat unnecessary toys ("Plasmoids"). The whole "deskto
The Gnome guys have completely lost the plot. This is evident with only two words: "Gnome Shell". Which is 1337 for "your workflow sucks, and so does multitasking."
"You have decided, without even hearing the argument."
The argument has been made, and proven untrue, by very, very intelligent people who make a lot of money to study just this small subset of things.
"Open Debate" does NOT mean "giving every single presented idea its fair shake". One would expect ideas like "the earth is flat" or "the earth is the center of the solar system" to be dismissed immediately, as well - becasue the evidence has already been heard for each, and the concepts have already proven to be false.
All he did is prove that Open Debate is not a license to waste time re-treading old and inflammatory ground; all you did was prove that you don't understand Open Debate at all.
> Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed.
...just a whole lot _more_ of them on the right-hand-side of politics, than otherwise.
Last I checked, no genuine, non-half-assed attempts have been made. Generally there's too much dissent about having to care for each other to put some sort of full system in place. (Note: this dissent is not entirely unwarranted in some cases).
> Not really. Go to a left wing meeting and say you think blacks are genetically less intelligent.
This is a red herring - at _best_ - and deserves no reply.
> "Bush is going to reintroduce conscription". "The Patriot Act will lead to concentration camps". "Global warming will kill us all". "Dominionists are going to introduce a 10 Commandments based theocracy".
This is a straw man, and deserves no reply. I _will_ say, though, that there are enough facts out there to make the evidence supporting each of those statements worrying, at best.
"Of course. There are idiots relying on blind faith comes on both sides"
> See #2 and 4#.
A red herring and a straw man, respectively? Fallacies are not proper responses, sorry.
> I really fail to see the relevance here.
Because someone who makes impacting decisions based upon what citizens do with their wobbly bits in the privacy of their own homes is mentally unsound, unfit for public office, openly discriminatory with little reason, and an overall waste of humanity.
> (Some) right wingers hate gays, (some) left wingers hate men, the middle class, whites, Christians and their own country. How does any one of that automatically verify someone's beliefs?
Well, in the case of gay hate (homophobia), man hate (misandry), white hate (racism) - these ALL should be disqualifiers. No one should elect or pay any attention at all to the sort of person who'd profess such a thing, honestly.
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with hating Christianity (strikes me as a logical conclusion), and sometimes christians themselves make it nigh on impossible to NOT hate them. However, since mythology doesn't belong in public office, I kind of see that as a non-issue.
Hating one's own country is a complicated topic, but in short, sometimes its a valid response and sometimes it is not. Like above, though, its kind of a non-issue. One is certainly free to hate one's own country, and this should make no difference whatsoever. I'd almost expect it from someone who has a lot of disagreements with current public policy.
I, for one, am horribly dismayed at this news.
For some reason, cellphone users have earned a special place of annoyance with folks that they do not deserve. See, on a cell phone, the speaker is practically in your ear canal, and the mike is practically in your mouth. On my travels, I _very_ _often_ find cell phone conversations to be less loud and intrusive than standard, person-to-person conversations. Especially when a majority of those conversations seem to be between people on differing rows of the plane. And, what's worse: I have to listen to BOTH sides of the conversation when two people are yelling over engine noise to each other. At least with a cellphone conversation, if its loud enough for me to hear, I can make up the other side of the dialogue.
Frankly, if you're in favor of banning something due to annoyance? Ban children. On a six-hour flight, I'd MUCH rather a self-absorbed former-frat-boy deal-closing businessman on bluetooth ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over a two year old with a rash and a set of healthy lungs.
"Ironically, they did away with the applications:/// method of editing your Applications menu in GNOME without adding a workaround and that was the last straw."
They did add a workaround. It was called "Smeg", and now "alacarte".
"The fact that there's a whole profession centered around surgical measures to enforce weight-loss, surgical procedures which can have serious complications, means that for at least some people, it's not simply a matter of will power."
No, it doesn't mean that.
All it means is that some people would rather buy their way out of a problem instead of working their way through it.
I second one of the other posters: lock obese people in a room and feed them 1000 calories a day, and see how they come out in a few months. Betcha "thinner" would be a word.
"Do you have any idea what it would take to make a building that can sustain 275 sustained wind load??? The answer to that is easy. No you don't." ... "I doubt that you could fined anyone that would even attempt to build a building rated at 265 MPH sustained winds."
Suggestion: Perhaps you shouldn't assume so much. That way, I won't have to paste links to buildings that can withstand the winds from very strong tornadoes.
"A levee that can take a 35 foot surge + 275MPH winds? Never have been done and would cost way to much. "
I was under the impression that a much larger one already existed.
"The only correct action in the face of a Category 5 storm is to evacuate."
Which is why I no longer live there - I essentially agree with this.
(Warning: I'm a native New Orleanean).
Well, is this the United States?
That's hardly an argument New Orleans gets to use. If New Orleans was interested in being a part of the United States, it would have stopped using Napoleonic code, stopped calling counties Parishes, and raised the drinking age to 21 much sooner than it did (and it would have done so of its own accord, instead of being pressured into it because of lack of Highway funds.) Among other things.
Not that I agree with any or all of those things; just saying that NOLA has had a long history of flipping off the USA in its past, and claiming solidarity now is more than a little hypocritical.
"And, while I can sympathize with your sentiments regarding say....someone right now, building a new home right on the beach somewhere along the coast."
Then how can you not sympathize with those same sentiments regarding, say, someone who is planning on moving back to The Parish (St. Bernard), New Orleans East, Lakeview, or Gentilly? Most if not all of those folks have to bulldoze and start from scratch if they choose to rebuild where they are. Effectively, that IS "someone right now, building a new home right on the beach somewhere along the coast" - or, at the very least, someone building in an area proven to be prone to total annihilation.
I have to wonder if seeing Katrina's damage as a lesson ("It is not physically safe to build a traditional a house here. Now we know.") is too much to ask.
"New Orleans is where it is for reasons"
Much of which can be attributed to rapid urban sprawl and genuine mistakes. Notice how the oldest areas of the city Proper (Uptown, French Quarter) made out considerably better. This is not a random thing - rather, New Orleans, when it was established and further on into its formative years, was built on the highest portions of the basin. Much of the rest of it (Lakeview and Gentilly are good examples) were some of the last additions, and rose fast enough to create an illusion of safety.
It was never intended to be a huge city - for much of its life it was little more than a very large port. The offshore oil industry more or less changed that.
"The US gets a lot from us down here...economically and culturally. (Jazz, blues, food)."
That's another smallish nit I'd like to pick. At least musically, New Orleans has been land of the cover band for the entire 31 years of my life. Nothing new - especially nothing new in the realms of Jazz and Blues - has happened here in a while.
I can't argue with the food, except to say that any uniquely New Orleans food offerings can't usually be found by outside visitors. A lot of places in, say, the French Quarter are nothing but burger joints with Cajun decorations on the walls.
"We ask for help now...and you turn your back on us? Why are we less important than other parts of the US?"
Ah. The meat of the discussion.
I don't think the US is turning its back on New Orleans because it is less important - I think the collective back is being turned because no one wants to spend capitol rebuilding in an area that is a sure target for destruction. It was a sure target before - surrounded by water and almost 20' below sea level in some areas - and everyone knew it, but the remarkable luck New Orleans had before led to a false sense of complacency. The meager levee protections NOLA had before Katrina did not hold to their reported specifications, Katrina was far stronger than those specifications, and the levee system is considerably weaker now. I think these facts, above everything else, have many people wondering exactly how smart an idea it would be to put things back to where they were before, because they are realizing that pre-Katrina New Orleans was an obviously vulnerable place.
Despite how much I miss my home, I wonder the same things. If I'm angry at the federal government, I am angry at it because I consider it to be a party to endanger
"Levee's for a CAT 5? Which CAT 5? 195mph? or 250mph? CAT 5 is doesn't have a maximum so saying it will withstand a CAT 5 is sort of wishful thinking."
In theory, you're right, but practically speaking, there must be half a million ways to figure out what to build.
A really good starting point would be to do the thirty minutes of research required and figure out what the biggest storm surge and highest wind speeds reported to have made landfall in the area (or, any of the gulf coast in general) were, and then plan for more than that. I.e., if the record-holding storm pushed 25' of storm-surge flooding into the Lake, the new levies should probably be build to withstand a 35' storm surge. Similarly, I believe the highest windspeed recorded was Camille's landfall (265mph in Mississippi coastal areas), so building codes should obviously be upped to withstand 275-300mph sustained winds.
Also, waiting for FEMA to assign new house-height standards is going to be functionally useless. It will be useful when it comes to getting a new insurance policy, sure, but when it comes to keeping your home safe, you'll be sorely disappointed. I know that in Gentilly, most houses got 5-9' of water (even though they are elevated 3' off the ground). FEMA's new standards in that area are 2-3' higher than before, which will get you insurance but still leave your house destroyed when the next storm blows through. Your best bet, again, is to surpass the record flood(s) that have hit in history: find out where the Katrina water line in your house is, and build 5-10' higher than that. You'll definitely fall within even the newest government guidelines, and actually do something constructive towards making sure you won't need aid in the future as well.
That is, if you stay in an area where this sort of thing is 100% likely to happen again, which I think is just a silly idea. (Hence, I moved). But I realize that some people are really attached to it, so I've been helping my friends and family who've chosen to stay make house plans that will last through a storm worse than Katrina.
On my stock Ubuntu Hoary system, I open the program called (oddly enough) "package manager". I type in the name of the program I want in the "search" field, or browse for a program from a list, click the little box on the side of it, and push the "go" button.
.dmg or .exe is exactly one less thing I have to go through to install software (when compared to Mac or PC), which means I have most "mind-numbingly simple" time of it (out of the three options discussed here).
It does the rest.
I don't even have to find and then go to a 3rd party website to download a file - I just launch software that is built in to my OS, and it does the finding, downloading, installation, and menu generation for me. If I know the name of the program I want, its as good as installed.
From where I sit, not having to track down a
I would talk about things I can't find in the repositories, but I honestly haven't had need of a program that wasn't in the repositories... so I've no experience with that.
Now, if you're referring specifically to RPM based distribution, I'm not sure I can disagree with your synopsys. I do recall having some of these types of issues with RPM based distros before. (Source based distros are just out of the conversation, of course).
Ubuntu is not even in the same ballpark as Fedora
On this, we agree; Ubuntu actually works and doesn't take a million years and three CD's to install.
" So your idea of a free society is one where everybody is allowed act like an asshole?"
If everybody weren't able to act like assholes, you wouldn't be able to make this complaint without some form of governmental punishment coming your way.
Is it just me, or do the two most-hyped new applications in Tiger (Dashboard and Spotlight) bear a striking resemblance to two Linux apps that I've been using for some time already (Desklets and Beagle)?
No menu editor.
*sigh*
but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut
I have arrows on shortcuts...?
And a continually decreasing level of configurability.
I have about four to five completely new configuration panels in 2.10 than I had in 2.8. And several more are unofficially available. How is this a decreasing level of configurability?
I wonder if we're actually both using GNOME...