The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it was simply nowhere near release quality; huge chunks of it were either massively buggy or simply not implemented, and it took them until 4.3 to get it to a state that I was prepared to use it as my desktop. At that point it worked pretty much identically to KDE 3.x, even though the underlying code had been completely rewritten, and I could just ignore the new stuff I had no use for such as activities without it affecting my desktop experience at all.
Unity, while it's less ugly than GNOME 3 and not quite as awful, still shares many of the same fundamental design flaws. No amount of bug fixing and tweaks can make a desktop usable when the basic ideas behind it are so wrong.
What concerns me in particular, is that at least with the KDE 4.0 debacle, there were quite a few "This is BAD... But I can see it being good in a few versions" type comments.... with Gnome 3, can't think I've seen a single positive comment, at best "changes are sorta manageable".
Yup. The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it simply wasn't even close to release quality; it was early alpha at best, with large chunks of functionality either buggy or unimplemented. 4.2.2 was the first version that I could imagine anyone using as their default desktop; I switched somewhere in the 4.3.x sequence.
The problem with GNOME 3 is that the fundamental design decisions are wrong. No amount of bug fixing etc. is going to make it usable.
I've just tried this. The most obvious change is the new 'K' menu, which is unbelievably awful and difficult to use. If there's no way to turn this junk off and go back to a sane way of doing things then that alone will be enough to keep me on KDE 3.x. The system settings window is also horribly broken - the nice tree view of all the sections has been replaced with a stupid layout that requires me to constantly click on the back button when I'm looking for something.
Does anyone know if the changes will prevent old themes from working? I like the Marble theme from old versions of KDE and have been adding it back myself since they inexplicably dropped it. Assuming they fix the thingsI mentioned above and I switch to 4.x, I'd like to be able to use it.
At least in firefox it's easy to replace the hideously broken Gtk file browser with the original JavaScript version.
Edit.../components/nsFilePicker.js and change the third argument from "" to FILEPICKER_CONTRACTID in the call to compMgr.registerFactoryLocation. You'll probably have to delete ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/compreg.dat to make the change take effect.
How can referencing someone else's library, regardless of their license, encumber my source code?
If there's only one library that implements the API you're using and that library is GPL'd, then there's no way to get a working executable without including GPL'd code in it. This means that
you have to distribute your code under the GPL. If there's a
non-GPL library that implements the same API then you don't have to GPL your code, even if the person you give the source to links it with the GPL'd library.
The most obvious problem is that, unlike the old XUL file browser, they don't use the current Firefox theme. This makes them look completely out of place on screen.
More importantly, the design of the new file browser is fundamentally broken; it's been dumbed down to the point of unusability. There's no obvious place to type filenames rather than using the mouse, the display of the directory tree is non-standard, clicking on "Browse for other folders" in the save dialog triples the size of the window and often moves the cancel/save buttons off the bottom of the screen, etc.
The disaster that is the new GTK file browser is the main reason that I'm still using GTK1 versions of Mozilla etc.
The world had become dependant on calculators, and nobody knew the basics operations. So this guy comes, shows them how to do a square root or division, and the people were amazed at him knowing the secret knowledge. They would test his assertions on the calculators, and say "hey, it works!"
You can do exactly what the author is describing in Microsoft Word, and it is a hell of a lot easier than Tex. As you are typing your document, you simply mark things with Heading 1, etc (create new styles as you need them). When you're done "composing", then edit the styles such that your document is rendered as you want it to be.
One of the nice things about a markup language compared to a word processor is that the document style is under the control of the user - the person who'll be reading the document - rather than the author. If you want full control over how a document looks then ship it as PostScript or PDF.
Another useful thing about markup languages is that they're usually plain text, which makes them readable even if you don't have a particular program. This also makes them easy to process automatically - extracting the title, authors, abstract etc. for example. Given a repository of papers, we can automatically produce statistics showing, for example, how many papers each author has published - just the sort of thing that funding bodies want to know. Try doing that with some WYSIWYG format where the various sections are obvious to a human eye but don't have anything in the file to say that centered text in bold is the title, the first italic bit is the abstract etc.
It's also using a fixed width that's wider than my browser window, which makes the articles a pain to read. Perhaps they should hire someone who understands that HTML is not PDF rather than trying to force a particular layout on my browser.
I think James Cameron has been laying low since he made an ass of himself with the "I'm the king of the world"
Considering what he'd been through over the previous couple of years, I think he was fairly restrained. After a long, hard shoot with nearly constant rumours that the movie was going to be one of the most expensive disasters in history, he's standing there in front of the entire entertainment industry with a couple of Oscars and a box office take heading for a billion dollars. In his place I'd probably have gone for "Fuck you, assholes!"
Yeah, if by "free speech" you mean "allow terrorists to broadcast propoganda with possible underlying go codes for their cells".
Why would they do this when they've no control over which parts of the tape will be shown, whether the original soundtrack or a dubbed translation will be used etc? Just off the top of my head I can think of several more efficient and faster methods - a small advert in a local paper or particular comments in a weblog for example.
I really do. 2.0 (with the 2.x GTK series) really messed things up, and with more and more crud going in, the good stuff going out...
GNOME 2.x isn't that bad once you get it running; it's getting it to run that's the problem. I managed to compile 1.x for Solaris, but I gave up in disgust with 2.x - far too many dependencies on libraries that I had to resort to google to find because the GNOME site didn't even have a link to them, hacks needed to the source etc. The developers seem to assume that everyone's running redhat-like linux and ignore everyone else.
It may be a lack of knowledge on my part, but since I've successfully built KDE 3, MIT X years ago and several other large packages I'm inclined to blame GNOME.
GIMP2's the same; easy on Redhat, a nightmare on anything else.
There is nothing agaist fighting thost that kill babies in the Bible. Not a thing. Unless you think Jesus would have approved of ripping a baby to pieces with a vaccumm cleaner.
So Numbers 5:11 - 5:31 isn't a description of how and when to administer an abortifacient then?
There's a difference between respecting their right to hold a belief and respecting the belief itself. Personally I'm of the opinion that people should be free to believe any damn-fool thing they want, but they shouldn't expect a free ride if they express those beliefs in public just because it's religion rather than politics/fashion/etc.
Also, their right to hold religious beliefs stops where my right not to starts; don't try to get laws passed or otherwise force me to follow your religion (or at least appear to) and I'll shake my head and leave you in peace.
Here's a bookmarklet that will display two pages side-by-side. It's a trivial change to make it display two copies of the current page without prompting.
I'll agree with you about the 5th book - a complete waste of paper - but I liked the 4th one. I think part of the reason I disliked the 5th one is the way he treated Fenchurch, my favourite character from the 4th (details omitted to avoid spoiling those who haven't read it yet). He also seemed desperate to bring the story to a close so he didn't have to write about the characters any more.
The 2nd Dirk Gently book was OK as well, but nowhere near as good as the 1st.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it was simply nowhere near release quality; huge chunks of it were either massively buggy or simply not implemented, and it took them until 4.3 to get it to a state that I was prepared to use it as my desktop. At that point it worked pretty much identically to KDE 3.x, even though the underlying code had been completely rewritten, and I could just ignore the new stuff I had no use for such as activities without it affecting my desktop experience at all.
Unity, while it's less ugly than GNOME 3 and not quite as awful, still shares many of the same fundamental design flaws. No amount of bug fixing and tweaks can make a desktop usable when the basic ideas behind it are so wrong.
What concerns me in particular, is that at least with the KDE 4.0 debacle, there were quite a few "This is BAD... But I can see it being good in a few versions" type comments.... with Gnome 3, can't think I've seen a single positive comment, at best "changes are sorta manageable".
Yup. The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it simply wasn't even close to release quality; it was early alpha at best, with large chunks of functionality either buggy or unimplemented. 4.2.2 was the first version that I could imagine anyone using as their default desktop; I switched somewhere in the 4.3.x sequence.
The problem with GNOME 3 is that the fundamental design decisions are wrong. No amount of bug fixing etc. is going to make it usable.
I've just tried this. The most obvious change is the new 'K' menu, which is unbelievably
awful and difficult to use. If there's no way to turn this junk off and go back to a
sane way of doing things then that alone will be enough to keep me on KDE 3.x. The system settings window is also horribly broken - the nice tree view of all the sections has been replaced with a stupid layout that requires me to constantly click on the back button when I'm looking for something.
Does anyone know if the changes will prevent old themes from working? I like the Marble theme from old versions of KDE and have been adding it back myself since they inexplicably dropped it. Assuming they fix the thingsI mentioned above and I switch to 4.x, I'd like to be able to use it.
At least in firefox it's easy to replace the hideously broken Gtk file browser with the original JavaScript version.
.../components/nsFilePicker.js and change the third argument from "" to FILEPICKER_CONTRACTID in the call to compMgr.registerFactoryLocation. You'll probably have to delete ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/compreg.dat to make the change take effect.
Edit
Bill Gates' tombstone will read
This man has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down
If there's only one library that implements the API you're using and that library is GPL'd, then there's no way to get a working executable without including GPL'd code in it. This means that you have to distribute your code under the GPL. If there's a non-GPL library that implements the same API then you don't have to GPL your code, even if the person you give the source to links it with the GPL'd library.
> what's wrong with the gnome file dialog?
The most obvious problem is that, unlike the old
XUL file browser, they don't use the current Firefox
theme. This makes them look completely out of place
on screen.
More importantly, the design of the new file browser
is fundamentally broken; it's been dumbed down to the
point of unusability. There's no obvious place to type
filenames rather than using the mouse, the display of
the directory tree is non-standard, clicking on
"Browse for other folders" in the save dialog triples
the size of the window and often moves the cancel/save
buttons off the bottom of the screen, etc.
The disaster that is the new GTK file browser is the
main reason that I'm still using GTK1 versions of
Mozilla etc.
Sounds like Isaac Asimov's The Feeling of Power
Yes, as are game show prizes and lottery winnings.
You can do exactly what the author is describing in Microsoft Word, and it is a hell of a lot easier than Tex. As you are typing your document, you simply mark things with Heading 1, etc (create new styles as you need them). When you're done "composing", then edit the styles such that your document is rendered as you want it to be.
One of the nice things about a markup language compared to a word processor is that the document style is under the control of the user - the person who'll be reading the document - rather than the author. If you want full control over how a document looks then ship it as PostScript or PDF.
Another useful thing about markup languages is that they're usually plain text, which makes them readable even if you don't have a particular program. This also makes them easy to process automatically - extracting the title, authors, abstract etc. for example. Given a repository of papers, we can automatically produce statistics showing, for example, how many papers each author has published - just the sort of thing that funding bodies want to know. Try doing that with some WYSIWYG format where the various sections are obvious to a human eye but don't have anything in the file to say that centered text in bold is the title, the first italic bit is the abstract etc.
That's because the FreeType people keep changing things. I've no idea which version of FreeType it will actually compile cleanly with, but adding
.../layout/svg/renderer/src/libart/Makefile will make it compile with 2.0.9
-DFT_RENDER_MODE_NORMAL=ft_render_mode_normal -DFT_KERNING_DEFAULT=ft_kerning_default
to the DEFINES line in
It's also using a fixed width that's wider than my browser window, which makes the articles a pain to read. Perhaps they should hire someone who understands that HTML is not PDF rather than trying to force a particular layout on my browser.
I think James Cameron has been laying low since he made an ass of himself with the "I'm the king of the world"
Considering what he'd been through over the previous couple of years, I think he was fairly restrained. After a long, hard shoot with nearly constant rumours that the movie was going to be one of the most expensive disasters in history, he's standing there in front of the entire entertainment industry with a couple of Oscars and a box office take heading for a billion dollars. In his place I'd probably have gone for "Fuck you, assholes!"
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3112095.stm for something along those lines - skydiving across the English Channel.
Yeah, if by "free speech" you mean "allow terrorists to broadcast propoganda with possible underlying go codes for their cells".
Why would they do this when they've no control over which parts of the tape will be shown, whether the original soundtrack or a dubbed translation will be used etc? Just off the top of my head I can think of several more efficient and faster methods - a small advert in a local paper or particular comments in a weblog for example.
I really do. 2.0 (with the 2.x GTK series) really messed things up, and with more and more crud going in, the good stuff going out...
GNOME 2.x isn't that bad once you get it running;
it's getting it to run that's the problem. I managed to
compile 1.x for Solaris, but I gave up in disgust
with 2.x - far too many dependencies on
libraries that I had to resort to google to find
because the GNOME site didn't even have a link to
them, hacks needed to the source etc. The developers
seem to assume that everyone's running
redhat-like linux and ignore everyone else.
It may be a lack of knowledge on my part, but since
I've successfully built KDE 3, MIT X years
ago and several other large packages I'm inclined
to blame GNOME.
GIMP2's the same; easy on Redhat, a nightmare
on anything else.
There is nothing agaist fighting thost that kill babies in the Bible. Not a thing. Unless you think Jesus would have approved of ripping a baby to pieces with a vaccumm cleaner.
So Numbers 5:11 - 5:31 isn't a description of how and when to administer an abortifacient then?
There's a difference between respecting their right to hold a belief and respecting the belief itself. Personally I'm of the opinion that people should be free to believe any damn-fool thing they want, but they shouldn't expect a free ride if they express those beliefs in public just because it's religion rather than politics/fashion/etc.
Also, their right to hold religious beliefs stops where my right not to starts; don't try to get laws passed or otherwise force me to follow your religion (or at least appear to) and I'll shake my head and leave you in peace.
Looking at http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/
I don't think they've got too much to worry about
Here's a bookmarklet that will display two pages side-by-side. It's a trivial change to make it display two copies of the current page without prompting.
Try some of these bookmarklets - the Zap ones can make most things readable
I'll agree with you about the 5th book - a
complete waste of paper - but I liked the 4th
one. I think part of the reason I disliked
the 5th one is the way he treated Fenchurch,
my favourite character from the 4th (details
omitted to avoid spoiling those who haven't
read it yet). He also seemed desperate to
bring the story to a close so he didn't have
to write about the characters any more.
The 2nd Dirk Gently book was OK as well, but
nowhere near as good as the 1st.
See http://www.digitalfountain.com/getDocument.htm/tec hnology/DF_MetaContentWhitePaper_v4.pdf