The most important thing for me is absolute addressing of workspaces. Don't think of them as 'going to the next or previous one (or worse, a grid). No, think of it as "My browser is on tab 4", "My chat client and music client are on tab 5". "My editor/IDE is on tab 1", etc. This makes switching between contexts insanely fast and completely painless. You don't need to hunt&pick with your mouse, scroll through lists, etc.
Ditto. Incidentally, when I got started with Linux, the default (with Gnome at the time) was a 2x2 space where you'd select each quadrant by number. Of course it could be extended, but there was still the idea of spatial organization, e.g. so you could move windows smoothly between adjacent areas. I still maintain the spatial idea with my Alt-F# desktops, even though I no longer use such a model, and I think of certain screens being "down below".
I don't get the problem either. I like to use virtual screens a lot so I can focus on one thing at a time, and I often have just one or two windows per screen. A project might be spread over several desktops, for example due to having a single Emacs session for everything. I think a single monitor with multiple virtual screens actually helps me focus better than trying to see everyhting at once. This is one reason why the whole desktop metaphor is stupid.
Agreed. The title would only make sense if we similarly used "Dollar extortion group" or "Euro extortion group". Although that's probably redundant, because debt-based currencies have a kind of built-in extortion anyway.
First of all, free software isn't about making money. In many ways it's about saving money and other resources, like not reinventing the wheel all the time. A lot of people are better off when the corporation doesn't have to waste money on propriatary software. For example, lower prices for customers.
Also, there isn't much locking up going on. A lot of the free software is licensed under BSD, MIT etc. which permits inclusion in closed products. With GPL software, companies are still free to use it to make a shitload of money, and in-house modifications need not be distributed, as long as the software itself isn't. Of course, a lot of businesses actually contribute back to free software, even with no strict obligations.
* Free developers mostly want to solve their own problems.
I think a lot of this has to do with the developer mindset. You think of the computer as a tool which can be used to make all kinds of wonderful things, as long as you learn to use it. When you write a nice piece of software, you often want to keep it somewhat general to anticipate future needs. This is when it may get interesting, when other developers find your code and apply it for something unexpected.
With free software, there's no point in having nice, well-defined "apps" because the ecosystem as a whole is much more powerful. For any given task, you can generally find a combination of free software that beats any single app for that use. Of course, putting it all together is not always trivial; you generally need to think about your task carefully.
Moreover, a single-use app is a developmental dead end. It won't have the potential to launch an avalanche of further development, at least not in this ecosystem sense.
What the flying fuck?!? I just wanted to check my balance and now I have to change my password.
I remember in the past some online banking sites did this right. You could log in to check balances with the basic password, but you'd need stronger credentials to make payments. Now they want me to use up numbers from the one-time pad both for the initial login, and again for the payment.
I understand the balance and transactions can be sensitive information to many people, but losing money directly should be a more immediate concern. As many other commenters are pointing out, the level of crypto should correlate with the value of the service.
I don't see much point in cramming things too tight. I like keeping things quiet, and the usual way is via larger coolers. Of course, better power efficiency is also great, but why offset a small TDP with smaller size, when you could get things even quieter?
Both RSA and D-H are based on the difficulty of solving math problems that quantum computing should be able to easily solve....
Things like Elliptic curve Diffie Helman are secure.
My impression, after studying some of the actual math, is that nothing is proved secure. So far, mathematicians haven't found any revolutionary shortcuts to such problems -- we are only safe until someone finds them. For example, as the sibling post mentions, there are EC versions of Shor's algorithm. Besides, there isn't anything magical about EC itself, it's like a different number system from a mathematician's point of view (field structure).
I live near the beach in the melanoma capital of the world (Queensland, Australia), and I see a LOT of pale-skinned tourists sunning themselves for hours at the beach in summer. Trying to get a year's worth of sun in a two-week holiday is the wrong way to go about it.
This is pretty much the problem in Finland with its short summers. We only get a few weeks of warm and sunny weather each year, so a lot of people consider it a national duty to spend all that time sunbathing.
if you live above/below 60 degrees off the equator, you'll need all the exposure you can get, but for those of us in the rest of the world, we need to to be careful, because we don't have a risk of insufficient exposure, we run the risk of excessive exposure.
Finland is between 60 and 70 degrees, and some of us still manage to get skin cancer.
I have almost free beer, I learned to make my own. There are some ingredients you probably have to buy, just like you need to buy hardware to run your free software. There are some ingredients you may be able to find in the wild for free.
Science would be a good start. Free software itself is an obvious continuation of the centuries of the scientific principle, which is being ruined by a more general tendency of closed propriety. For example, in molecular modelling you find a great deal of papers where the authors use closed-source software for the actual modelling, and the paper itself is paywalled despite public funding.
The real question should be, what is it I want to do today? If you're dead set on using that one app, chances are you'll also expect Linux to act as a free clone of Windows. You could probably run it on Wine, but in any case you'd miss the whole point of unix and open source.
If you expect a *commander equivalent to be your main interface with the OS, you'll miss the point of Linux, unix and open source. I can almost understand the need for that one single Windows-only app, but it's best to open up to a new kind of OS rather than expect a free Windows clone.
It's easy to be a role model if you happen to win the geography lottery. My closest example would be Norway, which has both hydropower and oil, so they can sell the fossil fuel for nice profits while living off clean energy themselves.
"I'm just an idea guy. I have some really great ideas. I just need someone else to do the easy parts like writing all the code."
What do you mean, "just" an idea guy? An idea guy is a special snowflake that should be put on a pedestal, while any primate can churn out the code.
However, snowflakes are easily generated with a little code. Given the special status of snowflakes, the programmers who can make these are truly rare, and should be treated with the utmost respect.
Chlorine and ozone aren't mutually exclusive in water treatment. AFAIK, ozone/oxygen is used at water treatment plants to kill germs, but the effect won't last indefinitely. Chlorine is added to protect against anything the water might catch on the way to end users.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important thing for me is absolute addressing of workspaces. Don't think of them as 'going to the next or previous one (or worse, a grid). No, think of it as "My browser is on tab 4", "My chat client and music client are on tab 5". "My editor/IDE is on tab 1", etc. This makes switching between contexts insanely fast and completely painless. You don't need to hunt&pick with your mouse, scroll through lists, etc.
Ditto. Incidentally, when I got started with Linux, the default (with Gnome at the time) was a 2x2 space where you'd select each quadrant by number. Of course it could be extended, but there was still the idea of spatial organization, e.g. so you could move windows smoothly between adjacent areas. I still maintain the spatial idea with my Alt-F# desktops, even though I no longer use such a model, and I think of certain screens being "down below".
So how do you focus on one thing when you can see a shitload of things at once?
Wait, we're still talking about virtual desktops, are we?
I don't get the problem either. I like to use virtual screens a lot so I can focus on one thing at a time, and I often have just one or two windows per screen. A project might be spread over several desktops, for example due to having a single Emacs session for everything. I think a single monitor with multiple virtual screens actually helps me focus better than trying to see everyhting at once. This is one reason why the whole desktop metaphor is stupid.
Agreed. The title would only make sense if we similarly used "Dollar extortion group" or "Euro extortion group". Although that's probably redundant, because debt-based currencies have a kind of built-in extortion anyway.
First of all, free software isn't about making money. In many ways it's about saving money and other resources, like not reinventing the wheel all the time. A lot of people are better off when the corporation doesn't have to waste money on propriatary software. For example, lower prices for customers.
Also, there isn't much locking up going on. A lot of the free software is licensed under BSD, MIT etc. which permits inclusion in closed products. With GPL software, companies are still free to use it to make a shitload of money, and in-house modifications need not be distributed, as long as the software itself isn't. Of course, a lot of businesses actually contribute back to free software, even with no strict obligations.
* Free developers mostly want to solve their own problems.
I think a lot of this has to do with the developer mindset. You think of the computer as a tool which can be used to make all kinds of wonderful things, as long as you learn to use it. When you write a nice piece of software, you often want to keep it somewhat general to anticipate future needs. This is when it may get interesting, when other developers find your code and apply it for something unexpected.
With free software, there's no point in having nice, well-defined "apps" because the ecosystem as a whole is much more powerful. For any given task, you can generally find a combination of free software that beats any single app for that use. Of course, putting it all together is not always trivial; you generally need to think about your task carefully.
Moreover, a single-use app is a developmental dead end. It won't have the potential to launch an avalanche of further development, at least not in this ecosystem sense.
so many schools have jettisoned much of the cannon
Ah, the days when a University was a true fortress of wisdom.
What the flying fuck?!? I just wanted to check my balance and now I have to change my password.
I remember in the past some online banking sites did this right. You could log in to check balances with the basic password, but you'd need stronger credentials to make payments. Now they want me to use up numbers from the one-time pad both for the initial login, and again for the payment.
I understand the balance and transactions can be sensitive information to many people, but losing money directly should be a more immediate concern. As many other commenters are pointing out, the level of crypto should correlate with the value of the service.
I don't see much point in cramming things too tight. I like keeping things quiet, and the usual way is via larger coolers. Of course, better power efficiency is also great, but why offset a small TDP with smaller size, when you could get things even quieter?
Both RSA and D-H are based on the difficulty of solving math problems that quantum computing should be able to easily solve. ...
Things like Elliptic curve Diffie Helman are secure.
My impression, after studying some of the actual math, is that nothing is proved secure. So far, mathematicians haven't found any revolutionary shortcuts to such problems -- we are only safe until someone finds them. For example, as the sibling post mentions, there are EC versions of Shor's algorithm. Besides, there isn't anything magical about EC itself, it's like a different number system from a mathematician's point of view (field structure).
Are you Shor?
I live near the beach in the melanoma capital of the world (Queensland, Australia), and I see a LOT of pale-skinned tourists sunning themselves for hours at the beach in summer. Trying to get a year's worth of sun in a two-week holiday is the wrong way to go about it.
This is pretty much the problem in Finland with its short summers. We only get a few weeks of warm and sunny weather each year, so a lot of people consider it a national duty to spend all that time sunbathing.
if you live above/below 60 degrees off the equator, you'll need all the exposure you can get, but for those of us in the rest of the world, we need to to be careful, because we don't have a risk of insufficient exposure, we run the risk of excessive exposure.
Finland is between 60 and 70 degrees, and some of us still manage to get skin cancer.
I have almost free beer, I learned to make my own. There are some ingredients you probably have to buy, just like you need to buy hardware to run your free software. There are some ingredients you may be able to find in the wild for free.
Science would be a good start. Free software itself is an obvious continuation of the centuries of the scientific principle, which is being ruined by a more general tendency of closed propriety. For example, in molecular modelling you find a great deal of papers where the authors use closed-source software for the actual modelling, and the paper itself is paywalled despite public funding.
The real question should be, what is it I want to do today? If you're dead set on using that one app, chances are you'll also expect Linux to act as a free clone of Windows. You could probably run it on Wine, but in any case you'd miss the whole point of unix and open source.
If you expect a *commander equivalent to be your main interface with the OS, you'll miss the point of Linux, unix and open source. I can almost understand the need for that one single Windows-only app, but it's best to open up to a new kind of OS rather than expect a free Windows clone.
It's easy to be a role model if you happen to win the geography lottery. My closest example would be Norway, which has both hydropower and oil, so they can sell the fossil fuel for nice profits while living off clean energy themselves.
"I'm just an idea guy. I have some really great ideas. I just need someone else to do the easy parts like writing all the code."
What do you mean, "just" an idea guy? An idea guy is a special snowflake that should be put on a pedestal, while any primate can churn out the code.
However, snowflakes are easily generated with a little code. Given the special status of snowflakes, the programmers who can make these are truly rare, and should be treated with the utmost respect.
I think the English spelling is "penguin". Nevertheless, I named one of my machines "vin" so I can "ping vin" in the language of Linus.
"100% efficiency" per window?
Yes, but then we don't call them windows any more.
And that's why basement-dwelling übergeeks use Linux.
...more programmers are going into women, if you catch my drift. And I think you do, being the ever so smart programmer yourself.
Oh, wait, chlorine...
Chlorine and ozone aren't mutually exclusive in water treatment. AFAIK, ozone/oxygen is used at water treatment plants to kill germs, but the effect won't last indefinitely. Chlorine is added to protect against anything the water might catch on the way to end users.