... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.
Compiz has its uses. Sure, I only turn on wobbly windows to impress newbies, but its window placement rules are a god-send! If only Linux apps would damn-well remember where they were last time, I wouldn't need it, but since this is utterly beyond quite a few Linux application programmers, we need such hacks. Though, specifying certain rules based on window title, etc, mean that my windows open 100% where I expect them to, every time. Going back to Windows at work is a huge pain when you're constantly having to de-overlap explorer windows, for example.
Speaking as somebody who abhors DRM and the various limited digital music stores out there (with pathetic, mostly-pop rubbish catalogues), I agree with the post above your reply. Optical drives are invaluable for playing or ripping CDs, and I will never give up my CD collection and start buying these horrid music downloads from equally horrid online stores that more often than not tie you into iTunes or some other evil ecosystem (and since I use Linux, they don't work for me anyway, and if they can, courtesy of some hack, then that's unacceptable anyway).
No thank you very much! It's my CD collection for me from now until the day I die. I have about 1,400 of them so that ought to keep me busy, and yes, I have ripped most of them them but I also play them in my car and also in my kitchen stereo. There can be no substitute for owning the real thing, IMHO. All these people buying into proprietary online digital music stores will be sorry when the day comes that the store dies and your music is screwed. It has happened before, and it will happen again. And I'm not going near iTunes (since I use Linux) and because its offerings are so paltry that I laugh at its catalogue's meagre range!
What else is the NBN for other than using copious bandwidth for digital content? I sure as hell ain't gonna get a Telstra T-Box and be forced into watching movies and TV shows on their pathetic schedules, and most likely be forced to watch advertising without being able to skip through it. Or, what's worse, being forced to select from the paltry range of good TV shows from overseas and have to watch locally-produced content which is mostly rubbish. No thank you.
Whilst I'm not happy with Firefox's interface changes since the good old version-3 days, I still prefer it as a browser. For one, Firebug is unbeatable when it comes to debugging web sites (especially with AJAX), but since Chrome's developer tools use a font that's so small (which you can't change), there's no way I could even consider using it. Their hatred of menus and buttons gives me the heebie jeebies, too. So, for now, I'm staying loyal to Firefox (with a view to just giving up and using Ephipahy, on Debian, when even Firefox becomes so horrible I can't use it anymore).
Re:For those of us who prefer a video
on
GNOME 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
That video just demonstrates why I'm sticking with 2.30.2. No traditional taskbar method of switching between applications is a deal breaker. Oh, and that video seems to be 20% visits to "Help > About" windows... quite boring indeed!
For starters, they're calling it a "mash up" which is an instant reason to reach for the puke bucket. What's wrong with going to each "service" as and when you need them? Why trust some ".bomb" with all these services? You're just asking for trouble.
I don't know about you but I've never really liked the look of programming languages that use colons. Semi-colons are OK but two dots, one on top of the other? That's just craziness! And "do" statements remind me of BASIC... yuck.
You make it sound like I'm a tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist sitting in my mum's basement. I do believe that man went to the moon, for example, and I had never heard of your conspiracy theories concerning CFCs, so therefore I don't believe in them either. And naturally I reject creationism.
I voted for the Greens at the 2007 Australian federal election in the Senate, partly thanks to Al Gore's alarmism, but since reading Professor Ian Plimer's excellent book "Heaven & Earth", I don't believe a word of this house-of-cards global warming theory. It's just a collection of alarmist and unsubstantiated group-think given the nod by fellow greenie activists seeing dollar signs if they tout ever more alarming headlines in their journals and magazines. It's no wonder that the founder of Greenpeace has resigned. The greenies are putting all their hopes in this one basket of a flimsy theory, and meanwhile, true environmentalism suffers because it's clouded out by the non-issue of CO2.
I cite Bjorn Lomborg and MIT professor Richard Lindzen as two of the other eminent thinkers in the field to back up why I don't buy into this theory. Look them up.
I couldn't care less about Dr. Spencer's religious views. I happen to be an atheist, but that doesn't mean I should disregard him because atheists and creationists aren't supposed to tolerate each other's points of view. This whole "global warming" thing is a major beat up, and the proportion caused by mankind is insignificant compared to volcanoes and sunspot activity.
Most "peer reviewed" articles on global warming tend to come from rent-seekers or those with an agenda to push, so the fact that Dr. Spencer may be an anti-extreme-greenie-socialist-watermelon matters naught as far as I'm concerned.
... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal:-)
Amen to that, brotha! Firefox 4 & 5 (being absolutely identical... so why the version increment? why keep numbers in sync with other losers???) are still good browsers as far as the bit inside the GUI is concerned, but the menus, etc, around it are just ridiculous. What's wrong with a menu bar and a toolbar/location bar? It's simple. It works. You don't need to scratch your head to figure out how to use it. This disease you speak of where designers unleash their fantasies on unsuspecting users twice yearly is ridiculous. It's why I've stuck with 10.04 Ubuntu. The writing is on the wall: look for another distro when this one seems to be a bit old. There was a time where I at least respected Apple for their philosophy of not re-inventing stuff every few years, but it now looks like Steve Jobs is no longer satisfied anymore and is beginner to tinker way too much.
BTW, why does that "Working..." spinner at the bottom of slashdot constantly spin? It's annoying, damnit! Get off my lawn, while yer at it:-)
"And in fact, apart from this obsession with the internet filter, the current government actually has the best ideas."
Labor's last good idea came under Hawke and Keating in the 80s and 90s. This current lot are the crumbling shell of a once proud party, packed full of former political staffers and union apparatchiks. They are devoid of good ideas, and even if I agree with you for the sake of argument that they might actually have some, their implementation of them is a complete joke.
The Libs' idea of family friendly internet is a voucher for free "security software" that families may *choose* to install if they wish (and families probably should). Thankfully, the Libs believe in freedom of choice (and strong law and order to hunt down illegal stuff and shut it down where necessary, to balance things out).
...because the current government is utterly doomed at the next election, and all their half-baked ideas will be junked, like they should be. Given the current - and trending downwards for over 12 months now - opinion polls, they'll be reduced to a mere rump of their former selves. The Australian Labor Party federally has the same disease as their state-based comrades in New South Wales and will be severely punished in similarly spectacular fashion at the next election, you mark my words:-)
This disease of making something a designer's wet dream at the expense of actual usability is becoming more and more widespread. It needs to stop! The same can be said of Unity or GNOME 3. Sure, taken as a stand-alone GUI art installation, it might turn some heads and get a few people excited, but if you have to use the darn thing for more than an hour, its inadequacy outshines the shiny!
The ultimate arbiter of whether a design or a change is a good thing should be whether or not you've increased the number of clicks/hovers/steps that a user has to go through to achieve the same task. If so, then bin it and start again. Sorry, but fancy interfaces won't win anybody over if you're pissed off simply having to use it. Just like a trophy bride, she might look nice, but eventually the nagging turns you right off.
This disease that so many software makers seem to be getting whereby useful one-click-away buttons and widgets are regarded as heresy HAS TO GO! I'm so sick of idiots with new unproven ideas foisting them on us all, forcing us to re-learn tried and true methods of achieving things. First it happened to Microsoft Office, now I hear Open Office wants to be infected with the same disease. First chrome decides to strip away all functionality, so Mozilla has to copy? WHY GOD, WHY? Just leave stuff alone FFS!
If there are options to turn this stuff back on, then I guess I will at learn learn to accept it. Not even Apple in all their we-hate-features-and-user-choice philosophy wouldn't dream of going to this bizarre extreme!
...delete your account! Well, at least do your best to delete as much of it as you can. As soon as I learnt years ago that you could never delete your Facebook account I knew never to sign up to that rubbish. And Facebook have vindicated my decision every step of the way ever since.
You'd be a complete nutjob to be using Facebook. I hope that Diaspora is made available to the public in some form this year, though I'm reasonably content with Twitter.
I set the Nautilus process to "best effort" using ionice as a startup application in GNOME. Problem solved. I don't care how long a large file copy takes, if I can still do my other stuff at the same time, so what? Nautilus really needs to be set to a lower priority by default. It's scary behaviours like this that drive away potential Linux converts (it almost drove me back until this was pointed out to me by a kind Tuxian in Adelaide, South Australia).
You'll never get people tagging all their files, and any system that tries to impose its own ideas on tagging or whatever is only ever going to raise eyebrows and frustrate people because they think/do know better.
I'd prefer to err on the side of upgrading the multi-touch capabilities of Nautilus and adding more icons to the toolbar (that'll take some convincing the Gnome-devs for sure!) to make multiple selections, copying, pasting, etc easier with the touch of a finger (or fingers).
If not, then the very least there needs to be a way to tone down any such "Ubuntu Netbook Remix knows best" setting for those that know better!
I was always a KDE man but when version 4 came out GNOME actually looked decent by comparison, which is why I'm still using it today (over a year later). If they go and muck up a near-perfect desktop for the sake of fixing something that ain't broke, then I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.
GNOME should be working to improve things that are still ridiculously complicated, like configuring input devices (reassigning mouse buttons for weird devices, etc) and improving Nautilus (which hasn't had any love for years). For general GTK apps, things like Evolution could do with less "mac-like dictatorship" and allowing users to minimise it to the tray, and to return to the Inbox when deleting a message. These simple things that some Nazi has decided people shouldn't be allowed to do is what makes people dismiss Linux and stick with their Windows or Macs.
I've often wondered about this, too. Looking at Philips's product information though, I'm not sure I'll be handing them my cash. All I see are tiny product images and meaningless slogans all over their page. I want details, damnit! Like, does it also have built-in FM radio? What's the remote look like? Can I have multiple remotes in each room and does each thing receive commands from the remote? Does it have to be connected to the internet or can it operate stand-alone? Some companies' marketing departments are really so clueless these days.
I bought this e-book just the other day. I got sick of trying to piece together various out-of-date tutorials and following the API docs online. Whilst you can't say the API docs aren't all there, I think it's probably too much. The hide inheritance members button at the top is a must!
However, the learning curve for Ext JS is HUGE and an approach such as "Learning Ext JS" is what's called for, even for competent programmers. I found the Apress "Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears" to be far too centred around the example scenarios, whereas, "Learning Ext JS" is perfect for somebody with a use in mind but just wants to know how all the widgets work. The Gears book would be ideal for somebody with no real idea in mind and plenty of time on their hands to "see what this Gears/Ext JS caper is all about" but if you want to just get to the point of how a grid works, or any other widget, then you're going to have to read through a lot of verbiage to answer your question.
I've also got no problem with the licensing. I use Ubuntu and prefer open source software, and if you're FOSS too, then there's no problem with Ext JS. If you're commercial, then the rather meagre licensing fee for Ext JS is hardly going to make you ditch it and piece together all that cross-browser-Ajaxy-goodness yourself! Whilst jQuery is nice and I prefer it's leaner syntax, its plugin repository is getting tad messy these days and jQuery UI only has six widgets. Can't beat Ext JS if you're not a FOSS license zealot and you just want something to take the pain out of RIA development. Life's too short to get hung up on things that don't matter.
Why do you have to "mv hello.jar hello"? Can't you simply chmod the jar file and run it? If not, then that's just another typical reason why Java = Fail.
Slashdot Mirror
... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.
Compiz has its uses. Sure, I only turn on wobbly windows to impress newbies, but its window placement rules are a god-send! If only Linux apps would damn-well remember where they were last time, I wouldn't need it, but since this is utterly beyond quite a few Linux application programmers, we need such hacks. Though, specifying certain rules based on window title, etc, mean that my windows open 100% where I expect them to, every time. Going back to Windows at work is a huge pain when you're constantly having to de-overlap explorer windows, for example.
Speaking as somebody who abhors DRM and the various limited digital music stores out there (with pathetic, mostly-pop rubbish catalogues), I agree with the post above your reply. Optical drives are invaluable for playing or ripping CDs, and I will never give up my CD collection and start buying these horrid music downloads from equally horrid online stores that more often than not tie you into iTunes or some other evil ecosystem (and since I use Linux, they don't work for me anyway, and if they can, courtesy of some hack, then that's unacceptable anyway).
No thank you very much! It's my CD collection for me from now until the day I die. I have about 1,400 of them so that ought to keep me busy, and yes, I have ripped most of them them but I also play them in my car and also in my kitchen stereo. There can be no substitute for owning the real thing, IMHO. All these people buying into proprietary online digital music stores will be sorry when the day comes that the store dies and your music is screwed. It has happened before, and it will happen again. And I'm not going near iTunes (since I use Linux) and because its offerings are so paltry that I laugh at its catalogue's meagre range!
What else is the NBN for other than using copious bandwidth for digital content? I sure as hell ain't gonna get a Telstra T-Box and be forced into watching movies and TV shows on their pathetic schedules, and most likely be forced to watch advertising without being able to skip through it. Or, what's worse, being forced to select from the paltry range of good TV shows from overseas and have to watch locally-produced content which is mostly rubbish. No thank you.
This government has got to go. Make no mistake!
Whilst I'm not happy with Firefox's interface changes since the good old version-3 days, I still prefer it as a browser. For one, Firebug is unbeatable when it comes to debugging web sites (especially with AJAX), but since Chrome's developer tools use a font that's so small (which you can't change), there's no way I could even consider using it. Their hatred of menus and buttons gives me the heebie jeebies, too. So, for now, I'm staying loyal to Firefox (with a view to just giving up and using Ephipahy, on Debian, when even Firefox becomes so horrible I can't use it anymore).
That video just demonstrates why I'm sticking with 2.30.2. No traditional taskbar method of switching between applications is a deal breaker. Oh, and that video seems to be 20% visits to "Help > About" windows... quite boring indeed!
For starters, they're calling it a "mash up" which is an instant reason to reach for the puke bucket. What's wrong with going to each "service" as and when you need them? Why trust some ".bomb" with all these services? You're just asking for trouble.
I don't know about you but I've never really liked the look of programming languages that use colons. Semi-colons are OK but two dots, one on top of the other? That's just craziness! And "do" statements remind me of BASIC... yuck.
Where I come from "HSV" stands for Holden Special Vehicle. I don't know what you're on about :-)
You make it sound like I'm a tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist sitting in my mum's basement. I do believe that man went to the moon, for example, and I had never heard of your conspiracy theories concerning CFCs, so therefore I don't believe in them either. And naturally I reject creationism.
I voted for the Greens at the 2007 Australian federal election in the Senate, partly thanks to Al Gore's alarmism, but since reading Professor Ian Plimer's excellent book "Heaven & Earth", I don't believe a word of this house-of-cards global warming theory. It's just a collection of alarmist and unsubstantiated group-think given the nod by fellow greenie activists seeing dollar signs if they tout ever more alarming headlines in their journals and magazines. It's no wonder that the founder of Greenpeace has resigned. The greenies are putting all their hopes in this one basket of a flimsy theory, and meanwhile, true environmentalism suffers because it's clouded out by the non-issue of CO2.
I cite Bjorn Lomborg and MIT professor Richard Lindzen as two of the other eminent thinkers in the field to back up why I don't buy into this theory. Look them up.
I couldn't care less about Dr. Spencer's religious views. I happen to be an atheist, but that doesn't mean I should disregard him because atheists and creationists aren't supposed to tolerate each other's points of view. This whole "global warming" thing is a major beat up, and the proportion caused by mankind is insignificant compared to volcanoes and sunspot activity.
Most "peer reviewed" articles on global warming tend to come from rent-seekers or those with an agenda to push, so the fact that Dr. Spencer may be an anti-extreme-greenie-socialist-watermelon matters naught as far as I'm concerned.
Y'all have a nice day now, ya hear? :-)
... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal :-)
Amen to that, brotha! Firefox 4 & 5 (being absolutely identical... so why the version increment? why keep numbers in sync with other losers???) are still good browsers as far as the bit inside the GUI is concerned, but the menus, etc, around it are just ridiculous. What's wrong with a menu bar and a toolbar/location bar? It's simple. It works. You don't need to scratch your head to figure out how to use it. This disease you speak of where designers unleash their fantasies on unsuspecting users twice yearly is ridiculous. It's why I've stuck with 10.04 Ubuntu. The writing is on the wall: look for another distro when this one seems to be a bit old. There was a time where I at least respected Apple for their philosophy of not re-inventing stuff every few years, but it now looks like Steve Jobs is no longer satisfied anymore and is beginner to tinker way too much.
BTW, why does that "Working..." spinner at the bottom of slashdot constantly spin? It's annoying, damnit! Get off my lawn, while yer at it :-)
"And in fact, apart from this obsession with the internet filter, the current government actually has the best ideas."
Labor's last good idea came under Hawke and Keating in the 80s and 90s. This current lot are the crumbling shell of a once proud party, packed full of former political staffers and union apparatchiks. They are devoid of good ideas, and even if I agree with you for the sake of argument that they might actually have some, their implementation of them is a complete joke.
The Libs' idea of family friendly internet is a voucher for free "security software" that families may *choose* to install if they wish (and families probably should). Thankfully, the Libs believe in freedom of choice (and strong law and order to hunt down illegal stuff and shut it down where necessary, to balance things out).
...because the current government is utterly doomed at the next election, and all their half-baked ideas will be junked, like they should be. Given the current - and trending downwards for over 12 months now - opinion polls, they'll be reduced to a mere rump of their former selves. The Australian Labor Party federally has the same disease as their state-based comrades in New South Wales and will be severely punished in similarly spectacular fashion at the next election, you mark my words :-)
This disease of making something a designer's wet dream at the expense of actual usability is becoming more and more widespread. It needs to stop! The same can be said of Unity or GNOME 3. Sure, taken as a stand-alone GUI art installation, it might turn some heads and get a few people excited, but if you have to use the darn thing for more than an hour, its inadequacy outshines the shiny!
The ultimate arbiter of whether a design or a change is a good thing should be whether or not you've increased the number of clicks/hovers/steps that a user has to go through to achieve the same task. If so, then bin it and start again. Sorry, but fancy interfaces won't win anybody over if you're pissed off simply having to use it. Just like a trophy bride, she might look nice, but eventually the nagging turns you right off.
This disease that so many software makers seem to be getting whereby useful one-click-away buttons and widgets are regarded as heresy HAS TO GO! I'm so sick of idiots with new unproven ideas foisting them on us all, forcing us to re-learn tried and true methods of achieving things. First it happened to Microsoft Office, now I hear Open Office wants to be infected with the same disease. First chrome decides to strip away all functionality, so Mozilla has to copy? WHY GOD, WHY? Just leave stuff alone FFS!
If there are options to turn this stuff back on, then I guess I will at learn learn to accept it. Not even Apple in all their we-hate-features-and-user-choice philosophy wouldn't dream of going to this bizarre extreme!
...delete your account! Well, at least do your best to delete as much of it as you can. As soon as I learnt years ago that you could never delete your Facebook account I knew never to sign up to that rubbish. And Facebook have vindicated my decision every step of the way ever since.
You'd be a complete nutjob to be using Facebook. I hope that Diaspora is made available to the public in some form this year, though I'm reasonably content with Twitter.
I set the Nautilus process to "best effort" using ionice as a startup application in GNOME. Problem solved. I don't care how long a large file copy takes, if I can still do my other stuff at the same time, so what? Nautilus really needs to be set to a lower priority by default. It's scary behaviours like this that drive away potential Linux converts (it almost drove me back until this was pointed out to me by a kind Tuxian in Adelaide, South Australia).
You'll never get people tagging all their files, and any system that tries to impose its own ideas on tagging or whatever is only ever going to raise eyebrows and frustrate people because they think/do know better.
I'd prefer to err on the side of upgrading the multi-touch capabilities of Nautilus and adding more icons to the toolbar (that'll take some convincing the Gnome-devs for sure!) to make multiple selections, copying, pasting, etc easier with the touch of a finger (or fingers).
If not, then the very least there needs to be a way to tone down any such "Ubuntu Netbook Remix knows best" setting for those that know better!
I was always a KDE man but when version 4 came out GNOME actually looked decent by comparison, which is why I'm still using it today (over a year later). If they go and muck up a near-perfect desktop for the sake of fixing something that ain't broke, then I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.
GNOME should be working to improve things that are still ridiculously complicated, like configuring input devices (reassigning mouse buttons for weird devices, etc) and improving Nautilus (which hasn't had any love for years). For general GTK apps, things like Evolution could do with less "mac-like dictatorship" and allowing users to minimise it to the tray, and to return to the Inbox when deleting a message. These simple things that some Nazi has decided people shouldn't be allowed to do is what makes people dismiss Linux and stick with their Windows or Macs.
I've often wondered about this, too. Looking at Philips's product information though, I'm not sure I'll be handing them my cash. All I see are tiny product images and meaningless slogans all over their page. I want details, damnit! Like, does it also have built-in FM radio? What's the remote look like? Can I have multiple remotes in each room and does each thing receive commands from the remote? Does it have to be connected to the internet or can it operate stand-alone? Some companies' marketing departments are really so clueless these days.
I bought this e-book just the other day. I got sick of trying to piece together various out-of-date tutorials and following the API docs online. Whilst you can't say the API docs aren't all there, I think it's probably too much. The hide inheritance members button at the top is a must!
However, the learning curve for Ext JS is HUGE and an approach such as "Learning Ext JS" is what's called for, even for competent programmers. I found the Apress "Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears" to be far too centred around the example scenarios, whereas, "Learning Ext JS" is perfect for somebody with a use in mind but just wants to know how all the widgets work. The Gears book would be ideal for somebody with no real idea in mind and plenty of time on their hands to "see what this Gears/Ext JS caper is all about" but if you want to just get to the point of how a grid works, or any other widget, then you're going to have to read through a lot of verbiage to answer your question.
I've also got no problem with the licensing. I use Ubuntu and prefer open source software, and if you're FOSS too, then there's no problem with Ext JS. If you're commercial, then the rather meagre licensing fee for Ext JS is hardly going to make you ditch it and piece together all that cross-browser-Ajaxy-goodness yourself! Whilst jQuery is nice and I prefer it's leaner syntax, its plugin repository is getting tad messy these days and jQuery UI only has six widgets. Can't beat Ext JS if you're not a FOSS license zealot and you just want something to take the pain out of RIA development. Life's too short to get hung up on things that don't matter.
Why do you have to "mv hello.jar hello"? Can't you simply chmod the jar file and run it? If not, then that's just another typical reason why Java = Fail.