For those of you wondering about the demise of the word "hacker" to what it means today, I shall relate by explaining what you think you mean by "alpha transparency".
alpha (the greek letter) is often used in equations to reflect a coefficient. In the case of calculating out the colour of a pixel, you may be left with an equation like :
a * alpha + b * beta -------------------- c
In this particular case, "alpha" can be considered the coefficient for a source image intensity and "beta" can be considered the coefficient of a destination image intensity.
What this all boils down to is "alpha" transparency is the same as "beta" transparency, "gamma" transparency, or "horse" transparency. The use of the term "alpha" to describe it is worse than meaningless. Alpha can represent ANYTHING, that includes refractive quantities, air density, paint, or a splatter of your gran's homemade shoe polish.
It's called "transparency", not "alpha transparency". Perhaps semi-transparency, or if you're being really precise, "transparent filtering". Where in the latter case, you MAY use "alpha" to represent the filter.
Don't set out on a goal to write the next desktop or a 3D flight sim, cause you'll just end up disappointed. Remember - hacking is supposed to be fun. Just **PLAY** with the things you're good at and extend/merge these skills with new ones as you come across new systems and APIs. By all means have some ambition in your head, but don't try and implement it until you're ready! Write bits of it. Don't write a 3D flight-sim.. write a landscape renderer! Then a realtime voxel landscape viewer.. anything you get to play with. By the time you're approaching hacker status you'll have a huge directory of good code, bad code, funky experiments and a whole directory of trivial apps on freshmeat that noone uses:-) remember - *experiment*, *play*, *be cool!*
Viruses need "food" to spread. In the case of outlook viruses, the "food" is email addresses.
These are stored in the addressbook and mailboxes owned by outlook. These files aren't that readable anyway, so there's no reason why outlook can't encrypt the email addresses stored within and control access to this data via a broker.
If a VBScript app asks for access to your mailbox or your addressbook, it either asks the user, or in the case of a properly adminned NT network, this option will be hard-disabled by the administrator.
I actually mailed this suggestion to info@microsoft and got a rather template reply for fixing their bugs. Joy.
The reason Linux is always playing "catchup" is because the commercial vendors are always going to be "innovating" new products to stay ahead rather than fixing the broken ones they already have.
Opensource development isn't commerce-driven. We don't invent things that we don't need then try to find ways of making us need them, we tend to innovate at a lower level, in implementations of things we need (or would like) now.
Opensource gave us useful innovations like the apache "ProxyPass" directive. It was a great idea and solved all sorts of problems at ISPs. Closed source gave us ASP. We already had a thousand and one ways of producing dynamic web content, but after the ASP marketing hype, ISPs are now scrambling to catch up with a unix-based implementation of this "innovation" to try to avoid using bloody NT.
The moral here is that something doesn't have to look pretty or invoke a new protocol just to be innovative. The GNU OS desktop is far more advanced than anything M$ ever produced.
Imagine a 2d map of the earth which is dynamically generated as a "virtual" bitmap from some kind of renderer and copied to a scroll-window on the screen.
This could be far larger than 32768^2, but would be convenient to represent as screen-relevant 2D coordinates for the benefit of simplicity.
I spend about 200 pounds a year on CDs. This figure is roughly derivable by the number of albums I hear which I consider to be "worth buying". I occasionally download mp3s. These are usually crappy singles I might want to hear once or twice, or maybe just have an interest in. If I like the song then just maybe I'll consider the album "worth buying".
This is what the RIAA fails to understand when they make these rediculous law suits. I wouldn't spend any more on music than I already do just because of mp3s. In fact, the RIAA has NO evidence to suggest that mp3s are causing loss of revenue. They quote "millions" of lost revenue through theft of songs, but it doesn't take more than a tiny understanding of economics to realise that this revenue is NON-EXISTANT!
Incidentally, I bought the black album after hearing a.wav file of "unforgiven" a few years ago.
So my question to you is this :
Have you any evidence to suggest that you're losing revenue (eg. to your 12 million sales of the "black album" per year) through the distribution of mp3s?
I might also give you guys some advice :
If you want more money, DO SOME WORK and write another album that people might want to spend money on rather than being spoilt, menopausal hippies who've run out of ideas. If anything, you're affecting the "functional" artists who are working their asses off to become famous, who benefit from the free airplay that napster is giving them.
I'm an alcoholic. It's something to do. When you leave work at the end of the day and you can't get enough excitement out of sitting infront of the TV or hacking together some code which you're never gonna finish anyway, if you don't have a full time girlfriend and can't be fucked with the stress of it anyway, if you could get a brilliant career but it would mean going against your moral standards of loyalty and having a soul, then yeah.. sitting in a pub and watching the world go by over a pint or 6, pausing for the occasional chat with the girl behind the bar, and getting a good night's sleep afterwards is a perfectly good way to waste most evenings. See you all when the sun comes up.
Absolutely.. the vix.com spam traps are pretty good and VERY rarely block legitimate email. On the other hand, as a sysadmin of an ISP, I find that our customers' own configured relays (which incidentally are very often running Lotus notes.. is their "default setting" set to open relay?:( ) are landing in ORBS on a daily basis. Unfortunately, unlike vix.com which actually makes a geniune reasonable attempt to contact the maintainer of the relay (perhaps by doing something sensible by looking at the contact in the whois database) before throwing them in the pit, ORBS just send an email to "postmaster@machine" without a proper "To:" header and assume it's going to get spotted amongst the 20,000 bounces that postmaster receieves every day!
Apon discovering that one of our customers are in the netblock, rather than finding polite, helpful guys like the vixie mob, ORBS are just arrogant.
On one occasion, one of OUR relays was thrown into ORBS for allowing %hack type relaying, yeah, like THAT is useful to a spammer.!
Someone has already mentionned the maintenance of an FSF organisation to defeat ludicrous patents, and some kind of "patent watching body" that will watch patents being applied for so I've had this idea,
The FSF runs a "prior art forum", where every time you get a good idea, no matter how trivial, you jot it down in some kind of online form. There it's stored, open, with date and author. If someone tries to create a patent on such an "invention", our "patent watchers" can raise the alarm and inform the real "inventor" who can claim the patent him/herself.
If a disclaimer that any ideas entered into the database are granted to the public domain, (or even patented for the FSF) then the FSF will eventually be able to accumilate a rather large portfolio of patents for use in the protection of the GPL against corporates!
I have to sympathize here. We've had customers INSIST on NT for no reason whatsoever. We try to talk them out of it because NT is a NIGHTMARE to maintain. Nightly reboots on NT, compared to a current uptime of 248 days on Linux. We only put the NT server in for ASP freaks (although we try to sway them towards PHP).
customer : "Can I have it on NT please?"
sales rep : "is there any particular NT feature you would require? Otherwise, I would recommend our standard webhosting option"
customer : "it has to be NT. NT is more reliable because it says so in the adverts and it's made by microsoft and we use it here so it's got to be good".
Journalists are often described as "hacks", the word has a lot to do with the "hack"ing noise that a typewriter makes. It's a onomataphoea (sp?) This description dates almost all the way back to the invention of the typewriter. A "hacker" in those days was someone who stayed up all night typing out a report.
I'm SURE that the current use of the word has a lot to do with the hours of "hacking away" at the keyboard, and its origin never had anything to do with competence, or programming until the MIT days (although someone who spends many hours doing something is bound to become an expert).
Have a heart for us people who have the job of actually administering machines which are a target for this kind of thing. Here's a timescale :
one day) admin installs daemon X on server
next day) admin is informed of update, and upgrades.
4.00am) Mail hits bugtraq BUG IN DAEMON X!!!
5.00am) script kiddie in different timezone exploits said bug and mails your pwfile to every IRC channel in his region.
9.00am) Techie arrives at work (possibly hungover) to find thousands of emails in the support/abuse box, graffiti all over his website, and several PISSED OFF clients.
10.00am) Techie traces attack to foriegn ISP
several months later) Still no reply from foriegn ISP.
WTF are we supposed to do? we can't FILTER supported services mate, it's our job to keep these services running. We might as well just unplug the fucking switch and be done with it if that's your attitude. Fact is, (h|c)rackers will always exist, DoS will always exist. There's nothing you can do, so you might as well work this factor into your yearly budget in the same way that supermarkets account for shoplifters.
Well, ok, it can be upgraded to a debian mirror by someone who knows what they're doing!:-)
I certainly had to intervene when upgrading to potato.. it required some hacking, mainly whilst switching between "conf.modules" and "modutils", but then again anyone going from slink to potato will have the same problem.
Dunno about libc's, the machine that went through this is to my right, and the person behind it isn't complaining about much. Only problem I found is that when upgrading you lose corel's "hacked" version of KDE where you can dock the taskbar into the panel (is this opensource? I hope so, cause it's cool).
With regards to people saying that different distributions meet different peoples criteria, I have to agree. 1) At home, I have 64k of bandwidth - I don't want to have to download anything. SuSE's 6 CD's helps a great deal here. 2) At work, on my desktop, I have 100 megs of bandwidth and a local mirror. apt-get (debian) is my friend. 3) On work servers, I use redhat, because it's got the cleanest, fastest install of a "minimum" system, and I know it's gonna work. 4) for hacking, I use slackware, cause you can install a REAL minimum of software and learn loads just by building everything yourself. 5) To newbies, I recommend corel, cause it installs SO cleanly and effortlessly, and can be upgraded to a debian mirror quite easily. that's 5 distributions I use on a regular basis!
Is this a blatent troll, or just someone who doesn't read? 1) for the hundredth time, you don't need to crack the encryption in order to copy the disc. You only need to crack the encryption (or license a key) to build a player. The encryption is there for the primary purpose of price-fixing and a pathetic attempt to monopolize on the DVD player market. The attack on Jon under the guise of "piracy" is a deceitful attempt to protect this monopoly. 2) LinuxOne are being slated for trying to profit from our (the hacker community)'s hard work. This is akin to selling pirated merchandize (see above). Linux one isn't really effecting the hacker community anyway - the people who are being taken for a ride by these guys are potential investors who, non-understanding of linux one's ethics, even competence are standing to loose a lot of money. 3) Whilst I certainly wouldn't classify Jon as a script kiddie, many script kiddies grow into excellent hackers through this thing called experience.
In the cases where the law can do nothing to help us (perhaps even inhibit us) with our own internet rights, the only action the internet user is capable of generating against corporate bullies is to raise awareness.
In the same way that we boycot spammers with the RBL and the UDP, a list of websites owned by communities who infringe the rights of net users that could be accessed by all net users could benefit. How many people actually KNOW about Amazon/Etoy/MPAA/etc? Probably the population of slashdot readers. How it should be implemented would have to be described, but if web proxy software could pop up "warning, you are about to enter a website of a known abuser of peoples rights, click here for the reason why", it would certainly gain attention.
I have to agree. In fact, ALL the nominations here are appalling and totally unresearched.
GIMP : If gimp had a good UI people wouldn't still be booting windows to use photoshop. GIMP's UI has been slated by every HCI expert I've met. The menus are HUGE and completely oblivious to context. It's written in GTK for a start, which is not exactly what anyone would call "resonsive". "no".
Enlightenment: Cor, that's complete.. Half of the features (like being able to design borders) can't be reached via its own UI. Glitches in mouse event detection, default themes with tiny menus, tiny buttons, tiny borders. I've tried downloading other peoples themes but most of them are bugged or "flicker" in an ugly way when I move the mouse over things. Features that just don't make sense to a new user (like the the way the dragbar is implemented - I never found the Amiga OS equivalent this fiddly so what have they got so wrong?). You have to go to the main MENU to disable the pager (why can't you have a context-sensitive menu on the pager itself? that's what the right button is for guys). Inobvious drag handles connected to widgets. bleurgh. enlightenment is very pretty to look at but it's a fucking abortion to use.
Mozilla: How anyone can vote for something that is still too bugged to use I don't know. Did you guys actually go through repeatedly restarting it just to try out the user interface? From what I could make out it was still rather confusing. There's a "my panels" directory structure type thing which has been placed in the same contextual area as the main page. wtf? If I'm viewing a website the "my panels" section has absolutely no relevance. KFM has a nice interface - it's like netscape/mozilla in some respects but doesn't need 5 megs of resident ram just to click a button, which again makes it responsive.
XMMS: It's been said already - it's winamp. Although this one would have to get my vote here cause it's the only one that's actually obvious in its usage. Well done guys (the winamp guys, that is.. XMMS haven't done anything for the UI).
some suggestions :
WindowMaker. Clean, complete, simple, responsive, big chunky buttons, intuitive UI, and it can be made to look just as georgeous as everything else here.
KMail. The most functionality I've seen in a graphical mailer (with the possible exception of "agent" for win32, but that's commercial). The filter configuration page is excellent.
Corelpackage (or whatever its called) - the package tool for corel linux. (is this opensourced?) it's a very well thought out front-end to apt. Makes it very clear to the user exactly what is going on.
KDevelop. Ok, so it's a blatent copy of Visual Studio, but it's INTUITIVE. Could do with being able to split the "edit" window into more than one box, but apart from that it's come on nicely. KDebug is excellent too.
Pan (a gtk newsreader). Forgiven for using gtk, it's got two modes of viewing (paned and paneled) and is a doddle to use.
dargh.. ANYTHING but those four:-( They're making us linux users look like we can't design software.
If we can't share the technology then I'd rather it were never invented. Eventually someone else would have thought of it.
At least you recognise that it's the _implementation_ that is the hard work that should be remunerated. In the case of Gemsoft, their implementation enabled them to sell their patented idea. Now someone else has put in some of that "hard work", gemsoft can no longer sit on their asses sucking up free cash. They could always (shock horror) get off their asses and try to improve it like TiVo did?
This is how competition works, and this is why it is good for the consumer. Ban patents (and stop the bloody US trying to pressurise Europeans into joining their *****d up patent system - WE DONT WANT IT).
I'm not sure Be are COMPLETEY at a loss by selling their OS. There's a new wave of set-top boxes all ready to spring up, and of all the OSes I can think of BeOS seems to fit in beautifully. (ok, QNX/Neutrino falls into the same category). Linux is IMHO too resource hogging in an environment where cheap manufacture of components is so important.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you wondering about the demise of the word "hacker" to what it means today, I shall relate by explaining what you think you mean by "alpha transparency".
alpha (the greek letter) is often used in equations to reflect a coefficient. In the case of calculating out the colour of a pixel, you may be left with an equation like :
a * alpha + b * beta
--------------------
c
In this particular case, "alpha" can be considered the coefficient for a source image intensity and "beta" can be considered the coefficient of a destination image intensity.
What this all boils down to is "alpha" transparency is the same as "beta" transparency, "gamma" transparency, or "horse" transparency. The use of the term "alpha" to describe it is worse than meaningless. Alpha can represent ANYTHING, that includes refractive quantities, air density, paint, or a splatter of your gran's homemade shoe polish.
It's called "transparency", not "alpha transparency". Perhaps semi-transparency, or if you're being really precise, "transparent filtering". Where in the latter case, you MAY use "alpha" to represent the filter.
HAND.
Don't set out on a goal to write the next desktop or a 3D flight sim, cause you'll just end up disappointed. Remember - hacking is supposed to be fun. Just **PLAY** with the things you're good at and extend/merge these skills with new ones as you come across new systems and APIs. By all means have some ambition in your head, but don't try and implement it until you're ready! Write bits of it. Don't write a 3D flight-sim.. write a landscape renderer! Then a realtime voxel landscape viewer.. anything you get to play with. By the time you're approaching hacker status you'll have a huge directory of good code, bad code, funky experiments and a whole directory of trivial apps on freshmeat that noone uses :-) remember - *experiment*, *play*, *be cool!*
remember - windows users are extremely violent and stupid.
Viruses need "food" to spread. In the case of outlook viruses, the "food" is email addresses.
These are stored in the addressbook and mailboxes owned by outlook. These files aren't that readable anyway, so there's no reason why outlook can't encrypt the email addresses stored within and control access to this data via a broker.
If a VBScript app asks for access to your mailbox or your addressbook, it either asks the user, or in the case of a properly adminned NT network, this option will be hard-disabled by the administrator.
I actually mailed this suggestion to info@microsoft and got a rather template reply for fixing their bugs. Joy.
The reason Linux is always playing "catchup" is because the commercial vendors are always going to be "innovating" new products to stay ahead rather than fixing the broken ones they already have.
Opensource development isn't commerce-driven. We don't invent things that we don't need then try to find ways of making us need them, we tend to innovate at a lower level, in implementations of things we need (or would like) now.
Opensource gave us useful innovations like the apache "ProxyPass" directive. It was a great idea and solved all sorts of problems at ISPs. Closed source gave us ASP. We already had a thousand and one ways of producing dynamic web content, but after the ASP marketing hype, ISPs are now scrambling to catch up with a unix-based implementation of this "innovation" to try to avoid using bloody NT.
The moral here is that something doesn't have to look pretty or invoke a new protocol just to be innovative. The GNU OS desktop is far more advanced than anything M$ ever produced.
Imagine a 2d map of the earth which is dynamically generated as a "virtual" bitmap from some kind of renderer and copied to a scroll-window on the screen.
This could be far larger than 32768^2, but would be convenient to represent as screen-relevant 2D coordinates for the benefit of simplicity.
Hi,
.wav file of "unforgiven" a few years ago.
I spend about 200 pounds a year on CDs. This figure is roughly derivable by the number of albums I hear which I consider to be "worth buying". I occasionally download mp3s. These are usually crappy singles I might want to hear once or twice, or maybe just have an interest in. If I like the song then just maybe I'll consider the album "worth buying".
This is what the RIAA fails to understand when they make these rediculous law suits. I wouldn't spend any more on music than I already do just because of mp3s. In fact, the RIAA has NO evidence to suggest that mp3s are causing loss of revenue. They quote "millions" of lost revenue through theft of songs, but it doesn't take more than a tiny understanding of economics to realise that this revenue is NON-EXISTANT!
Incidentally, I bought the black album after hearing a
So my question to you is this :
Have you any evidence to suggest that you're losing revenue (eg. to your 12 million sales of the "black album" per year) through the distribution of mp3s?
I might also give you guys some advice :
If you want more money, DO SOME WORK and write another album that people might want to spend money on rather than being spoilt, menopausal hippies who've run out of ideas. If anything, you're affecting the "functional" artists who are working their asses off to become famous, who benefit from the free airplay that napster is giving them.
I'm an alcoholic. It's something to do. When you leave work at the end of the day and you can't get enough excitement out of sitting infront of the TV or hacking together some code which you're never gonna finish anyway, if you don't have a full time girlfriend and can't be fucked with the stress of it anyway, if you could get a brilliant career but it would mean going against your moral standards of loyalty and having a soul, then yeah.. sitting in a pub and watching the world go by over a pint or 6, pausing for the occasional chat with the girl behind the bar, and getting a good night's sleep afterwards is a perfectly good way to waste most evenings. See you all when the sun comes up.
Absolutely.. the vix.com spam traps are pretty good and VERY rarely block legitimate email. On the other hand, as a sysadmin of an ISP, I find that our customers' own configured relays (which incidentally are very often running Lotus notes.. is their "default setting" set to open relay? :( ) are landing in ORBS on a daily basis. Unfortunately, unlike vix.com which actually makes a geniune reasonable attempt to contact the maintainer of the relay (perhaps by doing something sensible by looking at the contact in the whois database) before throwing them in the pit, ORBS just send an email to "postmaster@machine" without a proper "To:" header and assume it's going to get spotted amongst the 20,000 bounces that postmaster receieves every day!
Apon discovering that one of our customers are in the netblock, rather than finding polite, helpful guys like the vixie mob, ORBS are just arrogant.
On one occasion, one of OUR relays was thrown into ORBS for allowing %hack type relaying, yeah, like THAT is useful to a spammer.!
Sometimes, I wish AOL would just fuck off.
Someone has already mentionned the maintenance of an FSF organisation to defeat ludicrous patents, and some kind of "patent watching body" that will watch patents being applied for so I've had this idea,
The FSF runs a "prior art forum", where every time you get a good idea, no matter how trivial, you jot it down in some kind of online form. There it's stored, open, with date and author. If someone tries to create a patent on such an "invention", our "patent watchers" can raise the alarm and inform the real "inventor" who can claim the patent him/herself.
If a disclaimer that any ideas entered into the database are granted to the public domain, (or even patented for the FSF) then the FSF will eventually be able to accumilate a rather large portfolio of patents for use in the protection of the GPL against corporates!
waddaya think?
Las should be changed such that an idea shouldn't be patentable if it can be derived by using existing practices for their designated purpose.
Also, the patent office should be made aware that there a 6 billion people on the planet who could all have a similar idea when granting patents.
I have to sympathize here. We've had customers INSIST on NT for no reason whatsoever. We try to talk them out of it because NT is a NIGHTMARE to maintain. Nightly reboots on NT, compared to a current uptime of 248 days on Linux. We only put the NT server in for ASP freaks (although we try to sway them towards PHP).
customer : "Can I have it on NT please?"
sales rep : "is there any particular NT feature you would require? Otherwise, I would recommend our standard webhosting option"
customer : "it has to be NT. NT is more reliable because it says so in the adverts and it's made by microsoft and we use it here so it's got to be good".
You can't win.
Journalists are often described as "hacks", the word has a lot to do with the "hack"ing noise that a typewriter makes. It's a onomataphoea (sp?) This description dates almost all the way back to the invention of the typewriter. A "hacker" in those days was someone who stayed up all night typing out a report.
I'm SURE that the current use of the word has a lot to do with the hours of "hacking away" at the keyboard, and its origin never had anything to do with competence, or programming until the MIT days (although someone who spends many hours doing something is bound to become an expert).
is jargon.org connected to the rest of the world via damp string, or what?
:)
:-|
Congratulations slashdot, you've just slashdotted it
I'll come back tomorrow.
"Dilbert" had a thread about the "stubborn ageing colleague with a v-neck jumper" a short while back. Kinda sprang to mind just then.
Have a heart for us people who have the job of actually administering machines which are a target for this kind of thing. Here's a timescale :
one day) admin installs daemon X on server
next day) admin is informed of update, and upgrades.
4.00am) Mail hits bugtraq BUG IN DAEMON X!!!
5.00am) script kiddie in different timezone exploits said bug and mails your pwfile to every IRC channel in his region.
9.00am) Techie arrives at work (possibly hungover) to find thousands of emails in the support/abuse box, graffiti all over his website, and several PISSED OFF clients.
10.00am) Techie traces attack to foriegn ISP
several months later) Still no reply from foriegn ISP.
WTF are we supposed to do? we can't FILTER supported services mate, it's our job to keep these services running. We might as well just unplug the fucking switch and be done with it if that's your attitude. Fact is, (h|c)rackers will always exist, DoS will always exist. There's nothing you can do, so you might as well work this factor into your yearly budget in the same way that supermarkets account for shoplifters.
Well, ok, it can be upgraded to a debian mirror by someone who knows what they're doing! :-)
I certainly had to intervene when upgrading to potato.. it required some hacking, mainly whilst switching between "conf.modules" and "modutils", but then again anyone going from slink to potato will have the same problem.
Dunno about libc's, the machine that went through this is to my right, and the person behind it isn't complaining about much. Only problem I found is that when upgrading you lose corel's "hacked" version of KDE where you can dock the taskbar into the panel (is this opensource? I hope so, cause it's cool).
With regards to people saying that different distributions meet different peoples criteria, I have to agree. 1) At home, I have 64k of bandwidth - I don't want to have to download anything. SuSE's 6 CD's helps a great deal here. 2) At work, on my desktop, I have 100 megs of bandwidth and a local mirror. apt-get (debian) is my friend. 3) On work servers, I use redhat, because it's got the cleanest, fastest install of a "minimum" system, and I know it's gonna work. 4) for hacking, I use slackware, cause you can install a REAL minimum of software and learn loads just by building everything yourself. 5) To newbies, I recommend corel, cause it installs SO cleanly and effortlessly, and can be upgraded to a debian mirror quite easily. that's 5 distributions I use on a regular basis!
Is this a blatent troll, or just someone who doesn't read? 1) for the hundredth time, you don't need to crack the encryption in order to copy the disc. You only need to crack the encryption (or license a key) to build a player. The encryption is there for the primary purpose of price-fixing and a pathetic attempt to monopolize on the DVD player market. The attack on Jon under the guise of "piracy" is a deceitful attempt to protect this monopoly. 2) LinuxOne are being slated for trying to profit from our (the hacker community)'s hard work. This is akin to selling pirated merchandize (see above). Linux one isn't really effecting the hacker community anyway - the people who are being taken for a ride by these guys are potential investors who, non-understanding of linux one's ethics, even competence are standing to loose a lot of money. 3) Whilst I certainly wouldn't classify Jon as a script kiddie, many script kiddies grow into excellent hackers through this thing called experience.
This might have been suggested before.
In the cases where the law can do nothing to help us (perhaps even inhibit us) with our own internet rights, the only action the internet user is capable of generating against corporate bullies is to raise awareness.
In the same way that we boycot spammers with the RBL and the UDP, a list of websites owned by communities who infringe the rights of net users that could be accessed by all net users could benefit. How many people actually KNOW about Amazon/Etoy/MPAA/etc? Probably the population of slashdot readers. How it should be implemented would have to be described, but if web proxy software could pop up "warning, you are about to enter a website of a known abuser of peoples rights, click here for the reason why", it would certainly gain attention.
I have to agree. In fact, ALL the nominations here are appalling and totally unresearched.
:-( They're making us linux users look like we can't design software.
GIMP : If gimp had a good UI people wouldn't still be booting windows to use photoshop. GIMP's UI has been slated by every HCI expert I've met. The menus are HUGE and completely oblivious to context. It's written in GTK for a start, which is not exactly what anyone would call "resonsive". "no".
Enlightenment: Cor, that's complete.. Half of the features (like being able to design borders) can't be reached via its own UI. Glitches in mouse event detection, default themes with tiny menus, tiny buttons, tiny borders. I've tried downloading other peoples themes but most of them are bugged or "flicker" in an ugly way when I move the mouse over things. Features that just don't make sense to a new user (like the the way the dragbar is implemented - I never found the Amiga OS equivalent this fiddly so what have they got so wrong?). You have to go to the main MENU to disable the pager (why can't you have a context-sensitive menu on the pager itself? that's what the right button is for guys). Inobvious drag handles connected to widgets. bleurgh. enlightenment is very pretty to look at but it's a fucking abortion to use.
Mozilla: How anyone can vote for something that is still too bugged to use I don't know. Did you guys actually go through repeatedly restarting it just to try out the user interface? From what I could make out it was still rather confusing. There's a "my panels" directory structure type thing which has been placed in the same contextual area as the main page. wtf? If I'm viewing a website the "my panels" section has absolutely no relevance. KFM has a nice interface - it's like netscape/mozilla in some respects but doesn't need 5 megs of resident ram just to click a button, which again makes it responsive.
XMMS: It's been said already - it's winamp. Although this one would have to get my vote here cause it's the only one that's actually obvious in its usage. Well done guys (the winamp guys, that is.. XMMS haven't done anything for the UI).
some suggestions :
WindowMaker. Clean, complete, simple, responsive, big chunky buttons, intuitive UI, and it can be made to look just as georgeous as everything else here.
KMail. The most functionality I've seen in a graphical mailer (with the possible exception of "agent" for win32, but that's commercial). The filter configuration page is excellent.
Corelpackage (or whatever its called) - the package tool for corel linux. (is this opensourced?) it's a very well thought out front-end to apt. Makes it very clear to the user exactly what is going on.
KDevelop. Ok, so it's a blatent copy of Visual Studio, but it's INTUITIVE. Could do with being able to split the "edit" window into more than one box, but apart from that it's come on nicely. KDebug is excellent too.
Pan (a gtk newsreader). Forgiven for using gtk, it's got two modes of viewing (paned and paneled) and is a doddle to use.
dargh.. ANYTHING but those four
I think the reason why this rocks is cause it's using GNUStep. GNUStep is a beautiful widget set.
:-)
- Proud to be a windowmaker user
If we can't share the technology then I'd rather it were never invented. Eventually someone else would have thought of it.
At least you recognise that it's the _implementation_ that is the hard work that should be remunerated. In the case of Gemsoft, their implementation enabled them to sell their patented idea. Now someone else has put in some of that "hard work", gemsoft can no longer sit on their asses sucking up free cash. They could always (shock horror) get off their asses and try to improve it like TiVo did?
This is how competition works, and this is why it is good for the consumer. Ban patents (and stop the bloody US trying to pressurise Europeans into joining their *****d up patent system - WE DONT WANT IT).
I'm not sure Be are COMPLETEY at a loss by selling their OS. There's a new wave of set-top boxes all ready to spring up, and of all the OSes I can think of BeOS seems to fit in beautifully. (ok, QNX/Neutrino falls into the same category). Linux is IMHO too resource hogging in an environment where cheap manufacture of components is so important.