This sort of thing leads (and is intended to lead) to convergence: all Linux apps/desktops/installs look and act the same. This is the logical end point of the "Aunt Tilly" movement because Aunt Tilly won't understand the concept of "distros". The ordinary user all you "standard desktop" fans keep going on about will come to equate Linux with the system they learnt on (prob RH). Then, in the quest to protect them from ever having to think again, you'll have to make all Linux desktops look and feel like the one most people learn on (ie RH).
Eventually, as with Windows and MacOS today, overhauling the system will become next to impossible (Apple pulled it off but it was a last gasp effort, like the Mac itself, before the company flatlined). If new ideas in desktop design come along they will be ignored not because they are not good but because they are different.
That is not a future I'm interested in for Linux and if the cost of avoiding that was that Linux never made it to the big-time on the desktop then that would be a sacrifice I'd be happy to make.
But, it doesn't even have to mean that. All this crap about KDE/GNOME is missing the truth:
THE DESKTOP DOES NOT MATTER
As many people here have said, the ordinary user just wants to get work done. Think about what that means (better yet, go and look at real users working in their offices). The normal user does not use the desktop. They use the Start menu but even that is because they have to. If they really had what they need it would be a screen with maybe six big buttons on it marked "Word Processor","Spread Sheet", "Email", "Web","Print Queue", and one custom button for whatever other app they use in their work (Quick Books, Photoshop, Quark, whatever).
These buttons would be for restarting the given app if it crashes; in normal use a window for each app would be started up on boot.
Give them a handy way to switch between them and that's all 90% of Windows users would ever want or need.
I know this because I've done it. WindowMaker can set this up very easily and it takes about 3 minutes to turn a Windows User into a Linux User like this, for the simple reason that the desktop is not what people use all day, every day. If you have the apps (and OpenOffice has gone a long way on this) they don't give a toss what the desktop is doing.
KDE and GNOME are not things normal users need! Power users like systems like KDE/Gnome because they are useful for handling large numbers of apps and file locations. Normal office users don't have lots of apps and keep all their files in "My Documents".
The only thing convergence does is ossify the system and make life harder for power users who want to be able pick and choose their environments to suit their, minority, needs.
So: package KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, ICEbox, and as many other desktops with your distro that you can fit onto the CD, make them all options during install, and make the default choice one the simplest with a handfull of icons already set up to start the "usual" apps and leave Linux to celebrate diversity while Windows fades away as new ideas and innovations pass it by because they are "too radical" for users.
The idea is to unify a desktop solution so that people who are familiar with MS (read: most of the world) are not terrified of trying to configure a Linux box.
In other words, because people are used to brain-dead fucked-up systems we should do the same to Linux so that they're comfortable.
Screw that. I want choice; if I didn't then I would still be using Windows.
So, basically their reaction to users having a choice is to try and negate that choice by making the options as similar as possible. How very MicroSoft!
The whole point of having KDE/GNOME/WindoMaker/Et al is to allow people to pick the one that suits them.
If RH don't like this then why don't they just drop the one(s) they don't want people to use?
That's not what I said, I said that BL has an easy time recruiting by playing that card to the Muslims. The connection is bogus insofar as BL is not interested in the Palestinians.
First off, the only thing Israel is doing which is infuriating to the Islamist radicals is existing at all.
Quite right. If you moved into my house and kicked me out and then said that some mythical spirit told you it was okay I don't think I'd be too impressed either.
Time after time, Israel has met every demand made by the Palestinian leadership, only to be met with a fresh wave of murder-suicide bombings, and a fresh wave of demands.
And yet the Israelis manage to keep ahead on the death score.
Second, central to your argument here is the idea that we should be setting our foreign policy not based on what is right or just, but on what will appease the radical Islamists,
Hardly. Radical Muslims/Christian/Jews etc can all away and fuck themselves. Spending your life trying to act like characters in a badly-written fairy story is not going to get my sympathy any time soon. However, acting in such a way as to appease on such retarded group (Israelis) is bound to stir up trouble with their equally retarded foes (Palestinians). And for what? So that they can go on deluding themselves? Why bother?
If you had credible evidence of state sponsorship of terrorism here which posed an immediate threat to Great Britain
The US tolerated the activities of the IRA and allowed them to raise funding and train in the country for years. What difference is there between that and the Taliban's relationship to old BL? Taking the moral high ground is not so easy when the people you are taking to remember your past actions.
That isn't the case, though, and even the description you give, is at best extremely stretched.
It didn't seem stretched when my friend got blown up and New Yorkers were reported to have celebrated and had a whip round to buy more guns 'n ammo for the people that did it.
But you seem to think that it's okay if Mr. Hussein has a nuke, since you think he won't use it.
First of all, he doesn't have it. Second of all he's not going to get it. Thirdly, if he had it he would not use it. I agree that he is not rational but he is very keen on his own survival. He is no more likely to nuke the US, or help someone else do it, than he is to hang himself.
could arm them with such a weapon while maintaining enough deniability to make deterrence useless,
What, you mean like Mulla Omar did?
There are lots of more pressing, real threats to world peace - Pakistan/India, China's increased activity in Nepal (Mountain Nations, collect the set!), Mugabee's rampant demagogy in Africa, Chechnya/Russia, an increasingly desperate government in N. Korea.
We don't need to throw fuel on the fire when it's already too hot.
This is not why Mr. bin Laden says he attacked us -- he states that his grievance is with the nature of our society and with a string of perceived grievances stretching back over five hundred years.
Loony Bin's only real grievance is that he's not the ruler of the world, he says whatever he thinks will help recruit people to that, very personal, cause. His sort are a dim a dozen. What does make him different is that he's recruiting from a population who see their "brothers" being shot by Israeli troops in US made tanks with US made guns calling in US made aircraft for support. This makes his job much easier but it doesn't actually mean that he himself gives a shit about the Jewish/Arab issue one way or the other.
Iraq has close ties to the specific groups which already murdered 3,000 of our citizens
Well, New York has close ties with a specific group (the IRA) which killed 2000+ of our (UK) citizens. Should the Prime Minister send the troops into the Bronx?
Not that I disagree with your idea that we should be tougher on China, but right now we have bigger fish to fry.
Bigger than China!?
What proof is there that Iraq is a threat to the US? I can see the argument that Madman Who'ssane? might be a threat to Israel but what is he in danger of doing that he couldn't have done over the last ten years? A Nuke? I don't think so! You could have a competition to guess how much of Iraq would be left over after it fired a single nuke at the US and the winning entry would be measured in grammes.
This is a project that exists only to gain kudos with Microsoft by agreeing to axe it in favour of their DRM Home system. Who do they think they're kidding?
Over there, look: commies abusing human rights, they've got weapons of mass destruction, they've invaded their peaceful neighbour, Tibet, and they're in breach of UN resolutions. I guess we're going to have to send the troops in and kick their ass!
What's that you say, Mr Bush? No, I don't think Tibet has any oil. Why do you ask?
The fact that I don't have a life doesn't change the fact that you just didn't get it, and instead felt the need to flame randomly, but really, all you did was get yourself burned.
It wasn't random but I did ponder the issue of whether it was humour or not. I guess I got it wrong.
"Whose Line is it Anyway?," and "1840 House: The Greatest Generation,"
Both are non-BBC programs and are therefore paid for from advertising, which in turn is recouped from increases in prices which you have to pay even if you don't have a TV.
It reads like classic PR techniques applied in the American media for decades: News by Press Release.
Given that the piece is fairly negative about MS (oh, didn't you read it?) it's hard to imagine that it's that simple. I doubt if MS would have pointed out their guilty verdict and used terms like "abuse" of market share in a PR.
The British government needs the money from MS to support the stupidly extravigant(sp) lifestyle afforded the royal family,
Which is odd, since the royal family put 35 million NET into the government every year.
MS have made changes due to a ruling on "fair" competition. The word "equitable" does not appear anywhere in the story,
That MS has been "found guilty of abusing its market dominance",
That the DOJ thought that MS was abusing its market share,
That nine states are holding out and that a ruling is pending, and
People have been installing software to cut out some of MS's crap already (PC Lite).
The item could have gone into more detail but what it does say is pretty straight-down-the-line factual and is not "half the story" as the poster claimed. Sure, there's no mention of EULA changes but, since they're not legally binding anyway who gives a toss? It's only a small piece, not the history of Windows!
TWW
Re:What exactly is ITC/Afga's complaint based on?
on
Adobe Gets Hit By DMCA
·
· Score: 2
Is it possible to get an installable font out of a PDF that has a font embedded,
Yes.
TWW
Re:Want Linux to be successful -- this is good
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 1
A minimalist desktop appeals to those that just want to get their work done
Indeed, that's why I use WindowMaker. I did try XFCE but it was quite a while ago and it wasn't quite ready yet but the philosophy's right.
TWW
Re:Want Linux to be successful -- this is good
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 5, Informative
All I want is a desktop that does its job -- who cares what it is? A user in an office should never have to care. They should simply be able to use it.
This is what I do:
Install WindowMaker
Copy over my standard WM setup and icons from one of the other office machines
Copy over.xmodmap to change CapsLock to Control and the funny menu key to CapsLock
Show desktop to new employee and say "The function keys take you from screen 1 to screen 10, the number's in the top left. Screen 2 has Opera, Netscape and Mozilla [points to icons] so you can use whichever you like. This icon is Pan which lets you read newsgroups. Screen 3 is for graphics: that's Sketch, the Gimp and GQView. Screen 4 has Open Office and Acrobat Reader and screen 5 is music players; that's a cd player and that's an Ogg/mp3 player. The email program is on the right under the calculator. Any questions?"
Generally speaking that's all anyone needs to be told about the desktop.
You know, I could threaten to sue you for absolutely anything at any time. I could even sue you for wrongful death. But if my claim has no merit, the judge is just going to throw it out of court. He might even slap me with a fine for filing a nuisance suit.
Have a look at your bank balance. Now imagine that you are being sued by Microsoft because you released a byte-code interpreter that they claim infringes on some C# patent (just an example, I don't know if they have such a thing). They make it clear that they will appeal through every level of the system over a period of perhaps 10 years, after first getting an injunction to stop you selling your interpreter while the case drags on. Or, you can sign your interpreter over to them and get on with your life.
The case might have no merit but I think you might find yourself signing on that dotted line.
We have laws against rape, and they are the source of many false accusations, but it would be ridiculous to legalize rape on this basis.
The difference is that rape is a genuine crime knowingly commited against someone while patent infringement is frequently done without any intent or any knowledge of the patent or, even worse, without knowing that someone somewhere will interpret that patent in a way you never thought of.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps he's a time traveller who commutes from the 23rd century.
TWW
Quantum uncertainty.
TWW
Eventually, as with Windows and MacOS today, overhauling the system will become next to impossible (Apple pulled it off but it was a last gasp effort, like the Mac itself, before the company flatlined). If new ideas in desktop design come along they will be ignored not because they are not good but because they are different.
That is not a future I'm interested in for Linux and if the cost of avoiding that was that Linux never made it to the big-time on the desktop then that would be a sacrifice I'd be happy to make.
But, it doesn't even have to mean that. All this crap about KDE/GNOME is missing the truth:
THE DESKTOP DOES NOT MATTER
As many people here have said, the ordinary user just wants to get work done. Think about what that means (better yet, go and look at real users working in their offices). The normal user does not use the desktop. They use the Start menu but even that is because they have to. If they really had what they need it would be a screen with maybe six big buttons on it marked "Word Processor","Spread Sheet", "Email", "Web","Print Queue", and one custom button for whatever other app they use in their work (Quick Books, Photoshop, Quark, whatever).
These buttons would be for restarting the given app if it crashes; in normal use a window for each app would be started up on boot.
Give them a handy way to switch between them and that's all 90% of Windows users would ever want or need.
I know this because I've done it. WindowMaker can set this up very easily and it takes about 3 minutes to turn a Windows User into a Linux User like this, for the simple reason that the desktop is not what people use all day, every day. If you have the apps (and OpenOffice has gone a long way on this) they don't give a toss what the desktop is doing.
KDE and GNOME are not things normal users need! Power users like systems like KDE/Gnome because they are useful for handling large numbers of apps and file locations. Normal office users don't have lots of apps and keep all their files in "My Documents".
The only thing convergence does is ossify the system and make life harder for power users who want to be able pick and choose their environments to suit their, minority, needs.
So: package KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, ICEbox, and as many other desktops with your distro that you can fit onto the CD, make them all options during install, and make the default choice one the simplest with a handfull of icons already set up to start the "usual" apps and leave Linux to celebrate diversity while Windows fades away as new ideas and innovations pass it by because they are "too radical" for users.
TWW
TWW
In other words, because people are used to brain-dead fucked-up systems we should do the same to Linux so that they're comfortable.
Screw that. I want choice; if I didn't then I would still be using Windows.
TWW
The whole point of having KDE/GNOME/WindoMaker/Et al is to allow people to pick the one that suits them.
If RH don't like this then why don't they just drop the one(s) they don't want people to use?
TWW
You've never heard of Jewish settlers, then? Some of them seem quite clear on the subject of religious "rights".
TWW
That's not what I said, I said that BL has an easy time recruiting by playing that card to the Muslims. The connection is bogus insofar as BL is not interested in the Palestinians.
First off, the only thing Israel is doing which is infuriating to the Islamist radicals is existing at all.
Quite right. If you moved into my house and kicked me out and then said that some mythical spirit told you it was okay I don't think I'd be too impressed either.
Time after time, Israel has met every demand made by the Palestinian leadership, only to be met with a fresh wave of murder-suicide bombings, and a fresh wave of demands.
And yet the Israelis manage to keep ahead on the death score.
Second, central to your argument here is the idea that we should be setting our foreign policy not based on what is right or just, but on what will appease the radical Islamists,
Hardly. Radical Muslims/Christian/Jews etc can all away and fuck themselves. Spending your life trying to act like characters in a badly-written fairy story is not going to get my sympathy any time soon. However, acting in such a way as to appease on such retarded group (Israelis) is bound to stir up trouble with their equally retarded foes (Palestinians). And for what? So that they can go on deluding themselves? Why bother?
If you had credible evidence of state sponsorship of terrorism here which posed an immediate threat to Great Britain
The US tolerated the activities of the IRA and allowed them to raise funding and train in the country for years. What difference is there between that and the Taliban's relationship to old BL? Taking the moral high ground is not so easy when the people you are taking to remember your past actions.
That isn't the case, though, and even the description you give, is at best extremely stretched.
It didn't seem stretched when my friend got blown up and New Yorkers were reported to have celebrated and had a whip round to buy more guns 'n ammo for the people that did it.
But you seem to think that it's okay if Mr. Hussein has a nuke, since you think he won't use it.
First of all, he doesn't have it. Second of all he's not going to get it. Thirdly, if he had it he would not use it. I agree that he is not rational but he is very keen on his own survival. He is no more likely to nuke the US, or help someone else do it, than he is to hang himself.
could arm them with such a weapon while maintaining enough deniability to make deterrence useless,
What, you mean like Mulla Omar did?
There are lots of more pressing, real threats to world peace - Pakistan/India, China's increased activity in Nepal (Mountain Nations, collect the set!), Mugabee's rampant demagogy in Africa, Chechnya/Russia, an increasingly desperate government in N. Korea.
We don't need to throw fuel on the fire when it's already too hot.
TWW
Loony Bin's only real grievance is that he's not the ruler of the world, he says whatever he thinks will help recruit people to that, very personal, cause. His sort are a dim a dozen. What does make him different is that he's recruiting from a population who see their "brothers" being shot by Israeli troops in US made tanks with US made guns calling in US made aircraft for support. This makes his job much easier but it doesn't actually mean that he himself gives a shit about the Jewish/Arab issue one way or the other.
Iraq has close ties to the specific groups which already murdered 3,000 of our citizens
Well, New York has close ties with a specific group (the IRA) which killed 2000+ of our (UK) citizens. Should the Prime Minister send the troops into the Bronx?
Not that I disagree with your idea that we should be tougher on China, but right now we have bigger fish to fry.
Bigger than China!?
What proof is there that Iraq is a threat to the US? I can see the argument that Madman Who'ssane? might be a threat to Israel but what is he in danger of doing that he couldn't have done over the last ten years? A Nuke? I don't think so! You could have a competition to guess how much of Iraq would be left over after it fired a single nuke at the US and the winning entry would be measured in grammes.
TWW
TWW
What's that you say, Mr Bush? No, I don't think Tibet has any oil. Why do you ask?
Hello? Hello? Mr Bush?
TWW
I hope a terrorist flies a plane into your house, fuckwad.
That was actually pretty funny. Of course, I mean in the sense of laughing at you rather than with you.
TWW
TWW
Yeah, I want to work for MS and Apple for no pay too.
TWW
There are lot of words I'd use to describe XML; "ideal" isn't one of them.
TWW
It wasn't random but I did ponder the issue of whether it was humour or not. I guess I got it wrong.
TWW
Both are non-BBC programs and are therefore paid for from advertising, which in turn is recouped from increases in prices which you have to pay even if you don't have a TV.
It reads like classic PR techniques applied in the American media for decades: News by Press Release.
Given that the piece is fairly negative about MS (oh, didn't you read it?) it's hard to imagine that it's that simple. I doubt if MS would have pointed out their guilty verdict and used terms like "abuse" of market share in a PR.
The British government needs the money from MS to support the stupidly extravigant(sp) lifestyle afforded the royal family,
Which is odd, since the royal family put 35 million NET into the government every year.
blah blah blah
Grow up and get a life.
TWW
The item could have gone into more detail but what it does say is pretty straight-down-the-line factual and is not "half the story" as the poster claimed. Sure, there's no mention of EULA changes but, since they're not legally binding anyway who gives a toss? It's only a small piece, not the history of Windows!
TWW
Yes.
TWW
Indeed, that's why I use WindowMaker. I did try XFCE but it was quite a while ago and it wasn't quite ready yet but the philosophy's right.
TWW
This is what I do:
Generally speaking that's all anyone needs to be told about the desktop.
TWW
Have a look at your bank balance. Now imagine that you are being sued by Microsoft because you released a byte-code interpreter that they claim infringes on some C# patent (just an example, I don't know if they have such a thing). They make it clear that they will appeal through every level of the system over a period of perhaps 10 years, after first getting an injunction to stop you selling your interpreter while the case drags on. Or, you can sign your interpreter over to them and get on with your life.
The case might have no merit but I think you might find yourself signing on that dotted line.
We have laws against rape, and they are the source of many false accusations, but it would be ridiculous to legalize rape on this basis.
The difference is that rape is a genuine crime knowingly commited against someone while patent infringement is frequently done without any intent or any knowledge of the patent or, even worse, without knowing that someone somewhere will interpret that patent in a way you never thought of.
TWW
Which is a lot more than 4096. The whole dithering debate is nonsense at 160x160. With pixels that size dithering simply does not work.
TWW
Yes, just like versions 1,2,3,4,5, and 6.
Oh, did you not know what you were talking about?
TWW
I assume you know that Opera have finally made the MDI abortion mode optional?
TWW