Begging your pardon, but I would respectfully have to disagree. Equating being a grandmother to a low level of technical incompetence has its basis in statistics. Even if one were simply forming hypotheses, one could easilly assume that the older one is, the less technically oriented this person is LIKELY to be. Perhaps not inherently because of age itself, but because of the kind of learning experiences these various groups of people have had.
It's all a matter of making learned guesses and rationalizing ones way through the given information. Not all grandmothers are old. Most seniors have little to no technical training. I can't say for certain whether one becomes harder to train the older one gets.
As for the statement on discrimination: while I certainly disagree with discrimination in any form, I don't see it happening here or in the article. Discrimination is a directed action against representatives of a group. When software developers develop or talk about designing software for grandmothers, they are simply making assumptions based on numbers. If one were to turn down a job applicant for a technical job, for instance, for simply being a grandmother, then THAT is discrimination.
Oh.. I should probably add "has a fast implementation". Java may be an easy language to pick up, but dang! Most apps I develop on it feel like its wading in molasses. If they're going to run core subsystems in that language, there's a potential to increase the latency for every application that uses them.
I don't care what the next core and/or applications development language becomes the official for Gnome so long as it's easy to learn, effective for its purpose, is elegant and will make Gnome programming truly powerful (capable of doing almost anything apps should be able to do).
Most object-oriented languages are easy to pick up. Java, in particular, is easy to learn because most IDEs help in the syntax (auto-completion) and has great code-to-documentation facilities (Javadoc). In contrast, Glib-GObject is really hard to pick up (not just because of the syntax, per se but because there is very scarce documentation and very few books).
I'll look at Eiffel. If it's something I can pick up in a day and master in a week, then by all means.
Re:Good But Some Strange and Bizarre Decisions
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
The spatial Nautilus crap(!!!!????), and no navigational/explorer view by default (!!!!!!?????).
If you don't know then don't bother, because I'm not going to explain it. Editing a registry to turn on the navigational view doesn't seem very usable to me either. The author is quite obviously making excuses for this spatial Nautilus (Windows My Computer) crap - can't think why. This is not learning from past UI design.
You, sir, sound like someone trying to sound smart but are failing miserably. I've already posted the things I dislike with the spatial nautilus. The mere fact that it has generated a lot of negative sentiment should be cause for the Gnome developers to give pause.
I've carried it forward, however, by also giving suggestions on how to improve spatial nautilus for every point that I had a problem with. (Read my previous post.) It would behoove you to detail your complaints with spatial nautilus. If you have any suggestions on improving it (rather than just outright removing it), it would be nice to know.
The -test series do not have official update sites. The updates that you're seeing actually point you to the development repository. Test1 was cut from a couple of older packages. Not all the upgrades in the development (aka rawhide) subdirectory are crucial.
To balance off statements like yours, I must say that fedora core2 test1 worked very well on 4 DIFFERENT systems that I tried it on (1 dual-SMP, 1 uni server, 1 uni workstation and 1 laptop). Some with a little tweaking.
This is a test of the distribution. This way, they get to test the ISOs, as well. You CAN apt-get upgrade or yum update your older release installation if you want to. Not everyone has an older installation and for those people, they'd rather download the new distribution rather than an old one and the upgrades.
I started using the Spatial Nautilus and found it cumbersome in several ways (hard to navigate between directories/windows, desktop getting cluttered, Metacity not popping up windows in the most logical places, etc.) I'm in the middle of writing up a proposal that can help it become a little more useful.
The general idea is to modify the windows-list applet so that when it's on a vertical taskbar, it shows a GtkTreeView of the windows spawned for that desktop. Since subdirectory windows are now children of higher directory windows, it would mimic the former functionality of the tree panel in the old Nautilus view. What's more, the tree view in the windows-list applet would work for other windows as well and not just Nautilus.
Some features I plan to throw in are: transparency (this should work well with the autohide feature of the panel), make window active on mouse hover, drag & drop.
I started to write the code myself, but the tasklist object in libwnck isn't the easiest to understand for a guy who's literally just starting out in glib, GObject and applet programming.
Historically, humans have policed themselves against such predators. Unfortunately, these same predators have gotten wiley and have managed to corrupt the law so that it now protects them. In this case, i'm talking about SCO being the scammer. Everyone can see that they are trying to extort money when they themselves have done nothing to deserve it. No hard work. No research and development. Nothing.
And yet this thing has dragged on for months and is in the meantime costing various companies hundreds of thousands of dollars to thresh out. All for what? So that we can re-affirm what we already know? That crime doesn't/shouldn't pay? There should be a better shortcut to that same lesson.
At the risk of incurring negative karma, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the conspiracy theory where IBM is infusing Novell with dollars the same way M$ did for SCO.
This is a joke, folks.
Kudos to the Gnome team for their timely reaction
on
Gnome.org Compromised?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
We have to remember that most of the people working on Gnome and/or maintaining the servers are volunteers. That said, I have to tip my hat to these people for the very professional action they provided post the compromise. Taking down the compromised server, informing the community, and, most importantly, not releasing premature statements of blame or excuses (which is more than what I can say for a lot of professional companies).
For news regarding what was compromised and HOW it was compromised. I doubt we'll ever find WHO and WHY, but here's hoping that we do.
I would like to know if it was some known exploit that the admin didn't take care of. Or some easy-to-guess password by one of the developers. Or, worse, some as-yet-unknown exploit.
Please refrain from using overly simplistic arguments to support your cause. In my opinion, it wasn't JUST the license change that lead to this seemingly spiralling downfall, but the head developers of XFree86 itself (David Dawes, to be specific).
I've read and re-read various threads on the XFree86 mailing list (please look it up in archives and past posts on/.) and the man strikes me as positively arrogant, with no respect for the opinions of others (unless he was actually majorly outnumbered, and sometimes not even then). He has repeatedly ignored input from other people including his own co-developers and loves to portray himself as the righteous leader. His posts are nothing short of antagonistic and he has very selective memory.
Would that be sufficient reason for a project to fail? In this case, I would say so. He insists on having and keeping all control of the project to himself. If he had good sense, that wouldn't be a problem, but he's already shown that all he's interested in is recognition and retaining control over the project (rather than the project's welfare).
Past posts have shown that several suggestions and patches had been ignored which led to the project's stagnation. You may argue that the project is successful and works even now, but the point is it could have been so much better under a different type of leadership.
The recent license change is but one manifestation of how callous the head developers are.
Subscription systems for large media files aren't new. Microsoft unsuccessfully attempted to build one, dubbed Active Channels, into Windows in 1997. But BitTorrent and RSS have garnered attention from some of the same media giants who abandoned Active Channels and other "push media" technologies in past years.
Gives me hope that corporations actually think before they make IT decisions and actually consider an open standard/protocol important.
GTK+ has been designed from the ground up to support a range of languages, not only C/C++. Using GTK+ from languages such as Perl and Python (especially in combination with the
Glade GUI builder) provides an effective method of rapid application development.
How is Glade2 development coming along in terms of supporting Gtk2 2.4? I visited their website and there doesn't seem to be any mention of it.
Woohoo! Let's pound on that new fileselector and see if we can break it or make suggestions (to improve it).
Congratulations to the Gtk2 developers! How's the API documentation coming along? Last time I tried learning to program with gtk2, the API reference manual was soo incomplete (incomplete function description, calling semantics, etc.)
Shouldn't it be high time that we formalized some new terminology? I propose that the term "SCOism" be coined to mean the deliberate misuse of facts and half-truths to propagate FUD. Here are my favorite SCO SCOisms:
1) We own the rights to Unix and its derivatives and since IBM worked on both Unix and Linux, Linux is a derivative and royalty is owned us.
2) Pamela Jones lives close to the IBM headquarters and ibiblio.org (the organization which hosts her site) have IBM computer. That means she's an IBM lackey.
3) CA has settled a dispute by licensing a totally different product but which gives them the right to use Linux legally. Therefore, they have licensed Linux from us!
4) The text of the S2 memo has been misinterpreted by Eric Raymond. Thought Microsoft and Baystar are mentioned there, it has nothing to do with the letter.
IF the installer forced an actual installation rather than made it an OPTION. If it were an option, then IMHO it would be a Good Thing(TM) (even if no one actually installs them).
A fine product. Great for personal or even corporate use. I've been following (and updating) this application since early 0.9x days. Best of luck, and hope you don't have any problems with M$ for the similarity in name between the project name and a M$ app.
Actually, more than extortionism or racketeering, wouldn't this act count more as terrorism (and subject to -- what was it? -- the Patriot Act)? They've been doing nothing but terrorize companies and the public from acting in their best interest.
Kudos to M. Robertson et al. for managing to criticize with impunity but effectively the practices and prejudices in commerce that have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with business. Lin---s... I like it!
I don't care where it's sold (I bought a Sony-Ericsson P900 from Asia because I couldn't find anyone selling the A760). I want that phone. Could someone post a website of a company that sells it?
May I suggest that companies given letters by SCO consider filing charges and append to their response letters:
Additionally, if SCO fails to provide the aforementioned documents of proof and continues to try to extract purchases of licenses from us, we will have no recourse but to have our lawyers file charges of extortion and racketeering against your company.
As a software designer, developer, programmer and user, I have to saw that rewrites done right are A Good Thing(TM). When I do a rewrite, it is with the intention that it is to be better than the old one. I only do rewrites when a limitation of the old code base has been reached or can be foreseen to be reached.
When a rewrite is to be made, it goes without saying that anything learned from previous development should also be applied to the newer project. If you can't learn from the mistakes of the past, don't do a rewrite.
It is not rewriting, per se, that is the problem. It is choosing WHEN to do a rewrite. Unless there is sufficient reason to do one (ie. old code hard to maintain, scalability problems, old code reaching its maximum potential, etc.), of course one should stick to improving on existing one. If, however, the reason is that so "we could have something new", or so that "we could say we did a rewrite" or "I'm the new architect around here. Scrap the old code and write my design", then of course rewrites might be more trouble than they're worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Begging your pardon, but I would respectfully have to disagree. Equating being a grandmother to a low level of technical incompetence has its basis in statistics. Even if one were simply forming hypotheses, one could easilly assume that the older one is, the less technically oriented this person is LIKELY to be. Perhaps not inherently because of age itself, but because of the kind of learning experiences these various groups of people have had.
It's all a matter of making learned guesses and rationalizing ones way through the given information. Not all grandmothers are old. Most seniors have little to no technical training. I can't say for certain whether one becomes harder to train the older one gets.
As for the statement on discrimination: while I certainly disagree with discrimination in any form, I don't see it happening here or in the article. Discrimination is a directed action against representatives of a group. When software developers develop or talk about designing software for grandmothers, they are simply making assumptions based on numbers. If one were to turn down a job applicant for a technical job, for instance, for simply being a grandmother, then THAT is discrimination.
Oh .. I should probably add "has a fast implementation". Java may be an easy language to pick up, but dang! Most apps I develop on it feel like its wading in molasses. If they're going to run core subsystems in that language, there's a potential to increase the latency for every application that uses them.
I don't care what the next core and/or applications development language becomes the official for Gnome so long as it's easy to learn, effective for its purpose, is elegant and will make Gnome programming truly powerful (capable of doing almost anything apps should be able to do).
Most object-oriented languages are easy to pick up. Java, in particular, is easy to learn because most IDEs help in the syntax (auto-completion) and has great code-to-documentation facilities (Javadoc). In contrast, Glib-GObject is really hard to pick up (not just because of the syntax, per se but because there is very scarce documentation and very few books).
I'll look at Eiffel. If it's something I can pick up in a day and master in a week, then by all means.
You, sir, sound like someone trying to sound smart but are failing miserably. I've already posted the things I dislike with the spatial nautilus. The mere fact that it has generated a lot of negative sentiment should be cause for the Gnome developers to give pause.
I've carried it forward, however, by also giving suggestions on how to improve spatial nautilus for every point that I had a problem with. (Read my previous post.) It would behoove you to detail your complaints with spatial nautilus. If you have any suggestions on improving it (rather than just outright removing it), it would be nice to know.
The -test series do not have official update sites. The updates that you're seeing actually point you to the development repository. Test1 was cut from a couple of older packages. Not all the upgrades in the development (aka rawhide) subdirectory are crucial.
To balance off statements like yours, I must say that fedora core2 test1 worked very well on 4 DIFFERENT systems that I tried it on (1 dual-SMP, 1 uni server, 1 uni workstation and 1 laptop). Some with a little tweaking.
This is a test of the distribution. This way, they get to test the ISOs, as well. You CAN apt-get upgrade or yum update your older release installation if you want to. Not everyone has an older installation and for those people, they'd rather download the new distribution rather than an old one and the upgrades.
Would've been logical if you thought it through.
I started using the Spatial Nautilus and found it cumbersome in several ways (hard to navigate between directories/windows, desktop getting cluttered, Metacity not popping up windows in the most logical places, etc.) I'm in the middle of writing up a proposal that can help it become a little more useful.
The general idea is to modify the windows-list applet so that when it's on a vertical taskbar, it shows a GtkTreeView of the windows spawned for that desktop. Since subdirectory windows are now children of higher directory windows, it would mimic the former functionality of the tree panel in the old Nautilus view. What's more, the tree view in the windows-list applet would work for other windows as well and not just Nautilus.
Some features I plan to throw in are: transparency (this should work well with the autohide feature of the panel), make window active on mouse hover, drag & drop.
I started to write the code myself, but the tasklist object in libwnck isn't the easiest to understand for a guy who's literally just starting out in glib, GObject and applet programming.
Historically, humans have policed themselves against such predators. Unfortunately, these same predators have gotten wiley and have managed to corrupt the law so that it now protects them. In this case, i'm talking about SCO being the scammer. Everyone can see that they are trying to extort money when they themselves have done nothing to deserve it. No hard work. No research and development. Nothing.
And yet this thing has dragged on for months and is in the meantime costing various companies hundreds of thousands of dollars to thresh out. All for what? So that we can re-affirm what we already know? That crime doesn't/shouldn't pay? There should be a better shortcut to that same lesson.
At the risk of incurring negative karma, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the conspiracy theory where IBM is infusing Novell with dollars the same way M$ did for SCO.
This is a joke, folks.
We have to remember that most of the people working on Gnome and/or maintaining the servers are volunteers. That said, I have to tip my hat to these people for the very professional action they provided post the compromise. Taking down the compromised server, informing the community, and, most importantly, not releasing premature statements of blame or excuses (which is more than what I can say for a lot of professional companies).
For news regarding what was compromised and HOW it was compromised. I doubt we'll ever find WHO and WHY, but here's hoping that we do.
I would like to know if it was some known exploit that the admin didn't take care of. Or some easy-to-guess password by one of the developers. Or, worse, some as-yet-unknown exploit.
Please refrain from using overly simplistic arguments to support your cause. In my opinion, it wasn't JUST the license change that lead to this seemingly spiralling downfall, but the head developers of XFree86 itself (David Dawes, to be specific).
/.) and the man strikes me as positively arrogant, with no respect for the opinions of others (unless he was actually majorly outnumbered, and sometimes not even then). He has repeatedly ignored input from other people including his own co-developers and loves to portray himself as the righteous leader. His posts are nothing short of antagonistic and he has very selective memory.
I've read and re-read various threads on the XFree86 mailing list (please look it up in archives and past posts on
Would that be sufficient reason for a project to fail? In this case, I would say so. He insists on having and keeping all control of the project to himself. If he had good sense, that wouldn't be a problem, but he's already shown that all he's interested in is recognition and retaining control over the project (rather than the project's welfare).
Past posts have shown that several suggestions and patches had been ignored which led to the project's stagnation. You may argue that the project is successful and works even now, but the point is it could have been so much better under a different type of leadership.
The recent license change is but one manifestation of how callous the head developers are.
Gives me hope that corporations actually think before they make IT decisions and actually consider an open standard/protocol important.
I believe that is the intention.
How is Glade2 development coming along in terms of supporting Gtk2 2.4? I visited their website and there doesn't seem to be any mention of it.
Woohoo! Let's pound on that new fileselector and see if we can break it or make suggestions (to improve it).
Congratulations to the Gtk2 developers! How's the API documentation coming along? Last time I tried learning to program with gtk2, the API reference manual was soo incomplete (incomplete function description, calling semantics, etc.)
Shouldn't it be high time that we formalized some new terminology? I propose that the term "SCOism" be coined to mean the deliberate misuse of facts and half-truths to propagate FUD. Here are my favorite SCO SCOisms:
1) We own the rights to Unix and its derivatives and since IBM worked on both Unix and Linux, Linux is a derivative and royalty is owned us.
2) Pamela Jones lives close to the IBM headquarters and ibiblio.org (the organization which hosts her site) have IBM computer. That means she's an IBM lackey.
3) CA has settled a dispute by licensing a totally different product but which gives them the right to use Linux legally. Therefore, they have licensed Linux from us!
4) The text of the S2 memo has been misinterpreted by Eric Raymond. Thought Microsoft and Baystar are mentioned there, it has nothing to do with the letter.
IF the installer forced an actual installation rather than made it an OPTION. If it were an option, then IMHO it would be a Good Thing(TM) (even if no one actually installs them).
A fine product. Great for personal or even corporate use. I've been following (and updating) this application since early 0.9x days. Best of luck, and hope you don't have any problems with M$ for the similarity in name between the project name and a M$ app.
Actually, more than extortionism or racketeering, wouldn't this act count more as terrorism (and subject to -- what was it? -- the Patriot Act)? They've been doing nothing but terrorize companies and the public from acting in their best interest.
Kudos to M. Robertson et al. for managing to criticize with impunity but effectively the practices and prejudices in commerce that have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with business. Lin---s ... I like it!
I don't care where it's sold (I bought a Sony-Ericsson P900 from Asia because I couldn't find anyone selling the A760). I want that phone. Could someone post a website of a company that sells it?
May I suggest that companies given letters by SCO consider filing charges and append to their response letters:
Additionally, if SCO fails to provide the aforementioned documents of proof and continues to try to extract purchases of licenses from us, we will have no recourse but to have our lawyers file charges of extortion and racketeering against your company.
Sincerely,
As a software designer, developer, programmer and user, I have to saw that rewrites done right are A Good Thing(TM). When I do a rewrite, it is with the intention that it is to be better than the old one. I only do rewrites when a limitation of the old code base has been reached or can be foreseen to be reached.
When a rewrite is to be made, it goes without saying that anything learned from previous development should also be applied to the newer project. If you can't learn from the mistakes of the past, don't do a rewrite.
It is not rewriting, per se, that is the problem. It is choosing WHEN to do a rewrite. Unless there is sufficient reason to do one (ie. old code hard to maintain, scalability problems, old code reaching its maximum potential, etc.), of course one should stick to improving on existing one. If, however, the reason is that so "we could have something new", or so that "we could say we did a rewrite" or "I'm the new architect around here. Scrap the old code and write my design", then of course rewrites might be more trouble than they're worth.
All common sense.
Well, always one to see some guide side in anything, I hope a Linux port of HalfLife 2 suddenly just happens.