Hmm, I think you misunderstand what KDE does. The Move/Copy/Link is not a "Dialog" that appears somewhere else on the screen. It is more like a popup menu with just these three items, and it appears directly under your mouse cursor. No real interruption of workflow there.
Also, it does have keyboard modifiers for drag operations. The Move/Copy/Link menu only appears if you drag with no modifier. So it seems to me that it is not all that different from what you are describing. What happens to a drag operation with no key modifier in your scheme? I thought you had said before that move was the default drag operation, so why do you need to hold down Alt?
Why, exactly, do you care if a character in a novel is portrayed as a homosexual? Does it offend your sensibilities to know that such people exist? Why? I think you are reading your bible a little too selectively; try to find that part about "judge not, lest ye be judged", and "do unto others...".
To say that Stephenson "advertises" for homosexuality is a gross mischaracterization. Turing was, in fact, a homosexual, a fact which turned the life of this brilliant man (the man who contributed more to the defeat of the Nazis than any other individual), into a sorrowful tragedy for which the British government ought to be eternally ashamed of itself. Alan Turing was a Hero. He was also gay.
And since you say that Stephenson doesn't pay similar attention to Christian characters, I guess you didn't actually *read* Quicksilver, did you? If you had, you would of course know that the central character (Daniel Waterhouse) was not only a Christian, his religion (and that of his family) plays a central role in the events of the book. Not that an author has any obligation to you or anyone else to maintain some kind of ridiculous "equal time" balance in the sociopolitical aspects of its characters.
And what does being liberal or conservative have to do with one's ability to accept a homosexual character in a novel? I doubt that all conservatives are as ignorant and intolerant as you are. I find it totally absurd that you regard the presence of a homosexual character as a "political" statement.
I appreciate what you are saying, but I think you underestimate people's ability to learn and adapt. After seeing the "Move, Copy, or Link" window once, twice, at most three times, I seriously doubt it is going to come as some big work-interrupting suprise when they see it on subsequent drags. Besides, part of the magic of computers is that you *can* do things that can't be done in real life. You *can* copy a document - perfectly, instantly - with your bare hands! Why tell the user that they can't?
Sure, the first time they try to drag an icon from one window to another, they might think "what the heck is this?", but after a few tries, don't you think they'd learn and adapt to the new paradigm, and eventually come to see that it provides them with both efficiency and flexibility?
Anyway, I guess it comes down to personal opinion. I personally cannot stand the "spatial desktop" metaphor. I feel hog-tied whenever I have used it. It's not a RL desktop, it's a computer UI. Why limit yourself to the restrictions of the physical world?
Would you want to use a web browser that split a long document into window-sized "pages", instead of a scrolling display? After all, that's how you read a long document on your physical desktop, right? And why should we be able to do a text-search on that document? One can't do it in the real world, after all. If people accept these breakages of the metaphor, I don't see why the other breakages (changing folders in a single window, having a more flexible click-and-drag option) are so different as to be unadaptable.
So, taking your ideal "Spatial desktop metaphor" UI to its logical conclusion: to copy a file, I would have to drag the file to a "Xerox machine" window or icon, and then press the "Copy" button on the Xerox machine, which would give me two copies of my file in the Xerox machine. I would then move one of them back to the original folder, and then move the copy to wherever I wanted a copy of it.
The point is, the metaphor can be pushed too far. To me, it's clearly easier to just have to OS ask "Copy, Move or Link?" when I drag an icon. This also has the advantage that the computer is not doing what it assumes I want to do; it is doing what I tell it to do.
(don't get me wrong, I really like when a program can guess what I want it to do, but only if it is right most of the time...)
Hmm, I was under the impression that most viruses these days just need a stupid email client (read: Outlook), with no intervention by the user required one way or the other.
Yes, I suppose there may be a way to disable the braindeadedness of Outlook, and that some may regard users as "stupid" if they do not lock down their system in this way. But, given that MS pitches Windows as the everyman's OS, does it not make much more sense to place the burden on *them* to provide a reasonably secure default setup, such that it is reasonably resistant to simple script-kiddie attacks "out of the box"?
There's a difference between stupidity and ignorance. In this case, it seems to me that the OS design is stupid, and if the user is ignorant of this fact, then they are in trouble.
Can you name one? One that had a non-negigible infection rate on Linux machines?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but Linux users mostly don't run as root, and they don't generally use mail programs that open attachements without asking, so I really don't see how script-kiddie level virii can propagate on Linux.
You can press Alt+F1 anytime to invoke the application menu, even if you don't have the actual "K" button in your kicker panel. Alternatively, you can use Alt+F2 to open the "Run Command" window, where you can type the name of any program you want to run (you can also type a URL here to launch your browser to that page). Another alternative: you can add an "Application Launcher" applet to your kicker panel, which is essentially the "Run Application" window, but always available.
On my desktop, I have the application launcher applet on its own panel anchored to the upper left, and set to auto-hide and size-to-contents. So instead of Alt+F2, all I have to do is throw the mouse to the upper left and type an app name. Very cool, IMHO.
So, everyone, let's be a little less hasty with the "KDE sucks" nonsense. There's some really cool UI stuff in there that can be tweaked to suit you personally. And if there's something you don't like about the default UI, I can almost guarantee it can be easily turned off or changed.
Since you are observing from the surface of the Earth, it can't very well be plotted in the sky. Or, it can, but it's not very interesting: it's the big green thing blocking your view of the sky's "lower half".
Oh, and the blurb is a bit out of date. In KDE 3.2, KStars now has 126,000 stars, and also includes thousands of comets and asteroids (including Quaoar).
Well, if that's the problem you're trying to solve, why not just carry a CD, which is almost 1GB. Seems like a simpler and technically superior solution to me. Plus, if you buy an mp3-aware discman, then you can listen even when you aren't at a networked computer.
Quoth the researchers: Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
Respondeth the RIAA: Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets. Of respondents ages 18-24 who download, 33 percent said they bought less music than in the past year while 21 percent bought more. Of those ages 25-34, the survey found 25 percent bought less and 17 percent bought more, Weiss said.
Earth to Weiss: These people bought fewer CDs in the past year, yes. But your stats show nothing about that being correlated with the fact that they are file sharers. Where is the control group? The stats on CD purchases of non-sharers? I'm sure their CD purchases skyrocketed last year, right? Oh wait:
illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
Huh. Who'da thunk it?
Everything you need to know about television:
on
You're Watching Less TV
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In TV economics, you are not the customer, you are the product. Corporate advertisers are the customers, and they pay big bucks for your eyeballs.
Makes me feel dirty every time I think about it. I stopped watching shortly after this was pointed out to me.
why...that's brilliant! Finally I can realize my dream of never again seeing the word "loose" written when "lose" is intended! By patenting it, I can simply charge a fee equal to my annoyance at the sight of that extra little o. Say, 50 grand per incident.
Except wouldn't the entire point of Novell's current initiative-- the one as part of which they are standardizing on Qt-- to be to open up Linux such that it appeals at least to some extent to persons beyond the rather limited OSS set that uses it now?
I would hope that Novell will try to do this by bringing those persons into *our* way of doing things, not by trying to change the Linux community into the Windows community. If the latter is their goal (which I seriously doubt), then I say no thanks.
Oh, pity the poor proprietary software company! All they ask is that someone give them a first-class GUI toolkit at no cost, and with no strings attached! Is that so much to ask?
Please. Cry me a river. Trolltech spent a huge investment on making Qt the best cross-platform GUI toolkit available anywhere. I think they're decision to provide a GPL'd version was an incredibly noble thing for them to do (althogh in truth, they do get a lot out of it in return, especially through their relationship with KDE). My hat is off to Trolltech.
Do you not see the hypocrisy in demanding that one software company (TT) must give away its product for free so that other companies can profit from the work? How does that make any kind of sense?
The first correct statement in your post. Nothing stops your customers from using Qt to develop software, as long as the software is either GPL'd or for internal use only. If your customer wants to develop proprietary software to distribute for profit, perhaps you can do them a favor and recommend Windows, since windows users are more likely to buy into (literally) the proprietary software model.
No, I really did mean science. Everything I stated applies to that particular method of seeking knowledge.
Science is just the term to describe a method of working toward knowledge.
Yes. The word is also used to describe the body of knowledge which results from said method.
And it's not even the only method, though there are people who zealously claim so.
Don't know about that. I know there are people who strongly believe that Science is the best method for increasing certain kinds of knowledge (in fact I count myself among them), but I have never heard someone state that there is no other way to obtain knowledge. That's just silly.
So far the only human creation to span many generations has been religions and the wars they involve.
There's a human endeavor that has been "under construction" for many centuries; it involves dedicated workers from nearly all nations of the world working in collaboration and competition to advance the endeavor incrementally, year after year, lifetime after lifetime.
There's another one in PA called Centralia. This town sits above a coal mine that caught fire 40 years ago. They couldn't put out the fire, so the town was evacuated.
Now, when I say "they couldn't put out the fire", I mean it. It's still burning! Well, smoldering anyway. There are fissures all over the town with smoke coming out. I haven't been there, but I'd love to check it out sometime.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I think you misunderstand what KDE does. The Move/Copy/Link is not a "Dialog" that appears somewhere else on the screen. It is more like a popup menu with just these three items, and it appears directly under your mouse cursor. No real interruption of workflow there.
Also, it does have keyboard modifiers for drag operations. The Move/Copy/Link menu only appears if you drag with no modifier. So it seems to me that it is not all that different from what you are describing. What happens to a drag operation with no key modifier in your scheme? I thought you had said before that move was the default drag operation, so why do you need to hold down Alt?
Why, exactly, do you care if a character in a novel is portrayed as a homosexual? Does it offend your sensibilities to know that such people exist? Why? I think you are reading your bible a little too selectively; try to find that part about "judge not, lest ye be judged", and "do unto others...".
To say that Stephenson "advertises" for homosexuality is a gross mischaracterization. Turing was, in fact, a homosexual, a fact which turned the life of this brilliant man (the man who contributed more to the defeat of the Nazis than any other individual), into a sorrowful tragedy for which the British government ought to be eternally ashamed of itself. Alan Turing was a Hero. He was also gay.
And since you say that Stephenson doesn't pay similar attention to Christian characters, I guess you didn't actually *read* Quicksilver, did you? If you had, you would of course know that the central character (Daniel Waterhouse) was not only a Christian, his religion (and that of his family) plays a central role in the events of the book. Not that an author has any obligation to you or anyone else to maintain some kind of ridiculous "equal time" balance in the sociopolitical aspects of its characters.
And what does being liberal or conservative have to do with one's ability to accept a homosexual character in a novel? I doubt that all conservatives are as ignorant and intolerant as you are. I find it totally absurd that you regard the presence of a homosexual character as a "political" statement.
I appreciate what you are saying, but I think you underestimate people's ability to learn and adapt. After seeing the "Move, Copy, or Link" window once, twice, at most three times, I seriously doubt it is going to come as some big work-interrupting suprise when they see it on subsequent drags. Besides, part of the magic of computers is that you *can* do things that can't be done in real life. You *can* copy a document - perfectly, instantly - with your bare hands! Why tell the user that they can't?
Sure, the first time they try to drag an icon from one window to another, they might think "what the heck is this?", but after a few tries, don't you think they'd learn and adapt to the new paradigm, and eventually come to see that it provides them with both efficiency and flexibility?
Anyway, I guess it comes down to personal opinion. I personally cannot stand the "spatial desktop" metaphor. I feel hog-tied whenever I have used it. It's not a RL desktop, it's a computer UI. Why limit yourself to the restrictions of the physical world?
Would you want to use a web browser that split a long document into window-sized "pages", instead of a scrolling display? After all, that's how you read a long document on your physical desktop, right? And why should we be able to do a text-search on that document? One can't do it in the real world, after all. If people accept these breakages of the metaphor, I don't see why the other breakages (changing folders in a single window, having a more flexible click-and-drag option) are so different as to be unadaptable.
So, taking your ideal "Spatial desktop metaphor" UI to its logical conclusion: to copy a file, I would have to drag the file to a "Xerox machine" window or icon, and then press the "Copy" button on the Xerox machine, which would give me two copies of my file in the Xerox machine. I would then move one of them back to the original folder, and then move the copy to wherever I wanted a copy of it.
The point is, the metaphor can be pushed too far. To me, it's clearly easier to just have to OS ask "Copy, Move or Link?" when I drag an icon. This also has the advantage that the computer is not doing what it assumes I want to do; it is doing what I tell it to do.
(don't get me wrong, I really like when a program can guess what I want it to do, but only if it is right most of the time...)
Most "viruses" at the moment need a stupid user.
Hmm, I was under the impression that most viruses these days just need a stupid email client (read: Outlook), with no intervention by the user required one way or the other.
Yes, I suppose there may be a way to disable the braindeadedness of Outlook, and that some may regard users as "stupid" if they do not lock down their system in this way. But, given that MS pitches Windows as the everyman's OS, does it not make much more sense to place the burden on *them* to provide a reasonably secure default setup, such that it is reasonably resistant to simple script-kiddie attacks "out of the box"?
There's a difference between stupidity and ignorance. In this case, it seems to me that the OS design is stupid, and if the user is ignorant of this fact, then they are in trouble.
Linux viri exist
Can you name one? One that had a non-negigible infection rate on Linux machines?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but Linux users mostly don't run as root, and they don't generally use mail programs that open attachements without asking, so I really don't see how script-kiddie level virii can propagate on Linux.
the lesson continues :)
You can press Alt+F1 anytime to invoke the application menu, even if you don't have the actual "K" button in your kicker panel. Alternatively, you can use Alt+F2 to open the "Run Command" window, where you can type the name of any program you want to run (you can also type a URL here to launch your browser to that page). Another alternative: you can add an "Application Launcher" applet to your kicker panel, which is essentially the "Run Application" window, but always available.
On my desktop, I have the application launcher applet on its own panel anchored to the upper left, and set to auto-hide and size-to-contents. So instead of Alt+F2, all I have to do is throw the mouse to the upper left and type an app name. Very cool, IMHO.
So, everyone, let's be a little less hasty with the "KDE sucks" nonsense. There's some really cool UI stuff in there that can be tweaked to suit you personally. And if there's something you don't like about the default UI, I can almost guarantee it can be easily turned off or changed.
Check it out, you'll be glad you did.
Check out the Previews & Meta-data tab of the Konqueror Configure window. You can turn off the thumbnails.
now, if I can only get rid of the stupid "K" menu
1. Right-click on K-menu
2. Select "Remove Start Applications Menu"
3. There is no step 3.
I guess IHBT'd, and I will now HAND. Thanks!
As the author of KStars, allow me to clarify:
Since you are observing from the surface of the Earth, it can't very well be plotted in the sky. Or, it can, but it's not very interesting: it's the big green thing blocking your view of the sky's "lower half".
Oh, and the blurb is a bit out of date. In KDE 3.2, KStars now has 126,000 stars, and also includes thousands of comets and asteroids (including Quaoar).
But some people are under the impression that since they borrowed a CD from a friend, and copied that CD to their computer, it is now THEIR data.
I am under that impression. As far as I am concerned, the situation you describe is fair use.
Nothing really classic, like the guys who did a spoof on Cops with Stormtrooper outfits. Anybody know if those videos can be found?
Step 1: www.google.com
Step 2: Type: "Troops star wars"
Step 3: Click "I'm Feeling Lucky"
(there's a reason people like to say "google is your friend"...)
Well, if that's the problem you're trying to solve, why not just carry a CD, which is almost 1GB. Seems like a simpler and technically superior solution to me. Plus, if you buy an mp3-aware discman, then you can listen even when you aren't at a networked computer.
Wouldn't it be great to have a place where you could store a gig of your most commonly listened to music.
I have such a place. It's called my hard drive. Seriously, in today's market 1 GB of diskspace costs all of one US dollar. Woo.
"Everybody" did not say that choice is bad. Some people prefer simplicity over choice, others prefer the opposite. Amazing, I know.
Quoth the researchers:
Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
Respondeth the RIAA:
Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets. Of respondents ages 18-24 who download, 33 percent said they bought less music than in the past year while 21 percent bought more. Of those ages 25-34, the survey found 25 percent bought less and 17 percent bought more, Weiss said.
Earth to Weiss: These people bought fewer CDs in the past year, yes. But your stats show nothing about that being correlated with the fact that they are file sharers. Where is the control group? The stats on CD purchases of non-sharers? I'm sure their CD purchases skyrocketed last year, right? Oh wait:
illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.
Huh. Who'da thunk it?
In TV economics, you are not the customer, you are the product. Corporate advertisers are the customers, and they pay big bucks for your eyeballs.
Makes me feel dirty every time I think about it. I stopped watching shortly after this was pointed out to me.
why...that's brilliant! Finally I can realize my dream of never again seeing the word "loose" written when "lose" is intended! By patenting it, I can simply charge a fee equal to my annoyance at the sight of that extra little o. Say, 50 grand per incident.
Except wouldn't the entire point of Novell's current initiative-- the one as part of which they are standardizing on Qt-- to be to open up Linux such that it appeals at least to some extent to persons beyond the rather limited OSS set that uses it now?
I would hope that Novell will try to do this by bringing those persons into *our* way of doing things, not by trying to change the Linux community into the Windows community. If the latter is their goal (which I seriously doubt), then I say no thanks.
Oh, pity the poor proprietary software company! All they ask is that someone give them a first-class GUI toolkit at no cost, and with no strings attached! Is that so much to ask?
Please. Cry me a river. Trolltech spent a huge investment on making Qt the best cross-platform GUI toolkit available anywhere. I think they're decision to provide a GPL'd version was an incredibly noble thing for them to do (althogh in truth, they do get a lot out of it in return, especially through their relationship with KDE). My hat is off to Trolltech.
Do you not see the hypocrisy in demanding that one software company (TT) must give away its product for free so that other companies can profit from the work? How does that make any kind of sense?
That's bullshit.
The first correct statement in your post. Nothing stops your customers from using Qt to develop software, as long as the software is either GPL'd or for internal use only. If your customer wants to develop proprietary software to distribute for profit, perhaps you can do them a favor and recommend Windows, since windows users are more likely to buy into (literally) the proprietary software model.
No, I really did mean science. Everything I stated applies to that particular method of seeking knowledge.
Science is just the term to describe a method of working toward knowledge.
Yes. The word is also used to describe the body of knowledge which results from said method.
And it's not even the only method, though there are people who zealously claim so.
Don't know about that. I know there are people who strongly believe that Science is the best method for increasing certain kinds of knowledge (in fact I count myself among them), but I have never heard someone state that there is no other way to obtain knowledge. That's just silly.
So far the only human creation to span many generations has been religions and the wars they involve.
There's a human endeavor that has been "under construction" for many centuries; it involves dedicated workers from nearly all nations of the world working in collaboration and competition to advance the endeavor incrementally, year after year, lifetime after lifetime.
It's called Science.
There's another one in PA called Centralia. This town sits above a coal mine that caught fire 40 years ago. They couldn't put out the fire, so the town was evacuated.
Now, when I say "they couldn't put out the fire", I mean it. It's still burning! Well, smoldering anyway. There are fissures all over the town with smoke coming out. I haven't been there, but I'd love to check it out sometime.