Ok, but that's not really an answer. That only explains what happens if Joker, specifically, dies.
But the vastly more useful question is in the general sense. What happens if I register with [Reg Company X] and [Reg Company X] goes belly up?
ie: if Joker goes under, then you say CORE takes over. So what happens if CORE goes under? Does someone else take over? So what happens if you follow it up the chain to the point where there's no-one to take it over?
Or, assume you're with a company (not Joker, obviously) that doesn't do it "through" anyone else? What happens if they go kaput?
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
Nope. Just pop it in a standard CD-ROM drive. Most have a little ridge in hem that will allow them to hold mini-CD's quite comfortably. Which is basically what this is -- a mini-CD, with the edges chopped off.
Of course, if you have a caddy drive, you're outta luck...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.
That's easy... they're to make sure the CD stays in place...
Think about your typical CD-ROM drive... the disc needs sme way to stay centred in the drive. Usually, there's a little "ridge" about 2/3 the way out from the center, to fit mini-CD's. The rounded edge ensures that these things will slip in and that ridge will hold them in place, rather than you having to worry about getting them exactly centered, or them "wandering" in mid-operation.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
No, they didn't! We're not talking about window managers here, or desktop environments (although that is affected -- I'll get to that), we're talking API's. And Netscape certainly does write to an API -- it's called Motif. And all of Motif is statically linked into Netscape.
Like he (the guy you're responding to) said, "you either have to include the whole GUI in your app - making it bloated and crash-prone"... and what are the most common complaints about Netscape? You got it! (1)Buggy, (2)Crashes all the time.
And even after you get past that, your assertion that "That one binary runs on GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, and all others" is technically correct. But have you tried using drag-and drop with GNOME? Ok. Howabout WMaker? Now let's see you try it in KDE...
Netscape works under all of them, true. But it doesn't exactly work properly in all of them...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
Ok, fair enough. I admit I still haven't tried Mozilla on Linux... I'm Red Hat 5.2 (Glibc 2.0) which apparently Moz has "problems" building on, or some such. The last time I tried upgrading my glibc, I managed to totally fuxor my system and am too chicken to try it again.
I do have it on my NT machine, but as of yet, I don't find it terribly usable. No major bugs, per sé, but I just like the feel of Opera better.
But the point is that I haven't been actively tracking it, so really don't know how fast it's progressing.
In other words, point taken:-)
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> Also make sure to look in bugzilla if you find problems, as there are sometimes workarounds posted there
Whoa, whoa, whoa... Hold on there!
This may be all fine and well for Slashdot users, et. al., but are you seriously considering telling people to do this for a released Netscape product??? (ie: shrink-wrapped, for-Windows, on-supermarket-shelves?)
Methinks you vastly overestimate the capabilities of many a home Netscape user. Don't forget, this article is about releasing it as primetime Netscape, to the mass public. All the discussions we've rehashed on here about making Linux user-friendly apply doubletime to this!
This seems to me a pretty piss-poor way of going about things, myself.
Maybe they'll be fixed in due course, but by your own admission, they're working on dogfood bugs right now. In otherwords, it may be a little while before these sorts of things (the ones with "workarounds," etc...) get addressed.
In other words, as the poster said, this does not look like it's ready to be released this spring. Not unless they make absolutely phenomenal progress between now and then.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> ventually, they'll get bored and move back to Usenet or wherever else it is that they came from (under a rock?).
That's what they used to say in Usenet. Which is now for all purposes, dead.
That's what scares me about this place, more and more. I just hope they don't start trying to overwhelm the people who write real code. I mean, I really fear the day when we have to filter out "The Gimp." programs from Freshmeat which link to really good-looking fake sites at "www.thegimp.org" and contain programs purporting to be the Gimp, but are really trojan horses.
Bob's Fancy Clock Applet for GNOME is easy enough to read through the source code of to make sure it doesn't do anything naughty, but if the program is big enough...
*shudder*
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> Of course there's other things to look at like, how long will it take to do the port, quality of the end product, customer satisfaction, etc. Having never purchased a Loki product (yet), I can't say how they compare in these areas. Anyone care to comment on the quality of Loki's ports?
Really good. Better, if anything, than the original. That is to say, better than the original would be if ported by the original company that wrote it, anyway. And here's why:
Local expertise. A lot of game companies out there writing for Windows know Windows well. But they don't necessarily know a lot about other OS'es. Which means that any port they do will likely be designed from a Windows point of view, and not "play nicely" with X, the Window Managers, etc.
You can write an X program that is "X-compliant" (or whatever the term is), but isn't X-compliant, really. We've all seen them.
But Loki, having a lot of expertise in Linux/X, will likely know the tricks of the trade, the gotcha's and the little things that make for a good X program.
By all accounts (I haven't played it), the original Windows Civ:CTP wasn't all that great. However, the Loki port was really good. (I do own that one). Why? Because Linux users have a lower standard? Not really. Just that Loki knew what they were doing, and did a really good job with the port, making for a game that ran better in X than even the original did in Windows.
Definitely far better than any X port would have if done by Activision...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> It may be that the page had some mention of recording, in which case this would not apply. However, it now reads in its entirety "This page is not here yet" (shades of Transmeta) so I don't know.
Hmmm... dunno about that, but at one point in time, he had an MP3 recording there of the phone call. It was definitely taped. Or recorded. Or whatever.
> In fact, according to various Tom Clancy novels (always a reliable source:), it is still the case that every telephone call in and out of Washington DC is recorded by the government.
Extremely improbable. Do you have any idea how many millions of phone calls are made in and out of that city every day?? DC is a pretty big place. Maybe they record everything in and out of every government office, but that's still unlikely. I just can't imagine there being the resources to do that. And if it were all automated, or something, how in the hell would thery ever find one of those recordings, if necessary?
I mean, there are about 3 million residents of DC, right? And assume each one spends an average of 1/2 hour on the phone on an average day (I don't think that's unreasonable... it may even be on the low side). That's 1 1/2 million HOURS of taping per DAY...
*shakes head*
No fucking way.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
Hmmm... I may be totally of my rocker here, but I always thought that X printing issues had more to do with the underlying Unix prining system than anything else; ie: that Unix was the problem, not X.
Anyone care to comment? Am I right or horribly wrong?
Of course, this doesn't excuse X's horrible (lack of) drag-and-drop implementation. But it looks like that is finally coming around (ie: witness the rest of this thread).
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
You misunderstand. I/we (I'm not the poster you responded to) have nothing against the website itself. It's his/her prerogative to create it. And it's fine if some people find it funny. What sucks, is the fact that he's spammed Slashdot over and over and over and over and over... again. In the last week, I personally have seen him spam/. with this link at least 100 times. No, I am not exaggerating. 100 times, easily. And I only read at most 1/4 of the articles, and even then only about 1/3 to 1/2 the posts under those articles (unless it's something I'm really interested in).
This person has put up a web-page. That is fine. However, he is also spamming it (under false pretenses, too... he disguises the link as being relevant to the discussion). That is not fine. It is spam, plain and simple. And we are responding to him as we would to any spammer, to any person that abuses their internet accounts. By reporting them to their ISP and hoping that their detrimental activities are stopped.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
It doesn't matter who needs it. I don't know. I may never know. But the point it, it's in the spec, and must be supported. In case anyone needs it. Whoever they may be.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
> As far as the round menus go, I just don't know what he was talking about. But, with differnt themes of the respective toolkit, one cold put thick borders on buttons.
I'm not sure, but what I think he's talking about here is an application of Fitt's Law that he mentioned in his "A test to give you fitts" article.
Rather than have your menu arranged vertically (or horizontally) as is the case with 99% of menus today, you have the items arranged in a circle, around the cursor.
This works best with popup menus, where you click the button, and come up with something like the following (where the asterisk is the cursor point):
The idea here is that (1)the distance the mouse has to move to the menu item is drastically reduced, and (2) each option is associated with both a distance and a direction, amking them easier to remember, even if the user isn't looking at the screen.
It's a neat idea, and one that I don't think either GNOME or KDE are capable of, without a lot of kludging.
The only desktop environment I know of that does this is UDE but that suffers from other problems, notably that it's nowhere near being complete, not to mention the fact that development on it seems to be all but nonexistent these days.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it. -- - Sean
Sorry, dude. When I go to the link I provided, I get a directory full of src.rpm's (I copied that link directly out of my URL bar). When I go to the one you provided, I get a "FTP directory not found" or some such error.
Like I said, the URL's provided by LinuxOne are wrong. -- - Sean
Somehow, I doubt that would work very well. Given the format of the Slashdot interviews, they only get useful information out of someone who is willing to honestly answer all the questions posed to them.
So far, the people at L1 have been rather evasive about answering any hard-hitting questions (as evidenced by the very article we are responding to). So what's to stop them from (assuming they were even to agree to the interview in the first place) giving poor- or non-answers to any questions?
However, on a slightly more encouraging note, check out the sibling comment to this one, by a "Lester Bottoms". He claims to be the "Director of Business Development" for Linux One. There is no proof for this, however I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and believe him until I see evidence otherwise.
I say "encouraging" because it indicates that someone from L1 at least reads slashdot.
Now, the interesting thing is that this guy seems more interested in talking to Rob Malda (doesn't even seem to know his name... just calls him "CmdrTaco") than responding to any of the questions posed on the website.
This is particularly discouraging, since the only reason (aside from wanting to to an interview) that I can think of for this is that he wants to coerce Rob to stop running stories on L1. Hmmmm...
Richard, if there is a different reason, please let us know!
However, if this guy is legit, maybe we'll be able to get some answers out of him. Too bad there's no email address -- Hotmail or not -- attached to his account... -- - Sean
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, man... it's hilarious the way some people are totally unable to see a joke even when it comes up and hits them it the face!
Did you really think the poster was that stupid? Did you not maybe clue in when he/she talked about using it in embedded systems???
Lighten up, dude!
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Ok, but that's not really an answer. That only explains what happens if Joker, specifically, dies.
But the vastly more useful question is in the general sense. What happens if I register with [Reg Company X] and [Reg Company X] goes belly up?
ie: if Joker goes under, then you say CORE takes over. So what happens if CORE goes under? Does someone else take over? So what happens if you follow it up the chain to the point where there's no-one to take it over?
Or, assume you're with a company (not Joker, obviously) that doesn't do it "through" anyone else? What happens if they go kaput?
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Nope. Just pop it in a standard CD-ROM drive. Most have a little ridge in hem that will allow them to hold mini-CD's quite comfortably. Which is basically what this is -- a mini-CD, with the edges chopped off.
Of course, if you have a caddy drive, you're outta luck...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.
That's easy... they're to make sure the CD stays in place...
Think about your typical CD-ROM drive... the disc needs sme way to stay centred in the drive. Usually, there's a little "ridge" about 2/3 the way out from the center, to fit mini-CD's. The rounded edge ensures that these things will slip in and that ridge will hold them in place, rather than you having to worry about getting them exactly centered, or them "wandering" in mid-operation.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
>They just chose to write to the standard X APIs
No, they didn't! We're not talking about window managers here, or desktop environments (although that is affected -- I'll get to that), we're talking API's. And Netscape certainly does write to an API -- it's called Motif. And all of Motif is statically linked into Netscape.
Like he (the guy you're responding to) said, "you either have to include the whole GUI in your app - making it bloated and crash-prone"... and what are the most common complaints about Netscape? You got it! (1)Buggy, (2)Crashes all the time.
And even after you get past that, your assertion that "That one binary runs on GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, and all others" is technically correct. But have you tried using drag-and drop with GNOME? Ok. Howabout WMaker? Now let's see you try it in KDE...
Netscape works under all of them, true. But it doesn't exactly work properly in all of them...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Ok, fair enough. I admit I still haven't tried Mozilla on Linux... I'm Red Hat 5.2 (Glibc 2.0) which apparently Moz has "problems" building on, or some such. The last time I tried upgrading my glibc, I managed to totally fuxor my system and am too chicken to try it again.
:-)
I do have it on my NT machine, but as of yet, I don't find it terribly usable. No major bugs, per sé, but I just like the feel of Opera better.
But the point is that I haven't been actively tracking it, so really don't know how fast it's progressing.
In other words, point taken
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Hehe... I remember my Cyrix 486 DX-2 66 with 6 megs of RAM that... umm... "ran" Windows '95.
Definitely crazy...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
I may be misunderstanding, but a simple "strip `find .`" would seem to suffice...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> Also make sure to look in bugzilla if you find problems, as there are sometimes workarounds posted there
Whoa, whoa, whoa... Hold on there!
This may be all fine and well for Slashdot users, et. al., but are you seriously considering telling people to do this for a released Netscape product??? (ie: shrink-wrapped, for-Windows, on-supermarket-shelves?)
Methinks you vastly overestimate the capabilities of many a home Netscape user. Don't forget, this article is about releasing it as primetime Netscape, to the mass public. All the discussions we've rehashed on here about making Linux user-friendly apply doubletime to this!
This seems to me a pretty piss-poor way of going about things, myself.
Maybe they'll be fixed in due course, but by your own admission, they're working on dogfood bugs right now. In otherwords, it may be a little while before these sorts of things (the ones with "workarounds," etc...) get addressed.
In other words, as the poster said, this does not look like it's ready to be released this spring. Not unless they make absolutely phenomenal progress between now and then.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> ventually, they'll get bored and move back to Usenet or wherever else it is that they came from (under a rock?).
That's what they used to say in Usenet. Which is now for all purposes, dead.
That's what scares me about this place, more and more. I just hope they don't start trying to overwhelm the people who write real code. I mean, I really fear the day when we have to filter out "The Gimp." programs from Freshmeat which link to really good-looking fake sites at "www.thegimp.org" and contain programs purporting to be the Gimp, but are really trojan horses.
Bob's Fancy Clock Applet for GNOME is easy enough to read through the source code of to make sure it doesn't do anything naughty, but if the program is big enough...
*shudder*
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
On-topic? Perhaps.
Redundant? definitely!!!!!!!!
You can be marked down for that, too... and that's applicable...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> Of course there's other things to look at like, how long will it take to do the port, quality of the end product, customer satisfaction, etc. Having never purchased a Loki product (yet), I can't say how they compare in these areas. Anyone care to comment on the quality of Loki's ports?
Really good. Better, if anything, than the original. That is to say, better than the original would be if ported by the original company that wrote it, anyway. And here's why:
Local expertise. A lot of game companies out there writing for Windows know Windows well. But they don't necessarily know a lot about other OS'es. Which means that any port they do will likely be designed from a Windows point of view, and not "play nicely" with X, the Window Managers, etc.
You can write an X program that is "X-compliant" (or whatever the term is), but isn't X-compliant, really. We've all seen them.
But Loki, having a lot of expertise in Linux/X, will likely know the tricks of the trade, the gotcha's and the little things that make for a good X program.
By all accounts (I haven't played it), the original Windows Civ:CTP wasn't all that great. However, the Loki port was really good. (I do own that one). Why? Because Linux users have a lower standard? Not really. Just that Loki knew what they were doing, and did a really good job with the port, making for a game that ran better in X than even the original did in Windows.
Definitely far better than any X port would have if done by Activision...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Except that your prediction was false... CmdrTaco has apparently said that he won't do anything about these accounts, and for precisely that reason...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Well... you see... that's why you post intelligently at work, and troll from home (or vice-versa, depending on preference).
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Well, then that's your problem. Don't come whining to us about it.
Unless you're trying to be a parody, in which case it didn't come off too well...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> It may be that the page had some mention of recording, in which case this would not apply. However, it now reads in its entirety "This page is not here yet" (shades of Transmeta) so I don't know.
:), it is still the case that every telephone call in and out of Washington DC is recorded by the government.
Hmmm... dunno about that, but at one point in time, he had an MP3 recording there of the phone call. It was definitely taped. Or recorded. Or whatever.
> In fact, according to various Tom Clancy novels (always a reliable source
Extremely improbable. Do you have any idea how many millions of phone calls are made in and out of that city every day?? DC is a pretty big place. Maybe they record everything in and out of every government office, but that's still unlikely. I just can't imagine there being the resources to do that. And if it were all automated, or something, how in the hell would thery ever find one of those recordings, if necessary?
I mean, there are about 3 million residents of DC, right? And assume each one spends an average of 1/2 hour on the phone on an average day (I don't think that's unreasonable... it may even be on the low side). That's 1 1/2 million HOURS of taping per DAY...
*shakes head*
No fucking way.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Hmmm... I may be totally of my rocker here, but I always thought that X printing issues had more to do with the underlying Unix prining system than anything else; ie: that Unix was the problem, not X.
Anyone care to comment? Am I right or horribly wrong?
Of course, this doesn't excuse X's horrible (lack of) drag-and-drop implementation. But it looks like that is finally coming around (ie: witness the rest of this thread).
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
You misunderstand. I/we (I'm not the poster you responded to) have nothing against the website itself. It's his/her prerogative to create it. And it's fine if some people find it funny. What sucks, is the fact that he's spammed Slashdot over and over and over and over and over... again. In the last week, I personally have seen him spam /. with this link at least 100 times. No, I am not exaggerating. 100 times, easily. And I only read at most 1/4 of the articles, and even then only about 1/3 to 1/2 the posts under those articles (unless it's something I'm really interested in).
This person has put up a web-page. That is fine. However, he is also spamming it (under false pretenses, too... he disguises the link as being relevant to the discussion). That is not fine. It is spam, plain and simple. And we are responding to him as we would to any spammer, to any person that abuses their internet accounts. By reporting them to their ISP and hoping that their detrimental activities are stopped.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
It doesn't matter who needs it. I don't know. I may never know. But the point it, it's in the spec, and must be supported. In case anyone needs it. Whoever they may be.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> As far as the round menus go, I just don't know what he was talking about. But, with differnt themes of the respective toolkit, one cold put thick borders on buttons.
I'm not sure, but what I think he's talking about here is an application of Fitt's Law that he mentioned in his "A test to give you fitts" article.
Rather than have your menu arranged vertically (or horizontally) as is the case with 99% of menus today, you have the items arranged in a circle, around the cursor.
This works best with popup menus, where you click the button, and come up with something like the following (where the asterisk is the cursor point):
|
Menu|Menu
-_Item1|Item2_-
--___|___--
Menu--_/\_--Menu
Item_|*|_Item
6_--\____/--_3
_--| --_
-Menu|Menu -
Item5|Item4
|
The idea here is that (1)the distance the mouse has to move to the menu item is drastically reduced, and (2) each option is associated with both a distance and a direction, amking them easier to remember, even if the user isn't looking at the screen.
It's a neat idea, and one that I don't think either GNOME or KDE are capable of, without a lot of kludging.
The only desktop environment I know of that does this is UDE but that suffers from other problems, notably that it's nowhere near being complete, not to mention the fact that development on it seems to be all but nonexistent these days.
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
> The whole problem here is that someone - a metagod (M[infinity]) - would have to run the meta-Slashdot.
Around these parts, that guy's name is "root"...
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean
Sorry, dude. When I go to the link I provided, I get a directory full of src.rpm's (I copied that link directly out of my URL bar). When I go to the one you provided, I get a "FTP directory not found" or some such error.
Like I said, the URL's provided by LinuxOne are wrong.
--
- Sean
Ahhhh. kewl.
--
- Sean
Somehow, I doubt that would work very well. Given the format of the Slashdot interviews, they only get useful information out of someone who is willing to honestly answer all the questions posed to them.
So far, the people at L1 have been rather evasive about answering any hard-hitting questions (as evidenced by the very article we are responding to). So what's to stop them from (assuming they were even to agree to the interview in the first place) giving poor- or non-answers to any questions?
However, on a slightly more encouraging note, check out the sibling comment to this one, by a "Lester Bottoms". He claims to be the "Director of Business Development" for Linux One. There is no proof for this, however I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and believe him until I see evidence otherwise.
I say "encouraging" because it indicates that someone from L1 at least reads slashdot.
Now, the interesting thing is that this guy seems more interested in talking to Rob Malda (doesn't even seem to know his name... just calls him "CmdrTaco") than responding to any of the questions posed on the website.
This is particularly discouraging, since the only reason (aside from wanting to to an interview) that I can think of for this is that he wants to coerce Rob to stop running stories on L1. Hmmmm...
Richard, if there is a different reason, please let us know!
However, if this guy is legit, maybe we'll be able to get some answers out of him. Too bad there's no email address -- Hotmail or not -- attached to his account...
--
- Sean
I haven't bothered trying to download any of them, but this directory is full of src.rpms...
ftp://140.174.127.95/LinuxOne/Source/
--
- Sean