So I understand that you're not using K3b, amarok, kopete, konqueror, kate, quanta or any other good kde app because you want to be stuck with Xterm?
I'm not "stuck" with an xterm, although I use it for certain tasks and it's much more lightweight than a konsole. Recently a lot more of my interaction has been through a web browser. I load Firefox when I start and take it from there. Sometimes I run xmms, and in the past I've used Thunderbird for email although I tend to use gmail more often these days.
I don't deal a lot with CD's, so I don't need k3b. I don't need an MP3/ogg manager like amarok, since I don't spend a lot of time collecting music. I certainly don't need an instant messanger client. I already have a web browser. I prefer 'joe' for my text editor, but sometimes use emacs, and I don't do a lot of web coding to need quanta. I'm not trying to suggest that these aren't "good" applications, but I just don't need them for what I do on my workstation. Should this be a problem?
Sure, I use KDE apps occasionally, but not enough that I'll need the KDE runtime more than about once or twice a week. The main KDE app I probably use is kstars, because there isn't much available in the way of open source astronomy software. I settled on OpenOffice.org some time ago, it's helpful that it's cross-platform for those times when I do need to work with some documents I've earlier saved on a Windows box, and it's just convenient to keep using it.
It's not a bad desktop, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend my own setup for a novice user or someone converting from Windows, but not everyone running linux uses KDE or Gnome. I just find it a pain having to load the KDE runtime.
I actually went and read the article, and (surprise, surprise), Villasante is really not saying what Slashdot reports that he's saying.
If you read the entire article, he's not specifically complaining that corporations are abusing the free coding of open source. What he is saying is that the corporations who release open source are also very responsible for lobbying for a lot of things that are later likely to inhibit open source development in the future. His working example is the European intellectual property legislation, that would ultimately inhibit open source in the wider view but is still being campaigned for by the likes of IBM and Sun.
His point is that open source is the future of the software industry for Europe, yet by putting these laws in place that will give more power to the multi-national corportions, Europe is inhibiting its own future software industry.
He's suggesting that open source developers are happily working with these corporations at ground level, but the same organisations might ultimately lead to a less productive open source model. This is what he means about the open source communities not taking himself seriously.
I'm inclined to agree with him in many respects. Being able to develop in conjunction with businesses is a win-win scenario in terms of actually getting software developed, but we shouldn't necessarily ignore what else these businesses are doing just because they're cooperating in one aspect.
koffice is cleaner, less bloated, and better documented, and if (big if, I know, but still) all the effort that went into OOo went into it instead we would see more returns.
I might be tricking myself with this, but one of the reasons I tend to stay away from koffice is that I really don't like having to load all of he kde infrastructure underneath in order to actually load it. If I was using KDE in the first place I wouldn't care as much because that runtime environment would already be loaded. I actually use WindowMaker, however, because in comparison it's so fast with most simple tasks and I can get away from all of the extra stuff that tends to be loaded underneath.
In effect, I spend a lot of time looking for lightweight alternatives to run in WindowMaker rather than something that's going to (often unnecessarily) load the entire KDE runtime when I open it, not to mention requiring a truckload of KDE dependencies to simply install it. OpenOffice isn't exactly lightweight, but using it is still consistent with the habit of not wanting to load the KDE runtime.
I suggested I might be tricking myself, because I don't know how the generic KDE runtime stuff compares with whatever it is that OpenOffice loads internally on its own. I'd be interested to see a more formalised comparison for all of us who steer away from KDE unless we really have to use it.
I can't speak for the others, but you might not have noticed that python2.4 is already in Debian unstable, and has been for some time. (You have to install it explicitly, since the python package presently depends on python2.3.)
But having a requirement that something work on a large number of platforms slows down the release cycle.
I'm not sure that I agree. To me, the Debain delays seems to be at least as much a political and leadership thing. In particular, consider how quickly Debian went into a freeze for a new release after a change in leadership. Granted that it's a week behind schedule, but the green line is now going down rapidly, and we're expecting a new release within a matter of days. If it was so difficult to support and release on multiple architectures, this likely wouldn't have been able to happen.
I'm not trying to imply that the old Debian leadership was necessarily bad or that the new leadership is particularly good. But a change in attitudes very quickly resulted in a new release. This suggests that support on lots of architectures has little to do with it, whereas leadership attitudes has a lot to do with it.
We'll have to wait and see just how reliable Debian Sarge turns out to be when it's promoted to stable, of course. (Disclaimer: I run debian sarge on my home workstation and laptop.)
The article seems to imply that this tool should be useful to prevent someone from driving, and maybe rental car companies and the like would go for something like that. On the whole, though, it seems unlikely that anyone intent on actually driving the car won't be able to fool it. Unless it's forced on them by an overbearing government, it seems the people who this might prevent from driving are unlikely to have it installed in the first place.
I think that this sort of tool would be much more useful for someone who's already responsible enough. I can certainly see this being used as a very helpful indicator, similar to the audial beeping that can be set to go off if the car starts drifting too fast.
The vast majority of people who I know are responsible drinkers. If a sensor in a car reminds them that they're not fit to drive, they'll find some other way to get home, or dial up a driver service if necessary. I doubt they'd want to pay US$600 for it, but if mass production brought the price down and manufacturers started including it as an extra that simply provided a warning instead of trying to lock down the car, I'm pretty sure it'd get used.
I don't think "stealing" is a very good word to use, or you start to fall into the same trap that a lot of people accuse organisations like the RIAA and MPAA of. ("Stealing" music, copyright "theft", etc.) That is, unless you agree with them that use of another person's ideas without asking is theft.
Personally I think it's good that Microsoft has finally decided to implement what everyone else has, for a long time, known to be useful. Just because Microsoft has done it doesn't mean that everyone else must stop doing it.
The first three Indiana Jones movies were classic and beautiful. The movie felt realistic and compelling, in much the same way as the original three Star Wars movies.
Perhaps I'm mis-remembering, or maybe we just have different opinions, but personally I thought that the second Indiana Jones movie wasn't anywhere near the standard of the other two.
Raiders was a lot of fun, with both the script and the acting. It also had several very strong characters, including Marion Ravenwood, who's possibly one of the best female characters to have come out of a 1980's Hollywood movie.
In the Temple of Doom, this was all traded in for what seemed to be the boring stereotypical mid-80's movie formula at the time: a whinging helpless city girl being dragged along on an adventure, repeatedly made to look stupid by both Indy and an irritating 10-year old boy. The plot and the acting were both below standard.
I thought that Last Crusade was back to the original standard, though.
Indianna Jones is a really cool movie trilogy, and to be honest it's one of my favourites. I don't think you can look at it, though, and claim that it was classic and beautiful. I might go as far as saying that about two of the movies, but it severely trailed off in the middle. Maybe Lucas just got lucky with the original Star Wars movies.
wasn't Microsoft convicted of anti-trust violations relating to their monopoly on the browser? Wasn't a serious issue of their case the "need" to integrate Internet Explorer with the OS? Now it is MORE integrated--to the point that they CAN'T possibly make a Windows 2000 version?
Perhaps I've mis-understood something, but my understanding of the problem was that Windows couldn't work without IE. If IE7 doesn't work without Windows, then who cares? There are plenty of browser alternatives available. I agree that there could be a serious problem if Microsoft refuses to update IE for older versions of Windows, and in that way they could be leveraging their monopoly to force people to upgrade from Win2K, but I don't see that as being the same issue.
Anyone could write an application that relied on only recently-available API's, which is what Microsoft seems to be doing with IE7. It may be silly or restrictive to do so since it locks out large parts of the market, but unless they're still ensuring that new versions of Windows won't work without IE7 (completely possible), it doesn't seem to be the same problem.
Windows products do seem to use TABS.... Right-click on "My Computer" (if you've actually left it named that!), select PROPERTIES. Not only does Microsoft use TABS to manage some of the most important aspects of computers, they've done it poorly! [--snip--] Fortunately Mozilla and Firefox came along and convinced me tabbed interfaces could be done nicely and ergonomicly. I'm back in the tabbed fold... sigh.
I like the Mozilla/Firefox tabs, and so far I prefer them over anything else I've seen lately. If Microsoft actually does have a genuine problem, though, I think it's likely to be that the tabs Firefox uses work inconsistently with most similar-looking tabs in nearly any other application.
In Windows, tabs are nearly always static. The user can always see what tabs are visible, new tabs never appear and old tabs don't disappear. This is a factor in usability because it means the user can expect that they're aware of all available configuration options.
In Windows, the concept of creating a tab or destroying a tab don't exist. If Microsoft could argue something rationally about this, it would be that the concept of creating and destroying tabs might confuse a user, if not in IE than in nearly every other Windows application they use after it. It puts the user into a frame of mind where they're being asked to do something that's normally done by a developer.
I still think it's a silly argument, though, if only because static tabs need have nothing to do with it. The fact is that Microsoft does provide dynamic tabs in their applications -- they simply look slightly different. Specifically, take a look at how MS Excel manages multiple worksheets (within a spreadsheet), and you'll notice that it uses differents types of tabs, where they're spaced along the bottom of the window instead of the top. This type of tab mimics exactly the type of dynamic behaviour that Internet Explorer would be using.
If Microsoft wants to be consistent with their other applications, they need only utilise the same system that Excel uses, and they might even find that people more quickly understand Excel as a result.
OO.o will intermittently switch to English at random intervals and start marking all of your words as misspelled until you select the whole text and manually switch it to the other language (through the ungainly interface of the font selection dialog, IIRC.)
Were you simply changing language property of the font inline within the text, or were you changing the language property of the font for the 'default' style, which all other text styles are (I think) based on? (Visit Format/Styles/Catalog, then Modify the style called Default and adjust its language.)
If the former, you may find that because there are still remnants of other fonts in different (or maybe hidden-in-some-way) parts of your document, not to mention all of the other heading and paragraph styles that get used and injected through all sorts of automated operations, it could come back again quite easily.
I agree that the Font section seems like an unintuitive place for this, but I still think it'd fit perfectly well in the Paragraph section. Language is a property of particular bits of text much more than the entire document. There are a lot of cases where it's useful to be able to assign more than one language per document.
Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office? I'm considering switching everything over, especially after reading this article.
I vastly prefer OpenOffice over MS Office, but to be fair, there are a few things that I find slightly irritating. I haven't researched them properly, so it's possible they've been fixed since 1.1.3, which is what I've been using:
Sometimes when I save a Writer document on one system and open it on another, the page layouts are slightly different. (eg. What's exactly 4 pages on one system may be slightly over 4 pages on another.) I haven't figured out why, unless it's because the paper size settings are different between systems, and it's not being properly preserved in OpenOffice's saved document format.
For a reason that I can't identify, opening a Word document in OpenOffice causes all of the imported text to be dark blue. I presume there's something in an internal template that I haven't yet been able to locate.
There are a few minor niggles that I've had with things like table layout cell-spacing, when I can't get paragraphs in neighbouring cells to line up even though various settings seem to imply that they should. Having said so, I've had some much bigger nightmares fighting with table layouts in MS Word.
In my view it's not flawless, but I do vastly prefer it over Word.
I'm no expert on Time, and I haven't read it in a while, so I welcome any comments about my thoughts on this.
I've never found Time magazine terribly interesting. My impression of Time magazine was that it rarely does anything but echo trends and common beliefs that are being pushed in society, without really challenging or questioning many of them at all. People in America and other western countries like movies, and treat them with importance. It shouldn't be a surprise that Time will cover this in some way every so often.
Why should such a magazine be particularly interesting except for those who are already stereotypical members of society?
The roomba made sense- it replaced noisy, expensive vacuum cleaners (seriously, vacuum cleaners are expensive) and eliminated the work. This little bugger uses special, expensive consumables, and replaces two items which aren't particularly expensive (mop, bucket). Nor does it take very long to mop a floor- 2 minutes, if you include filling the bucket with warm water.
It's a bit hard to say without more information, but if you're paying someone to do all of this then it might make sense, if it's reliable and autonomous enough, and particularly if the cleaning solutions can be bought more cheaply in bulk.
There are a lot of large buildings around for public and office use, with large amounts of floor space. Most of them get cleaned and vacuumed every night, although this may not be obvious unless you're either a cleaner or work a lot of night shift.
I'm not a fan of layoffs either but a company is there to make money, nothing else.
I agree with you in this instance and probably most others like it, but only very reluctantly. A company is there solely to make money, but this is only the case because society has decided to put companies into such a position.
I find it quite reprehensible that the law treats corporations as legal people, with nearly all the rights but few if any of the conscious responsibilities and attitudes that one would typically expect from a real person in society, even if it's not enforced.
The fact that corporations are only there to make money for shareholders, as the law sees it, is what causes so many of our problems today. For instance, businesses don't "care" about the environment because they actually care. Businesses aren't even alive, so they can't care. They're abstract entities that "decide" to take it into account, in some cases, because they think it'll increase their profit margins and thereby their return to shareholders. The current system is why businesses such as Microsoft, but also many others, treat legal penalties for illegal practices (perhaps ones that weren't definitely established as illegal, for however dodgy they might have appeared) as "business expenses" or "business risks" rather than serious punishment to stop them doing the same things all over again. But the shareholders still get their money, and probably more of it.
At any time when it becomes more profitable to ignore good societial ethics in favour of profit, a corporation isn't just likely to ignore them, it's legally required to. The weirdest thing is that the shareholders themselves, to whom the company is supposedly responsible, are kept so abstract from the companies that they own that actually directing them to aim for anything other than profit is a near-impossible exercise.
I'll be one of the first to admit that the current market system is responsible for some huge leaps in efficiency of businesses, and their ability to do things well and give certain things back to society. That said, it's also the cause of some serious problems that are coming back to haunt us, and it'll keep happening for as long as people let their governments be run by abstract corporate dinosaurs that have leaped out of control.
I think Linux is the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees; it does not need to steal credit from BSD and other projects in order to deserve praise.
You're absolutely right with this: Linux is just an optional kernel in an entire system of interchangable software.
I use linux at home because I find it so much easier to administer than any other 'nix. (It has a much larger userbase and there's a lot of free support, which I like.) That aside, I also have access to a mostly NetBSD-based intranet that's administered brilliantly by someone else who knows what they're doing.
For the most part, whether it's linux or BSD doesn't matter to me at all. The underlying standards mean that I can run virtually any software on one system that will run on the other. If a component of either system fails, becomes obsolete or unsupported, I really won't have to worry because I can just slot in a replacement component.
The ability to do this has nothing, directly, to do with linux -- it has to do with Open Source. If there's any comparison here at all, it's between the Microsoft model of doing things, and the Open Source model of doing things.
... that the best software in the world couldn't protect you from the stupidity of the guy in front of the monitor. Makes you wonder who is worse: Microsoft or their users?
Not properly evaluating or understanding attachments that are sent via email is synonymous to not critically evaluating any information that's received... such as faithfully believing whatever happens to be published on the television evening news.
Personally I'm not sure if it's so much a computer training issue. A lot of these problems might be solved in one go, if only the education system could focus a bit more on training people to be critical and cautious of all information that they receive.
I'm not trying to imply that this is all the education system's fault, either. Society's just screwed up right now, and there are so many contradictory messages out that that completely undermine so much of what good education actually has to offer.
The kind of people that would watch a crappy version on their computers are NOT the people who would pay $9 to see it in the theatre. Will this affect anything? No.
It seems to me just like the MPAA pumping the press to make it look like a huge deal. It's not.
I don't exactly respect the MPAA, their way of doing things, or what they stand for. But to me it seems that if the MPAA didn't go to such draconian lengths to make it difficult for people to make good copies, there would be much higher quality renditions circulating via BitTorrent.
Lesson learnt: if it's about a country your country does not like, for any reason do not trust the information you get. No matter which country is yours and which the other. Either go and check for yourself, or simply guard your doubts.
Definitely, and there are lots of examples of this on both sides. My girlfriend was in Chile when this happened. The local newspapers, including the ones that people there didn't see as gutter press, all reported that the Spice Girls had been lined up on a rugby field and shot.
As ironic as that might have been, it didn't actually happen.
I mean, we all know how it's going to end, and we all know the points the plot HAS to pass through, we all know who HAS to survive, etc, etc. There's no real freedom in there, except to fill in the minor details which don't advance the overall plot.
I disagree with you quite strongly. If the prequels suck, it has nothing to do with knowing what happens in the future.
There are plenty of examples, written and film, where what happens at the end is known very accurately. The entertainment and interest comes from finding out how the story gets to where it has to be. Any historical novel is based on telling a story with a known ending -- often even with the events well known throughout it. This doesn't mean that a great story can't be told. (Try reading "Aztec", by Gary Jennnings.)
If you haven't watched Babylon 5, for instance, or any of the later shows that followed its example, you should. The entire show was based on telling the audience up-front about exactly what would happen -- often years in advance, but hiding the details of how the characters and the story would get to that point. The interest comes out of all these extra details, especially the character development and exploring why people ended up doing what they did.
I'm going to try not to comment on how well George Lucas developed his prequels, but he hadn't exactly written himself into a corner by releasing the later episodes first. Especially given the underlying story of Anakin's change of character, there was plenty of material to work with and make three brilliant films.
Tabs are a really bad thing -- they are a totally inconsistant form of window management that is only used in one type of application. They defeat the normal applicaiton switchers (taskbar, dock, expose, alt-tab).
If you're speaking short term then you might have a point for consistency. Long term, I think it's necessary to justify that all of these other types of application switchers are better than tabs. To be honest, I don't have much confidence in Microsoft's ability to offer good UI advice -- the company has a history of ignoring even its own researchers unless it's convenient not to, and it also has a history of hideous UI's. Above all, Microsoft has a conflict of interests, where it's advantageous for it to promote the use of whatever UI methods and standards it already provides.
From the tab perspective, every so often, I've wondered what it might be like if tabs were the dominant form of application switching. It'd mean less annoying windows floating around my desktop, for one thing.
Sadly, Linux's biggest strength is that it implements ideas from other oses very well. It just just implements them a few years after everyone else. Kde and Gnome look a lot like very pretty versions Windows 98.
But they work a whole lot better in many ways. Perhaps they fall short in others depending on your specific needs. In my view, though, either KDE or Gnome today offer a far superior experience to Windows 98 and a very comparable (if not better) experience to Windows XP. As someone else pointed out, WinXP is really just a dressed up 98, which in itself is just a dressed up 95.
Personally I mostly use WindowMaker, but last time I looked at KDE, for instance, I was very impressed with the way that it's managed to integrate so many things, apparently so seamlessly. It's true that many of the ideas have already been implemented in Windows, more often than not by third parties than by Microsoft, but perhaps because of that, the Windows implementations of them are often quite half-baked and badly integrated.
Okay, that's a fair enough comment I shall have to get the DVD some time. I do still wonder if he gets any royalties for the movie-related income, or if it's completely independent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not "stuck" with an xterm, although I use it for certain tasks and it's much more lightweight than a konsole. Recently a lot more of my interaction has been through a web browser. I load Firefox when I start and take it from there. Sometimes I run xmms, and in the past I've used Thunderbird for email although I tend to use gmail more often these days.
I don't deal a lot with CD's, so I don't need k3b. I don't need an MP3/ogg manager like amarok, since I don't spend a lot of time collecting music. I certainly don't need an instant messanger client. I already have a web browser. I prefer 'joe' for my text editor, but sometimes use emacs, and I don't do a lot of web coding to need quanta. I'm not trying to suggest that these aren't "good" applications, but I just don't need them for what I do on my workstation. Should this be a problem?
Sure, I use KDE apps occasionally, but not enough that I'll need the KDE runtime more than about once or twice a week. The main KDE app I probably use is kstars, because there isn't much available in the way of open source astronomy software. I settled on OpenOffice.org some time ago, it's helpful that it's cross-platform for those times when I do need to work with some documents I've earlier saved on a Windows box, and it's just convenient to keep using it.
It's not a bad desktop, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend my own setup for a novice user or someone converting from Windows, but not everyone running linux uses KDE or Gnome. I just find it a pain having to load the KDE runtime.
I actually went and read the article, and (surprise, surprise), Villasante is really not saying what Slashdot reports that he's saying.
If you read the entire article, he's not specifically complaining that corporations are abusing the free coding of open source. What he is saying is that the corporations who release open source are also very responsible for lobbying for a lot of things that are later likely to inhibit open source development in the future. His working example is the European intellectual property legislation, that would ultimately inhibit open source in the wider view but is still being campaigned for by the likes of IBM and Sun.
His point is that open source is the future of the software industry for Europe, yet by putting these laws in place that will give more power to the multi-national corportions, Europe is inhibiting its own future software industry.
He's suggesting that open source developers are happily working with these corporations at ground level, but the same organisations might ultimately lead to a less productive open source model. This is what he means about the open source communities not taking himself seriously.
I'm inclined to agree with him in many respects. Being able to develop in conjunction with businesses is a win-win scenario in terms of actually getting software developed, but we shouldn't necessarily ignore what else these businesses are doing just because they're cooperating in one aspect.
I might be tricking myself with this, but one of the reasons I tend to stay away from koffice is that I really don't like having to load all of he kde infrastructure underneath in order to actually load it. If I was using KDE in the first place I wouldn't care as much because that runtime environment would already be loaded. I actually use WindowMaker, however, because in comparison it's so fast with most simple tasks and I can get away from all of the extra stuff that tends to be loaded underneath.
In effect, I spend a lot of time looking for lightweight alternatives to run in WindowMaker rather than something that's going to (often unnecessarily) load the entire KDE runtime when I open it, not to mention requiring a truckload of KDE dependencies to simply install it. OpenOffice isn't exactly lightweight, but using it is still consistent with the habit of not wanting to load the KDE runtime.
I suggested I might be tricking myself, because I don't know how the generic KDE runtime stuff compares with whatever it is that OpenOffice loads internally on its own. I'd be interested to see a more formalised comparison for all of us who steer away from KDE unless we really have to use it.
I can't speak for the others, but you might not have noticed that python2.4 is already in Debian unstable, and has been for some time. (You have to install it explicitly, since the python package presently depends on python2.3.)
I'm not sure that I agree. To me, the Debain delays seems to be at least as much a political and leadership thing. In particular, consider how quickly Debian went into a freeze for a new release after a change in leadership. Granted that it's a week behind schedule, but the green line is now going down rapidly, and we're expecting a new release within a matter of days. If it was so difficult to support and release on multiple architectures, this likely wouldn't have been able to happen.
I'm not trying to imply that the old Debian leadership was necessarily bad or that the new leadership is particularly good. But a change in attitudes very quickly resulted in a new release. This suggests that support on lots of architectures has little to do with it, whereas leadership attitudes has a lot to do with it.
We'll have to wait and see just how reliable Debian Sarge turns out to be when it's promoted to stable, of course. (Disclaimer: I run debian sarge on my home workstation and laptop.)
The article seems to imply that this tool should be useful to prevent someone from driving, and maybe rental car companies and the like would go for something like that. On the whole, though, it seems unlikely that anyone intent on actually driving the car won't be able to fool it. Unless it's forced on them by an overbearing government, it seems the people who this might prevent from driving are unlikely to have it installed in the first place.
I think that this sort of tool would be much more useful for someone who's already responsible enough. I can certainly see this being used as a very helpful indicator, similar to the audial beeping that can be set to go off if the car starts drifting too fast.
The vast majority of people who I know are responsible drinkers. If a sensor in a car reminds them that they're not fit to drive, they'll find some other way to get home, or dial up a driver service if necessary. I doubt they'd want to pay US$600 for it, but if mass production brought the price down and manufacturers started including it as an extra that simply provided a warning instead of trying to lock down the car, I'm pretty sure it'd get used.
I don't think "stealing" is a very good word to use, or you start to fall into the same trap that a lot of people accuse organisations like the RIAA and MPAA of. ("Stealing" music, copyright "theft", etc.) That is, unless you agree with them that use of another person's ideas without asking is theft.
Personally I think it's good that Microsoft has finally decided to implement what everyone else has, for a long time, known to be useful. Just because Microsoft has done it doesn't mean that everyone else must stop doing it.
Perhaps I'm mis-remembering, or maybe we just have different opinions, but personally I thought that the second Indiana Jones movie wasn't anywhere near the standard of the other two.
Raiders was a lot of fun, with both the script and the acting. It also had several very strong characters, including Marion Ravenwood, who's possibly one of the best female characters to have come out of a 1980's Hollywood movie.
In the Temple of Doom, this was all traded in for what seemed to be the boring stereotypical mid-80's movie formula at the time: a whinging helpless city girl being dragged along on an adventure, repeatedly made to look stupid by both Indy and an irritating 10-year old boy. The plot and the acting were both below standard.
I thought that Last Crusade was back to the original standard, though.
Indianna Jones is a really cool movie trilogy, and to be honest it's one of my favourites. I don't think you can look at it, though, and claim that it was classic and beautiful. I might go as far as saying that about two of the movies, but it severely trailed off in the middle. Maybe Lucas just got lucky with the original Star Wars movies.
Perhaps I've mis-understood something, but my understanding of the problem was that Windows couldn't work without IE. If IE7 doesn't work without Windows, then who cares? There are plenty of browser alternatives available. I agree that there could be a serious problem if Microsoft refuses to update IE for older versions of Windows, and in that way they could be leveraging their monopoly to force people to upgrade from Win2K, but I don't see that as being the same issue.
Anyone could write an application that relied on only recently-available API's, which is what Microsoft seems to be doing with IE7. It may be silly or restrictive to do so since it locks out large parts of the market, but unless they're still ensuring that new versions of Windows won't work without IE7 (completely possible), it doesn't seem to be the same problem.
Maybe I've missed a point in your response, but isn't that exactly what I said? (See paragraph 4.)
I like the Mozilla/Firefox tabs, and so far I prefer them over anything else I've seen lately. If Microsoft actually does have a genuine problem, though, I think it's likely to be that the tabs Firefox uses work inconsistently with most similar-looking tabs in nearly any other application.
In Windows, tabs are nearly always static. The user can always see what tabs are visible, new tabs never appear and old tabs don't disappear. This is a factor in usability because it means the user can expect that they're aware of all available configuration options.
In Windows, the concept of creating a tab or destroying a tab don't exist. If Microsoft could argue something rationally about this, it would be that the concept of creating and destroying tabs might confuse a user, if not in IE than in nearly every other Windows application they use after it. It puts the user into a frame of mind where they're being asked to do something that's normally done by a developer.
I still think it's a silly argument, though, if only because static tabs need have nothing to do with it. The fact is that Microsoft does provide dynamic tabs in their applications -- they simply look slightly different. Specifically, take a look at how MS Excel manages multiple worksheets (within a spreadsheet), and you'll notice that it uses differents types of tabs, where they're spaced along the bottom of the window instead of the top. This type of tab mimics exactly the type of dynamic behaviour that Internet Explorer would be using.
If Microsoft wants to be consistent with their other applications, they need only utilise the same system that Excel uses, and they might even find that people more quickly understand Excel as a result.
Were you simply changing language property of the font inline within the text, or were you changing the language property of the font for the 'default' style, which all other text styles are (I think) based on? (Visit Format/Styles/Catalog, then Modify the style called Default and adjust its language.)
If the former, you may find that because there are still remnants of other fonts in different (or maybe hidden-in-some-way) parts of your document, not to mention all of the other heading and paragraph styles that get used and injected through all sorts of automated operations, it could come back again quite easily.
I agree that the Font section seems like an unintuitive place for this, but I still think it'd fit perfectly well in the Paragraph section. Language is a property of particular bits of text much more than the entire document. There are a lot of cases where it's useful to be able to assign more than one language per document.
I vastly prefer OpenOffice over MS Office, but to be fair, there are a few things that I find slightly irritating. I haven't researched them properly, so it's possible they've been fixed since 1.1.3, which is what I've been using:
Sometimes when I save a Writer document on one system and open it on another, the page layouts are slightly different. (eg. What's exactly 4 pages on one system may be slightly over 4 pages on another.) I haven't figured out why, unless it's because the paper size settings are different between systems, and it's not being properly preserved in OpenOffice's saved document format.
For a reason that I can't identify, opening a Word document in OpenOffice causes all of the imported text to be dark blue. I presume there's something in an internal template that I haven't yet been able to locate.
There are a few minor niggles that I've had with things like table layout cell-spacing, when I can't get paragraphs in neighbouring cells to line up even though various settings seem to imply that they should. Having said so, I've had some much bigger nightmares fighting with table layouts in MS Word.
In my view it's not flawless, but I do vastly prefer it over Word.
I'm no expert on Time, and I haven't read it in a while, so I welcome any comments about my thoughts on this.
I've never found Time magazine terribly interesting. My impression of Time magazine was that it rarely does anything but echo trends and common beliefs that are being pushed in society, without really challenging or questioning many of them at all. People in America and other western countries like movies, and treat them with importance. It shouldn't be a surprise that Time will cover this in some way every so often.
Why should such a magazine be particularly interesting except for those who are already stereotypical members of society?
It's not quite the same, but for what it's worth there are still some BBS's operating that are available via Telnet. Check out here for a listing.
It's a bit hard to say without more information, but if you're paying someone to do all of this then it might make sense, if it's reliable and autonomous enough, and particularly if the cleaning solutions can be bought more cheaply in bulk.
There are a lot of large buildings around for public and office use, with large amounts of floor space. Most of them get cleaned and vacuumed every night, although this may not be obvious unless you're either a cleaner or work a lot of night shift.
I agree with you in this instance and probably most others like it, but only very reluctantly. A company is there solely to make money, but this is only the case because society has decided to put companies into such a position.
I find it quite reprehensible that the law treats corporations as legal people, with nearly all the rights but few if any of the conscious responsibilities and attitudes that one would typically expect from a real person in society, even if it's not enforced.
The fact that corporations are only there to make money for shareholders, as the law sees it, is what causes so many of our problems today. For instance, businesses don't "care" about the environment because they actually care. Businesses aren't even alive, so they can't care. They're abstract entities that "decide" to take it into account, in some cases, because they think it'll increase their profit margins and thereby their return to shareholders. The current system is why businesses such as Microsoft, but also many others, treat legal penalties for illegal practices (perhaps ones that weren't definitely established as illegal, for however dodgy they might have appeared) as "business expenses" or "business risks" rather than serious punishment to stop them doing the same things all over again. But the shareholders still get their money, and probably more of it.
At any time when it becomes more profitable to ignore good societial ethics in favour of profit, a corporation isn't just likely to ignore them, it's legally required to. The weirdest thing is that the shareholders themselves, to whom the company is supposedly responsible, are kept so abstract from the companies that they own that actually directing them to aim for anything other than profit is a near-impossible exercise.
I'll be one of the first to admit that the current market system is responsible for some huge leaps in efficiency of businesses, and their ability to do things well and give certain things back to society. That said, it's also the cause of some serious problems that are coming back to haunt us, and it'll keep happening for as long as people let their governments be run by abstract corporate dinosaurs that have leaped out of control.
You're absolutely right with this: Linux is just an optional kernel in an entire system of interchangable software.
I use linux at home because I find it so much easier to administer than any other 'nix. (It has a much larger userbase and there's a lot of free support, which I like.) That aside, I also have access to a mostly NetBSD-based intranet that's administered brilliantly by someone else who knows what they're doing.
For the most part, whether it's linux or BSD doesn't matter to me at all. The underlying standards mean that I can run virtually any software on one system that will run on the other. If a component of either system fails, becomes obsolete or unsupported, I really won't have to worry because I can just slot in a replacement component.
The ability to do this has nothing, directly, to do with linux -- it has to do with Open Source. If there's any comparison here at all, it's between the Microsoft model of doing things, and the Open Source model of doing things.
Not properly evaluating or understanding attachments that are sent via email is synonymous to not critically evaluating any information that's received... such as faithfully believing whatever happens to be published on the television evening news.
Personally I'm not sure if it's so much a computer training issue. A lot of these problems might be solved in one go, if only the education system could focus a bit more on training people to be critical and cautious of all information that they receive.
I'm not trying to imply that this is all the education system's fault, either. Society's just screwed up right now, and there are so many contradictory messages out that that completely undermine so much of what good education actually has to offer.
I don't exactly respect the MPAA, their way of doing things, or what they stand for. But to me it seems that if the MPAA didn't go to such draconian lengths to make it difficult for people to make good copies, there would be much higher quality renditions circulating via BitTorrent.
Definitely, and there are lots of examples of this on both sides. My girlfriend was in Chile when this happened. The local newspapers, including the ones that people there didn't see as gutter press, all reported that the Spice Girls had been lined up on a rugby field and shot.
As ironic as that might have been, it didn't actually happen.
I disagree with you quite strongly. If the prequels suck, it has nothing to do with knowing what happens in the future.
There are plenty of examples, written and film, where what happens at the end is known very accurately. The entertainment and interest comes from finding out how the story gets to where it has to be. Any historical novel is based on telling a story with a known ending -- often even with the events well known throughout it. This doesn't mean that a great story can't be told. (Try reading "Aztec", by Gary Jennnings.)
If you haven't watched Babylon 5, for instance, or any of the later shows that followed its example, you should. The entire show was based on telling the audience up-front about exactly what would happen -- often years in advance, but hiding the details of how the characters and the story would get to that point. The interest comes out of all these extra details, especially the character development and exploring why people ended up doing what they did.
I'm going to try not to comment on how well George Lucas developed his prequels, but he hadn't exactly written himself into a corner by releasing the later episodes first. Especially given the underlying story of Anakin's change of character, there was plenty of material to work with and make three brilliant films.
If you're speaking short term then you might have a point for consistency. Long term, I think it's necessary to justify that all of these other types of application switchers are better than tabs. To be honest, I don't have much confidence in Microsoft's ability to offer good UI advice -- the company has a history of ignoring even its own researchers unless it's convenient not to, and it also has a history of hideous UI's. Above all, Microsoft has a conflict of interests, where it's advantageous for it to promote the use of whatever UI methods and standards it already provides.
From the tab perspective, every so often, I've wondered what it might be like if tabs were the dominant form of application switching. It'd mean less annoying windows floating around my desktop, for one thing.
But they work a whole lot better in many ways. Perhaps they fall short in others depending on your specific needs. In my view, though, either KDE or Gnome today offer a far superior experience to Windows 98 and a very comparable (if not better) experience to Windows XP. As someone else pointed out, WinXP is really just a dressed up 98, which in itself is just a dressed up 95.
Personally I mostly use WindowMaker, but last time I looked at KDE, for instance, I was very impressed with the way that it's managed to integrate so many things, apparently so seamlessly. It's true that many of the ideas have already been implemented in Windows, more often than not by third parties than by Microsoft, but perhaps because of that, the Windows implementations of them are often quite half-baked and badly integrated.
Okay, that's a fair enough comment I shall have to get the DVD some time. I do still wonder if he gets any royalties for the movie-related income, or if it's completely independent.