but because they have a very direct, personal interest in the direction of their nation's foreign policy.
If we denied people to right to vote because of conflict of interest, not many people would be allowed to vote. Do we also deny people in the defense industry? What about those janitors who sweep the floors of the defense industry? Are those receiving direct funding from the government (at any level) eligible, such as welfare recipients, social security recipients, teachers, firemen?
It's so nice to know that the Linux community is free from elitism and other bad attitudes. Such a breath of fresh air in hackerdom.
I mean after all, the freebsd-newbies list sends out a weekly messages saying to not post technical questions to the list. And what do the FreeBSD people do when someone posts a technical question to the wrong list after being repeatedly told not to? They tell the user not to! How rude!
The number of hardcopy paper-and-ink books on a bookstore's shelves directly correlates to the operating system's "slashdot" rating. Linux used to have only a couple of books in the bookshelves, and only geeks used it. Then there were hundreds, including a whole series of "For Dummies..." books different only the title of the distribution on the cover. It was only then that Slashdot began posting front page articles on every minor release of the development kernel.
If we want every minor -STABLE update to have a major mispelled referrer-altered main page announcement on Slashdot, then we need more than the dozen FreeBSD books that are out there. CndrTaco and Hemoo will never recognize FreeBSD as an operating system until it has its own category in the Dewey Decimal System.
Paper grows on tree. Literally. Not figuratively or metaphorically, but literally.
Now consider how we get silicon, copper, aluminum and plastic, which go into the production of laptop computers. Also consider the sources of electricity used to power that computer.
I don't mean to imply that paper manufacturing is perfect. But the trees used to make paper are grown on farms. Maybe we should start making laptops out of wood too. But then they wouldn't weigh only four pounds, which would put a severe crimp in the lifestyles of environmentalists.
This is a myth. There were things in Win95 that had long been in in the Mac. But Microsoft didn't copy the Mac. They copied OS/2 Warp.
The reason this myth got started is because most tech reporters at the time (as now) only use Windows. They had to compare this new look to something in their experience, but they didn't have any experience outside of Windows. But they did notice that some people in the publication's art department were using that Mac. So they compared it to that. Most likely they had never even heard of OS/2. And if they did, certainly they never used it.
Funny, I can do roughly the same thing with KDE through the miniCLI. Except I don't need the word "start". For example: ~/myrandomdocument.sxw. I'm sure there's a KDE command line tool equivalient to "start" that does the same thing.
The Unix tradition of splitting up applications by *type of content* instead of *application* is crazy.
Yes it's crazy. There are some systems that do it the "non-crazy" way, but not many. And none which are popular or particularly current. I can think of RISCOS and NeXT and that's it.
Windows certainly doesn't do it that way. Do you seriously think I can type in "msword" at a DOS/NT prompt and expect anything meaningful to happen? You'll get an error message unless you have specifically set the path to wherever it's installed. DOS/NT has no idea where "msword" is unless you tell it. That's why people run that program using the menu or clicking an icon. But oddly enough, UNIX knows exactly where "abiword" is when you type it on the command line.
It would certainly be nice to have a RISCOS like directory structure. But that's not what GoboLinux is doing.
p.s. If you can think of any sensible mechanism to make a RISCOS like directory structure usable for any arbitrary application under UNIX, please let me know, because I would like to implement it. Making it work for just ROX applications isn't good enough. It needs to work for XEmacs, Konqueror, OpenOffice, and anything else not specifically designed for that infrastructure.
But why is there cruft like/bin vs./usr/bin and/sbin vs./usr/sbin in a typical linux FS?
Because/bin and/sbin are always located on the root partition, whereas/usr might not be. For a single user home system, this doesn't mean much. But most uses of UNIX aren't on the single user home system.
I've often found myself wishing there was a standard place that locally installed apps would go to across Linux distros.
That standard location is indeed/usr/local. Hence the name. / and/usr are for the base system./usr/local is for everything else. Most Linux distros do not follow this rule, even though it's spelled out in the FHS. For historical reasons, there's also a/usr/X11R6./opt is just a kludge, and shouldn't be used except for oddball packages, mostly commercial.
In short,/usr is the domain of the OS/distro, while/usr/local is the domain of the sysadmin.
The problem is, that's impossible. No file directory structure is going to be innately intuitive, because the whole concept of "file" and "directory" is not innately intuitive.
I had to take a class and pass a test before I could drive a car. And a car is much easier to use than a computer. So why is everyone demanding that computers require no education to use?
How does this help? How many newbies are going to leave their home directory anyway?
If someone can't get beyong the GUI, then a simple "Home" icon is all they need. If they can get beyond that location, and don't know anything, then the directory names should be *scary* so that they don't start deleting random files out of/etc or/sbin. And if they are smart enough to know what they're doing, then there's no need to change their names anyway.
Organizing the home directory makes sense. But reorganizing and renaming the system infrastructure just so we don't scare off people who shouldn't be there anyway is silly. Who cares that "/Programs/XFree86/4.3/" is more friendly than "/usr/X11R6" when we don't want the clueless in that directory to begin with?
I'd still hire "old" people, but only if their resume showed strong skills with new technology and new ways of designing/doing things.
"I'm sorry, I can't hire you because you haven't demonstrated that you can keep up with the technology."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, it says here that you wrote the kernel for Windows 95, but nothing about experience with Windows Server 2003. And you seem very efficient in Perl, C, C++ and Java, but we're using C#. And to top things off, you drive a Buick Regal and don't have any body piercings. We can't possibly hire you because you're married and have kids, which means we won't be your sole overriding priority in life."
I can see why they call you "ratboy". Here's a vastly superior way to do you first example:... if ((flag & VAL1) || (flag & VAL2)
;/* nothing */ else...
So stop abusing operator overloading. When you overload '+' for char* you are abusing the mechanism. However, overloading '+' for string makes sense.
The syntactic sugar I would really like to see for C++ is the ability to write your own operators. Then you could use statements such as "x = y cat z". (of course what I really want is a readable object oriented functional language suitable for systems programming)
The common man did stand for that way back when, because way back when computers cost more than your house. "Back that truck up to the side, the Vax is going in the spare bedroom we converted to an office."
But the idea of thin clients is still a good one... in some environments. No, not your home. But maybe at your company. The traditional "thin" client is passe, because the hardware is so cheap now, but "smart" clients can be pretty damned useful. I don't know if that term has any officialdom, but a lot of modern UNIX networks are set up that way. A smart client works like a typical X terminal, but it has its own OS and local storage. Run OpenOffice on your local Linux/BSD desktop, but that $20,000 CAD is running on that server over there. It makes no difference to you though, because it acts like it's local.
Re:Resolved: NOTGNOME
on
GnomeDex 3.0
·
· Score: 1
A president who thinks he's got a missile shield is like a middle schooler wearing gang colors in the Bronx who thinks he knows karate. I think that's the worst analogy I've ever come up with. Good lord.
It is a very bad analogy. Especially considering that the prior administration under Saint Bill had the same missile shield, and that should Gore Esq. have won the last election, he would have had that very same missile shield. This isn't something that Bush invented.
Back to the topic at hand. Should there be nation states with ballistic missiles aimed at the US, then I, as a US citizen, would prefer to have a missile shield of some kind in place, even if it isn't 100% perfect, than to have no shield at all. Notice that I did NOT say that I would before a greater offensive buildup. Nor did I say that I didn't want any other country to have one as well. Stopping 99 missiles out of 100 from getting through is a damn site better than letting all 100 get though.
I may have issues with specific proposals for ballistic defense technologies, but I do not have any issues with the basic concept. My views on the matter do not shift and sway according to who is currently holding the office of US President.
And I guess reality is too blunt for you. The Soyuz program has a bad record of missing their landing targets. But they still make it more than they miss. NASA has an excellent record. But let's assume that SDI is all screwed up, and it fails one time in a hundred. So when the baddies launch 100 missiles, the odds are pretty good that they'll shoot down 99 of them. It's a damned shame about that one city, but it's a damn sight better than 100 smoldering cities.
Dude, it's called "risk analysis". You are far more likely to die from a software bug in an automobile ignition system than you are to die from a software bug in an orbital weapons platform.
Are you really worried that SDI is going to burn your house down? Consider that SDI has never burned a house down, but thousands still manage to burn down every year.
Where do you people come from, and why won't you crawl back there?
KDE is not released under the GPL license. It's released under a wide variety of licenses, GPL merely being the most common, followed by in rough order the LGPL, QPL, BSD and MIT licenses, plus a few others.
KWin, the window manager component, is under the BSD license. So technically does this make KDE BSD? Of course not!
And free Qt is under *TWO* different licenses, at the same time! GPL and QPL. The popular Liquid theme is under the QPL. Does this make Liquid property of Trolltech, or Mosfet their employee? Of course not!
Norwegian has a separate word for free as in freedom
Cool! And what is this word? And how is it different from "free" as in "free verse", "free electron", "free end of a rope", and "free from danger"?
There are probably a dozen distinct definitions to the English word "free". Does two words in Norwegian, Spanish, French, etc., really solve any problems? Okay now we know that the 'G' in "GNU" does not mean "gratis", but frankly, we all knew that already.
Slashdot Mirror
What about:
d: loyalty is to people, loyalty to software is akin to cultism, and IBM doesn't join cults.
but because they have a very direct, personal interest in the direction of their nation's foreign policy.
If we denied people to right to vote because of conflict of interest, not many people would be allowed to vote. Do we also deny people in the defense industry? What about those janitors who sweep the floors of the defense industry? Are those receiving direct funding from the government (at any level) eligible, such as welfare recipients, social security recipients, teachers, firemen?
It's so nice to know that the Linux community is free from elitism and other bad attitudes. Such a breath of fresh air in hackerdom.
I mean after all, the freebsd-newbies list sends out a weekly messages saying to not post technical questions to the list. And what do the FreeBSD people do when someone posts a technical question to the wrong list after being repeatedly told not to? They tell the user not to! How rude!
The number of hardcopy paper-and-ink books on a bookstore's shelves directly correlates to the operating system's "slashdot" rating. Linux used to have only a couple of books in the bookshelves, and only geeks used it. Then there were hundreds, including a whole series of "For Dummies..." books different only the title of the distribution on the cover. It was only then that Slashdot began posting front page articles on every minor release of the development kernel.
If we want every minor -STABLE update to have a major mispelled referrer-altered main page announcement on Slashdot, then we need more than the dozen FreeBSD books that are out there. CndrTaco and Hemoo will never recognize FreeBSD as an operating system until it has its own category in the Dewey Decimal System.
Paper grows on tree. Literally. Not figuratively or metaphorically, but literally.
Now consider how we get silicon, copper, aluminum and plastic, which go into the production of laptop computers. Also consider the sources of electricity used to power that computer.
I don't mean to imply that paper manufacturing is perfect. But the trees used to make paper are grown on farms. Maybe we should start making laptops out of wood too. But then they wouldn't weigh only four pounds, which would put a severe crimp in the lifestyles of environmentalists.
Windows 95 copied things that had been in MacOS
This is a myth. There were things in Win95 that had long been in in the Mac. But Microsoft didn't copy the Mac. They copied OS/2 Warp.
The reason this myth got started is because most tech reporters at the time (as now) only use Windows. They had to compare this new look to something in their experience, but they didn't have any experience outside of Windows. But they did notice that some people in the publication's art department were using that Mac. So they compared it to that. Most likely they had never even heard of OS/2. And if they did, certainly they never used it.
Funny, I can do roughly the same thing with KDE through the miniCLI. Except I don't need the word "start". For example: ~/myrandomdocument.sxw. I'm sure there's a KDE command line tool equivalient to "start" that does the same thing.
Open Konsole and there's a Linux command line
Every time I open Konsole I get a FreeBSD command line instead. Maybe I should log this as a bug to Redhat so they can fix it for me.
The Unix tradition of splitting up applications by *type of content* instead of *application* is crazy.
Yes it's crazy. There are some systems that do it the "non-crazy" way, but not many. And none which are popular or particularly current. I can think of RISCOS and NeXT and that's it.
Windows certainly doesn't do it that way. Do you seriously think I can type in "msword" at a DOS/NT prompt and expect anything meaningful to happen? You'll get an error message unless you have specifically set the path to wherever it's installed. DOS/NT has no idea where "msword" is unless you tell it. That's why people run that program using the menu or clicking an icon. But oddly enough, UNIX knows exactly where "abiword" is when you type it on the command line.
It would certainly be nice to have a RISCOS like directory structure. But that's not what GoboLinux is doing.
p.s. If you can think of any sensible mechanism to make a RISCOS like directory structure usable for any arbitrary application under UNIX, please let me know, because I would like to implement it. Making it work for just ROX applications isn't good enough. It needs to work for XEmacs, Konqueror, OpenOffice, and anything else not specifically designed for that infrastructure.
But why is there cruft like /bin vs. /usr/bin and /sbin vs. /usr/sbin in a typical linux FS?
/bin and /sbin are always located on the root partition, whereas /usr might not be. For a single user home system, this doesn't mean much. But most uses of UNIX aren't on the single user home system.
/usr/local. Hence the name. / and /usr are for the base system. /usr/local is for everything else. Most Linux distros do not follow this rule, even though it's spelled out in the FHS. For historical reasons, there's also a /usr/X11R6. /opt is just a kludge, and shouldn't be used except for oddball packages, mostly commercial.
/usr is the domain of the OS/distro, while /usr/local is the domain of the sysadmin.
Because
I've often found myself wishing there was a standard place that locally installed apps would go to across Linux distros.
That standard location is indeed
In short,
The problem is, that's impossible. No file directory structure is going to be innately intuitive, because the whole concept of "file" and "directory" is not innately intuitive.
I had to take a class and pass a test before I could drive a car. And a car is much easier to use than a computer. So why is everyone demanding that computers require no education to use?
How does this help? How many newbies are going to leave their home directory anyway?
/etc or /sbin. And if they are smart enough to know what they're doing, then there's no need to change their names anyway.
If someone can't get beyong the GUI, then a simple "Home" icon is all they need. If they can get beyond that location, and don't know anything, then the directory names should be *scary* so that they don't start deleting random files out of
Organizing the home directory makes sense. But reorganizing and renaming the system infrastructure just so we don't scare off people who shouldn't be there anyway is silly. Who cares that "/Programs/XFree86/4.3/" is more friendly than "/usr/X11R6" when we don't want the clueless in that directory to begin with?
...and we don't have to get the girl drunk first before we can work up the courage :-)
I'd still hire "old" people, but only if their resume showed strong skills with new technology and new ways of designing/doing things.
"I'm sorry, I can't hire you because you haven't demonstrated that you can keep up with the technology."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, it says here that you wrote the kernel for Windows 95, but nothing about experience with Windows Server 2003. And you seem very efficient in Perl, C, C++ and Java, but we're using C#. And to top things off, you drive a Buick Regal and don't have any body piercings. We can't possibly hire you because you're married and have kids, which means we won't be your sole overriding priority in life."
If the business is smart, it will hire the older programmer instead of the younger programmer, everything else being equal.
I can see why they call you "ratboy". Here's a vastly superior way to do you first example: ... /* nothing */ ...
if ((flag & VAL1) || (flag & VAL2)
;
else
So stop abusing operator overloading. When you overload '+' for char* you are abusing the mechanism. However, overloading '+' for string makes sense.
The syntactic sugar I would really like to see for C++ is the ability to write your own operators. Then you could use statements such as "x = y cat z". (of course what I really want is a readable object oriented functional language suitable for systems programming)
The common man did stand for that way back when, because way back when computers cost more than your house. "Back that truck up to the side, the Vax is going in the spare bedroom we converted to an office."
But the idea of thin clients is still a good one... in some environments. No, not your home. But maybe at your company. The traditional "thin" client is passe, because the hardware is so cheap now, but "smart" clients can be pretty damned useful. I don't know if that term has any officialdom, but a lot of modern UNIX networks are set up that way. A smart client works like a typical X terminal, but it has its own OS and local storage. Run OpenOffice on your local Linux/BSD desktop, but that $20,000 CAD is running on that server over there. It makes no difference to you though, because it acts like it's local.
Yeah, sort of like "GNU/LiGNuX".
A president who thinks he's got a missile shield is like a middle schooler wearing gang colors in the Bronx who thinks he knows karate. I think that's the worst analogy I've ever come up with. Good lord.
It is a very bad analogy. Especially considering that the prior administration under Saint Bill had the same missile shield, and that should Gore Esq. have won the last election, he would have had that very same missile shield. This isn't something that Bush invented.
Back to the topic at hand. Should there be nation states with ballistic missiles aimed at the US, then I, as a US citizen, would prefer to have a missile shield of some kind in place, even if it isn't 100% perfect, than to have no shield at all. Notice that I did NOT say that I would before a greater offensive buildup. Nor did I say that I didn't want any other country to have one as well. Stopping 99 missiles out of 100 from getting through is a damn site better than letting all 100 get though.
I may have issues with specific proposals for ballistic defense technologies, but I do not have any issues with the basic concept. My views on the matter do not shift and sway according to who is currently holding the office of US President.
And I guess reality is too blunt for you. The Soyuz program has a bad record of missing their landing targets. But they still make it more than they miss. NASA has an excellent record. But let's assume that SDI is all screwed up, and it fails one time in a hundred. So when the baddies launch 100 missiles, the odds are pretty good that they'll shoot down 99 of them. It's a damned shame about that one city, but it's a damn sight better than 100 smoldering cities.
Dude, it's called "risk analysis". You are far more likely to die from a software bug in an automobile ignition system than you are to die from a software bug in an orbital weapons platform.
Are you really worried that SDI is going to burn your house down? Consider that SDI has never burned a house down, but thousands still manage to burn down every year.
Where do you people come from, and why won't you crawl back there?
KDE is not released under the GPL license. It's released under a wide variety of licenses, GPL merely being the most common, followed by in rough order the LGPL, QPL, BSD and MIT licenses, plus a few others.
KWin, the window manager component, is under the BSD license. So technically does this make KDE BSD? Of course not!
And free Qt is under *TWO* different licenses, at the same time! GPL and QPL. The popular Liquid theme is under the QPL. Does this make Liquid property of Trolltech, or Mosfet their employee? Of course not!
Norwegian has a separate word for free as in freedom
Cool! And what is this word? And how is it different from "free" as in "free verse", "free electron", "free end of a rope", and "free from danger"?
There are probably a dozen distinct definitions to the English word "free". Does two words in Norwegian, Spanish, French, etc., really solve any problems? Okay now we know that the 'G' in "GNU" does not mean "gratis", but frankly, we all knew that already.
I've got emacs in my BSD/FreeBSD system...