I think any "product" of open development that is sufficiently successful will eventually be killed by competing anti-open interests (software companies, adjacent industries, governments, etc.)
As a result, individual products like "Linux" will probably come and go. However, the death of any open product simply means that the labor pool of the open development process will have or will soon move on to construction and maintenance of a new product which will in time, due to the superiority of the process (IMHO), again compete with proprietary interests, etc.
As such, open development is likely to evolve into a lifestyle or an ideal which leads those who embrace it or participate in it to make use of a series of "open" products over time. These types of "open products" are developed, marketed and used quite differently from products originating in the traditional marketplace and the use of "open products" comes at the expense of the traditional marketplace (to use RIAA/MPAA logic).
Thus, I tend to believe that if open development (and open content, etc. etc.) continues to grow in popularity as a philosophy and preference, there will eventually be some kind of sociocultural clash on a larger scale between the "open" and "marketplace" (i.e. closed) worlds.
I am not an economist but it seems to me that open development and traditional more closed/proprietary marketplaces represent fundamentally different economies that coexist peacefully now only because open development hasn't been large enough in the past to warrant the expense or dischord necessary to displace or destroy it. However, as more and more talent/revenue/ideas/sales/young minds are "lost" (RIAA/MPAA again) to open development, I can't help but think that this will change.
It seems to me that we are seeing the beginnings of this already with the grumbling of large interests like Microsoft about the "evils" of the GPL and open source.
In fact, manufacturing technology would create a whole new pool of inventors, in my opinion. People who never spent a moment in their lives trying to "design" something will suddenly know that anything they can imagine and describe, they can build and have within a few minutes!
Imagine how much faster development of ideas will happen. If someone is enthusiastic about an idea he's working on, he can prototype it twenty times before dinner until he gets it right.
We'll have all kinds of new twists to existing products as well, as people personalize their world according to their tastes. Some teenage geek girl somewhere will no doubt tweak the DVD player "file" and add "patches" from a few other files to build a pink, heart-shaped DVD player with an integrated telephone that says "Hello, kitty!" each time you open the drawer.
People will invent what they want. They will share it with their family and friends and neighbors.
And (moving on to the darker side) ideas will be strictly, strictly controlled by corporations. The process itself will be strictly controlled, once the traditional economic model starts to suffer thanks to people building only what they need and want using their own designs.
Not only the free IP trade, but also the free manufacturing device trade will become black-market fixtures with the most severe and draconian of punishments for unlicensed copying of everything from pencils to corn to small bronze buddha statues; the wealthy will remain weatlhy and will remain in strict control of the movement of goods and information.
Only now, people will realize that copying food or goods, like copying music, is essentially a cost-free technology and they're being made to work their entire lives simply to ensure that others remain the "haves" while they are forever stuck in the larger pool of "have nots".
There will be rioting in the streets and a cultural revolution the likes of which has never before been seen in human history.
Or maybe people will just bore of pink DVD players and go back to their jobs for lack of anything better to do.
Who knows!?
But moving back to the original point, I'm sure being able to turn any idea into matter within a few minutes will enhance not slow the flood of original thought.
Unless your a professional photographer or an advanced amateur that's spending his/her weekends shooting weddings in 35mm or you're independently wealthy; you're probably going to have to wait a few years before the price of these puppies comes down to the "consumer" level.
Oh, I don't know... How many geeks spend $3k+ to put together a gaming machine that will be obsolete in six months anyway?
The Digital SLR market now has entries that are relatively affordable. You can get a Canon 10d and a 50mm f1.8 prime Canon lens for less than $1500 new, street price. A very classic setup! You can get a Sigma SD9 and a couple of nice pro Sigma f2.8 zooms for even less than that. Both of these cameras will put most 35mm films to shame if you know what you're doing.
People have their hobbies; they don't wait until they're Bill Gates to spend money on what they enjoy. When I was a teenager, I was a guitar guy. I used to spend thousands on amps and guitar bodies and effects while living on little more than crackers and water. Lots of other people think nothing of spending thousands to add all kinds of enhancements to their cars. Slashdot geeks build terabyte RAIDs and put them into dual-P4 systems with $500 graphics cards, all to get a few more fps out of their 3D games. Outdoors "geeks" spend thousands on climbing gear, or cycling gear.
I know a few people who aren't pro but will likely grab a D2H the moment it's out. As for myself, I'm a Canon man.:-)
I think the crux of the issue here (and what you are getting at) is that work and study are much easier to accomplish if you are passionate about them; if you have a personal point of view, something unique to contribute, an unfailing interest in the subject matter, or some other conscious driving force behind it.
Unfortunately, in the modern world, this is very difficult.
Very few types of work leave room for individuality or craftsmanship any longer. Nearly any type of work you do is likely to relegate you in some way, metaphorical or otherwise, to a position of "cog in a wheel in the giant machine."
Nearly all of modern industry also requires a dedicated, detailed skill set that tends to take years to master, often descends into minutiae at the expense of the "bigger picture" and that tends to compartmentalize one within the field (i.e. you have studied to be this kind of cog in the wheel, and after you put in your decades to master it, you will be stuck as that cog forever, because it will take far too long to train to become another kind of cog).
Because of the nature of the modern marketplace, there is very little room for individuality, passion, or points of view. Whether in academics or business, if your work and even your general demeanor are not well-suited to maximize profit, you will quickly find yourself out of work. Thus, in the interest of staying active (i.e. employed, in school, funded by grants, etc.) in a field, people generally try to sublimate themselves to the greatest extent possible, becoming the most colorless, generic cog they can be.
As a kind of corollary, work or study in any field these days also generally involves a large percentage of time coping with business-oriented and political issues, rather than the issues at hand. A successful photographer is first and foremost a successful businessman. A successful systems analyst is first and foremost a successful businessman. A successful lawyer is first and foremost a successful businessman. A successful doctor is first and foremost a successful businessman. Ad infinitum.
None of this breeds any kind of productivity ethic. Even if you are very interested in a field, and approach its study with enthusiasm, you are likely to run out of steam before you reach the end of your study, gradually disillusioned by the degree to which you must endlessly specialize, sublimate your own identity, avoid creativity, sacrifice future freedoms and learn the ins and outs of petty business, all in order to simply build a career doing something you thought you liked.
I personally feel that most men (and women) given a chance would prefer to be craftsmen (and women) of some kind, in whatever their chosen field, bringing a quality and uniquely personal product to the people of their own community. Instead, because of the nature of the modern marketplace, many essentially become clerks and civil servants in one field or another order to be able to draw a wage.
As a result, and lacking enthusiasm, we end up sitting around browsing the Web and dreaming of something better... but those who develop the fortitude to switch inevitably find that their new field is, on balance, not all that different from their last one... still all business, anonymity and colorless, impersonal nonsense.
People keep saying this, but the people who say it aren't reading what SCO is saying.
SCO has said publicly that it no specific section of Linux can be removed or re-written to make it "clean". Their argument is that once SCO's IP was copied into the Linux kernel, later versions of Linux-- all of it-- became a "derivative work" and thus the entire kernel is now "SCO IP".
The only way they feel you could "clean" Linux is to revert to kernel 2.2 and restart development from there, but none of the existing developers or even Linux users could work on development because they've already been tainted-- all current Linux users have already seen the secret SCO IP in Linux kernels they're using. Any code created by current Linux developers or users would therefore be written with knowledge of SCO's super-duper technology, so SCO says that any code written by current Linux developers or users would therefore be "SCO IP" from the day it is born because it is a derivative work. And so they would still have to sue you for licensing fees over it, even though you just wrote it five minutes ago.
So, SCO says, we're letting you all off the hook. Since the only way to "clean" Linux development would eventually kill it completely (since no existing Linux developers or Linux users could work on a clean version), we'll be generous and let Linux live, and just charge license fees instead.
Now I've seen other/. posters say "So what if SCO doesn't believe it's clean, if we remove the offending code, it will be clean and then they'll have no claim."
But they don't have any claim now; by most peoples' standards, they're making fraudulent claims to manipulate their stock price.Why does everyone think that if we remove some code from Linux and send a nice card to SCO saying that's what we've done, SCO will sit down and say "Okay, you're clean now. Thanks, Linux people!" and then withdraw their case?
Only the facts promoted by globalists don't hold up empirically. The "consumer class" which isn't wealthy enough to risk capital in megaprofitable hedge funds and currency speculation but is still wealthy enough to enjoy your "cheaper" goods is continually pared down.
There is some net gain around the fringes in the so-called "developing economies" (which oddly enough funnel most of their capital growth to the established markets) and there is some mild migration into the consumer class in such markets but at the same time in the established markets there is an ever increasing polarization between invest-capable and below-living-wage.
We are turning the bell curve in the devloped markets into a set of two "camel humps." On the one side are those, ever increasing in number, whose consuming power is disappearing while their hours forever increase and their wages forever decrease (see two-worker households who still need food stamps to be able to consume) while on the other side are those who find their consumer power increasing out of all proportion to the world's working populations.
No, 300 million people that were "brought out of poverty" are still in relative poverty compared to our own consuming classes, while another hundred million in formerly stronger markets formerly of the consuming classes are moving ever closer toward relative poverty all so that a few million at the top can accept the capital flowing out of the "emerging markets" in order to take a tenfold increase in their leveraged ability to speculate on the global markets for ever greater amounts of cash at the expense of the said emerging markets in a kind of perverse economic-exploitative double-whammy.
It's ugly and it's why there are kids running around in their idealism trying to stop the WTO.
And meanwhile, what the guys at the bottom know is that they lost their jobs to India (in the US) or to China (in India) or to wherever the market happens to be "emerging" next. Only in each case real wealth doesn't ever actually "emerge" for the bulk of the population.
If you mean me personally, possibly nothing. But it doesn't matter, it's not about me personally.
What stops "any worker" from being a CEO? Is that what you're asking?
Numbers and simple economics.
Every worker at IBM cannot be the CEO. There is one CEO. There are a limited number of people drawing huge salaries precisely because if you equalize salaries you'll find that you can't offer CEO-style filthy riches to every single worker. Of course, that is how it should be. Everyone who works should be drawing a fair wage and nobody, working or not, should be drawing multi-million dollar salaries on the backs of said workers.
As for me personally, why would I want to be the CEO?
In order to be considered a "good CEO" I'd have to screw workers and customers both as often as possible, preferably without their realizing it, in order to keep the salaries of the few people that employ me at the same sky-high level as my own. I'd have to exploit the political and legal systems in any way possible to make more money than my board probably deserves and definitely more money than I deserve. I'd have to do my best to chase competitors out of business and their workers out of livelihoods even if their products were of better quality and their workers more reliable than my own. I'd have to hurt a thousand families in the US office this week when I send their jobs to India, then a thousand families in the India office next week when I send their jobs to China, keeping all the money bought by this pain for myself and the wealthy few at the top. I'd have to find every new and interesting way possible to exploit the third world and the environment, before my competitors learn to do the same. If I can't do all of this, I'm out on my ear, because those are the marks of a good CEO.
Not my game, mate. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. But obviously many can.
So the guy in India, does just as good of a job and is willing to work for tons less... why *wouldn't* he desearve the job?
You've missed the point entirely. This is not just about American workers.
Global Capitalism, our New World Order, pits the Indian workers against the American workers and indeed against every other worker on earth. Each worker must continue to lower his or her labor prices in comparison to the others in order to remain employed; in order to live.
Refer to my simple scenario again.
The Indian worker had to work twice as long for half the money in the end in order to get the job away from the American worker. In order to get work, he had to lower his own value by a factor of four, along with the value of every other worker in the same industry anywhere around the globe. And he will have to continue to lower it in order to compete with (for example) a Chinese worker, who will be lowering the worth of the workers even farther, extending his hours even longer in order to try to wrest the job from the Indian worker.
And as economies collapse, the fat cats at the top continue to draw huge salaries while moving the jobs to wherever people are most desperate, driving wages and benefits relentlessly lower for all workers around the world, while they themselves draw larger and larger salaries and bonuses from the resulting increase in margins.
And all the while they use global media (owned by the wealthy), trade organizations and government policy (both most heavily influenced by-- you guessed it-- the wealthy), in order to create labor surplusses in any field whose labor price they wish to reduce. "Come buy a degree in IT from us! IT is where the future lies!" is the word that hits the airwaves, and workers around the world who are hoping for a decent salary pay the big $$$ to buy into the new field only to find that they've had a hand in creating (and have paid their way into the middle of) yet another labor surplus, so that they can be played off against one another while lining the pockets of those at the top.
The rich get richer and are able to consume more and more. The worker must get poorer and poorer if he wishes to stay employed, which is just as well, because as the hours increase more and more, he has less and less time to consume anyway. Think about it. How many of you have put in unpaid overtime because you know it reduces the chance of your getting your tech-pink-slip?
By doing so, you're making other tech workers try to out-unpaid-overtime you, so that they won't get laid off. Here and there a few workers can't afford to sacrifice any longer and they do indeed get laid off. You may say to yourself "thank God I worked all that extra unpaid overtime" and go home happy for one night... but you're now expected to be that productive all the time. And inevitably someone else will come and out-work you.
Perhaps that someone else will be someone in India who is needy enough to work twice as long for half the money.
When that happens, the company makes money. But you don't get it that increase in profits. The worker in India doesn't get it. The new worker in China who works three times as long for a third of the money doesn't get it either, though he does steal the job away from the Indian guy. Who gets the now 66% wage savings, multiplied by innumerable workers (and leaving destruction in its wake)?
The CEO, the board, and the investor and venture captial class, who aren't even fairly taxed on those increases.
Who loses? Everyone else. The workers. The children. The social programs supported by workers' taxes. Entire national economies. Everyone who isn't... working.
Make yourself more valuable than those Indian workers by being willing to work 60 hours a week for the same salary
Then of course they don't want to lose their jobs, so they will make themselves more valuable by deciding to work 80 hours a week for the same salary.
And since you have to eat and can't afford to lose your job either, you decide to work 80 hours a week, but now you are willing to work for 80% of your original salary.
But they can't afford to lose their jobs either, so they will work 80 hours for 50% of your original salary and forego all company benefits.
You and your co-workers proclaim that this is not a living wage and that you hardly see your kids anymore, so the company fires its US workforce and moves operations to India, but continues to offer unpaid internships in the more expensive labor markets like yours. Naturally you take one of these unpaid internships so that while you are "looking for a job" you will at least be "gaining new skills".
And fourteen months into your unpaid internship, you see that taxes on the CEO have been lowered and he how has a little windfall in addition to that $44 million salary and bonuses for increasing profits. He uses his windfall to buy a yacht.
Because he worked for it.
Yes, he worked for it, unlike you, you lazy bum. If you had been willing to work for less money, for longer hours, had learned a few new skills (when you working weren't working your 80 hours or raising your kids), you wouldn't be stuck competing with new college graduates for that unpaid intership each quarter. And if you had been working longer, harder hours at that unpaid internship all along, you might have turned it into a real job by now.
But you suck and your labor obviously isn't worth any money.
2.5. Drive up UnixWare license figures for quarterlies, to inflate stock value. 2.6. Establish claim to Linux IP by being able to point to mass licensing, indicating de facto SCO ownership. 2.7. Continue to sell off insider-owned shares at a regular rate.
Re:Sounds like a plan.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 3, Informative
The X Window System is at version 11, release 6.6.
XFree86 is the one that's at version 4.0. Restrictions on smoothness and responsiveness to user input are due more to driver and kernel performance characteristics than issues with X itself.
Not to mention that they burned a lot of goodwill in the Linux community (one of the few viable non-Microsoft markets) when they abandoned their Linux line.
When Corel released WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 9 for Linux, there was an incredible marketing push. I got samples. I also got Tux plush toys, balloons, beach balls, "Corel Linux" stress cubes, posters and other branding-oriented products sent to me.
I was one of the individuals to decide to pony up $$$ for some trial installations of WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux and Corel Draw 9 for Linux, thinking that these were bigtime apps. The initial release was somewhat (incredibly, you found as time wore on,) buggy, but with service packs already available for the Windows version and assurances that the Linux product line represented a major long-term investment by Corel, I was reasonably confident that the product was viable.
Well... As the weeks turned into months and still no service packs at all, the Corel Office for Linux newsgroup filled up with more and more dissatisfied people wondering about the crashing, the incompatibilities with LPR, and a million other little bugs that had yet to be addressed.
Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace. There has never been so much as a peep out of corel about them since the initial product launch and marketing push. To get anyone at Corel on the phone who even admits that such products ever existed is damn near impossible. The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.
And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!
In Red Hat 8, they're still unstable, they still sometimes simply error out when you try to save a file you've been working on (can you say "lost work"?), more obscure parts of the programs still tend to crash them or display broken dialogs, and you still have to run a second font server and hand-massage your/etc/printcap file to get them to print to it. These problems that I was sure would be fixed within weeks of release in a service pack are still here years later.
In Red Hat 9, the programs don't install at all. There's a fundamental incompatibility with NTPL. If you grab the Red Hat 8 libraries and use them with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you can get the apps to install and run, but they don't save or spool print jobs at all no matter what you do, and they have a tendency to simply turn into runaway processes at the slightest irritation.
And to add final insult to injury, we've recently discovered that about 75% of the files created by the Linux versions of WordPerfect Office 2000 can't be opened by the Windows versions of Corel's products. Old files created with these apps are very orphaned.
I'll never buy Corel again for any reason! And I've heard from other people using Linux in varied environments that who also spent $$$ on the Corel licenses that feel much the same way. They could have ruled the Linux world if they'd stuck with it. Instead, they screwed many thousands of decision-makers who won't ever want to smell them again.
That's the most stupid and pompous statement I have ever heard.
Well, it's true. Learn to differentiate between shades of meaning.
The original post said that OS X helps in "just getting work done". Any competent computer user can "just get work done" on any platform. If OS X allows user Y to "just get work done" while they can't "just get work done" on other systems, then they aren't terribly computer literate.
ON the other hand, if OS X is the platform that some prefer, then I have absolutely no problem with that, as I've said multiple times in this thread. I only object when others say that my preferences prevent me from getting work done. They don't. They help me to get more work done.
What the hell do you mean by advanced methods?
I mean that from a purely clicks/keystrokes perspective, or from an eye motion perspective, traditional X environments are some of the most efficient methods in existence.
Five mouse/keystrokes for a given task is less advanced than two or three mouse/keystrokes for the same task because reducing the number of operations required to complete a given tasks saves time for repetitive work. The learning curve argument in this case is moot because 1) a learning curve only applies once, and 2) the learning curve for two new mouse/keystrokes to replace five old mouse/keystrokes is negligible.
Similarly, the appearance of OS X, while more intuitive and easier to grok for the beginner, has higher contrast levels and more colors. this increases the number of apparent objects in the field of vision and forces widgets into the group of perceived objects. If you are not familiar with computers and these objects are likely to be missed, this is beneificial behavior. If you are familiar with these objects and can find them easily when needed, then the increased visibility only serves to compete with more important elements in your field of vision (i.e. content).
For these reasons, I would argue that customization capability is good and that the "just right" features of OS X are intended primarily to aid the functionally computer illiterate.
This does not mean that only functionally computer illiterate users will use OS X, as you seem to have interpreted me to say. Far from it. But for the very computer literate, I argue that more customization can be, and indeed almost always is, helpful.
I suppose my response was the length and force that it was because of two issues which are naturally not your fault:
1) The number of times that I've seen posts on/. and on other forums indicating that anyone who needs configuration options of any kind is technically elitist, probably not gainfully employed, and certainly not as productive as an OS X user and
2) The fact that GNOME removed most of my favorite configuration options for 2.0, citing in part a desire to "just get things right" like Mac OS X.
So I do apologize if you felt that there was a personal attack intended from my quarter either; nothing of the sort was intended and if this had been a personal communication rather than a public one (in which one often posts in order to make a point to many, rather than just the original poster) I would have written with a bit more humor.
I do, however, consider themes to be important. I don't change them all the time, but I do select a nonstandard one. In my case, text is black-on-white, widgets are flat (not colorful, not very highlighted) and essentially khaki in color. I don't consider it just a matter of preference, I find that the low-contrast, minimal widgets allow me to see the actual content I'm working on (images, text) in multiple windows much more quickly, with much less "hunting" on the part of my eyes.
I find that with standard grey Windows themes with strong highlights, or with the Mac OS X appearance that my eyes are distracted by the widgets. I have a very large desktop area and often have dozens of windows open. I often shift between them fairly rapidly.
So I do think that the case that themes are rarely useful is overstated, or at least requires a little more nuance. For me, they are always useful on an ongoing basis, even if only generally change them once (when I install).
But there was nothing personal or necessarily against OS X as a product intended in my response. I merely meant to indicate that the "it's just right" concept is naturally morely likely to appeal to those who are not as familiar with the meanings of all of the options in other systems or who are not as comfortable with the changes that they impart, and that this likelihood does not conversely indicate less productivity for those who do find those options to be helpful.
It's more like this scenario: A police car flashes you. Do you pull over? Of course. An officer gets out and walks to your car and only when he gets to your car window and begins to try to sell you Chanel copies do you realize that his badge reads "great scents", that the logo on the side of his car reads "To Scent and Perfect" and that the thing on his belt is a credit card reader, not a baton.
You run Photoshop on *Intel*... which is irrelevant to PowerPC based systems which is what this topic is about.
So the previous poster says it's not about the OS, it's about the applications. Now you say it's not about the applications, it's about the OS.
So why not drop your attitude that people who like MacOSX just can't handle a l33t s3tu9 like yours.
No. This is not what I said. Read what I wrote. I was responding to this:
"The irony is, the lack of costume features is part of what makes OS X a much better platform for just getting work done. A computer is a tool, not a home, it's not a fashion statement. OS X gets this right. Trivial time-wasters like themes--while they may keep you from getting bored--really don't have much practical value."
I am not saying that your Mac OS X is not of value to you. What I am arguing against is the argument (read the paragraph above again) that my Linux is less valuable to me.
Why are Mac OS X users so insecure? It's a fine operating system. Why must they always post these "Mac OS X is useful, other systems are not!" messages?
Read the original poster's message again.
"Fashion statement." "Trvial time wasters." "Don't have much practical value."
Who is making negative statements about another system? Not me. I made positive statements about my own own system, out of frustration at having been labeled (as you just did) a "l33t s3tu9" (your words) wannabe just for not preferring Mac OS X.
Rather than give you a whole bunch of details about what "I" do that will add a lot of noise to the discussion, I'll point you toward the actual tools that may be of help in creating your own workflow:
scarse for command-line calibration and profiles work (pre-built rpms can be had at the rpm search sites, see also patches if you want to compile yourself.)
And of course these days there are also additionals things that you can do some tasks related to color management:
Photoshop and some other tools from device vendors in the Windows world will run under Crossover Office (I use PS6 mysefl).
Some basic (very basic) stuff also exists for GIMP if you are so inclined.
VMware is helpful if you need to run applications in a real Windows environment from within Linux with device support, including support for USB.
Finally if you are a coder you may find littlecms to be useful as well.
I run Photoshop in KDE when I have to do Photoshop work. See http://www.codeweavers.com. It works very well, thanks. I don't need a lot of the applications you mentioned, so why is it so wrong if I don't use them?
And don't discount the "making it go faster" aspect you are so dismissive of. If you make an operation five seconds faster, and you have to perform that operation 10,000 times over a work week, you have just saved yourself 50,000 seconds, or in other words gained nearly 14 hours of additional work.
If an X environment provides the applications you need, and you can provide your own tweaks to optimize your workflow, then you are gaining, not losing.
I have no problem with you wanting nice defaults. My problem is with people who say to me "You want choices? You must be a 'leet geek who never gets any work done because you are always fondling your desktop. You're not a real person so we don't care about your choices."
Their choice, if it makes them more productive is completely valid.
My argument is that Linux makes me much more productive, and not simply because I'm "used to it" -- there are real, hard, numbers-based reasons why I work faster in Linux than in other systems. It has to do with saving (i.e. reducing the number of) clicks and keystrokes and minimizing (i.e. making less obvious or visible) distracting widgets when they're interfering with my visual workflow, thereby reducing unneeded eye movements.
I didn't post to try to run down the decisions of others... I posted because I'm tired of hearing:
"The irony is, the lack of costume features is part of what makes OS X a much better platform for just getting work done. A computer is a tool, not a home, it's not a fashion statement. OS X gets this right. Trivial time-wasters like themes--while they may keep you from getting bored--really don't have much practical value. " [From the parent post to my post.]
It's a basic argument that I hear nearly all the time now from Mac OS X enthusiasts that I know: preferences are crap, Linux preferences doubly so.
I'm not sure why the Mac OS X crowd feels the need to try to convince everyone that preferences only exist for geeky elitist people to dote over. I don't change my preferences every five minutes, I change them all once when I install, and make additional tweaks very rarely and if needed as I am working. Geeky elitist people don't need preferences, they just build a good.twmrc and do everything from the '$' prompt!
I don't have any geeky elitist pride, I use KDE!
One of my biggest worries (and irritations that led to my original post) is that GNOME is no longer in the same league. They've taken out most of the preferences, including traditional X preferences like focus-follows-mouse. Why? They feel that there are "right" choices (click to focus) and "wrong" choices (focus follows mouse) and they want it to "just be right" without the user having to worry about it.
I mean, if removing a choice (GNOME) or never offering a choice (Mac OS X) is a way of "getting it right" then I suppose there's an implication that every time I've selected a non-default preference over the years, I've been doing it "wrong". Which seems clearly untrue to me. I have no problem if people don't like my choices, but I remain convinced that they make me more productive beyond mere "I like it that way!" value.
I only hope KDE doesn't follow GNOME and remove every preference, locking the user into a basic set of Windows-like or MacOS-like management and appearance preferences. Then I might be stuck with TWM!
Slashdot Mirror
...I am not so sure about Linux.
I think any "product" of open development that is sufficiently successful will eventually be killed by competing anti-open interests (software companies, adjacent industries, governments, etc.)
As a result, individual products like "Linux" will probably come and go. However, the death of any open product simply means that the labor pool of the open development process will have or will soon move on to construction and maintenance of a new product which will in time, due to the superiority of the process (IMHO), again compete with proprietary interests, etc.
As such, open development is likely to evolve into a lifestyle or an ideal which leads those who embrace it or participate in it to make use of a series of "open" products over time. These types of "open products" are developed, marketed and used quite differently from products originating in the traditional marketplace and the use of "open products" comes at the expense of the traditional marketplace (to use RIAA/MPAA logic).
Thus, I tend to believe that if open development (and open content, etc. etc.) continues to grow in popularity as a philosophy and preference, there will eventually be some kind of sociocultural clash on a larger scale between the "open" and "marketplace" (i.e. closed) worlds.
I am not an economist but it seems to me that open development and traditional more closed/proprietary marketplaces represent fundamentally different economies that coexist peacefully now only because open development hasn't been large enough in the past to warrant the expense or dischord necessary to displace or destroy it. However, as more and more talent/revenue/ideas/sales/young minds are "lost" (RIAA/MPAA again) to open development, I can't help but think that this will change.
It seems to me that we are seeing the beginnings of this already with the grumbling of large interests like Microsoft about the "evils" of the GPL and open source.
My reply seems to have been attached to a message other than the one under which I clicked "reply"... (hope this one makes it to the right spot!)
You probably could have if this interviewee hadn't lied through his teeth about money not buying influence.
In fact, manufacturing technology would create a whole new pool of inventors, in my opinion. People who never spent a moment in their lives trying to "design" something will suddenly know that anything they can imagine and describe, they can build and have within a few minutes!
Imagine how much faster development of ideas will happen. If someone is enthusiastic about an idea he's working on, he can prototype it twenty times before dinner until he gets it right.
We'll have all kinds of new twists to existing products as well, as people personalize their world according to their tastes. Some teenage geek girl somewhere will no doubt tweak the DVD player "file" and add "patches" from a few other files to build a pink, heart-shaped DVD player with an integrated telephone that says "Hello, kitty!" each time you open the drawer.
People will invent what they want. They will share it with their family and friends and neighbors.
And (moving on to the darker side) ideas will be strictly, strictly controlled by corporations. The process itself will be strictly controlled, once the traditional economic model starts to suffer thanks to people building only what they need and want using their own designs.
Not only the free IP trade, but also the free manufacturing device trade will become black-market fixtures with the most severe and draconian of punishments for unlicensed copying of everything from pencils to corn to small bronze buddha statues; the wealthy will remain weatlhy and will remain in strict control of the movement of goods and information.
Only now, people will realize that copying food or goods, like copying music, is essentially a cost-free technology and they're being made to work their entire lives simply to ensure that others remain the "haves" while they are forever stuck in the larger pool of "have nots".
There will be rioting in the streets and a cultural revolution the likes of which has never before been seen in human history.
Or maybe people will just bore of pink DVD players and go back to their jobs for lack of anything better to do.
Who knows!?
But moving back to the original point, I'm sure being able to turn any idea into matter within a few minutes will enhance not slow the flood of original thought.
Unless your a professional photographer or an advanced amateur that's spending his/her weekends shooting weddings in 35mm or you're independently wealthy; you're probably going to have to wait a few years before the price of these puppies comes down to the "consumer" level.
:-)
Oh, I don't know... How many geeks spend $3k+ to put together a gaming machine that will be obsolete in six months anyway?
The Digital SLR market now has entries that are relatively affordable. You can get a Canon 10d and a 50mm f1.8 prime Canon lens for less than $1500 new, street price. A very classic setup! You can get a Sigma SD9 and a couple of nice pro Sigma f2.8 zooms for even less than that. Both of these cameras will put most 35mm films to shame if you know what you're doing.
People have their hobbies; they don't wait until they're Bill Gates to spend money on what they enjoy. When I was a teenager, I was a guitar guy. I used to spend thousands on amps and guitar bodies and effects while living on little more than crackers and water. Lots of other people think nothing of spending thousands to add all kinds of enhancements to their cars. Slashdot geeks build terabyte RAIDs and put them into dual-P4 systems with $500 graphics cards, all to get a few more fps out of their 3D games. Outdoors "geeks" spend thousands on climbing gear, or cycling gear.
I know a few people who aren't pro but will likely grab a D2H the moment it's out. As for myself, I'm a Canon man.
Unfortunately, in the modern world, this is very difficult.
None of this breeds any kind of productivity ethic. Even if you are very interested in a field, and approach its study with enthusiasm, you are likely to run out of steam before you reach the end of your study, gradually disillusioned by the degree to which you must endlessly specialize, sublimate your own identity, avoid creativity, sacrifice future freedoms and learn the ins and outs of petty business, all in order to simply build a career doing something you thought you liked.
I personally feel that most men (and women) given a chance would prefer to be craftsmen (and women) of some kind, in whatever their chosen field, bringing a quality and uniquely personal product to the people of their own community. Instead, because of the nature of the modern marketplace, many essentially become clerks and civil servants in one field or another order to be able to draw a wage.
As a result, and lacking enthusiasm, we end up sitting around browsing the Web and dreaming of something better... but those who develop the fortitude to switch inevitably find that their new field is, on balance, not all that different from their last one... still all business, anonymity and colorless, impersonal nonsense.
People keep saying this, but the people who say it aren't reading what SCO is saying.
/. posters say "So what if SCO doesn't believe it's clean, if we remove the offending code, it will be clean and then they'll have no claim."
SCO has said publicly that it no specific section of Linux can be removed or re-written to make it "clean". Their argument is that once SCO's IP was copied into the Linux kernel, later versions of Linux-- all of it-- became a "derivative work" and thus the entire kernel is now "SCO IP".
The only way they feel you could "clean" Linux is to revert to kernel 2.2 and restart development from there, but none of the existing developers or even Linux users could work on development because they've already been tainted-- all current Linux users have already seen the secret SCO IP in Linux kernels they're using. Any code created by current Linux developers or users would therefore be written with knowledge of SCO's super-duper technology, so SCO says that any code written by current Linux developers or users would therefore be "SCO IP" from the day it is born because it is a derivative work. And so they would still have to sue you for licensing fees over it, even though you just wrote it five minutes ago.
So, SCO says, we're letting you all off the hook. Since the only way to "clean" Linux development would eventually kill it completely (since no existing Linux developers or Linux users could work on a clean version), we'll be generous and let Linux live, and just charge license fees instead.
Now I've seen other
But they don't have any claim now; by most peoples' standards, they're making fraudulent claims to manipulate their stock price.Why does everyone think that if we remove some code from Linux and send a nice card to SCO saying that's what we've done, SCO will sit down and say "Okay, you're clean now. Thanks, Linux people!" and then withdraw their case?
And in fact, they've said they won't.
Only the facts promoted by globalists don't hold up empirically. The "consumer class" which isn't wealthy enough to risk capital in megaprofitable hedge funds and currency speculation but is still wealthy enough to enjoy your "cheaper" goods is continually pared down.
There is some net gain around the fringes in the so-called "developing economies" (which oddly enough funnel most of their capital growth to the established markets) and there is some mild migration into the consumer class in such markets but at the same time in the established markets there is an ever increasing polarization between invest-capable and below-living-wage.
We are turning the bell curve in the devloped markets into a set of two "camel humps." On the one side are those, ever increasing in number, whose consuming power is disappearing while their hours forever increase and their wages forever decrease (see two-worker households who still need food stamps to be able to consume) while on the other side are those who find their consumer power increasing out of all proportion to the world's working populations.
No, 300 million people that were "brought out of poverty" are still in relative poverty compared to our own consuming classes, while another hundred million in formerly stronger markets formerly of the consuming classes are moving ever closer toward relative poverty all so that a few million at the top can accept the capital flowing out of the "emerging markets" in order to take a tenfold increase in their leveraged ability to speculate on the global markets for ever greater amounts of cash at the expense of the said emerging markets in a kind of perverse economic-exploitative double-whammy.
It's ugly and it's why there are kids running around in their idealism trying to stop the WTO.
And meanwhile, what the guys at the bottom know is that they lost their jobs to India (in the US) or to China (in India) or to wherever the market happens to be "emerging" next. Only in each case real wealth doesn't ever actually "emerge" for the bulk of the population.
You have just said it is "morally right" not to "give a damn" about any fellow human being that doesn't enrich you personally in some way.
You have made my case for me.
Ladies and gentlemen, QED.
If you mean me personally, possibly nothing. But it doesn't matter, it's not about me personally.
What stops "any worker" from being a CEO? Is that what you're asking?
Numbers and simple economics.
Every worker at IBM cannot be the CEO. There is one CEO. There are a limited number of people drawing huge salaries precisely because if you equalize salaries you'll find that you can't offer CEO-style filthy riches to every single worker. Of course, that is how it should be. Everyone who works should be drawing a fair wage and nobody, working or not, should be drawing multi-million dollar salaries on the backs of said workers.
As for me personally, why would I want to be the CEO?
In order to be considered a "good CEO" I'd have to screw workers and customers both as often as possible, preferably without their realizing it, in order to keep the salaries of the few people that employ me at the same sky-high level as my own. I'd have to exploit the political and legal systems in any way possible to make more money than my board probably deserves and definitely more money than I deserve. I'd have to do my best to chase competitors out of business and their workers out of livelihoods even if their products were of better quality and their workers more reliable than my own. I'd have to hurt a thousand families in the US office this week when I send their jobs to India, then a thousand families in the India office next week when I send their jobs to China, keeping all the money bought by this pain for myself and the wealthy few at the top. I'd have to find every new and interesting way possible to exploit the third world and the environment, before my competitors learn to do the same. If I can't do all of this, I'm out on my ear, because those are the marks of a good CEO.
Not my game, mate. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. But obviously many can.
So the guy in India, does just as good of a job and is willing to work for tons less... why *wouldn't* he desearve the job?
You've missed the point entirely. This is not just about American workers.
Global Capitalism, our New World Order, pits the Indian workers against the American workers and indeed against every other worker on earth. Each worker must continue to lower his or her labor prices in comparison to the others in order to remain employed; in order to live.
Refer to my simple scenario again.
The Indian worker had to work twice as long for half the money in the end in order to get the job away from the American worker. In order to get work, he had to lower his own value by a factor of four, along with the value of every other worker in the same industry anywhere around the globe. And he will have to continue to lower it in order to compete with (for example) a Chinese worker, who will be lowering the worth of the workers even farther, extending his hours even longer in order to try to wrest the job from the Indian worker.
And as economies collapse, the fat cats at the top continue to draw huge salaries while moving the jobs to wherever people are most desperate, driving wages and benefits relentlessly lower for all workers around the world, while they themselves draw larger and larger salaries and bonuses from the resulting increase in margins.
And all the while they use global media (owned by the wealthy), trade organizations and government policy (both most heavily influenced by-- you guessed it-- the wealthy), in order to create labor surplusses in any field whose labor price they wish to reduce. "Come buy a degree in IT from us! IT is where the future lies!" is the word that hits the airwaves, and workers around the world who are hoping for a decent salary pay the big $$$ to buy into the new field only to find that they've had a hand in creating (and have paid their way into the middle of) yet another labor surplus, so that they can be played off against one another while lining the pockets of those at the top.
The rich get richer and are able to consume more and more. The worker must get poorer and poorer if he wishes to stay employed, which is just as well, because as the hours increase more and more, he has less and less time to consume anyway. Think about it. How many of you have put in unpaid overtime because you know it reduces the chance of your getting your tech-pink-slip?
By doing so, you're making other tech workers try to out-unpaid-overtime you, so that they won't get laid off. Here and there a few workers can't afford to sacrifice any longer and they do indeed get laid off. You may say to yourself "thank God I worked all that extra unpaid overtime" and go home happy for one night... but you're now expected to be that productive all the time. And inevitably someone else will come and out-work you.
Perhaps that someone else will be someone in India who is needy enough to work twice as long for half the money.
When that happens, the company makes money. But you don't get it that increase in profits. The worker in India doesn't get it. The new worker in China who works three times as long for a third of the money doesn't get it either, though he does steal the job away from the Indian guy. Who gets the now 66% wage savings, multiplied by innumerable workers (and leaving destruction in its wake)?
The CEO, the board, and the investor and venture captial class, who aren't even fairly taxed on those increases.
Who loses? Everyone else. The workers. The children. The social programs supported by workers' taxes. Entire national economies. Everyone who isn't... working.
Welcome to the New World Order.
Right.
Make yourself more valuable than those Indian workers by being willing to work 60 hours a week for the same salary
Then of course they don't want to lose their jobs, so they will make themselves more valuable by deciding to work 80 hours a week for the same salary.
And since you have to eat and can't afford to lose your job either, you decide to work 80 hours a week, but now you are willing to work for 80% of your original salary.
But they can't afford to lose their jobs either, so they will work 80 hours for 50% of your original salary and forego all company benefits.
You and your co-workers proclaim that this is not a living wage and that you hardly see your kids anymore, so the company fires its US workforce and moves operations to India, but continues to offer unpaid internships in the more expensive labor markets like yours. Naturally you take one of these unpaid internships so that while you are "looking for a job" you will at least be "gaining new skills".
And fourteen months into your unpaid internship, you see that taxes on the CEO have been lowered and he how has a little windfall in addition to that $44 million salary and bonuses for increasing profits. He uses his windfall to buy a yacht.
Because he worked for it.
Yes, he worked for it, unlike you, you lazy bum. If you had been willing to work for less money, for longer hours, had learned a few new skills (when you working weren't working your 80 hours or raising your kids), you wouldn't be stuck competing with new college graduates for that unpaid intership each quarter. And if you had been working longer, harder hours at that unpaid internship all along, you might have turned it into a real job by now.
But you suck and your labor obviously isn't worth any money.
Capitalism: because It Treats People Well.
You forgot:
2.5. Drive up UnixWare license figures for quarterlies, to inflate stock value.
2.6. Establish claim to Linux IP by being able to point to mass licensing, indicating de facto SCO ownership.
2.7. Continue to sell off insider-owned shares at a regular rate.
The X Window System is at version 11, release 6.6.
XFree86 is the one that's at version 4.0. Restrictions on smoothness and responsiveness to user input are due more to driver and kernel performance characteristics than issues with X itself.
Not to mention that they burned a lot of goodwill in the Linux community (one of the few viable non-Microsoft markets) when they abandoned their Linux line.
/etc/printcap file to get them to print to it. These problems that I was sure would be fixed within weeks of release in a service pack are still here years later.
When Corel released WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 9 for Linux, there was an incredible marketing push. I got samples. I also got Tux plush toys, balloons, beach balls, "Corel Linux" stress cubes, posters and other branding-oriented products sent to me.
I was one of the individuals to decide to pony up $$$ for some trial installations of WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux and Corel Draw 9 for Linux, thinking that these were bigtime apps. The initial release was somewhat (incredibly, you found as time wore on,) buggy, but with service packs already available for the Windows version and assurances that the Linux product line represented a major long-term investment by Corel, I was reasonably confident that the product was viable.
Well... As the weeks turned into months and still no service packs at all, the Corel Office for Linux newsgroup filled up with more and more dissatisfied people wondering about the crashing, the incompatibilities with LPR, and a million other little bugs that had yet to be addressed.
Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace. There has never been so much as a peep out of corel about them since the initial product launch and marketing push. To get anyone at Corel on the phone who even admits that such products ever existed is damn near impossible. The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.
And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!
In Red Hat 8, they're still unstable, they still sometimes simply error out when you try to save a file you've been working on (can you say "lost work"?), more obscure parts of the programs still tend to crash them or display broken dialogs, and you still have to run a second font server and hand-massage your
In Red Hat 9, the programs don't install at all. There's a fundamental incompatibility with NTPL. If you grab the Red Hat 8 libraries and use them with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you can get the apps to install and run, but they don't save or spool print jobs at all no matter what you do, and they have a tendency to simply turn into runaway processes at the slightest irritation.
And to add final insult to injury, we've recently discovered that about 75% of the files created by the Linux versions of WordPerfect Office 2000 can't be opened by the Windows versions of Corel's products. Old files created with these apps are very orphaned.
I'll never buy Corel again for any reason! And I've heard from other people using Linux in varied environments that who also spent $$$ on the Corel licenses that feel much the same way. They could have ruled the Linux world if they'd stuck with it. Instead, they screwed many thousands of decision-makers who won't ever want to smell them again.
Rather than get annoyed at your post, I'll just ask you to read the other multiple points that I made.
Umm, yes, this didn't actually happen to me, it's meant to be a metaphor. :-)
Have a nice day!
That's the most stupid and pompous statement I have ever heard.
Well, it's true. Learn to differentiate between shades of meaning.
The original post said that OS X helps in "just getting work done". Any competent computer user can "just get work done" on any platform. If OS X allows user Y to "just get work done" while they can't "just get work done" on other systems, then they aren't terribly computer literate.
ON the other hand, if OS X is the platform that some prefer, then I have absolutely no problem with that, as I've said multiple times in this thread. I only object when others say that my preferences prevent me from getting work done. They don't. They help me to get more work done.
What the hell do you mean by advanced methods?
I mean that from a purely clicks/keystrokes perspective, or from an eye motion perspective, traditional X environments are some of the most efficient methods in existence.
Five mouse/keystrokes for a given task is less advanced than two or three mouse/keystrokes for the same task because reducing the number of operations required to complete a given tasks saves time for repetitive work. The learning curve argument in this case is moot because 1) a learning curve only applies once, and 2) the learning curve for two new mouse/keystrokes to replace five old mouse/keystrokes is negligible.
Similarly, the appearance of OS X, while more intuitive and easier to grok for the beginner, has higher contrast levels and more colors. this increases the number of apparent objects in the field of vision and forces widgets into the group of perceived objects. If you are not familiar with computers and these objects are likely to be missed, this is beneificial behavior. If you are familiar with these objects and can find them easily when needed, then the increased visibility only serves to compete with more important elements in your field of vision (i.e. content).
For these reasons, I would argue that customization capability is good and that the "just right" features of OS X are intended primarily to aid the functionally computer illiterate.
This does not mean that only functionally computer illiterate users will use OS X, as you seem to have interpreted me to say. Far from it. But for the very computer literate, I argue that more customization can be, and indeed almost always is, helpful.
Apology accepted and offered in kind.
/. and on other forums indicating that anyone who needs configuration options of any kind is technically elitist, probably not gainfully employed, and certainly not as productive as an OS X user and
I suppose my response was the length and force that it was because of two issues which are naturally not your fault:
1) The number of times that I've seen posts on
2) The fact that GNOME removed most of my favorite configuration options for 2.0, citing in part a desire to "just get things right" like Mac OS X.
So I do apologize if you felt that there was a personal attack intended from my quarter either; nothing of the sort was intended and if this had been a personal communication rather than a public one (in which one often posts in order to make a point to many, rather than just the original poster) I would have written with a bit more humor.
I do, however, consider themes to be important. I don't change them all the time, but I do select a nonstandard one. In my case, text is black-on-white, widgets are flat (not colorful, not very highlighted) and essentially khaki in color. I don't consider it just a matter of preference, I find that the low-contrast, minimal widgets allow me to see the actual content I'm working on (images, text) in multiple windows much more quickly, with much less "hunting" on the part of my eyes.
I find that with standard grey Windows themes with strong highlights, or with the Mac OS X appearance that my eyes are distracted by the widgets. I have a very large desktop area and often have dozens of windows open. I often shift between them fairly rapidly.
So I do think that the case that themes are rarely useful is overstated, or at least requires a little more nuance. For me, they are always useful on an ongoing basis, even if only generally change them once (when I install).
But there was nothing personal or necessarily against OS X as a product intended in my response. I merely meant to indicate that the "it's just right" concept is naturally morely likely to appeal to those who are not as familiar with the meanings of all of the options in other systems or who are not as comfortable with the changes that they impart, and that this likelihood does not conversely indicate less productivity for those who do find those options to be helpful.
It's more like this scenario: A police car flashes you. Do you pull over? Of course. An officer gets out and walks to your car and only when he gets to your car window and begins to try to sell you Chanel copies do you realize that his badge reads "great scents", that the logo on the side of his car reads "To Scent and Perfect" and that the thing on his belt is a credit card reader, not a baton.
You run Photoshop on *Intel*... which is irrelevant to PowerPC based systems which is what this topic is about.
So the previous poster says it's not about the OS, it's about the applications. Now you say it's not about the applications, it's about the OS.
So why not drop your attitude that people who like MacOSX just can't handle a l33t s3tu9 like yours.
No. This is not what I said. Read what I wrote. I was responding to this:
"The irony is, the lack of costume features is part of what makes OS X a much better platform for just getting work done. A computer is a tool, not a home, it's not a fashion statement. OS X gets this right. Trivial time-wasters like themes--while they may keep you from getting bored--really don't have much practical value."
I am not saying that your Mac OS X is not of value to you. What I am arguing against is the argument (read the paragraph above again) that my Linux is less valuable to me.
Why are Mac OS X users so insecure? It's a fine operating system. Why must they always post these "Mac OS X is useful, other systems are not!" messages?
Read the original poster's message again.
"Fashion statement."
"Trvial time wasters."
"Don't have much practical value."
Who is making negative statements about another system? Not me. I made positive statements about my own own system, out of frustration at having been labeled (as you just did) a "l33t s3tu9" (your words) wannabe just for not preferring Mac OS X.
Rather than give you a whole bunch of details about what "I" do that will add a lot of noise to the discussion, I'll point you toward the actual tools that may be of help in creating your own workflow:
scarse for command-line calibration and profiles work (pre-built rpms can be had at the rpm search sites, see also patches if you want to compile yourself.)
And of course these days there are also additionals things that you can do some tasks related to color management:
Photoshop and some other tools from device vendors in the Windows world will run under Crossover Office (I use PS6 mysefl).
Some basic (very basic) stuff also exists for GIMP if you are so inclined.
VMware is helpful if you need to run applications in a real Windows environment from within Linux with device support, including support for USB.
Finally if you are a coder you may find littlecms to be useful as well.
I run Photoshop in KDE when I have to do Photoshop work. See http://www.codeweavers.com. It works very well, thanks. I don't need a lot of the applications you mentioned, so why is it so wrong if I don't use them?
And don't discount the "making it go faster" aspect you are so dismissive of. If you make an operation five seconds faster, and you have to perform that operation 10,000 times over a work week, you have just saved yourself 50,000 seconds, or in other words gained nearly 14 hours of additional work.
If an X environment provides the applications you need, and you can provide your own tweaks to optimize your workflow, then you are gaining, not losing.
I have no problem with you wanting nice defaults. My problem is with people who say to me "You want choices? You must be a 'leet geek who never gets any work done because you are always fondling your desktop. You're not a real person so we don't care about your choices."
Their choice, if it makes them more productive is completely valid.
.twmrc and do everything from the '$' prompt!
My argument is that Linux makes me much more productive, and not simply because I'm "used to it" -- there are real, hard, numbers-based reasons why I work faster in Linux than in other systems. It has to do with saving (i.e. reducing the number of) clicks and keystrokes and minimizing (i.e. making less obvious or visible) distracting widgets when they're interfering with my visual workflow, thereby reducing unneeded eye movements.
I didn't post to try to run down the decisions of others... I posted because I'm tired of hearing:
"The irony is, the lack of costume features is part of what makes OS X a much better platform for just getting work done. A computer is a tool, not a home, it's not a fashion statement. OS X gets this right. Trivial time-wasters like themes--while they may keep you from getting bored--really don't have much practical value. " [From the parent post to my post.]
It's a basic argument that I hear nearly all the time now from Mac OS X enthusiasts that I know: preferences are crap, Linux preferences doubly so.
I'm not sure why the Mac OS X crowd feels the need to try to convince everyone that preferences only exist for geeky elitist people to dote over. I don't change my preferences every five minutes, I change them all once when I install, and make additional tweaks very rarely and if needed as I am working. Geeky elitist people don't need preferences, they just build a good
I don't have any geeky elitist pride, I use KDE!
One of my biggest worries (and irritations that led to my original post) is that GNOME is no longer in the same league. They've taken out most of the preferences, including traditional X preferences like focus-follows-mouse. Why? They feel that there are "right" choices (click to focus) and "wrong" choices (focus follows mouse) and they want it to "just be right" without the user having to worry about it.
I mean, if removing a choice (GNOME) or never offering a choice (Mac OS X) is a way of "getting it right" then I suppose there's an implication that every time I've selected a non-default preference over the years, I've been doing it "wrong". Which seems clearly untrue to me. I have no problem if people don't like my choices, but I remain convinced that they make me more productive beyond mere "I like it that way!" value.
I only hope KDE doesn't follow GNOME and remove every preference, locking the user into a basic set of Windows-like or MacOS-like management and appearance preferences. Then I might be stuck with TWM!
Oh, yeah, I couldn't think of anything to help you with number 5 - I couldn't find it :-)
:-)
Yes, perhaps OS X could help me to count properly.