I've just tried it, and it works fine with Mozilla 1.7 and Gimp 2.0.4.
I don't have Konquerer installed, so haven't been able to try that, but I can (for example) drag-and-drop from Rhythmbox to K3B just fine, so I expect Konqueror to Gimp would work too. This isn't surprising - X has had drag-and-drop mostly sorted for years now.
Because of concerns over concentration of media power (particularly because of Berlusconni's near-monopoly on both state and private broadcasting), pirate TV has become a popular political action in Italy. Many stations have been set up as community resources, sometimes broadcasting to as small an area as a couple of streets (and thereby resisting the homogenising effects of the mass media). Check out Telestreet for more information (in Italian).
You're misreading those screenshots - GNOME apps almost universally apply changes immediately, so 'close' doesn't mean 'abort', it means 'continue'. So it's quite consistent for 'OK', 'add' and 'close' buttons to be in the same location - they all mean 'continue with this action'. Meanwhile, the 'abort' button is second from the right in all those screenshots (except for the first, where 'abort' doesn't make sense, so there is no 'abort' button).
The consistent, well thought out, placement of the buttons in GNOME is one of those little things which make it's UI such a pleasure to use - check out the Human Interface Guidlines for more details.
The apostrophe in possesives replaces the letter 'e'. Back in the day, English, like Latin and German, has a system of 'cases', changed word endings used to denote different uses of words. The genetive (possesive) ending was 'es'. At some point, we stopped using cases, but we still needed a way to denote the possesive, and the apostrophe-s was born.
... I'd recommend you spend some time using it to actually _manage_ files.
As one of the gnome devs points out, when people test a file manager, they often go and browse around their files. If they do this using spatial, they'll come to the conclusion that it sucks. But that's because spatial _does_ suck for browsing files - if you want to look for something, use the file browser (it's right there on the main menu).
But spatial is incredibly good for day-to-day file management. I finally got round to reorganising my home directory yesterday, and it's incredible how easy spatial made it (after all, file reorganisation is a task which you _want_ loads of windows open for).
So, before you attack spatial nautilus, try reorganising a few directories with it, because that's the sort of task it really shines for.
The "Many-worlds interpretation", first thought of in the late fifties gets rid of the need for a mystical observer by introducing parallell universes, where entangled particles can still interfere with each other.
This is a common claim about the many worlds interpretation, but I don't think it's true. A many-worlds interpretation still has to allow for the results of the double slit experiment, and, AFAIU, that means that universes only split when an observation is made.
ITYM 'Come on US! Get a proper welfare state and join the rest of the western world.'
The western world includes the US, Canada, Western Europe and (probably) Australia and New Zealand. Of the above, how many don't have socialised healthcare?
True, but note that you're not required to tell the truth when the retailer asks you for your details. Actually, I don't think you're required to tell them anything at all, but I may be wrong.
Surely, the logical extension of your argument is that you shouldn't abdicate responsibility by using whichever kernel some programmer decides to write, either. That's obviously ridiculous, and so is a blanket rejection of packaged software in favour of building from source. Installing pre-compilled packages isn't an abdication of responsibility, it's delegation - if you ascertain that a particular packager or distribution has standards you're prepared to trust, trusting them is no worse than trusting the power company to keep the electricity flowing to the machines.
Sure, but given that a parser for a binary format and an XML parser are of roughly equal complexity, and XML parsers can be reused by many different applications, there's a clear advantage to using XML.
Obviously, that's not a complete XML parser, but then, your supposed binary parser isn't a reasonable format, either. Real world binary formats are moderately complicated (look at any of the image file formats, for example); probably simpler than XML for some applications, but it's not a significant difference - and as XML parsers already exist, unlike parsers for whatever random format you invent, XML is obviously going to be a win in many cases.
If I buy a Debian CD from CheapBytes, I can sell that CD to you without having to distribute the source; that's a first sale right.
But I have no first sale right to _make a further copy_ of that CD and sell the copy to you. The only way to get a lawfully made copy of a work under the GPL is to get it from someone who has agreed to the GPL, i.e., who is providing source (or someone who got it from someone who agreed, and so on).
If the GPL were intended to require that everyone who distributed GPLed software had to also distribute source code, you would be right that it would require more than just copyright law. But the GPL is only supposed to apply to those who make and distribute copies of GPLed software, and in that case, copyright law is all that's necessary.
I don't think GNOME will lose experienced users. I've been using Linux since before 1.0, and I much prefer GNOME to KDE, because the GNOME designers take the time to figure out the right UI, rather than assume that providing a myriad of options will allow a good UI to emerge from users choices.
This Slashdot mantra that customisation is good is wrong for two reasons - first, because the more customisation there is available, the more effort is required to get something working right (I'm perfectly capable of editing the source of programs to customise their GUIs. I don't because I have better things to do - I want the source code to _do the right thing_). Second, because most users _don't make the right UI choices_. I know it's hard for most Slashdot users to accept, but a UI that has been carefully designed by someone else is likely to be _easier to use_ than the UI that results from an hour of random option tweeking. Epiphany and Rhythmbox are two great examples - every GUI element is scrutinised before being implemented, and there are very few options. Both applications are a joy to use.
I switched to GNOME around KDE 1.1, because it was too cluttered. I periodically try KDE again, and it makes my brain hurt - I spend all my time keeping track of the UI, whereas with GNOME, the developers have already anticipated how I'll use the application, and made sure that the interface is obvious to that use.
I don't want to bash KDE entirely. If it wants to be a geeks paradise of customisation, that's fine, it's good to have a DE for that market share. But it's not about experienced vs. inexperienced users - it's about those who want to tweak there environment, and those who just want to use it. Some experienced users may be fed up of having to do their own UI design, in the name of flexibility. I certainly do, and that's why I use GNOME.
Could you give some actual examples of how Klein's account is 'lie-laden'? And I love the way you dismiss her as 'an opinion columnist'. OMG, she is capable of drawing conclusions from the facts she presents. She must be biased! (This bizarre idea in the US that there is some hard and fast distinction between reporting, which is entirely objective, and comment, which is entirely subjective, is probably the single most damaging feature of the US media.)
Most city centres in the UK are covered by CCTV. As you live in London, you certainly can't have failed to notice them, particularly in the City. These cameras are capable of panning and zooming (watch them when a group of young people, particularly young black people, are walking past), are constantly monitored and recorded (and the recordings kept for a month, or longer if the police request it).
Sure, in residential areas, there's little CCTV (although still a certain amount, particularly mounted on private property, but observing public areas). However, the rising observation of public space is extremely problematic. Check out Privacy International's FAQ on the subject.
The problem is not the GUI, at least, not in the narrow sense of the toolkit and desktop environment. GNOME2 is at least as easy to use as OSX, although it lacks some of the cool features and eye-candy.
Where there is still a problem with Linux, which OSX has solved, is basic and medium level system configuration. Configuring new hardware under, say, Mandrake, is pretty easy, but still nowhere near as slick as OSX. Adding network shares and similar under Linuxconf or similar is a royal pain in the arse compared to OSX.
What we need is for the approach that has been so succesful in giving us an integrated Desktop (particularly GNOME's HIG and the approach of their usability team, concentrating on proper HCI principles rather than guesswork, and having a clear understanding of the target user) and applying that to the remaining parts of a linux home system.
And it's the home users, who need to do a bit of configuration on their own, who are currently not so well served by Linux. Linux has been ready for the corporate desktop for a couple of years now.
You're right about images (although the problem here is application support, not the X clipboard, which already supports different types of data), and the problem that closing applications clobbers the clipboard. But:
But you can't copy between for example OpenOffice and mozilla composer and keep the font and layout settings.
Sure you can, or at least, you can do it the other way; I've just copied from Epiphany to OO, and it preserved italics, font colour, font size.
The X clipboard infrastructure if fine. It's been said before many times, but it's still true: the problem is with the applications.
Does anyone still do site management by hand? Every web site I'm involved with either uses, or is in the process of switching to, a content management system, whether that's Plone, PostNuke, or something as simple as Blogger.
FrontPage and Dreamweaver strike me as incurably stuck in the dark ages of the Web, providing solutions to problems nobody has anymore, those involved in writing and maintaining a large number of individual, static, pages. Web sites (at least, those I'm familiar with) don't work that way these days - they work both at a level of granularity below the page (individual news headlines, or articles, or other chunks of content) and above the page (topics and templates). With this kind of system, writing HTML is a fraction of the overall work of running the site, so WYSIWYG page editors like Frontpage are pretty useless. I suppose you could do a draft of your main page template in Frontpage before implementing it properly, I suppose, but I'm not sure that usage would be worth the money.
So, I think the OSS world already has an alternative to Frontpage and Dreamweaver. What it doesn't have (because it doesn't need) is a clone of either of those two doomed applications.
Done so quickly they didn't bother with such trivialities as a knowledge of the English language, presumably. "[T]he comic-like sequences inherent of the first game"? "To a point of dissention"? Did the reviewer write this by throwing a thesaurus at the PC and hoping it would hit the right keys when it bounced?
this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best
Can you explain what you mean? What sort of votes are you talking about (internal policy? union issues? wider political issues?) and what sort of 'pressure' the employer can bring to bear?
The String types dynamically allocate memory. Hence, an operation such as this:
string1 = string2 + string3;
can fail. This doesn't leave you with any options; either you wrap every string assignment in try/catch blocks, or you just hope it works.
Well, you can do:
string1.reserve(string2.size() + string3.size());
Then
string1 = string2 + string3
is guaranteed to succeed.
With C-style strings, I can formally prove the correctness of an algorithm, but not with the String types, simply because their behavior is not well defined for cases in which memory allocation fails. Even if these string types had a standard behavior, you're still left with an algorithm that becomes useless when memory allocation fails.
What algorithm doesn't become useless when memory allocation fails? If you don't have enough memory to process your data, you don't have enough memory. Whether you do
try {
some_algorithm(); } catch( std::bad_alloc a ) {
std::cerr << "Could not allocate memory\n";
std::exit(1); }
is surely irrelavent. Using C strings doesn't gain you anything, but does mean you have to remember to check for terminating nulls and buffer lengths and deal with memory allocation all the time. I'd rather have all the capacity checks etc. in one place (in the string class), so that if there are buffer overflow bugs, they only have to be fixed once, rather than scattered throughout the application.
Me, I'll blow his fucking brains out with my 12 gauge before he gets through the window. And as has been said, "You can pry my guns from my cold, dead hands." You and the rest of your anti-gun cronies aren't getting them from me, period. And I dare you to try to take them by force.
You know, I'm so not bothered by this kind of posturing. If the US government ever enacts sensible gun control legislation, they can send the fucking army to get your oh-so-scary 12 guage. Or, maybe, they'll shoot you. Either way, the number of guns in the community goes down, and everyone's safer. (Statistical point - the majority of gun-related deaths are accidents. The danger isn't criminals with guns, it's people with guns).
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No, it doesn't. IE 6 still uses the wierd 'layout' property to implement it's rendering, triggering all the wierd float bugs.
"Two third-party presidential candidates purposely crossed a police barricade"
Dude, what kind of crazy fascist country are you from, that you'ld think 'crossing a police barricade' is breaking the law?
How about, today?
I've just tried it, and it works fine with Mozilla 1.7 and Gimp 2.0.4.
I don't have Konquerer installed, so haven't been able to try that, but I can (for example) drag-and-drop from Rhythmbox to K3B just fine, so I expect Konqueror to Gimp would work too. This isn't surprising - X has had drag-and-drop mostly sorted for years now.
Because of concerns over concentration of media power (particularly because of Berlusconni's near-monopoly on both state and private broadcasting), pirate TV has become a popular political action in Italy. Many stations have been set up as community resources, sometimes broadcasting to as small an area as a couple of streets (and thereby resisting the homogenising effects of the mass media). Check out Telestreet for more information (in Italian).
You're misreading those screenshots - GNOME apps almost universally apply changes immediately, so 'close' doesn't mean 'abort', it means 'continue'. So it's quite consistent for 'OK', 'add' and 'close' buttons to be in the same location - they all mean 'continue with this action'. Meanwhile, the 'abort' button is second from the right in all those screenshots (except for the first, where 'abort' doesn't make sense, so there is no 'abort' button).
The consistent, well thought out, placement of the buttons in GNOME is one of those little things which make it's UI such a pleasure to use - check out the Human Interface Guidlines for more details.
The apostrophe in possesives replaces the letter 'e'. Back in the day, English, like Latin and German, has a system of 'cases', changed word endings used to denote different uses of words. The genetive (possesive) ending was 'es'. At some point, we stopped using cases, but we still needed a way to denote the possesive, and the apostrophe-s was born.
... I'd recommend you spend some time using it to actually _manage_ files.
As one of the gnome devs points out, when people test a file manager, they often go and browse around their files. If they do this using spatial, they'll come to the conclusion that it sucks. But that's because spatial _does_ suck for browsing files - if you want to look for something, use the file browser (it's right there on the main menu).
But spatial is incredibly good for day-to-day file management. I finally got round to reorganising my home directory yesterday, and it's incredible how easy spatial made it (after all, file reorganisation is a task which you _want_ loads of windows open for).
So, before you attack spatial nautilus, try reorganising a few directories with it, because that's the sort of task it really shines for.
The "Many-worlds interpretation", first thought of in the late fifties gets rid of the need for a mystical observer by introducing parallell universes, where entangled particles can still interfere with each other.
This is a common claim about the many worlds interpretation, but I don't think it's true. A many-worlds interpretation still has to allow for the results of the double slit experiment, and, AFAIU, that means that universes only split when an observation is made.
ITYM 'Come on US! Get a proper welfare state and join the rest of the western world.'
The western world includes the US, Canada, Western Europe and (probably) Australia and New Zealand. Of the above, how many don't have socialised healthcare?
True, but note that you're not required to tell the truth when the retailer asks you for your details. Actually, I don't think you're required to tell them anything at all, but I may be wrong.
Surely, the logical extension of your argument is that you shouldn't abdicate responsibility by using whichever kernel some programmer decides to write, either. That's obviously ridiculous, and so is a blanket rejection of packaged software in favour of building from source. Installing pre-compilled packages isn't an abdication of responsibility, it's delegation - if you ascertain that a particular packager or distribution has standards you're prepared to trust, trusting them is no worse than trusting the power company to keep the electricity flowing to the machines.
Sure, but given that a parser for a binary format and an XML parser are of roughly equal complexity, and XML parsers can be reused by many different applications, there's a clear advantage to using XML.
How about a bit of perl?
...) = m!<packet id=('|")([0-9]+)\1\w*> ... </packet>!
($skip, $id, $len,
Obviously, that's not a complete XML parser, but then, your supposed binary parser isn't a reasonable format, either. Real world binary formats are moderately complicated (look at any of the image file formats, for example); probably simpler than XML for some applications, but it's not a significant difference - and as XML parsers already exist, unlike parsers for whatever random format you invent, XML is obviously going to be a win in many cases.
If I buy a Debian CD from CheapBytes, I can sell that CD to you without having to distribute the source; that's a first sale right.
But I have no first sale right to _make a further copy_ of that CD and sell the copy to you. The only way to get a lawfully made copy of a work under the GPL is to get it from someone who has agreed to the GPL, i.e., who is providing source (or someone who got it from someone who agreed, and so on).
If the GPL were intended to require that everyone who distributed GPLed software had to also distribute source code, you would be right that it would require more than just copyright law. But the GPL is only supposed to apply to those who make and distribute copies of GPLed software, and in that case, copyright law is all that's necessary.
I don't think GNOME will lose experienced users. I've been using Linux since before 1.0, and I much prefer GNOME to KDE, because the GNOME designers take the time to figure out the right UI, rather than assume that providing a myriad of options will allow a good UI to emerge from users choices.
This Slashdot mantra that customisation is good is wrong for two reasons - first, because the more customisation there is available, the more effort is required to get something working right (I'm perfectly capable of editing the source of programs to customise their GUIs. I don't because I have better things to do - I want the source code to _do the right thing_). Second, because most users _don't make the right UI choices_. I know it's hard for most Slashdot users to accept, but a UI that has been carefully designed by someone else is likely to be _easier to use_ than the UI that results from an hour of random option tweeking. Epiphany and Rhythmbox are two great examples - every GUI element is scrutinised before being implemented, and there are very few options. Both applications are a joy to use.
I switched to GNOME around KDE 1.1, because it was too cluttered. I periodically try KDE again, and it makes my brain hurt - I spend all my time keeping track of the UI, whereas with GNOME, the developers have already anticipated how I'll use the application, and made sure that the interface is obvious to that use.
I don't want to bash KDE entirely. If it wants to be a geeks paradise of customisation, that's fine, it's good to have a DE for that market share. But it's not about experienced vs. inexperienced users - it's about those who want to tweak there environment, and those who just want to use it. Some experienced users may be fed up of having to do their own UI design, in the name of flexibility. I certainly do, and that's why I use GNOME.
Could you give some actual examples of how Klein's account is 'lie-laden'? And I love the way you dismiss her as 'an opinion columnist'. OMG, she is capable of drawing conclusions from the facts she presents. She must be biased! (This bizarre idea in the US that there is some hard and fast distinction between reporting, which is entirely objective, and comment, which is entirely subjective, is probably the single most damaging feature of the US media.)
Most city centres in the UK are covered by CCTV. As you live in London, you certainly can't have failed to notice them, particularly in the City. These cameras are capable of panning and zooming (watch them when a group of young people, particularly young black people, are walking past), are constantly monitored and recorded (and the recordings kept for a month, or longer if the police request it).
Sure, in residential areas, there's little CCTV (although still a certain amount, particularly mounted on private property, but observing public areas). However, the rising observation of public space is extremely problematic. Check out Privacy International's FAQ on the subject.
The problem is not the GUI, at least, not in the narrow sense of the toolkit and desktop environment. GNOME2 is at least as easy to use as OSX, although it lacks some of the cool features and eye-candy.
Where there is still a problem with Linux, which OSX has solved, is basic and medium level system configuration. Configuring new hardware under, say, Mandrake, is pretty easy, but still nowhere near as slick as OSX. Adding network shares and similar under Linuxconf or similar is a royal pain in the arse compared to OSX.
What we need is for the approach that has been so succesful in giving us an integrated Desktop (particularly GNOME's HIG and the approach of their usability team, concentrating on proper HCI principles rather than guesswork, and having a clear understanding of the target user) and applying that to the remaining parts of a linux home system.
And it's the home users, who need to do a bit of configuration on their own, who are currently not so well served by Linux. Linux has been ready for the corporate desktop for a couple of years now.
Sure you can, or at least, you can do it the other way; I've just copied from Epiphany to OO, and it preserved italics, font colour, font size.
The X clipboard infrastructure if fine. It's been said before many times, but it's still true: the problem is with the applications.
Does anyone still do site management by hand? Every web site I'm involved with either uses, or is in the process of switching to, a content management system, whether that's Plone, PostNuke, or something as simple as Blogger.
FrontPage and Dreamweaver strike me as incurably stuck in the dark ages of the Web, providing solutions to problems nobody has anymore, those involved in writing and maintaining a large number of individual, static, pages. Web sites (at least, those I'm familiar with) don't work that way these days - they work both at a level of granularity below the page (individual news headlines, or articles, or other chunks of content) and above the page (topics and templates). With this kind of system, writing HTML is a fraction of the overall work of running the site, so WYSIWYG page editors like Frontpage are pretty useless. I suppose you could do a draft of your main page template in Frontpage before implementing it properly, I suppose, but I'm not sure that usage would be worth the money.
So, I think the OSS world already has an alternative to Frontpage and Dreamweaver. What it doesn't have (because it doesn't need) is a clone of either of those two doomed applications.
Done so quickly they didn't bother with such trivialities as a knowledge of the English language, presumably. "[T]he comic-like sequences inherent of the first game"? "To a point of dissention"? Did the reviewer write this by throwing a thesaurus at the PC and hoping it would hit the right keys when it bounced?
Actually, under Russian socialism, workers were paid a wage. Not necessarily a particularly good one, but that's better than Russian capitalism is managing.
What algorithm doesn't become useless when memory allocation fails? If you don't have enough memory to process your data, you don't have enough memory. Whether you dooris surely irrelavent. Using C strings doesn't gain you anything, but does mean you have to remember to check for terminating nulls and buffer lengths and deal with memory allocation all the time. I'd rather have all the capacity checks etc. in one place (in the string class), so that if there are buffer overflow bugs, they only have to be fixed once, rather than scattered throughout the application.