"Suggested fix:...I suggest we release 0.8 5 days after slashdot announces it.
Actually, just about all of the milestones were released well after Slashdot claimed they were out, as one person after another looked at the FTP site and was confused about the versioning scheme.
As an aside, given that Slashdot is the most prominent and most popular Linux site and the flagship of VA Linux's sites (linux.com notwithstanding), isn't its performance a little embarassing? Not that it's a big deal for me to go without Slashdot when it's unreachable every day between 5-7 pm EST (the twitching subsides after an hour or so) but you would think the guys at LNUX would want their showcase to give a better impression.
The comments in the C|Net story are so absurd (they sound like a particularly heavy-handed Segfault article) I'm curious to see how this was reported elsewhere. I don't see any other coverage, including on the Microsoft site. Does anyone know of other articles?
It has since been renamed "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor," in a "GNU's Not UNIX" fashion.
OK, so this kind of recursive name was cute and clever (maybe) when the FSF first did it. By the millionth or so time, though, it's gotten pretty stale.
...and by the way, I always have to laugh at Linux maniacs who have the attitude that they're the hyperrational ubergeeks while the rest of the world chooses their technology according to marketing, eyecandy or some other "Joe Sixpack" criterion. Meanwhile, their primary concerns are 1) translucent shading and 2) which free software celebrity is putting his name on it.
Advocates of Freehand and Illustrator have some nasty flame wars, but you don't see them dropping developers' names like fashion slaves talking about designers.
Look, I know from following the Darwin lists that Wilfredo Sanchez is a huge contributor but -- front page Slashdot news? The Mac sites aren't making such a big deal about this. It's not like Steve Jobs or Avie Tevanian is leaving.
The free software world has this habit of latching on to whichever developer brings himself to their attention. Just try to explain to people that Jamie Zawinski didn't singlehandedly write Navigator or that Jason Haas isn't doing PowerPC Linux entirely on his own.
Again, no disrespect to Wilfredo (or JWZ or Jason, for that matter). I know he was extremely important in OS X development. But this sort of "Stop the presses! RASTER QUIT HIS JOB AT RED HAT!" mentality strikes me as more appropriate for Tiger Beat.
I don't think this is a very interesting question for an interview; why don't you just mail ComboyNeal this request as explained in the FAQ?
Well, I thought "CowboyNeal, why didn't you reply to my email where I asked about the possibility of a posting history Slashbox?" was kind of an obnoxious question.;-)
Anyway, at least I'm not asking about an open submission queue for the zillionth time...
Hmm...what you're saying is that viruses shouldn't cost you anything because full backups should be instantly available. That's true, but the fact is that they aren't. For one thing, when a virus spreads during the day (which it will) that day's work is lost as you go back to the previous night's backup, or the one before that, to be on the safe side. And that's the best case scenario -- I have yet to work in a place where that's really what would happen. In all my workplaces, people would have lost weeks of work, or maybe everything. And that's not even mentioning the idiot admin who refused to give me a restore because of some turf squabble with a rival.
Hey, street crime wouldn't cost anything if people all stayed inside.
Like a lot of people, I bet, I frequently look at my user info page to see if there have been responses to my posts, and what moderations I have received. Would it be possible to provide a Slashbox with that information on the main page?
1) I think of myself as an adept person -- I have more code in Linux distributions than most people here -- and I have never thought the Mac treats me as an idiot. On the contrary, the ease of use allows you to take chances (because there's nothing you can screw up that can't be fixed by rebooting with extensions off) where most Windows users are terrified of the prospect of changing a single setting.
2) However much of a "failure" the Mac itself has been, a copy of it runs 90-something percent of the world's personal computers. And those rebel Linux desktops are busy copying that copy.
3) You can't have encountered too many Windows users if you think they're all people who found the Mac interface insufficient for their advanced computing needs.
As I mentioned in my other comment, EFM has (had, now it's out of cvs) exactly this. Not built in command line, no constantly running terminal, but the ability to just type and have your typing be a BASH command (or do things like open directories, etc).
So you just type while the FM has focus and it acts as a terminal? Don't you have any visual feedback of what you're typing? It sounds like what I guess I'm subconsciously doing when I switch from Unix to a Mac and notice myself repeatedly hitting the tab key when selecting a file. Except it works...
It also seems similar to the embedded terminal view in Konqueror (not Alt-F2), except without the terminal.
Anyway, Advogato is a stronghold of the "It didn't exist anywhere until Gnome added it." mentality so there's no point raising these points there.
I've had similar experiences -- more often than not the check never arrives and I have to write follow up letters. I make sure to keep copies of the relevant documentation.
I'm not sure what your question is, though. It reminds me of the Ask Slashdot a few days ago where the guy basically asked, "My operating system doesn't have good internationalization or support for Microsoft data formats. I refuse to use any of the software that does do these things. What should I do?"
The Microsoft EULA is more complicated though. There is a genuine question as to who is responsible for those rebates. (I don't think they ever expected to give any.) Advertising a rebate and then ystematically ignoring responses is inexcusable.
Ohmigod, am I really about to agree (kind of) with Jon Katz?
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.
You're right that she doesn't perceive them as lovable, brilliant scalawags -- but that's hardly a prerequisite for being a technology advocate.
Gnotices is completely slashdotted and the submitter neglected to explain what project this involves. A patch to what is available? Given that it affects both the Gnome desktop and Mozilla, I assume it's a new feature of GTK....?
I'm not going to stress too much about this - my impression is that anyone who knows the difference between ls and ln -s can get a new high-paying job with no problem. Several of them are constantly rearranging our filesystems and breaking paths for no apparent reason.
Then there was the guy doing system maintenance on my girlfriend's Sun a few weeks ago. I walked into her office to hear the supervisor explaining to him how to find the ID number of a process...
Actually, New York pays far more out to the Federal government than it receives. Mississippi, IIRC, has the highest ratio of receipts to payments. (Thanks, Trent!)
For all the whining rural states do about the oversized, oppressive government, they mostly make out like bandits from it. And then they threaten to not fill out their census forms. Yeah, that'll fix those nosy Easterners and their New World Order! Hey, go ahead, give up your Federal funds.
How exactly do the record companies make money on PC sales? And how exactly do musicians make money on them?
I don't think he's saying that they are. His proposal is that a tax should be levied on CD-R drives and media and the proceeds should be distributed by the RIAA according to the proportion in Napster's logs. His assumptions seem to be that Napster logs perfectly represent the illegal sharing of music and that saving said music files represents a constant fraction of everyone's CD-R use.
Why that is a fairer approach than requiring Napster to directly pay royalties is beyond me.
When linux was young and hopping around in the excitement of its youth, there were many bold dreams and brave ideas. People talked of it replacing windows and leading to a revolutionary new world...At this point, no matter of marketing is going to make much difference. The direction has already been set - linux as a server OS for scripters and hackers, windows as a gui for ordinary users.
Exactly.
It's not 1998 anymore. The rise of Linux from geek toy to mainstream OS was so meteoric that people were happy to project it into the future and talk about "World Domination" and the like. The reality has set in now: Linux has and will hold a major chunk of the server market and the new apps make it a practical desktop OS for those who really want to use Unix. But, at the same time, iD couldn't sell enough copies of Quake to justify future Linux boxes, Corel took a bath on its Linux productivity applications, Applixware is being sold, it's turning out that an army of hackers can't instantly write a solid office suite and Slashdot can't even pull a majority of Linux hits.
I love running Linux at home, where it meets my needs (coding and net access) and I'm going to keep contributing to free software. But I'm certainly not giving up my Mac and MS Office at work.
Speaking of marketing, search Google for KDE and look at the paid ad on the right. Classy, huh?
Incidentally, those "jackasses" as you call them might very well have a book's worth of ideas about GUIs themsleves. A new idea for a GUI would take a book to explain. Who's going to try and post a quick summary here, to get flamed by a bunch of whining morons?
I suppose. And one of those "idiot trolls" might really have a grits-covered Natalie Portman in his bed. (Which would explain why she's not answering any of the letters I send to her at Harvard.) But I'm thinking no.
Note that the difference between Jef Raskin and the jackasses who post to every Gnome or KDE story saying, "Why are developers wasting their time imitating existing interfaces? They should be doing something much better. No, I don't have any ideas as to what 'something much better' is, but that's what they should be doing." is:
1) Virtually all of today's GUI's are derived directly or indirectly from his work on and before the Mac. 2) He's written a book that explains what 'something much better' might look like.
So Korn (the band) drinks Coors Light? I might have suspected...
For those of you wondering where that apparently idiotic non-sequitur came from, it refers to this picture on David Korn's web site. Roblimo, I appreciate your including my question but you could have edited out that line, especially if you're stripping out the HTML.;-)
Seriously. I've seen a bunch of people install Linux, having read statements about how: There are equivalent desktop applications for everything you use under Windows: Word -- AbiWord, KWord, Siag Excel -- KSpread, Gnumeric, Pathetic Writer Photoshop -- Gimp and so forth. They discover that while it's easy to compile a table like that, the quality of those Linux apps ranges from slipshod to unusable and wonder what the hell the Linux advocates are thinking.
The answer is that those advocates aren't using Linux for any real work - they're just downloading, patching and compiling over and over again. If that's what you enjoy, then KSpread and Gnumeric are much better than Excel. And I love tinkering with KSpread but I get my work done in Excel.
And for crying out loud, of course KDE works with 2.4. As if no one thought of 2.4 support until this pinhead and his friend decided to add it?
The KDE 2.0 installation has been fraught with setbacks and unexplained crashes, and is very poorly documented. "I'm finding this difficult," says the sysadmin, fully aware of the implication that if this is tricky for him to master, then it would be well nigh impossible for the average person.
I'm a biologist, not a hacker, and compiling KDE is trivial.
One quibble, though, gustar; penultimate means "second-most," not "most."
Just because the company is a monopoly that is less than scrupulous in their practices doesn't mean that Joe Consumer (using Windoze, dialing MSN to get to their Hotmail email) doesn't have a use for them.
Forget Joe Consumer -- the majority of Slashdot hits come from Windows/IE. Even if everyone claims to be using Galeon or lynx.
What I have to laugh at are posts like this complaining that Slashdot is a hotbed of pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux, anti-Mozilla sentiment.
AREA MAN CONSTANTLY MENTIONING HE DOESN'T OWN A TELEVISION
CHAPEL HILL, NC--Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers--as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one."...............
Re:Why is "unhappy ending" described as "realistic
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 1
I searched through my accounts looking for one with moderator points to give you. No luck, but at least I get to post.;-)
I love the old Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach movies. I'd probably have found them saccharine and annoying if I had seen them when they were made, but today the optimism, friendliness and joy in life that fills them seems so refreshing in a culture that has turned its back on those things.
Over the last 30 years, the attitude shapers of US culture have decided that bleakness, pessimism, ugliness and cynicism are the only "realistic" or "authentic" way to see the world. It's a corrosive, lazy attitude that is at least as destructive as relentless optimism. That's how we get a Presidential election where candidates don't need to stake out real positions -- everyone in the media is writing about spinning and scheming because they're all too cool to talk about anything as lame as what the candidates actually stand for.
You're probably thinking "well this isn't slavery". Well, when corporations finally own enough of the ideas that we can't have an idea that isn't derivative of a patent or copyright, we will be slaves once again.
Good Freaking Lord.
The Napster users who compare themselves to Rosa Parks and Ghandi are appalling enough -- but you're seriously comparing restraints on your ability to copy Apple's industrial designs to slavery? Do you have the slightest sense of proportion?
Not that I'm such a corporate serf -- I'm posting this in Konqueror with an Aqua GTK theme I got off themes.org before it was pulled. But slavery? That people should be expected to pay for what they're unable or unwilling to make for themselves?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, just about all of the milestones were released well after Slashdot claimed they were out, as one person after another looked at the FTP site and was confused about the versioning scheme.
As an aside, given that Slashdot is the most prominent and most popular Linux site and the flagship of VA Linux's sites (linux.com notwithstanding), isn't its performance a little embarassing? Not that it's a big deal for me to go without Slashdot when it's unreachable every day between 5-7 pm EST (the twitching subsides after an hour or so) but you would think the guys at LNUX would want their showcase to give a better impression.
On the other hand, news of the DOJ investigation of the Microsoft - Corel deal is all over the place.
OK, so this kind of recursive name was cute and clever (maybe) when the FSF first did it. By the millionth or so time, though, it's gotten pretty stale.
Advocates of Freehand and Illustrator have some nasty flame wars, but you don't see them dropping developers' names like fashion slaves talking about designers.
The free software world has this habit of latching on to whichever developer brings himself to their attention. Just try to explain to people that Jamie Zawinski didn't singlehandedly write Navigator or that Jason Haas isn't doing PowerPC Linux entirely on his own.
Again, no disrespect to Wilfredo (or JWZ or Jason, for that matter). I know he was extremely important in OS X development. But this sort of "Stop the presses! RASTER QUIT HIS JOB AT RED HAT!" mentality strikes me as more appropriate for Tiger Beat.
Well, I thought "CowboyNeal, why didn't you reply to my email where I asked about the possibility of a posting history Slashbox?" was kind of an obnoxious question. ;-)
Anyway, at least I'm not asking about an open submission queue for the zillionth time...
Hey, street crime wouldn't cost anything if people all stayed inside.
Like a lot of people, I bet, I frequently look at my user info page to see if there have been responses to my posts, and what moderations I have received. Would it be possible to provide a Slashbox with that information on the main page?
2) However much of a "failure" the Mac itself has been, a copy of it runs 90-something percent of the world's personal computers. And those rebel Linux desktops are busy copying that copy.
3) You can't have encountered too many Windows users if you think they're all people who found the Mac interface insufficient for their advanced computing needs.
So you just type while the FM has focus and it acts as a terminal? Don't you have any visual feedback of what you're typing? It sounds like what I guess I'm subconsciously doing when I switch from Unix to a Mac and notice myself repeatedly hitting the tab key when selecting a file. Except it works...
It also seems similar to the embedded terminal view in Konqueror (not Alt-F2), except without the terminal.
Anyway, Advogato is a stronghold of the "It didn't exist anywhere until Gnome added it." mentality so there's no point raising these points there.
I'm not sure what your question is, though. It reminds me of the Ask Slashdot a few days ago where the guy basically asked, "My operating system doesn't have good internationalization or support for Microsoft data formats. I refuse to use any of the software that does do these things. What should I do?"
The Microsoft EULA is more complicated though. There is a genuine question as to who is responsible for those rebates. (I don't think they ever expected to give any.) Advertising a rebate and then ystematically ignoring responses is inexcusable.
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.
You're right that she doesn't perceive them as lovable, brilliant scalawags -- but that's hardly a prerequisite for being a technology advocate.
Then there was the guy doing system maintenance on my girlfriend's Sun a few weeks ago. I walked into her office to hear the supervisor explaining to him how to find the ID number of a process...
For all the whining rural states do about the oversized, oppressive government, they mostly make out like bandits from it. And then they threaten to not fill out their census forms. Yeah, that'll fix those nosy Easterners and their New World Order! Hey, go ahead, give up your Federal funds.
I don't think he's saying that they are. His proposal is that a tax should be levied on CD-R drives and media and the proceeds should be distributed by the RIAA according to the proportion in Napster's logs. His assumptions seem to be that Napster logs perfectly represent the illegal sharing of music and that saving said music files represents a constant fraction of everyone's CD-R use.
Why that is a fairer approach than requiring Napster to directly pay royalties is beyond me.
Exactly.
It's not 1998 anymore. The rise of Linux from geek toy to mainstream OS was so meteoric that people were happy to project it into the future and talk about "World Domination" and the like. The reality has set in now: Linux has and will hold a major chunk of the server market and the new apps make it a practical desktop OS for those who really want to use Unix. But, at the same time, iD couldn't sell enough copies of Quake to justify future Linux boxes, Corel took a bath on its Linux productivity applications, Applixware is being sold, it's turning out that an army of hackers can't instantly write a solid office suite and Slashdot can't even pull a majority of Linux hits.
I love running Linux at home, where it meets my needs (coding and net access) and I'm going to keep contributing to free software. But I'm certainly not giving up my Mac and MS Office at work.
Speaking of marketing, search Google for KDE and look at the paid ad on the right. Classy, huh?
I suppose. And one of those "idiot trolls" might really have a grits-covered Natalie Portman in his bed. (Which would explain why she's not answering any of the letters I send to her at Harvard.) But I'm thinking no.
1) Virtually all of today's GUI's are derived directly or indirectly from his work on and before the Mac.
2) He's written a book that explains what 'something much better' might look like.
For those of you wondering where that apparently idiotic non-sequitur came from, it refers to this picture on David Korn's web site. Roblimo, I appreciate your including my question but you could have edited out that line, especially if you're stripping out the HTML. ;-)
There are equivalent desktop applications for everything you use under Windows:
Word -- AbiWord, KWord, Siag
Excel -- KSpread, Gnumeric, Pathetic Writer
Photoshop -- Gimp
and so forth. They discover that while it's easy to compile a table like that, the quality of those Linux apps ranges from slipshod to unusable and wonder what the hell the Linux advocates are thinking.
The answer is that those advocates aren't using Linux for any real work - they're just downloading, patching and compiling over and over again. If that's what you enjoy, then KSpread and Gnumeric are much better than Excel. And I love tinkering with KSpread but I get my work done in Excel.
And for crying out loud, of course KDE works with 2.4. As if no one thought of 2.4 support until this pinhead and his friend decided to add it?
The KDE 2.0 installation has been fraught with setbacks and unexplained crashes, and is very poorly documented. "I'm finding this difficult," says the sysadmin, fully aware of the implication that if this is tricky for him to master, then it would be well nigh impossible for the average person.
I'm a biologist, not a hacker, and compiling KDE is trivial.
One quibble, though, gustar; penultimate means "second-most," not "most."
Forget Joe Consumer -- the majority of Slashdot hits come from Windows/IE. Even if everyone claims to be using Galeon or lynx.
What I have to laugh at are posts like this complaining that Slashdot is a hotbed of pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux, anti-Mozilla sentiment.
AREA MAN CONSTANTLY MENTIONING HE DOESN'T OWN A TELEVISION
CHAPEL HILL, NC--Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers--as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one." ...............
I love the old Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach movies. I'd probably have found them saccharine and annoying if I had seen them when they were made, but today the optimism, friendliness and joy in life that fills them seems so refreshing in a culture that has turned its back on those things.
Over the last 30 years, the attitude shapers of US culture have decided that bleakness, pessimism, ugliness and cynicism are the only "realistic" or "authentic" way to see the world. It's a corrosive, lazy attitude that is at least as destructive as relentless optimism. That's how we get a Presidential election where candidates don't need to stake out real positions -- everyone in the media is writing about spinning and scheming because they're all too cool to talk about anything as lame as what the candidates actually stand for.
Good Freaking Lord.
The Napster users who compare themselves to Rosa Parks and Ghandi are appalling enough -- but you're seriously comparing restraints on your ability to copy Apple's industrial designs to slavery? Do you have the slightest sense of proportion?
Not that I'm such a corporate serf -- I'm posting this in Konqueror with an Aqua GTK theme I got off themes.org before it was pulled. But slavery? That people should be expected to pay for what they're unable or unwilling to make for themselves?