Actually, I like the name Kontour. It's pretty clever, like Konqueror and Krayon. Also, the K convention is a good thing - makes KDE applications instantly recognizable as KDE apps, and gets stuck in people's minds.
Now that Adobe's (legitimate) concerns have been addressed, I hope the KDE crew tells those nosy, blood-sucking lawyers to stick it!
Someone here on Slashdot had a rather eloquent quote. I'm sorry, but I don't remember the name. Anyways...
As an aside (not related to your post, but to others I have read here), the arguments that the poster should shut up and stop bitching because he has no constitutional rights on private property are particularly disturbing, and the main reason I ultimately rejected the Libertarian stance on social issues. A nation in which one's rights end at the edge of the public sidewalk, in a country as privatized is this, is not a very free nation at all. How much of your life do you spend on private property vs. public property, and how many rights do you assume you
have that, according to such an argument, you in fact do not? I type this message right now, sitting on private property. I exersize my
freedom of speech on my lunch hour, yet these people would argue that firing my sorry ass would be just fine (if I were to offend my
employer), simply because although it is my time, it is my employer's network to which my laptop is connected and across which the bytestream passes.
If this is the kind of world they wish to advocate, then I want nothing of it. And, I suspect, our founding fathers would feel similarly.
If we were going to have a modern-day Boston Tea Party, the place to do it would be at book publishers' warehouses or printing facilities. I'd just bring in a firehose or six and wet down the boxes of books thoroughly - no casualties or risk of human life, but it makes all their brand new books completely unsellable.
This way, there would be several modes, selected by kernel parameters in the lilo.conf file or LILO prompt.
Splash-screen mode. Puts a pretty picture on the screen, stays there until the system gives you a login prompt or (x|k|g)dm login screen. The user should be able to press escape to ditch the splash screen & go to concise mode if problems arise.
Concise mode: Displays minimal information on bootup - kernel version, distribution name, machine name. Nothing else is printed unless something is wrong.
Verbose mode: Shows everything you never wanted to know about Linux as it boots - handy for kernel debugging or fixing configuration problems.
The first Emacs was developed in 1976 for the ITS platform by Richard Stallman, six years before Turbo Pascal. See the Emacs FAQ for yourself. Before you flame me, you might want to check your facts.
As far as development tools are concerned don't get me started with the monstrosity that Windows development has become. Between the Hungarian notation, the mixing of 16 & 32 bit code, the badly designed APIs, the not-quite-protected memory model and the maze of not-quite-compatible versions of the same DLLs, programming on Windows platforms is a nightmare. Comparatively speaking, Linux programming is much easier. Look how far KDE has come in just two years. They might put all the astroturfers posting on Slashdot out of a job at this pace.
I'd actually like to see someone name one part which is ahead of Microsoft. Just one.
Development tools. Linux (and the other unices) are light-years ahead of Microsoft with their development tools. Start with gcc, which is probably the most flexible compiler ever made - it handles C, C++, Objective C, Java, etc., and compiles code for dozens of platforms. Then you have emacs, which I consider to be the worlds first IDE, here long before Borland C++ or Turbo Pascal. There's Perl, Python, Tcl, the Unix shells, sed, awk, lex, yacc, gdb. Then you have all the libraries, too many for me to list, which are a tremendous help in enabling users to develop applications quickly. More recently, we have GUI toolkits - Qt, GTK+, Tk. We have source management tools such as CVS. All of these tools come with source code, so the programmer can get under the hood at will. The very design of Unix/Linux has evolved to be programmer friendly. Most Linux distributions come with hundreds of development tools.
While Microsoft's killer app is Office, Linux's killer app is its development tools. No other OS (except other Unices) even come close. That is why Microsoft sees such a threat from Linux.
The way ACME set the box up, when they do a remote shutdown of a vehicle, the box lets the driver keep driving until he parks & shuts off the ignition. Then it won't start up again.
Talk about Big Brother. I don't care what justification a company has about using this kind of technology. I deeply resent the idea of having every move of mine monitored. As long as I return the car in the same condition as it was before I rented it, where I drive or how fast I go is none of their damn business.
You must have a blast at Blockbuster when you return movies late.
That reminds me of a friend of mine who got unjustly fired by Blockbuster. How did he get back at them? Some people collect stamps or antique cars or computers. My friend collects Blockbuster late-fees. He rents from a Blockbuster and deliberately keeps the movie late a few days (or months.) He keeps doing this until the Blockbuster stops allowing him to rent. He then moves on to another Blockbuster doing the same thing (the various stores don't share their late fee lists.) He won't pay the late fees until the collection agencies call and threaten to break his kneecaps. So far he's accumulated hundreds of dollars of late fees, hasn't paid a cent of them yet, and is working hard on increasing his collection.:)
In some small towns (the ones that make traffic fines a main revenue source,) the lights going through the main drag would be synchronized and timed so they change in sequence, ostensibly for giving drivers a nice series of greens. Then they would set the yellow durations to 5 seconds on all the lights, except the last one, which would have a 2 second yellow duration. Of course, a cop would be waiting to nail the person who made it through all the 5 second yellows, but didn't make that last yellow.
I feel completely justified when I run the red light by my house at 3AM and here's why:
That light *only* switches with sensors - it doesn't have a scheduled change pattern. It's also a "No Turn on Red" intersection. Problem is, it sometimes doesn't detect my little Miata.
The first couple months that I lived there, I would wait at the light until it changed. I once waited for 15 minutes until somebody in a truck pulled up behind me.
AFAIK, that's perfectly legal. The laws in all the states I know of make an exception for people running red lights when it is apparent that the light is malfunctioning. I think the rule is that if the light stays red for more than two minutes, you can treat the light as a stop sign and go after looking to make sure the way is clear.
This is a hot topic right now in the UK and Europe. Under current laws in both Scotland and England (different legal systems, incidentally), it's a offence to refuse to tell the police if you were driving a car at a given time.
So just use the Ronald Reagan defense when asked that sort of question.
Officer: "Were you driving your vehicle at 8:52 AM on April 19, 2001?"
As an aside (not related to your post, but to others I have read here), the arguments that the poster should shut up and stop bitching because he has no constitutional rights on private property are particularly disturbing, and the main reason I ultimately rejected the Libertarian stance on social issues. A nation in which one's rights end at the edge of the public sidewalk, in a country as privatized is this, is not a very free nation at all. How much of your life do you spend on private property vs. public property, and how many rights do you assume you have that, according to such an argument, you in fact do not? I type this message right now, sitting on private property. I excersize my freedom of speech on my lunch hour, yet these people would argue that firing my sorry ass would be just fine (if I were to offend my employer), simply because although it is my time, it is my employer's network to which my laptop is connected and across which the bytestream passes.
If this is the kind of world they wish to advocate, then I want nothing of it. And, I suspect, our founding fathers would feel similarly.
May I quote this on my web page? This is probably the most eloquent explanation of why we fight the DMCA, the RIAA, fascist universities and corporations in general that I have heard yet.
As for computer crimes, I'd love to know what computer crimes have been comitted. Presumable, if and when charges are filed, all of this will become a matter of public record, and the university can expel the student for merely having charges broght against him, but the million dollar question is What charges could be filed in this case?
Supposedly, flikx is being investigated for making threats against various school officials because some script kiddies forged some email to make it appear to come from him. Any defense attorney who is even vaguely competent would be able to get these charges dropped, since it is so ridiculously easy to forge email return addresses these days, and a quick examination of the Received: headers of the emails in question would probably be enough to show the emails were faked.
The criminal charges are on extremely flimsy evidence, so U.U. would put themselves in a bad position if they expelled flikx based on that evidence. At best, they might be able to get him for "posting inappropriate content using University resources," which doesn't justify an expulsion.
If I were this guy I'd just pop a few Valiums, forget the whole thing and finish my degree.
The problem is if he's expelled, he loses all of his college credits which he worked so hard for. I would definitely fight the university on this one, with legal help of some sort. If the university won't allow him to return to campus, maybe he can cut a deal where he can "voluntarily withdraw" from the university and keep his credits. It sucks, but at least he can finish his degree. I'd write off the weblog, since it was made on university systems for the university, but criminal charges and severe sanctions are absolutely uncalled for.
One problem is that, currently, PGP keys require a password in order to use them for signing or encrypting email. People don't consider having to type in a password "easy to use." However, if you create a MUA that remembers the password, you've reduced the security, because now whoever can get at the machine can get at the key. This is the same old tradeoff between security and ease-of-use.
Maybe the MUA could use biometrics for identification: One way is to use face recognition software and a webcam. That should be better than no security, but it's not foolproof. A better way would be to encode the user's private keys into a smartcard. The user just removes the smartcard and keeps it with him, giving about the same security that car & house keys give. That should be good enough, we're talking about ordinary people who usually don't have too much sensitive stuff going over the net, not state secrets. The downside is that the user needs to buy a smartcard and a smartcard reader.
The word "organic" means the substance has carbon in it. That's all. I doubt that the panels would have any more of a health hazard than plastic, another organic material. At any rate, OLED color screens won't last ten years with present technology because the blue OLEDs only last 1000-2000 hours before fading. Hopefully that'll change soon. Heck, ten years ago, the only blue LEDs that existed would last for ten minutes before burning out - after being cooled with liquid nitrogen.
It looks like you're using a very large tile grid - 1024x1024. Games like Starcraft tend to use much smaller tile sets. In any case, It would seem to me that only a small set of the tiles would have "interesting" stuff on them, the rest can be generic terrain. Think about using a sparse array - where you make space to store the interesting elements, with their coordinates, but the uninteresting stuff doesn't need to use space.
Are you going true 3-D or are you using an isometric 2-D view, like Starcraft? You might want to take a look at the Flight Gear source code - they have some cool algorithms for storing 3-D terrain data if you were going for true 3-D.
Make yourself look as ridiculous as possible, while still in compliance with the code. If the code requires ties, wear a fish tie, a Dilbert tie, or some other atrociously ugly tie. If they require suits, wear an avocado green or plaid 70's style leisure suit. If you're a guy and the code says "Slacks or dresses required", wear a dress to work. You could also interpret "suit" to mean a 1700's style outfit, wig and all. By all means make sure your clothes have loud colors, colors that don't match, polka dots, bizzare styles and anything else that adds some color to your outfit.
When the PHB asks you about your outfit, point out that your clothes are in compliance with the dress code and make sure you tell everyone the look on his face.
I agree that Linux on the desktop isn't dead, it just needs more time to catch on. Look at DOS & Windows. When Windows 1.0 first came out, it was incredibly limited and clumsy. Everybody wrote it off as a poor Macintosh clone. It took several more years before Windows matured into version 3.0. Compared to the Mac, it was still clumsy, slow and limited, but more people noticed it. Windows only really took off with the masses when Win 95 was released. It took Microsoft about a decade to get Windows to sell.
And people call Linux dead because people didn't suddenly drop everything and install Red Hat two years after the first useful desktop environments appeared. Bah! Linux on the desktop can be successful, but it takes persistence. It will take a lot more than two years for this to happen.
As stated in the Win XP FAQ, GUID partitioning is a replacement for MBR partitioning that allows more partitions on the disk, of any size, without the silly BIOS limitations. It's a part if EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface that is replacing the old hairball that is the BIOS. The IA-64 Linux distributions already have a version of LILO that works with EFI.
In short, don't worry, Linux adapts, as it always does.
I can see the problems with the huge, multi-level file hierarchies that are present in Windows, Unix and every other system under the sun. People just can't keep track of thousands of files organized in hundreds of directories in a big tree structure. So far, that's the only way to organize the googlebytes of data a typical computer has, and it works poorly.
Windows, the Mac, and the X GUIs GNOME and KDE address this problem by hiding the filesystem whenever it can. In Windows, you click on an icon or navigate the Start menu to start a program instead of finding the executable foo.exe somewhere in c:\Program Files\foo\. Unfortunately, the filesystem still rears its ugly head frequently, and forces people to wander through it.
Maybe a database model would work better than the traditional hierarchical file system for managing all our data - instead of having a tree of files in subdirectories, have a large database that can be queried using SQL-style commands by the geeks among us, and GUIs capable of Doing The Right Thing for every piece of data in the database by using type information in the tables to put things in the right context. Programs would end up in the program table, word processor documents would end up in the document table, and the system would know instantly what it's dealing with when it looks in a table, and if the database is set up correctly, most searches can be made very quickly and be more likely to return useful results.
OK, its a crazy idea that has the potential of being a hundred times more complicated than hierarchical file systems. Anyone else have any ideas?
Sounds to me as if the judge was a Scientologist. He forbade the defense attorney from making an effective defense, and forbade the jury from using common sense.
Sounds to me like UGO wouldn't be able to pay you even if they wanted to fulfill their obligations, because of cash-flow problems. My advice is to talk to a lawyer to figure out what you can realistically get from them, then cut your losses and move your website somewhere else.
Not sure what you mean by 'fixing the wheel scrolling', but if you can turn off the smooth scrolling bullshit in tools->internet options->advanced.
I don't care all that much about IE's smooth scrolling. I like how you can use Control+wheel to scroll a page at a time in both Konqueror & Mozilla. (Netscape 4.x can be made to do this using imwheel.) If you try this in IE, it grows & shrinks the fonts (only the fonts that haven't been hard coded to a specific point size by moronic web coders & HTML editors. AUGH!!! USELESS!!!)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I like the name Kontour. It's pretty clever, like Konqueror and Krayon. Also, the K convention is a good thing - makes KDE applications instantly recognizable as KDE apps, and gets stuck in people's minds.
Now that Adobe's (legitimate) concerns have been addressed, I hope the KDE crew tells those nosy, blood-sucking lawyers to stick it!
Someone here on Slashdot had a rather eloquent quote. I'm sorry, but I don't remember the name. Anyways...
If we were going to have a modern-day Boston Tea Party, the place to do it would be at book publishers' warehouses or printing facilities. I'd just bring in a firehose or six and wet down the boxes of books thoroughly - no casualties or risk of human life, but it makes all their brand new books completely unsellable.
This way, there would be several modes, selected by kernel parameters in the lilo.conf file or LILO prompt.
The first Emacs was developed in 1976 for the ITS platform by Richard Stallman, six years before Turbo Pascal. See the Emacs FAQ for yourself. Before you flame me, you might want to check your facts.
As far as development tools are concerned don't get me started with the monstrosity that Windows development has become. Between the Hungarian notation, the mixing of 16 & 32 bit code, the badly designed APIs, the not-quite-protected memory model and the maze of not-quite-compatible versions of the same DLLs, programming on Windows platforms is a nightmare. Comparatively speaking, Linux programming is much easier. Look how far KDE has come in just two years. They might put all the astroturfers posting on Slashdot out of a job at this pace.
Development tools. Linux (and the other unices) are light-years ahead of Microsoft with their development tools. Start with gcc, which is probably the most flexible compiler ever made - it handles C, C++, Objective C, Java, etc., and compiles code for dozens of platforms. Then you have emacs, which I consider to be the worlds first IDE, here long before Borland C++ or Turbo Pascal. There's Perl, Python, Tcl, the Unix shells, sed, awk, lex, yacc, gdb. Then you have all the libraries, too many for me to list, which are a tremendous help in enabling users to develop applications quickly. More recently, we have GUI toolkits - Qt, GTK+, Tk. We have source management tools such as CVS. All of these tools come with source code, so the programmer can get under the hood at will. The very design of Unix/Linux has evolved to be programmer friendly. Most Linux distributions come with hundreds of development tools.
While Microsoft's killer app is Office, Linux's killer app is its development tools. No other OS (except other Unices) even come close. That is why Microsoft sees such a threat from Linux.
The way ACME set the box up, when they do a remote shutdown of a vehicle, the box lets the driver keep driving until he parks & shuts off the ignition. Then it won't start up again.
Talk about Big Brother. I don't care what justification a company has about using this kind of technology. I deeply resent the idea of having every move of mine monitored. As long as I return the car in the same condition as it was before I rented it, where I drive or how fast I go is none of their damn business.
That reminds me of a friend of mine who got unjustly fired by Blockbuster. How did he get back at them? Some people collect stamps or antique cars or computers. My friend collects Blockbuster late-fees. He rents from a Blockbuster and deliberately keeps the movie late a few days (or months.) He keeps doing this until the Blockbuster stops allowing him to rent. He then moves on to another Blockbuster doing the same thing (the various stores don't share their late fee lists.) He won't pay the late fees until the collection agencies call and threaten to break his kneecaps. So far he's accumulated hundreds of dollars of late fees, hasn't paid a cent of them yet, and is working hard on increasing his collection. :)
In some small towns (the ones that make traffic fines a main revenue source,) the lights going through the main drag would be synchronized and timed so they change in sequence, ostensibly for giving drivers a nice series of greens. Then they would set the yellow durations to 5 seconds on all the lights, except the last one, which would have a 2 second yellow duration. Of course, a cop would be waiting to nail the person who made it through all the 5 second yellows, but didn't make that last yellow.
AFAIK, that's perfectly legal. The laws in all the states I know of make an exception for people running red lights when it is apparent that the light is malfunctioning. I think the rule is that if the light stays red for more than two minutes, you can treat the light as a stop sign and go after looking to make sure the way is clear.
So just use the Ronald Reagan defense when asked that sort of question.
Officer: "Were you driving your vehicle at 8:52 AM on April 19, 2001?"
You: "I don't remember."
As an aside (not related to your post, but to others I have read here), the arguments that the poster should shut up and stop bitching because he has no constitutional rights on private property are particularly disturbing, and the main reason I ultimately rejected the Libertarian stance on social issues. A nation in which one's rights end at the edge of the public sidewalk, in a country as privatized is this, is not a very free nation at all. How much of your life do you spend on private property vs. public property, and how many rights do you assume you have that, according to such an argument, you in fact do not? I type this message right now, sitting on private property. I excersize my freedom of speech on my lunch hour, yet these people would argue that firing my sorry ass would be just fine (if I were to offend my employer), simply because although it is my time, it is my employer's network to which my laptop is connected and across which the bytestream passes.
If this is the kind of world they wish to advocate, then I want nothing of it. And, I suspect, our founding fathers would feel similarly.
May I quote this on my web page? This is probably the most eloquent explanation of why we fight the DMCA, the RIAA, fascist universities and corporations in general that I have heard yet.
As for computer crimes, I'd love to know what computer crimes have been comitted. Presumable, if and when charges are filed, all of this will become a matter of public record, and the university can expel the student for merely having charges broght against him, but the million dollar question is What charges could be filed in this case?
Supposedly, flikx is being investigated for making threats against various school officials because some script kiddies forged some email to make it appear to come from him. Any defense attorney who is even vaguely competent would be able to get these charges dropped, since it is so ridiculously easy to forge email return addresses these days, and a quick examination of the Received: headers of the emails in question would probably be enough to show the emails were faked.
The criminal charges are on extremely flimsy evidence, so U.U. would put themselves in a bad position if they expelled flikx based on that evidence. At best, they might be able to get him for "posting inappropriate content using University resources," which doesn't justify an expulsion.
If I were this guy I'd just pop a few Valiums, forget the whole thing and finish my degree.
The problem is if he's expelled, he loses all of his college credits which he worked so hard for. I would definitely fight the university on this one, with legal help of some sort. If the university won't allow him to return to campus, maybe he can cut a deal where he can "voluntarily withdraw" from the university and keep his credits. It sucks, but at least he can finish his degree. I'd write off the weblog, since it was made on university systems for the university, but criminal charges and severe sanctions are absolutely uncalled for.
One problem is that, currently, PGP keys require a password in order to use them for signing or encrypting email. People don't consider having to type in a password "easy to use." However, if you create a MUA that remembers the password, you've reduced the security, because now whoever can get at the machine can get at the key. This is the same old tradeoff between security and ease-of-use.
Maybe the MUA could use biometrics for identification: One way is to use face recognition software and a webcam. That should be better than no security, but it's not foolproof. A better way would be to encode the user's private keys into a smartcard. The user just removes the smartcard and keeps it with him, giving about the same security that car & house keys give. That should be good enough, we're talking about ordinary people who usually don't have too much sensitive stuff going over the net, not state secrets. The downside is that the user needs to buy a smartcard and a smartcard reader.
The word "organic" means the substance has carbon in it. That's all. I doubt that the panels would have any more of a health hazard than plastic, another organic material. At any rate, OLED color screens won't last ten years with present technology because the blue OLEDs only last 1000-2000 hours before fading. Hopefully that'll change soon. Heck, ten years ago, the only blue LEDs that existed would last for ten minutes before burning out - after being cooled with liquid nitrogen.
It looks like you're using a very large tile grid - 1024x1024. Games like Starcraft tend to use much smaller tile sets. In any case, It would seem to me that only a small set of the tiles would have "interesting" stuff on them, the rest can be generic terrain. Think about using a sparse array - where you make space to store the interesting elements, with their coordinates, but the uninteresting stuff doesn't need to use space.
Are you going true 3-D or are you using an isometric 2-D view, like Starcraft? You might want to take a look at the Flight Gear source code - they have some cool algorithms for storing 3-D terrain data if you were going for true 3-D.
Make yourself look as ridiculous as possible, while still in compliance with the code. If the code requires ties, wear a fish tie, a Dilbert tie, or some other atrociously ugly tie. If they require suits, wear an avocado green or plaid 70's style leisure suit. If you're a guy and the code says "Slacks or dresses required", wear a dress to work. You could also interpret "suit" to mean a 1700's style outfit, wig and all. By all means make sure your clothes have loud colors, colors that don't match, polka dots, bizzare styles and anything else that adds some color to your outfit.
When the PHB asks you about your outfit, point out that your clothes are in compliance with the dress code and make sure you tell everyone the look on his face.
AOL!!!
I agree that Linux on the desktop isn't dead, it just needs more time to catch on. Look at DOS & Windows. When Windows 1.0 first came out, it was incredibly limited and clumsy. Everybody wrote it off as a poor Macintosh clone. It took several more years before Windows matured into version 3.0. Compared to the Mac, it was still clumsy, slow and limited, but more people noticed it. Windows only really took off with the masses when Win 95 was released. It took Microsoft about a decade to get Windows to sell.
And people call Linux dead because people didn't suddenly drop everything and install Red Hat two years after the first useful desktop environments appeared. Bah! Linux on the desktop can be successful, but it takes persistence. It will take a lot more than two years for this to happen.
As stated in the Win XP FAQ, GUID partitioning is a replacement for MBR partitioning that allows more partitions on the disk, of any size, without the silly BIOS limitations. It's a part if EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface that is replacing the old hairball that is the BIOS. The IA-64 Linux distributions already have a version of LILO that works with EFI.
In short, don't worry, Linux adapts, as it always does.
That's almost fast enough to see blueshift in the road in front of you... Brings new meaning to the words "Crotch Rocket".
I can see the problems with the huge, multi-level file hierarchies that are present in Windows, Unix and every other system under the sun. People just can't keep track of thousands of files organized in hundreds of directories in a big tree structure. So far, that's the only way to organize the googlebytes of data a typical computer has, and it works poorly.
Windows, the Mac, and the X GUIs GNOME and KDE address this problem by hiding the filesystem whenever it can. In Windows, you click on an icon or navigate the Start menu to start a program instead of finding the executable foo.exe somewhere in c:\Program Files\foo\. Unfortunately, the filesystem still rears its ugly head frequently, and forces people to wander through it.
Maybe a database model would work better than the traditional hierarchical file system for managing all our data - instead of having a tree of files in subdirectories, have a large database that can be queried using SQL-style commands by the geeks among us, and GUIs capable of Doing The Right Thing for every piece of data in the database by using type information in the tables to put things in the right context. Programs would end up in the program table, word processor documents would end up in the document table, and the system would know instantly what it's dealing with when it looks in a table, and if the database is set up correctly, most searches can be made very quickly and be more likely to return useful results.
OK, its a crazy idea that has the potential of being a hundred times more complicated than hierarchical file systems. Anyone else have any ideas?
Sounds to me as if the judge was a Scientologist. He forbade the defense attorney from making an effective defense, and forbade the jury from using common sense.
Sounds to me like UGO wouldn't be able to pay you even if they wanted to fulfill their obligations, because of cash-flow problems. My advice is to talk to a lawyer to figure out what you can realistically get from them, then cut your losses and move your website somewhere else.
Not sure what you mean by 'fixing the wheel scrolling', but if you can turn off the smooth scrolling bullshit in tools->internet options->advanced.
I don't care all that much about IE's smooth scrolling. I like how you can use Control+wheel to scroll a page at a time in both Konqueror & Mozilla. (Netscape 4.x can be made to do this using imwheel.) If you try this in IE, it grows & shrinks the fonts (only the fonts that haven't been hard coded to a specific point size by moronic web coders & HTML editors. AUGH!!! USELESS!!!)