Agreed. However, I don't think this is that bad; slash-whatever will find the first occurrence and after that I can summon the Find bar with Ctrl+F if I need the next thing. I do think that FF1's quick find was a little bit better though...
3. Ugly graphics. IE7 is just clearly more beautiful.
Ever noticed how IE7 actually looks a lot like Netscape 6? Remember the great screams of "good riddance!" when the current Firefox default theme was introduced?
Look, prettiness of the UI is the least of my concerns in an application. Firefox's default theme is spartan but it works. I wouldn't call it ugly.
And since dawn of time, Mozilla has been skinnable, and so has been Firefox. If you want colourful themes, there's plenty of them out there. I won't touch them with a ten-meter pole, thank you very much.
Actually, every time I look at the default IE7 theme, I keep thinking "what the hell is this thing?" I haven't actually used IE7 myself, but I've seen it used and no one bothered to change the defaults. How can they use that thing? Every bit in the UI appears to be in direct violation of their own UI guidelines. A complete mess! I really hope one can rearrange the UI (similar to how you can rearrange things in Firefox) the way it used to be in IE6, because I refuse to use an application that has looks like a migraine-inducing mess.
I dislike having close buttons on each tab.
You can configure this behaviour. I actually like the new behaviour because there were many cases where I would accidentally close multiple tabs. Also, if I wanted to close a tab that was not active, it was right-click time.
Memory Foot print.
Right now I have four tabs open. My computer is actually running stuff. I can't remember when was the last time my comp ran out of memory.
Oh, you want to know the memory footprint. I have no clue. I usually have no clue about the memory consumption unless I'm having problems with that. Yeah, I'd be peeved if I was running out of memory and had to close applications thanks to that. I don't need to do that, so surprise surprise, I'm not peeved.
Being somewhat geeky personality, I'm always the last person to recommend people to get a life, but I've never understood why people who criticise Firefox seem to be the only people who I've met that actually know the exact resident set size of their browser at the exact time they're writing their witty critique. I don't get it. Last I checked, RAM was a renewable resource.
Maybe not, but it sounds like it will render obsolete most computers developed before the past 5 years. Nothing before Windows 2000 is compatible with the new version of Gecko? It sounds like something is wrong with that.
Pre-Win2K? Sure! People can install stable Debian, build Firefox 3 from source, and yep, it works... =)
(Kidding. I'm a Debian user.)
I guess the statement was just meant to say that this page's rendering doesn't break. =)
How do you detect whether you've been infected, when all you have is an image of an NTFS filesystem?
You make an image of filesystem that consists of out-of-the-box software that is known to be clean. If that's not clean, repeat from the start and keep both eyes open.
If you still want to check it, you can always mount the image as a local filesystem and use whatever tools you want to check it: mount -t ntfs/data/user-hd-image.img/mnt/loop -o loop,ro and bigassvirusandrootkittest --verbose/mnt/loop =)
And once you are infected, how do you clean up without losing all your user files?
You can always keep user files on another partition.
But usually, if you have the ability to use images like this, you're rich enough to use an actual Network. You don't keep any important user files locally, you have a file server instead. Local hard drive is only for applications and temporary stuff. (And if a virus grabs your OS while in middle of a big project, you keep the Temporary Stuff in a known location so that the tech support guy can easily move it to another drive before reimaging the whole thing. Or, hey, another partition again!)
WTF do corporations do when viruses and worms are whizzing past on their internal networks and there's no fix available? Do they blindly continue working with Word?
Good question!
Just this week Slashdot just reminded me of LibraryThing, so I signed up and turned my bookshelf into a big mess. I found one old (which is to say, early 1990s) book about desktop publishing.
And what that book has to say about word processing?
"The editors of your publication can use any word processor they want", it said. "All DTP programs read ASCII."
And from technical standpoint, little has changed there. I'm still sure publishing folks will keep saying that same thing. (From what I know about small newspaper's work, they still say "sure, send in a DOC, or RTF, or a plain text file, we'll do the rest". The situation may be different in biggest of the big newspapers which may have monstrous Word-based article submission systems.) Well, at very least the guy who sits in front of InDesign will say that.
Just like the book publishers, at least here, say "Print out your manuscript in Courier, double spaced, and mail it to this address. For God's sake don't send it yet in electronic form."
I have to ask this: Publishing industry lives by words. Sending textual information around is what gives that system life. They can live without Word just fine, thankyouverymuch, and won't be paralysed (at least not completely) when you yank the carpet from under Word all of sudden. Yet, there are businesses that would be paralysed if you would yank Word, and their core business is not related to written words. Now how the heck we have come to this paradox?
A classic example of what happens when you pick the completely wrong standard... or, rather, pick the wrong method of documentation. Know what I think? Word is sold as a dead simple way to produce formal documentation. Ordinary workers use it to produce the said formal documentation. The document begins its life as a formal document and is ultimately stored as a formal document. But now look at the publishing industry: The reporter or book author has absolutely zero interest in messing with the formatting, they rather spend their time working on the story. They trust the layout professionals at the printing side know what to do. The problem is not really Word, but the belief that it's good and proper that it makes you both the content guy and the layout guy.
Intertwining the Tool with the Process too tightly is silly in my opinion, as is placing the trust on people to do stuff that isn't really their job. I write stuff; it's not my headache if someone decides to use 16pt font instead of 18pt on the headline. Likewise, I'm sure people who are tasked with writing some documentation along their ordinary Corporate Work couldn't care less about the TPS cover sheet layout changes.
I looked a bit at the history - not that much yet, mind you - and it seems to me that the primary reason was that it appeared to be not that notable for a topic of its own. The deletion debate closure is pretty long-winded but it draws interesting conclusions.
I guess it's not the end yet, however.
One of Wikipedia's confusing bits is that if people think this article is fit for deletion, then it can and should stay entirely dead. This is not true.
This is yet again a good example of a topic that could, first and foremost, covered to sufficient detail at a main article, with only a redirect pointing at the actual article. I'm a big fan of brevity, actually; it's better to stick at essential details. (Do we need to know the workstations run Redhat? Does anyone care?) It's a funny thing: People see the Sonic the Hedgehog article and believe they can write as much stuff about their little but influential club. Umm... it's not always that way. You can't always think of a whole lot of interesting facts about some things. You can't always say "yes, I believe this topic can be expanded into a really big and interesting article".
So apologies if I'm not immediately thinking there's a great big misjustice that's been happened here; however, I agree the information could find a place in Wikipedia. It's a club that sounds notable within the university.
I'd first go expanding the university article, then, if the student club sections go too big, split them to articles of their own, and only then grudgingly create an article about the individual organisations.
My recommendation in this case would be to recreate the article as a redirect and add a short bit of it to the article about the university. I guess the club is interesting enough to be mentioned, in breadth of at least of a paragraph... (Heck, I can't think of more than a few short paragraphs of interesting stuff to say about our student union, and I guess-believe it was one of our guys who invented IRC, for crying out loud...) If there's sufficent need to restore the history, you can always bring that up at Deletion review.
Yes, we sometimes end up chopping things. Yes, we sometimes end up rewriting the whole thing from ground up and only sparing a few bits (just look at what the heck I recently had to do with this article, it wasn't pretty I tell you). But such is sometimes the nature of writing good stuff.
And yes, the deletion system is a bit schemy and annoying right now for ordinary users. The UI isn't best imaginable either. It's currently possible to show why the article was deleted (view logs for the page), but people don't know how to do that. (Hmm, got to add this to my great big list of MediaWiki UI design flaws.) The "legal reasons" thing is implemented but is a bit nasty because it's a new feature: formerly, ordinary admins were tasked to remove personal information, but the new really-super-secret deletion rights to sweep revisions further under the carpet is a rare privilege and not handed out at will. There's probably tons of "ordinarily deleted" revisions containing personal information and like. We probably would need more oversight-access people before we could let people look freely at deleted revisions again... However, always remember you can ask admins for copies of deleted articles that don't have such content; In this article's case, restoring the history might not be a big problem.
There was one day when I tried to make the convenience store clerk's head explode by buying pocketbook editions of Kama Sutra and Tolkien's Unfinished Tales on the same day...
Thanks to Slashdot for reminding me of this site. I heard about this site last month and wanted to join even before I visited it, just never got around =) And now that it was mentioned in Slashdot, it hold up for a while and then I just got an error message. Now I have half of the contents of my bookshelves stacked next to my computer and no way to enter this stuff. Hmm, wonder how this upload thing works... *fires up OpenOffice.org*
One thing I hate about these kind of comments is that they never tell what article this thing was about. "There was this article, you know?"... I hate that. Usually, when people talk this way in any debate, I get the distinct feeling that I'm not getting the whole picture. Usually also with the names told, too.
So could you tell me the name of the article? If it was indeed unjustly deleted, I will restore it. If it was speedy deleted, I can assess the history and tell exactly what went wrong and why.
(And also, remember that deleted articles, unless they're protected, can be recreated by anybody. Speedy deletion requests can be contested if you're quick enough to provide a plausible explanation. You can contact the deleting admin and explain yourself and ask them to explain themselves. You're also free to bring the issue up at Administrator's noticeboard/Incidents or Deletion review.)
Kioslaves are usable everywhere in KDE, the main GUI. That is part of the OS, depending on your definition of OS.
But the thing is, people don't pick desktop environments because of the brand. They pick programs that work.
I'm a GNOME user, but I use a bunch of KDE apps. GIMP still kicks Krita's butt. Psi is better than all GNOME Jabber clients combined. gDesklets appears to actually work, as opposed to SuperKaramba. Amarok appears to actually work, as opposed to Rhythmbox.
Part of my world has kioslaves. That's what's so aggravating to the users. That's why implementing them on the app library is bad.
And putting them in the app library is even more fun. (I can't open URLs in GIMP at all. Well, I can't do that in Scribus either, so I guess that evens it out.)
If you mean back down to the non-GUI level, then you need to use the correct tool for the job.
Ah. But think of it this way: You're advocating two kinds of applications. First, there are KDE apps, where every application is the "correct tool for the job", whether designed for the job or not. You can rip CDs in your word processor if you know how, thanks to the miracle of kioslaves.
Then, you're advocating the non-GUI tools which don't have that luxury and you're supposed to use the correct tool for the job. No, you can't use LaTeX and GNUPLOT to typeset an automated analysis and a frequency plot of a music file you rip from CD, but for a handy Unix guy with a solid grip of shell scripts (and maybe a bit of Perl), that's not a problem at all! It's all in the pipelines! Good old Unix stuff!
So which is better? In Unix, everything is about the pipes. If you could open() an file that's actually defined as an URL, you could use any tool, not just GUI apps, to open it.
And by the way, it's curl <url>. I hates® it when cURL dumps everything on to standard output, unlike wget which dumps everything to a guesstimatingly named file. I award you today's Useless Use of cat Award for suggesting curl... | cat. =)
And I'll second his complaint about not being able to type a URI directly in the dialog box. Having to fucking point, click, point, click, point, click, ad infinitum to get to a deeply nested folder was the last straw for me and Gnome.
I can open files just fine in GNOME apps without touching the mouse at all or squint around. remembering how the file name begins helps tremendously, I can just type the first few letters and it jumps there.
I still don't know where you supposedly can't type. I can type just fine in the file dialogs.
Are you honestly telling me that in today's world of operating systems, (Mac and Windows), that you are going to force people into a two step process for something that other operating systems do in one step!
What "two steps"? In Windows, I choose File, open, pick a directory, pick a file, hit OK. In Linux, I choose File, open, pick a directory, pick a file, hit OK.
GNOME file dialogs don't really make opening or saving files significantly harder than on Windows or Mac.
DVD playback is disabled by default and you have to go through hoops to enable it, whereas DVD playback just works in Windows and Mac. Most users just want it to work.
And that happens to be a legal issue, not technological. We can't do much about it until it's unquestionably legal to provide the software everywhere.
If you want, you can just download VLC and suddenly your DVDs "just work". Just don't sue anybody.
No, it's consistency, something a GNOME fanboy should be all in favour of.
If I can see the file, I can right-click it and operate on it.
To me, "consistency" means something along the lines of this: if I say "Open a file", I get to open a file.
Next you're probably saying that "Save as" dialog should be used for opening files too, because that's consistent ("if it looks like a file dialog, well, you can use it just like all other file dialogs") and you get to use the exact same features the file manager supports, too.
I want to be able to type in Gnome's file selector dialog. Gnome will not permit me!
Uh... what file selector dialog and where? And what are you trying to type in it anyway? File names? Love letters?
Why should Gnome assume that every file I want to open *is* on the local system? KDE on the other hand, does not assume that. And you can type/paste whatever URL you want and it will do the needful.
Because GNOME-VFS is basically inadequate and no one has got around to writing a system that actually works.
Oh, wait, that should be written instead as:
Because implementing network awareness at "open this file for reading" level is not the responsibility of the high reaches of the app layer. That's the operating system's job.
Unix assumes you're on a local system. Go install Plan 9 or something, or wait until someone comes up with a really awesome FUSE hack.
Both GNOME and KDE are doing this the hacky stop-gap way, and the only difference is that KDE folks have a solution that works, kind of. The elegant way would be to allow this stuff to work on any application. I'm not calling the present situation elegant until I can do "cat http://slashdot.org/".
(Oh wow, someone's actually working on the age-old mount -t webdav problem... We may actually have a great working filesystem one day!)
That said, as a GNOME user, I'm not terrified by the apparent lack of net transparency. If I want to open something from the web, it's Firefox's job to save it to/tmp and open up the appropriate document viewer. If I want to work on the file further, I'll save a local copy anyway.
Why can't I be able to do some basic file operations (renaming, deleting, moving) in the selector dialog itself? Why do I have to go back and open Nautilus?
Because people said "I want a file selector, not a file selector + submarine control dialog?" The fact that you can do something on a dialog that's not really none of the dialog's business is usually a symptom of excessive featuritis.
(Agreed, I think it'd be nice if the dialog had a button that says "open in Nautilus" for the rare cases where file management is needed.)
300 bucks for a crappy UI builder that adds multiple layers of abstraction on top of Swing!
Uh... the page says the program is under OSL licence.
id Software licences their crappy, outdated Quake 1 3D engine for bazillion dollorz. Are they evil too?
(Granted, the licence appears a bit problematic. You generally can't claim copyright on the output of your program, if the stuff it generates is based on the user input... Otherwise, pencil makers would be really rich. And limiting the field of use is (AFAIK) against Open Source Definition as well.)
If they did that, they'd have to outlaw half of the open source apps and 99% of the closed-source ones. Including one obscure Microsoft product. =)
Actually, since the laws generally just codify existing rational practices (or at least that's what they're generally supposed to do), it'd make much more sense to pass a law requiring the kernel source code comments to include profanities, as keeping the profanities confined to places where they matter leads to friendlier development environment.
You know C# has had properties since it came out right? I just don't see Java implementing this....it's very simple to implement (it compiles to get/set methods like java has now...) so they can't have been waiting for technical reasons...I think they just want to sit on their high horse and proclaim that their way is better. What other reason could they have?
Exactly what in "had this since it came out" makes C# better? For comparison, Java had object orientation in it even before C# even came out, surely that makes it much better than C# with this logic! =)
In my opinion it doesn't matter when a language implements a good idea, as long as when it does it, it should do it properly. C# got this right on the first try. Java has to do it right on the first try, too, even if it means being late in the game. There's precious little room for error in specifying language; you can always fix code, but fixing a broken spec is much harder.
I'm only saying, they're just taking their time and making things integrate properly, probably. Java implemented generics and annotations already, and both were harder to do than getter/setter sugar. All in due time.
I'm only guessing it got lower priority because generating getters and setters is, like, four mouse clicks in Eclipse. =)
Ruby has similar syntax, which is even more concise (attr:foo, and you have default getter and setter for @foo done - overriding that stuff is simple).
I'm a Linux developer and I rarely touch kernel code, and then, only for fun.
Rarely? =) You know, in a modern operating system, most application developers should never have the need to touch kernel code. Linux is a modern operating system in this respect. Linux application developers touch kernel code just as often as Windows application developers. Actually, I'd wager Linux application developers touch kernel code much less than Windows developers - people aren't asking Linux folks to develop really screwy copy protection methods that need device driver-level access to run =)
I've been tinkering with Linux for a decade, writing random hacks to do whatever I've needed to do, and never once needed to develop a kernel module. Linux kernel is voodoo stuff that luckily has a build system - three cheers to Debian folks for make-kpkg...
I think this is good news for Linux desktop. Java isn't that awful language for desktop stuff any more, especially thanks to things like SWT. Heck, even Swing appears to have become really good over time. SWT apps are generally indistinguishable from C++ apps in terms of responsiveness, the only problem seems to be the slightly ridiculous memory use. But hey, Eclipse is the new Emacs - Eight Megabytes that are Constantly Swapping is nothing these days, so we just need something else to joke about. =)
I also think this will be great in light of the great fears about Mono's licencing and Microsoft's suspected foul play. If Sun dumps us a time-tested GPL'd cross-platform application development kit that basically does everything Mono does (with slightly more verbosity), heck, I'm all for it. And Sun backs GNOME too - if Novell and Mono stuff go to oblivion, we at least have a stable, time-tested similar platform to look to.
Eh... I've been following this Java opensourcing with some interest, but I've not seen definite announcement yet. Know what I'm reminded of? Certain Lt. Kynnysmatto in Star Wreck 4.5: Weak Performance...
"Warn the enemy that we're about to return to fire."
"Warn the enemy that we're about to activate the twinkler banks."
"Warn the enemy that we're activating the twinkler banks now."
"Sir, the shields are down to 47%."
"That is less than 50%. Very well, we are no longer warning the enemy. Return fire. All twinkler banks and light balls... feuer."
That said, I'm extremely happy that they chose GPL. If it worked for OpenOffice.org it will work for Java =)
Sure they are, provided they cite their sources and explain a theory that has been reviewed by scientists at large and is widely enough known. I mean, a lot of noted academics wrote articles for Britannica - after their work had been vetted.
It appears in this case, it was a random, not particularly well known researcher, who wrote of an obscure pet theory of theirs. Neither widely accepted nor widely known.
Basically the problem is that Wikipedia doesn't cover original research (otherwise we'd have a featured article on Greater Why Slices Of Toast Stick To Roof When Thrown Vertically Theorem, by Joe Random, a School Kid) and when talking of something you know intimately, you have to treat it the way everyone else would treat it, i.e., point to published research.
Eh... this article appears to say that the leet hax0rs only put a link to the German article about W32.Blaster, and then used ordinary phishing techniques (i.e., set up a fake domain wikipedia-download.org, misused the Wikipedia logo, etc, etc...)
In other words, plain ordinary ho-hum phishing attack. Where's the blood? Where's the guts? Where's the annoyances?
I was already worried that there would have been some serious problems with the way MediaWiki handles JavaScript or something. Like back when someone added javascript:$1 to interwiki map...
Is there a description how this bot identifies plagiarism? Does he search for random edits?
I don't know if there's a really detailed description anywhere, and I'm not coffeed enough to find anything more, but the bot's user page says it searches for phrases found in new articles through Yahoo search API. So it may not be good for finding plagiarism that's been inserted to articles that are more than a few days old, I suppose, but it does help to find cases where people just copy-paste web stuff to new articles. Basically, this helps the new-page patrollers a lot.
Perhaps something to vet every edit would be cool =)
This is how you fix the problems with Wikipedia: Point them out in a way that makes the problems easy to fix. Okay, it's probably still harder to get criticism against user conduct and policies reacted upon, but the way Wikipedia works, the content is still easy to fix. Especially in the case of plagiarism.
I really wish people would conduct accuracy and plagiarism studies a bit more often - especially when it's easy to fix, like this.
A few of my annoyances
on
Game Breakers
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· Score: 1
Opening credits. I don't really mind game cutscenes, but being forced to mash start button bazillion times when starting up the game, or waiting good 5 minutes, is annoying. Especially if you're trying to make sense of a puzzle that's quicker redone by hitting Reset when you fail. Or when you're developing a mission/mod. (Metal Gear Solid: TTS comes in mind; Used to be a problem with Neverwinter Nights until I figured out how to turn off the intro movies. =)
Save points. Save points suck. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Metroid series. I just wish they'd learn to put the save points a bit closer to the boss fights. If I need to trudge 5 minutes through acrobatics-requiring hallways to a boss that kills me in 30 seconds... (Pain in the neck in several spots in Metroid Fusion and to lesser extent in both parts of Metroid Prime. Spider Guardian in MP2. Arrrgh. God I hate the fact my memory card lost my save and I have to play through that thing again soon...)
The most annoying side of Final Fantasy VII: I've played the game through - what, three times now. I love it. But why the heck did I have to keep the run button down all the time? There's one optional puzzle where you must not run. Game designers sometimes don't get the interface design. If you can notice at some point that the user interface is funny, fix it.
In net games, the lack of customisation. I've never really got into current MMORPGs because getting the player character to truly look unique is difficult. Someone get us Oblivion's character creator on steroids, bazillions of different sorts of armour and weapons, and especially clothing options. Or it would rule if someone did an open remake of Ultima Online. Paperdolling is a bit more trivial in 2D.
Again in net games: Variety. When developers get bright ideas - no matter how small - they should implement them. When users get bright ideas - no matter how small - they should implement them. The latter even if it doesn't really affect anything at all permanently. Above all don't make the game depend on routine and let the game stagnate.
Too coffeed to think anything more. But at least these spring to mind immediately...
Slashdot Mirror
Great. And I nominated it for deletion. I like the word but I'm afraid we have a pretty high threshold of inclusion for neologisms. =)
Pre-Win2K? Sure! People can install stable Debian, build Firefox 3 from source, and yep, it works... =)
(Kidding. I'm a Debian user.)
I guess the statement was just meant to say that this page's rendering doesn't break. =)
You make an image of filesystem that consists of out-of-the-box software that is known to be clean. If that's not clean, repeat from the start and keep both eyes open.
If you still want to check it, you can always mount the image as a local filesystem and use whatever tools you want to check it: mount -t ntfs /data/user-hd-image.img /mnt/loop -o loop,ro and bigassvirusandrootkittest --verbose /mnt/loop =)
You can always keep user files on another partition.
But usually, if you have the ability to use images like this, you're rich enough to use an actual Network. You don't keep any important user files locally, you have a file server instead. Local hard drive is only for applications and temporary stuff. (And if a virus grabs your OS while in middle of a big project, you keep the Temporary Stuff in a known location so that the tech support guy can easily move it to another drive before reimaging the whole thing. Or, hey, another partition again!)
Good question!
Just this week Slashdot just reminded me of LibraryThing, so I signed up and turned my bookshelf into a big mess. I found one old (which is to say, early 1990s) book about desktop publishing.
And what that book has to say about word processing?
"The editors of your publication can use any word processor they want", it said. "All DTP programs read ASCII."
And from technical standpoint, little has changed there. I'm still sure publishing folks will keep saying that same thing. (From what I know about small newspaper's work, they still say "sure, send in a DOC, or RTF, or a plain text file, we'll do the rest". The situation may be different in biggest of the big newspapers which may have monstrous Word-based article submission systems.) Well, at very least the guy who sits in front of InDesign will say that.
Just like the book publishers, at least here, say "Print out your manuscript in Courier, double spaced, and mail it to this address. For God's sake don't send it yet in electronic form."
I have to ask this: Publishing industry lives by words. Sending textual information around is what gives that system life. They can live without Word just fine, thankyouverymuch, and won't be paralysed (at least not completely) when you yank the carpet from under Word all of sudden. Yet, there are businesses that would be paralysed if you would yank Word, and their core business is not related to written words. Now how the heck we have come to this paradox?
A classic example of what happens when you pick the completely wrong standard... or, rather, pick the wrong method of documentation. Know what I think? Word is sold as a dead simple way to produce formal documentation. Ordinary workers use it to produce the said formal documentation. The document begins its life as a formal document and is ultimately stored as a formal document. But now look at the publishing industry: The reporter or book author has absolutely zero interest in messing with the formatting, they rather spend their time working on the story. They trust the layout professionals at the printing side know what to do. The problem is not really Word, but the belief that it's good and proper that it makes you both the content guy and the layout guy.
Intertwining the Tool with the Process too tightly is silly in my opinion, as is placing the trust on people to do stuff that isn't really their job. I write stuff; it's not my headache if someone decides to use 16pt font instead of 18pt on the headline. Likewise, I'm sure people who are tasked with writing some documentation along their ordinary Corporate Work couldn't care less about the TPS cover sheet layout changes.
I looked a bit at the history - not that much yet, mind you - and it seems to me that the primary reason was that it appeared to be not that notable for a topic of its own. The deletion debate closure is pretty long-winded but it draws interesting conclusions.
I guess it's not the end yet, however.
One of Wikipedia's confusing bits is that if people think this article is fit for deletion, then it can and should stay entirely dead. This is not true.
This is yet again a good example of a topic that could, first and foremost, covered to sufficient detail at a main article, with only a redirect pointing at the actual article. I'm a big fan of brevity, actually; it's better to stick at essential details. (Do we need to know the workstations run Redhat? Does anyone care?) It's a funny thing: People see the Sonic the Hedgehog article and believe they can write as much stuff about their little but influential club. Umm... it's not always that way. You can't always think of a whole lot of interesting facts about some things. You can't always say "yes, I believe this topic can be expanded into a really big and interesting article".
So apologies if I'm not immediately thinking there's a great big misjustice that's been happened here; however, I agree the information could find a place in Wikipedia. It's a club that sounds notable within the university.
I'd first go expanding the university article, then, if the student club sections go too big, split them to articles of their own, and only then grudgingly create an article about the individual organisations.
My recommendation in this case would be to recreate the article as a redirect and add a short bit of it to the article about the university. I guess the club is interesting enough to be mentioned, in breadth of at least of a paragraph... (Heck, I can't think of more than a few short paragraphs of interesting stuff to say about our student union, and I guess-believe it was one of our guys who invented IRC, for crying out loud...) If there's sufficent need to restore the history, you can always bring that up at Deletion review.
Yes, we sometimes end up chopping things. Yes, we sometimes end up rewriting the whole thing from ground up and only sparing a few bits (just look at what the heck I recently had to do with this article, it wasn't pretty I tell you). But such is sometimes the nature of writing good stuff.
And yes, the deletion system is a bit schemy and annoying right now for ordinary users. The UI isn't best imaginable either. It's currently possible to show why the article was deleted (view logs for the page), but people don't know how to do that. (Hmm, got to add this to my great big list of MediaWiki UI design flaws.) The "legal reasons" thing is implemented but is a bit nasty because it's a new feature: formerly, ordinary admins were tasked to remove personal information, but the new really-super-secret deletion rights to sweep revisions further under the carpet is a rare privilege and not handed out at will. There's probably tons of "ordinarily deleted" revisions containing personal information and like. We probably would need more oversight-access people before we could let people look freely at deleted revisions again... However, always remember you can ask admins for copies of deleted articles that don't have such content; In this article's case, restoring the history might not be a big problem.
There was one day when I tried to make the convenience store clerk's head explode by buying pocketbook editions of Kama Sutra and Tolkien's Unfinished Tales on the same day...
Thanks to Slashdot for reminding me of this site. I heard about this site last month and wanted to join even before I visited it, just never got around =) And now that it was mentioned in Slashdot, it hold up for a while and then I just got an error message. Now I have half of the contents of my bookshelves stacked next to my computer and no way to enter this stuff. Hmm, wonder how this upload thing works... *fires up OpenOffice.org*
Oo, this presents good opportunities.
One thing I hate about these kind of comments is that they never tell what article this thing was about. "There was this article, you know?" ... I hate that. Usually, when people talk this way in any debate, I get the distinct feeling that I'm not getting the whole picture. Usually also with the names told, too.
So could you tell me the name of the article? If it was indeed unjustly deleted, I will restore it. If it was speedy deleted, I can assess the history and tell exactly what went wrong and why.
(And also, remember that deleted articles, unless they're protected, can be recreated by anybody. Speedy deletion requests can be contested if you're quick enough to provide a plausible explanation. You can contact the deleting admin and explain yourself and ask them to explain themselves. You're also free to bring the issue up at Administrator's noticeboard/Incidents or Deletion review.)
But the thing is, people don't pick desktop environments because of the brand. They pick programs that work.
I'm a GNOME user, but I use a bunch of KDE apps. GIMP still kicks Krita's butt. Psi is better than all GNOME Jabber clients combined. gDesklets appears to actually work, as opposed to SuperKaramba. Amarok appears to actually work, as opposed to Rhythmbox.
Part of my world has kioslaves. That's what's so aggravating to the users. That's why implementing them on the app library is bad.
And putting them in the app library is even more fun. (I can't open URLs in GIMP at all. Well, I can't do that in Scribus either, so I guess that evens it out.)
Ah. But think of it this way: You're advocating two kinds of applications. First, there are KDE apps, where every application is the "correct tool for the job", whether designed for the job or not. You can rip CDs in your word processor if you know how, thanks to the miracle of kioslaves.
Then, you're advocating the non-GUI tools which don't have that luxury and you're supposed to use the correct tool for the job. No, you can't use LaTeX and GNUPLOT to typeset an automated analysis and a frequency plot of a music file you rip from CD, but for a handy Unix guy with a solid grip of shell scripts (and maybe a bit of Perl), that's not a problem at all! It's all in the pipelines! Good old Unix stuff!
So which is better? In Unix, everything is about the pipes. If you could open() an file that's actually defined as an URL, you could use any tool, not just GUI apps, to open it.
And by the way, it's curl <url>. I hates® it when cURL dumps everything on to standard output, unlike wget which dumps everything to a guesstimatingly named file. I award you today's Useless Use of cat Award for suggesting curl ... | cat. =)
I can open files just fine in GNOME apps without touching the mouse at all or squint around. remembering how the file name begins helps tremendously, I can just type the first few letters and it jumps there.
I still don't know where you supposedly can't type. I can type just fine in the file dialogs.
What "two steps"? In Windows, I choose File, open, pick a directory, pick a file, hit OK. In Linux, I choose File, open, pick a directory, pick a file, hit OK.
GNOME file dialogs don't really make opening or saving files significantly harder than on Windows or Mac.
And that happens to be a legal issue, not technological. We can't do much about it until it's unquestionably legal to provide the software everywhere.
If you want, you can just download VLC and suddenly your DVDs "just work". Just don't sue anybody.
To me, "consistency" means something along the lines of this: if I say "Open a file", I get to open a file.
Next you're probably saying that "Save as" dialog should be used for opening files too, because that's consistent ("if it looks like a file dialog, well, you can use it just like all other file dialogs") and you get to use the exact same features the file manager supports, too.
Uh... what file selector dialog and where? And what are you trying to type in it anyway? File names? Love letters?
Because GNOME-VFS is basically inadequate and no one has got around to writing a system that actually works.
Oh, wait, that should be written instead as:
Because implementing network awareness at "open this file for reading" level is not the responsibility of the high reaches of the app layer. That's the operating system's job.
Unix assumes you're on a local system. Go install Plan 9 or something, or wait until someone comes up with a really awesome FUSE hack.
Both GNOME and KDE are doing this the hacky stop-gap way, and the only difference is that KDE folks have a solution that works, kind of. The elegant way would be to allow this stuff to work on any application. I'm not calling the present situation elegant until I can do "cat http://slashdot.org/ ".
(Oh wow, someone's actually working on the age-old mount -t webdav problem... We may actually have a great working filesystem one day!)
That said, as a GNOME user, I'm not terrified by the apparent lack of net transparency. If I want to open something from the web, it's Firefox's job to save it to /tmp and open up the appropriate document viewer. If I want to work on the file further, I'll save a local copy anyway.
Because people said "I want a file selector, not a file selector + submarine control dialog?" The fact that you can do something on a dialog that's not really none of the dialog's business is usually a symptom of excessive featuritis.
(Agreed, I think it'd be nice if the dialog had a button that says "open in Nautilus" for the rare cases where file management is needed.)
Uh... the page says the program is under OSL licence.
id Software licences their crappy, outdated Quake 1 3D engine for bazillion dollorz. Are they evil too?
(Granted, the licence appears a bit problematic. You generally can't claim copyright on the output of your program, if the stuff it generates is based on the user input... Otherwise, pencil makers would be really rich. And limiting the field of use is (AFAIK) against Open Source Definition as well.)
Awwwww! I so wished we could have seen more Sick Windows Tricks. Oh well...
If they did that, they'd have to outlaw half of the open source apps and 99% of the closed-source ones. Including one obscure Microsoft product. =)
Actually, since the laws generally just codify existing rational practices (or at least that's what they're generally supposed to do), it'd make much more sense to pass a law requiring the kernel source code comments to include profanities, as keeping the profanities confined to places where they matter leads to friendlier development environment.
Exactly what in "had this since it came out" makes C# better? For comparison, Java had object orientation in it even before C# even came out, surely that makes it much better than C# with this logic! =)
In my opinion it doesn't matter when a language implements a good idea, as long as when it does it, it should do it properly. C# got this right on the first try. Java has to do it right on the first try, too, even if it means being late in the game. There's precious little room for error in specifying language; you can always fix code, but fixing a broken spec is much harder.
I'm only saying, they're just taking their time and making things integrate properly, probably. Java implemented generics and annotations already, and both were harder to do than getter/setter sugar. All in due time.
I'm only guessing it got lower priority because generating getters and setters is, like, four mouse clicks in Eclipse. =)
Ruby has similar syntax, which is even more concise (attr :foo, and you have default getter and setter for @foo done - overriding that stuff is simple).
And undoubtedly, Java will follow soon =)
Rarely? =) You know, in a modern operating system, most application developers should never have the need to touch kernel code. Linux is a modern operating system in this respect. Linux application developers touch kernel code just as often as Windows application developers. Actually, I'd wager Linux application developers touch kernel code much less than Windows developers - people aren't asking Linux folks to develop really screwy copy protection methods that need device driver-level access to run =)
I've been tinkering with Linux for a decade, writing random hacks to do whatever I've needed to do, and never once needed to develop a kernel module. Linux kernel is voodoo stuff that luckily has a build system - three cheers to Debian folks for make-kpkg...
I think this is good news for Linux desktop. Java isn't that awful language for desktop stuff any more, especially thanks to things like SWT. Heck, even Swing appears to have become really good over time. SWT apps are generally indistinguishable from C++ apps in terms of responsiveness, the only problem seems to be the slightly ridiculous memory use. But hey, Eclipse is the new Emacs - Eight Megabytes that are Constantly Swapping is nothing these days, so we just need something else to joke about. =)
I also think this will be great in light of the great fears about Mono's licencing and Microsoft's suspected foul play. If Sun dumps us a time-tested GPL'd cross-platform application development kit that basically does everything Mono does (with slightly more verbosity), heck, I'm all for it. And Sun backs GNOME too - if Novell and Mono stuff go to oblivion, we at least have a stable, time-tested similar platform to look to.
Eh... I've been following this Java opensourcing with some interest, but I've not seen definite announcement yet. Know what I'm reminded of? Certain Lt. Kynnysmatto in Star Wreck 4.5: Weak Performance...
"Warn the enemy that we're about to return to fire."
"Warn the enemy that we're about to activate the twinkler banks."
"Warn the enemy that we're activating the twinkler banks now."
"Sir, the shields are down to 47%."
"That is less than 50%. Very well, we are no longer warning the enemy. Return fire. All twinkler banks and light balls... feuer."
That said, I'm extremely happy that they chose GPL. If it worked for OpenOffice.org it will work for Java =)
Sure they are, provided they cite their sources and explain a theory that has been reviewed by scientists at large and is widely enough known. I mean, a lot of noted academics wrote articles for Britannica - after their work had been vetted.
It appears in this case, it was a random, not particularly well known researcher, who wrote of an obscure pet theory of theirs. Neither widely accepted nor widely known.
Basically the problem is that Wikipedia doesn't cover original research (otherwise we'd have a featured article on Greater Why Slices Of Toast Stick To Roof When Thrown Vertically Theorem, by Joe Random, a School Kid) and when talking of something you know intimately, you have to treat it the way everyone else would treat it, i.e., point to published research.
Eh... this article appears to say that the leet hax0rs only put a link to the German article about W32.Blaster, and then used ordinary phishing techniques (i.e., set up a fake domain wikipedia-download.org, misused the Wikipedia logo, etc, etc...)
In other words, plain ordinary ho-hum phishing attack. Where's the blood? Where's the guts? Where's the annoyances?
I was already worried that there would have been some serious problems with the way MediaWiki handles JavaScript or something. Like back when someone added javascript:$1 to interwiki map...
I don't know if there's a really detailed description anywhere, and I'm not coffeed enough to find anything more, but the bot's user page says it searches for phrases found in new articles through Yahoo search API. So it may not be good for finding plagiarism that's been inserted to articles that are more than a few days old, I suppose, but it does help to find cases where people just copy-paste web stuff to new articles. Basically, this helps the new-page patrollers a lot.
Perhaps something to vet every edit would be cool =)
This is how you fix the problems with Wikipedia: Point them out in a way that makes the problems easy to fix. Okay, it's probably still harder to get criticism against user conduct and policies reacted upon, but the way Wikipedia works, the content is still easy to fix. Especially in the case of plagiarism.
I really wish people would conduct accuracy and plagiarism studies a bit more often - especially when it's easy to fix, like this.
And by the way, Wikipedia recently got a bot that finds suspected plagiarism, which is pretty cool.
Too coffeed to think anything more. But at least these spring to mind immediately...