I've been uswing Linux for ten years, exclusively for maybe seven. I 'm not a programmer, but I'm comfortable at the command line, and I even released my own live CD, a modified version of Slax. So I'm competant, but I also have limitations. I like to keep a debian-based distro on one machine, and slackware based distro on the other, and among debian-based distros, ubuntu is the one that works, within my limitations, with my hardware. Again and again.
I used to hate Ubuntu, because I had cut my teeth on Debian, and I didn't know enough to negotiate the ways in which Ubuntu was different, but as a long-time Debian fanboy, I now love Ubuntu for having the vision to bet on debian as the template for mainstream Linux success, at a time when everybody was raving about Fedora. This is what I discovered by luck, as a newbie who installed Debian Sarge, and what I'd been telling everybody. Nobody believed me because Debian still had the reputation of being for geeks. I was lucky enough to come along at the birth of the new installer for Debain. Installing Woody, the previous version, was a long ordeal, with about 50 impenetrable questions I had to bluff through. Sarge was easy to install, and it came with an automatic connection to a ridiculous amount of software, and finding and installing software (and its dependancies) was the problem for a newbie. I saw the opportunity, and so did Shuttleworth.
Ubuntu proved me wrong, and then it proved me right.
It's still Debian at the core, the powerful system that used to be strictly for geeks.
Yeah, sure, Scotland sucks, whatever, but if MS is reporting Holidays that are only observed in England as being observed in "The UK", that's inaccurate. Patriot's Day is only observed in Maine and Massachusetts, but if MS reports that Patriot Day is observed "in the United States", well, that's technically true, but it's not accurate.
I'm all about the Linux, and I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I haven't used Windows since XP, and it hasn't been my primary OS since Win98. But if a regularly scheduled holiday is postponed by decree, does not being informed of that count as "a mistake"? The way I see it, the entity ordering the change is responsible for informing the media, and the mistake was not considering Microsoft (or Google, apparently) part of the media.
How often is a holiday temporarily postponed? I can't remember such a thing happening in the US. What we've all learned is that the information infrastructure is not equipped to handle this extraordinary case.
>>So factually speaking, contrary to your stupidity, as the facts are currently known, the minor is a violent thug who assaulted someone without provocation and died for their arrogant stupidity.
Without provocation? Seriously? Only if Trayvon pulled him out of his car while it was still moving.
I don't think George Zimmerman is this cartoon villain some people seem to think he is, but COME ON.
The only reason why these are "the facts as they are now known" is because we have the account of the survivor, and not the account of the one who died. That's not good enough. We need to look deeper.
Again, i want to emphasize, this looks like manslaughter to me, not murder, and no, the trial of public opinion is not sufficient. We need a real trial. That's all I want. The presumption of innocence applies to all defendants, and when Mr. Zimmerman becomes a defendant, he should have it, but until then, I'm not going to sit still while a dead child is subjected to a presumption of guilt. We need a trial.
>>Sorry but 911 operators have exactly zero authority to tell or order anyone to do anything.
No, but that establishes pretty clearly that Zimmerman is acting of his own initiative, not in cooporation with authorities. It establishes his recklessness. It establishes his responsibility. I can't believe that disregarding police dispatchers are how neighborhood watches are supposed to operate.
I too am not comfortable with a trial in the court of public opinion, and one reason is that I don't think that this a murder, and the word "murder" gets used all the time. Bleeding heart liberal that I am, I feel sorry for Zimmerman. He's just an idiot who fucked things up with his recklessness. I don't really care if he's a racist; that goes to what kind of idiot he is. If Zimmerman committed a crime, and I suspect that he did, the name of the crime is very likely "manslaughter", which is what they call it when your ill-advised fuckup cost someone his life. Zimmerman started an unnecessary confrontation with a kid carrying a bottle of iced tea, and whatever the kid did wrong, he paid for that. Should Zimmerman pay, too? Not with his whole life, but, yes, I think he should probably pay. There should be a trial.
Any armed man who is halfway competent should be able to prevent an unarmed kid from killing him with his bare hands, without taking the kid's life. It looks like Zimmerman blundered himself into a bad situation, and he took away the kid's life while blundering his way out of it.
I used my C64 almost exclusively for word processing It got me through college, plus I wrote a novel that was (justly) never published. The program was called SPEEDSCRIPT, and it took a little time to learn, but I've never seen a word processor for PC that was more powerful or more agile. The closest thing I know of today is probably emacs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript
"So you are saying their prediction was right even though it was wrong?"
1984 came and went. Clearly, George Orwell was wrong. There is no potential for totalitarian applications of emerging technology. I don't about anyone else, but I'm very relieved.
Actually, it is a perfect story for them. A complex story about the forces that shape perception apart from reality. They're personally involved, and so are their listeners (I tweeted that story!) It's going to be a really great program, and i can't wait.
So snark away, snarky-pants!
I've been using Linux for ten years, and I fucking love it, but I've read a hundred thousand of these articles, where techbloggers report on the OS WARS as if something may actually change, and nothing ever does, at least for Desktop systems. Windows made some inroads with gadgets, but I still only know one person who owns a mac. And a handful of people who use Linux, all of whom belong to my LUG.
Take it from someone who actually did it, changing your operating system can be really difficult for someone without a technical background. Most people won't do it without a good reason. If windows 8 sucks, people will keep using Windows 7.
Every blip or countertrend will always be accompanied by some jackass on the internet explaining how some established paradigm is "dying". Usually, it's some tech blogger desperately trying to goad readers into clicking on his story by being provocative, and it's usually a loaded question, because actually saying what is implied is flat-out ridiculous. When Linux on the desktop finally reaches two per cent. Some jackass will post a blog with the title "IS MICROSOFT DYING?"
It's really really really overdone, especially when you consider that it's nonsense. Dying means that Death is imminent, and death is nonexistence. You could argue that nothing that isn't a life form can die in the first place, and you'd usually be right. People are still putting on Greek tragedies. Indeed, somebody somewhere is probably WRITING a Greek tragedy. So Greek Tragedy is not dead. It's not even dying.
And "traditional internet search"? Hell, that doesn't make any sense either. Has the web been around long enough that anything about it can be considered "traditional"? Besides bullshit, I mean.
I believe that every single answer to his post had a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion. Most of such replies have been up-modded to insightful.
Except for the the one that said "you deserve to be modded down". Not logical. Not thoughtful.
I remember that after Apollo 11, it was said that the American space program had cost 8 lives. The figure comes from a Time-Life audio documentary entitled "To the Moon" that I listened to dozens of times as a kid, and I feel absolutely certain that was the number used, though I don't know what that would refer to beyond Apollo 1 . That would bring the total for fifty years up to 23.
Here's wikipedia's list of space program accidents, including non-fatalities and Russian accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
I can give Ubuntu credit for teaching me to love sudo. I run it on every distro I ever use now, including Slackware. With sudo, I can run root privileges without becoming a different user. This means that if I'm using ZSH as a normal user, I'm not suddenly moved back to using the login shell for the root user, which is always BASH. And I can use the tilde ~ as an absolute path, and it still means my home directory and not/root.
It's been a long time since I used Fedora, but I always thought YUM was slower than apt-get, required more setup than apt-get, and had more convoluted commands than apt-get. and Debian has always had ALL THE FREE SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD in it's repositories. Back when I was new and Woody and Sarge, I used to have a great time installing crazy shit that I found in the debian repositories.
>>>Windows is the only platform for which one can reliably download binaries directly from software authors.
I can reliably download Linux binaries from Mozilla, Opera, Google, Adobe,
>>>>On Linux, if you want software, you use apt-get, yum, etc. If the package you want exists in the repository, great. If not, things get tricky. Enter building from source, tracking down dependencies, and praying you get through./configure and make.
My God, everything is in apt-get! It's been years since I've had to compile anything on a debian system!
Linux's problem is that its greatest strength is maligned and misunderstood. Everyone thinks it's 1985 when the GUI saved everyone from the CLI empty black screen, but these days the CLI is built into the Linux desktopfile managers, making it easy to move back and forth from one to the other. Two tools are better than one, and Linux is a two tool desktop. It was surprisingly easy to learn the CLI, and after I and that was when I was compensated for the hassles that just can't be helped. I'm the only person in my LUG who came to Linux with not much of a computer background. Everybody else is a programmer, and an IP pro, and they're all telling me that ordinary users will never use Linux if you tell them about the CLI, but I never would have stuck with Linux without the CLI. Linux is better than Windows for a lot of things, but Windows will always be better at being windows.
It's ridiculous that anyone would want to use computers for 30-40 years and never learn some basic skills that would make them more powerful and efficient. In 1985, when every desktop user was a new user, "user friendly" meant beginner friendly, but there's a difference between something being "easy to learn" and being "easy to use" once you've learned it. It wasn't that hard to learn the CLI, but that doesn't matter because I learned it seven years ago, the price is paid, and now it's all gravy. People who don't know how to use the CLI are always telling me how it's useless and archaic. I try to be amused.
I'm using Trinity / KDE3, but Gnome 3 definitely makes KDE4 look a whole lot better.
Why are they fucking with the Desktop metaphor?
on
GNOME 3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
For a half hour, I just looked at this interface and it simply baffled me. I don't know what the organizing principle is supposed to be, and believe me, I don't care anymore. A half hour is all you get. I'm not saying that it's a train wreck. I'm saying that after a half an hour, I was unable to figure out how it's NOT a train wreck. I was unable to discern how these icons and windows are supposed to work together.
It looks to me like gnome discarded the organizing metaphor of the desktop in favor of the details of the interface. To me, the details don't matter. If you discard the desktop metaphor, you need to have something better to take its place, or your users have every reason to scream bloody murder.
The main thing that happened that made me chuck KDE4 after swearing that I loved it for a year was that one of my older computers stopped reading from the hard drive, and it couldn't boot from a USB device, so I could only run it from a live CD, and I chose Slax, which still uses KDE3. It was just a huge relief not to have think about the Desktop all the time, and after that going back to KDE4 would have been living a lie. These days, you can run Linux as a substitute for Windows, but if what you really want is Windows, it's just not going to be as good. I think Linux is better, but one thing it's not better at is being Windows.
Well, KDE4 is better at a lot of things, but it's not better at being KDE3. You can run KDE4 as if it was KDE3, but it feels like second best.
I'm trying to remember how many years ago Slashdot posted an article where someone predicted that we'd all be using touchscreens in five years instead of mouses. 3-4 years is my best guesstimate.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been uswing Linux for ten years, exclusively for maybe seven. I 'm not a programmer, but I'm comfortable at the command line, and I even released my own live CD, a modified version of Slax. So I'm competant, but I also have limitations. I like to keep a debian-based distro on one machine, and slackware based distro on the other, and among debian-based distros, ubuntu is the one that works, within my limitations, with my hardware. Again and again. I used to hate Ubuntu, because I had cut my teeth on Debian, and I didn't know enough to negotiate the ways in which Ubuntu was different, but as a long-time Debian fanboy, I now love Ubuntu for having the vision to bet on debian as the template for mainstream Linux success, at a time when everybody was raving about Fedora. This is what I discovered by luck, as a newbie who installed Debian Sarge, and what I'd been telling everybody. Nobody believed me because Debian still had the reputation of being for geeks. I was lucky enough to come along at the birth of the new installer for Debain. Installing Woody, the previous version, was a long ordeal, with about 50 impenetrable questions I had to bluff through. Sarge was easy to install, and it came with an automatic connection to a ridiculous amount of software, and finding and installing software (and its dependancies) was the problem for a newbie. I saw the opportunity, and so did Shuttleworth. Ubuntu proved me wrong, and then it proved me right. It's still Debian at the core, the powerful system that used to be strictly for geeks.
Yeah, sure, Scotland sucks, whatever, but if MS is reporting Holidays that are only observed in England as being observed in "The UK", that's inaccurate. Patriot's Day is only observed in Maine and Massachusetts, but if MS reports that Patriot Day is observed "in the United States", well, that's technically true, but it's not accurate.
I'm all about the Linux, and I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I haven't used Windows since XP, and it hasn't been my primary OS since Win98. But if a regularly scheduled holiday is postponed by decree, does not being informed of that count as "a mistake"? The way I see it, the entity ordering the change is responsible for informing the media, and the mistake was not considering Microsoft (or Google, apparently) part of the media. How often is a holiday temporarily postponed? I can't remember such a thing happening in the US. What we've all learned is that the information infrastructure is not equipped to handle this extraordinary case.
>>So factually speaking, contrary to your stupidity, as the facts are currently known, the minor is a violent thug who assaulted someone without provocation and died for their arrogant stupidity.
Without provocation? Seriously? Only if Trayvon pulled him out of his car while it was still moving. I don't think George Zimmerman is this cartoon villain some people seem to think he is, but COME ON. The only reason why these are "the facts as they are now known" is because we have the account of the survivor, and not the account of the one who died. That's not good enough. We need to look deeper.
Again, i want to emphasize, this looks like manslaughter to me, not murder, and no, the trial of public opinion is not sufficient. We need a real trial. That's all I want. The presumption of innocence applies to all defendants, and when Mr. Zimmerman becomes a defendant, he should have it, but until then, I'm not going to sit still while a dead child is subjected to a presumption of guilt. We need a trial.
>>Sorry but 911 operators have exactly zero authority to tell or order anyone to do anything.
No, but that establishes pretty clearly that Zimmerman is acting of his own initiative, not in cooporation with authorities. It establishes his recklessness. It establishes his responsibility. I can't believe that disregarding police dispatchers are how neighborhood watches are supposed to operate.
I too am not comfortable with a trial in the court of public opinion, and one reason is that I don't think that this a murder, and the word "murder" gets used all the time. Bleeding heart liberal that I am, I feel sorry for Zimmerman. He's just an idiot who fucked things up with his recklessness. I don't really care if he's a racist; that goes to what kind of idiot he is. If Zimmerman committed a crime, and I suspect that he did, the name of the crime is very likely "manslaughter", which is what they call it when your ill-advised fuckup cost someone his life. Zimmerman started an unnecessary confrontation with a kid carrying a bottle of iced tea, and whatever the kid did wrong, he paid for that. Should Zimmerman pay, too? Not with his whole life, but, yes, I think he should probably pay. There should be a trial.
Any armed man who is halfway competent should be able to prevent an unarmed kid from killing him with his bare hands, without taking the kid's life. It looks like Zimmerman blundered himself into a bad situation, and he took away the kid's life while blundering his way out of it.
I used my C64 almost exclusively for word processing It got me through college, plus I wrote a novel that was (justly) never published. The program was called SPEEDSCRIPT, and it took a little time to learn, but I've never seen a word processor for PC that was more powerful or more agile. The closest thing I know of today is probably emacs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript
"So you are saying their prediction was right even though it was wrong?"
1984 came and went. Clearly, George Orwell was wrong. There is no potential for totalitarian applications of emerging technology. I don't about anyone else, but I'm very relieved.
Actually, it is a perfect story for them. A complex story about the forces that shape perception apart from reality. They're personally involved, and so are their listeners (I tweeted that story!) It's going to be a really great program, and i can't wait. So snark away, snarky-pants!
Nah, it's probably conservatives who love bashing NPR.
I've been using Linux for ten years, and I fucking love it, but I've read a hundred thousand of these articles, where techbloggers report on the OS WARS as if something may actually change, and nothing ever does, at least for Desktop systems. Windows made some inroads with gadgets, but I still only know one person who owns a mac. And a handful of people who use Linux, all of whom belong to my LUG. Take it from someone who actually did it, changing your operating system can be really difficult for someone without a technical background. Most people won't do it without a good reason. If windows 8 sucks, people will keep using Windows 7.
If Anonymous is going after the CIA, that probably means that Boxxy is in the clear.
Torn between my deep love of child porn and my long-held belief that online surveillance is also pretty hot.
Every blip or countertrend will always be accompanied by some jackass on the internet explaining how some established paradigm is "dying". Usually, it's some tech blogger desperately trying to goad readers into clicking on his story by being provocative, and it's usually a loaded question, because actually saying what is implied is flat-out ridiculous. When Linux on the desktop finally reaches two per cent. Some jackass will post a blog with the title "IS MICROSOFT DYING?" It's really really really overdone, especially when you consider that it's nonsense. Dying means that Death is imminent, and death is nonexistence. You could argue that nothing that isn't a life form can die in the first place, and you'd usually be right. People are still putting on Greek tragedies. Indeed, somebody somewhere is probably WRITING a Greek tragedy. So Greek Tragedy is not dead. It's not even dying. And "traditional internet search"? Hell, that doesn't make any sense either. Has the web been around long enough that anything about it can be considered "traditional"? Besides bullshit, I mean.
I believe that every single answer to his post had a logical and thoughtful refutation of his opinion. Most of such replies have been up-modded to insightful.
Except for the the one that said "you deserve to be modded down". Not logical. Not thoughtful.
I remember that after Apollo 11, it was said that the American space program had cost 8 lives. The figure comes from a Time-Life audio documentary entitled "To the Moon" that I listened to dozens of times as a kid, and I feel absolutely certain that was the number used, though I don't know what that would refer to beyond Apollo 1 . That would bring the total for fifty years up to 23. Here's wikipedia's list of space program accidents, including non-fatalities and Russian accidents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
"Whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger..."
Whatever kills us, makes us dead.
I'm totally serious. Check out those workspaces! I'm talking about the Gnome shell. Don't know if there's a difference.
I can give Ubuntu credit for teaching me to love sudo. I run it on every distro I ever use now, including Slackware. With sudo, I can run root privileges without becoming a different user. This means that if I'm using ZSH as a normal user, I'm not suddenly moved back to using the login shell for the root user, which is always BASH. And I can use the tilde ~ as an absolute path, and it still means my home directory and not /root.
It's been a long time since I used Fedora, but I always thought YUM was slower than apt-get, required more setup than apt-get, and had more convoluted commands than apt-get. and Debian has always had ALL THE FREE SOFTWARE IN THE WORLD in it's repositories. Back when I was new and Woody and Sarge, I used to have a great time installing crazy shit that I found in the debian repositories.
>>>Windows is the only platform for which one can reliably download binaries directly from software authors. I can reliably download Linux binaries from Mozilla, Opera, Google, Adobe, >>>>On Linux, if you want software, you use apt-get, yum, etc. If the package you want exists in the repository, great. If not, things get tricky. Enter building from source, tracking down dependencies, and praying you get through ./configure and make.
My God, everything is in apt-get! It's been years since I've had to compile anything on a debian system!
Linux's problem is that its greatest strength is maligned and misunderstood. Everyone thinks it's 1985 when the GUI saved everyone from the CLI empty black screen, but these days the CLI is built into the Linux desktopfile managers, making it easy to move back and forth from one to the other. Two tools are better than one, and Linux is a two tool desktop. It was surprisingly easy to learn the CLI, and after I and that was when I was compensated for the hassles that just can't be helped. I'm the only person in my LUG who came to Linux with not much of a computer background. Everybody else is a programmer, and an IP pro, and they're all telling me that ordinary users will never use Linux if you tell them about the CLI, but I never would have stuck with Linux without the CLI. Linux is better than Windows for a lot of things, but Windows will always be better at being windows. It's ridiculous that anyone would want to use computers for 30-40 years and never learn some basic skills that would make them more powerful and efficient. In 1985, when every desktop user was a new user, "user friendly" meant beginner friendly, but there's a difference between something being "easy to learn" and being "easy to use" once you've learned it. It wasn't that hard to learn the CLI, but that doesn't matter because I learned it seven years ago, the price is paid, and now it's all gravy. People who don't know how to use the CLI are always telling me how it's useless and archaic. I try to be amused.
He gets it. I don't. To me, it just looks like an Unholy mess. It may be my fault that i don't get it it, but either way, it's just as useless to me.
I'm using Trinity / KDE3, but Gnome 3 definitely makes KDE4 look a whole lot better.
For a half hour, I just looked at this interface and it simply baffled me. I don't know what the organizing principle is supposed to be, and believe me, I don't care anymore. A half hour is all you get. I'm not saying that it's a train wreck. I'm saying that after a half an hour, I was unable to figure out how it's NOT a train wreck. I was unable to discern how these icons and windows are supposed to work together. It looks to me like gnome discarded the organizing metaphor of the desktop in favor of the details of the interface. To me, the details don't matter. If you discard the desktop metaphor, you need to have something better to take its place, or your users have every reason to scream bloody murder.
The main thing that happened that made me chuck KDE4 after swearing that I loved it for a year was that one of my older computers stopped reading from the hard drive, and it couldn't boot from a USB device, so I could only run it from a live CD, and I chose Slax, which still uses KDE3. It was just a huge relief not to have think about the Desktop all the time, and after that going back to KDE4 would have been living a lie. These days, you can run Linux as a substitute for Windows, but if what you really want is Windows, it's just not going to be as good. I think Linux is better, but one thing it's not better at is being Windows. Well, KDE4 is better at a lot of things, but it's not better at being KDE3. You can run KDE4 as if it was KDE3, but it feels like second best.
I'm trying to remember how many years ago Slashdot posted an article where someone predicted that we'd all be using touchscreens in five years instead of mouses. 3-4 years is my best guesstimate.