Please check your history. England was one of the first European countries to abolish slavery. THe principles of which were set in 1772. The slave trade did, however, continue particularly in the west indies despite a growing ant-slavery movement. These abolitionists even started buying large tracts of Africa in order to create free areas where potential slaves would be safe.
The British completely outlawed the slave trade anywhere in the British Empire in 1807 under the punishment of death and also took action against African leaders who refused to accept the abolition.
DonÂt be silly. You can not do this with something like KDE unless you persuade an army of other people to join you too. Anything that uses KDE libs would have to be forked at the same time. It is not a realistic option.
I do not suppose you have had too much exposure to OSX then.
I see similarities in the way things like the config tool works. I see the same daft inconsistencies and worse, the same attitude of this is how it is, adapt or go away.
The cute little plasmoids or OSX dashboard widgets are fun for about ten minutes and thereafter only serve as tools to impress people who you are trying to persuade to make the same choices you did.
At least the Linux apps are not as brain dead as the OSX equivalents.
I agree it is in its infancy but when I was running the original KDE Beta releases (prior to KDE 1.0) it was in its infancy too. However, it was, in my opinion, a vast improvement on what was around at the time in terms of features and usability. It was the infant child of KDE 3.5 but it is still recognizable as such, at least in terms of philosophy and direction.
KDE 4 on the other hand, may be an infant child, but to me it looks like it has the genetic code to grow into a beast that tells you how to work rather than the other way around. It hasnt even got any prettier in its short life.
If it would have been possible to shove the new technology underneath an interface that kept the same sense of user control then we wold have had something.
Been a Linux/KDE user for longer than I care to remember and I really, really donÂt like KDE 4.
I wish them luck with the project as I think there is some really impressive technology underneath that interface.
However as a tool to use to get things done it has all the worst aspects of OSX (and there are many) together with the dumbed down minimalism of Gnome.
Since KDE 4 I find I mostly only use Linux at work now because if I am going to have to use the bastard child of OSX and Gnome on my home machine I may as well use the god awful OSX because at least that supports all my gadgets out of the box.
My favourite apps are all Linux; digikam, amarok, k3b but non-kde 4 versions of these are a dead end now.
Where does someone who enjoyed the complexity and reconfigurability of KDE 3.5 go these days except a different platform.
Sometimes I wonder how another industry would react if a magical technology dropped in their lap that made duplicating their product instantaneous and nearly free You mean like the industry that used to deliver ice to peoples doors or maybe you were thinking of traveling minstrels. Perhaps you mean scribes or the mummification industry. Maybe you speak of the people who used to walk in front of cars with a big flag.
Things move on, industries lose their relevance others move abroad and the people left behind have to adapt.
In my view it is important to remember there was music before the recording industry and there will be music after it. These businesses are not a music industry, they are a recording and distribution industry. Thanks but we can record and distribute things ourselves now.
I really find it hard to believe the stuff that is supposed to come out of usability studies. I have seen some usability stuff at the sharp end and it looks sensible but what actually ends being released is beyond logic to me. I dont believe many of these people are capable of understanding the effect their goal is on the subjects reactions.
I fail to believe that "search" is better for newbies who dont know what they are searching for. Its almost as dumb as thinking context sensitive menus are a good idea. The most important learning tool in any system, even a text book is the chance of accidently seeing things you werent looking for. Be it, the man page for "grep" you first found while you were flicking through looking for the man page for "ls" or the option on a menu for "Save profile web browsing" while looking for the option to "exit", this is useful stuff to become aware of. People dont look for things they dont know about for christ sake!
Dont get me started on who thought it was a good idea to move the "clear the url line" button from the left the right in konqueror. I dont know about most people but I start writing in that box on the left and not only that, thats where the cursor ends up after youve pressed it.
Oh and big grey boxes with tools on when you hover over a plasmoid. Pretty but dumb. I see that now, at least, the little tool icons dont swap sides depending on which part of the screen your on. Thank god for one small mercy from the "how people work gurus". I had to laugh when my excitement at getting rid of the things (by "locking" the desktop) made it impossible to change your background image. Logical to some extent until you realise that, given the "set image as background image" disappears from the desktop menu, there are no clues whatsoever to tell you in six months time that the steps to change your background are 1) unlock desktop, 2) Go to menu that two seconds ago didnt mention anything about this task and 3) select the option to change the background.
It is utter, utter nonsense and we are being taken in by the human interface sales pitch.
I really, realy get some of the technology improvements in KDE4. I think they are a marvel and have the potential to be world beating. It is streets ahead of anything else. Sadly, it will become just a demo application for technology if this philosophy continues.
My 65 year old mother hates it and she is one of the target users.
Believe me, you are not alone. I have been a KDE user on many machines since the pre-kde 1.0. I started with KDE Beta 2 or Beta 3, cant remember.
KDE 4 is, as you say, a real step backwards for people that do things their own way. I really, really dislike the new philosophy and bizarre design decisions. I really wanted to like it but find I can now go back to fvwm2 or even TkDesk which is what I once ran or, if I have to have my way of working decided for me, use OSX (this post on a macbook). I really disike OSX but it has all the nastiness of modern GUI trends tempered by supporting all sorts of hardware without thinking about it. Plus I can run Photoshop and the tomTom to go software.
Ok, I still have Slackware/KDE 3.5 running in vmware on this box but how long can I keep doing that?
"Actually, nazism called itself national socialism but was rather fascist despotism"
Hitler said those who think of national socialism as a political movement have not understood it at all. His "national socialism" ideas were much grander than mere politics. He and Pol Pot might have got on quite well though.
Thus highlighting the power of the jury system. Ultimately there are enough people who actually take it seriously to persuade those who don't to think a bit more.
Amazing that some people take it so lightly but it is encouraging that, in the end, it usually gets balanced out.
I appreciate your comments regarding trying to do things the mac way and I really tried. I really wanted, particularly iTunes and iPhoto, to be good. iTunes does organize files on your machine but if it gets it wrong, which is often does, you can't do anything about it. Take for example the simple problem of having a CD by an artist that has one track by that artist and one other artist too. In iTunes you get two albums, one of which has only one track. You cant edit the id3 tags. Amarok, just reads the tags but if can't it guesses, usually correctly, what you meant. If it's wrong you just edit it yourself. iTunes is rather limited in moving, deleting and organizing files itself (say you have an mp3 and an mp4 of the same song) and therefore, I think the file manager is the best way to organize. Amarok is good for that.
Amarok, also looks up the lyrics for your song, gets detailed information on the artist from Wikipedia and syncs with practically anything you care to mention. Amarok also gives you choices of album artwork rather than just displaying the wrong one which iTunes regularly does. For me, iTunes focus is on downloading from the iTunes store (which is it very good at) and syncing with an iPod. The actual music playing and organizing seems just an add on.
iPhoto suffers much the same things in my view. It splits up all your images into dates regardless of how you want to organize things, it is slow and image editing and touch up features are really limited. Again, it is very good at trying to get me to buy stuff though.
In the next few months Digikam and Amarok will be available natively on the mac though as they will be part of KDE 4, I presume they will be much less useable than the current versions. However, in a year or two, I guess we can have proper comparisons.
Is there any software that comes with OSX that people use for more than a couple of weeks apart from iPhot and iTunes?
iTunes does actually work and plays tunes. Feature wise it's a cripple and it is really stupid at collecting songs into an album even if you actually rip them from a single CD. It's main focus is on getting you to spend money, not playing tunes.
iPhoto is pathetic. I like the feature of quickly flicking through the pictures in an "event" by side scrolling the mouse but that is it. Other than that, it is dumb and featureless. Just compare it to Digikam and you'll see why.
iTunes = Irritating pile of rubbish that can't even recognise a track on the same album with an additional artist is in fact still the same album and nearly always gets album artwork wrong. Can't even edit tags. Great at syncing an iPod but not much else
Amarok = Rock solid, incredible feature set, sync anything and now can even output to an airport express box.
I will admit to seeing very buggy installations of Amarok though. I can only presume the problem is one of package management. My built from source installs are always flawless though I'm not expecting everyone should do that. More work required on packaging it for the distros.
"And since Leopard OS X is a certified UNIX, so please tell me what makes your Linux box so mega superior to OS X?"
1) It can be an NFS server without being stupid, slow and unbelievably convoluted 2) rsync works properly 3) X works works properly ( this could end up a long list so I will stick with ---) 4) Most things work properly 5) X rarely crashes (though doesn`t say "Don't worry OSX was not affected") 6) It supports a huge range of filesystems 7) It doesn't try and sell him stuff all the time 8) It doesn't have that god awful "Finder" 9) It supports more media types out of the box 10) It has a reliable DVD ripper that doesn't occasionally chop the end of things off 11) It comes with a DVD ripper! 12) Applications stop running when you hit a "quit" button on the window decorations 13) It has logical volume management that doesn't suck 14) It has a keyboard layout that means you can actually find the pipe symbol 15) It's cheap 16) etc etc etc
To be fair, the Mac shows promise. It's just that about 95% of everthing it does is pretty good but it's the most important 5% that sucks.
Only had three Linux kernel panics in twelve years and two of those were within five minutes of each other. Admittedly that is two more than I've had on HP-UX in even longer and about the same as I had with SCO Unix/Xenix. I have pulled out ps/2 cables plenty of times on the Linux boxen too. However, ps/2 mice drivers were always unable to re-connect after a cable pull until very recently so you always ended up rebooting anyway, even with Windows.
MacOS is evidence of this principle: Apple understands that people relate to the computer not through the kernel but through the UI, and they put a lot of time and effort into creating a slick UI. Indeed, the UI is the reason most people switch from Windows to Mac, in spite of the learning curve. The reason for switching is not the fancy BSD kernel, for most people. The Mac interface is not a reference model people should look up to.
The company at which I work recently allowed some of its staff to go purchase a computer for use at home on condition that it could connect to the office network over a vpn.
All of these people bought a mac because they look cool. Three bought iMac and two bought a mac book pro. By con-incidence three of these people used Windows at work and two used Linux.
After about three weeks every body had got so fed up with the OSX interface that the Windows guys installed Windows on their machines and the Linux guys installed Linux.
I don't think the "slick Apple UI" is slick for everyone. Personally I think the GUI is worse than Windows but the "terminal" application is its saving grace.
I have two macs and a Linux box at home. I have only recently purchased the macs. Sadly OSX doesnt yet run Amarok or Digikam and therefore 99.9% of the time my mac book pro runs Slackware in a VMware fusion virtual machine. There is not one bit of software I have on either of my macs that comes close in features and ease of use to the Linux equivalent except "bibble" and "Firefox" but that is only because I have both of those on Linux too.
I am glad someone from the security industry is talking a least some sense.
Security has become a mantra and almost a religion. I have been in the industry for many years and even worked on C1/B2 secure systems in the past.
In industry people seem to forget the cost benefit. What is the cost of an intrusion set against the cost of bringing your systems down once a month to patch them?
Obviously it can depends. However, the risk of a seriously damaging intrusion is significantly less than just an inconvenient one and even that is low with basic security policies in place. This calculation is rarely made and consideration of the negative effect on users less so.
Really tight security is extremely expensive to the business who are often shown dramtic examples of grabbing a users web sessions to basically instill a largely unrealistic fear. For a few oraganizations extreme security measures maybe profitable but for most, basic security and good firewalling is probably all that is required.
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Please check your history. England was one of the first European countries to abolish slavery. THe principles of which were set in 1772. The slave trade did, however, continue particularly in the west indies despite a growing ant-slavery movement. These abolitionists even started buying large tracts of Africa in order to create free areas where potential slaves would be safe.
The British completely outlawed the slave trade anywhere in the British Empire in 1807 under the punishment of death and also took action against African leaders who refused to accept the abolition.
Is it magic cabling?
Then look a little more carefully and think a little harder.
DonÂt be silly. You can not do this with something like KDE unless you persuade an army of other people to join you too. Anything that uses KDE libs would have to be forked at the same time. It is not a realistic option.
I do not suppose you have had too much exposure to OSX then.
I see similarities in the way things like the config tool works. I see the same daft inconsistencies and worse, the same attitude of this is how it is, adapt or go away.
The cute little plasmoids or OSX dashboard widgets are fun for about ten minutes and thereafter only serve as tools to impress people who you are trying to persuade to make the same choices you did.
At least the Linux apps are not as brain dead as the OSX equivalents.
When everybody is heading in the same direction i.e dumb, simple, controlled and ugly it doesnÂt matter which of them you pick.
I agree it is in its infancy but when I was running the original KDE Beta releases (prior to KDE 1.0) it was in its infancy too. However, it was, in my opinion, a vast improvement on what was around at the time in terms of features and usability. It was the infant child of KDE 3.5 but it is still recognizable as such, at least in terms of philosophy and direction.
KDE 4 on the other hand, may be an infant child, but to me it looks like it has the genetic code to grow into a beast that tells you how to work rather than the other way around. It hasnt even got any prettier in its short life.
If it would have been possible to shove the new technology underneath an interface that kept the same sense of user control then we wold have had something.
Been a Linux/KDE user for longer than I care to remember and I really, really donÂt like KDE 4.
I wish them luck with the project as I think there is some really impressive technology underneath that interface.
However as a tool to use to get things done it has all the worst aspects of OSX (and there are many) together with the dumbed down minimalism of Gnome.
Since KDE 4 I find I mostly only use Linux at work now because if I am going to have to use the bastard child of OSX and Gnome on my home machine I may as well use the god awful OSX because at least that supports all my gadgets out of the box.
My favourite apps are all Linux; digikam, amarok, k3b but non-kde 4 versions of these are a dead end now.
Where does someone who enjoyed the complexity and reconfigurability of KDE 3.5 go these days except a different platform.
or a map
Things move on, industries lose their relevance others move abroad and the people left behind have to adapt.
In my view it is important to remember there was music before the recording industry and there will be music after it. These businesses are not a music industry, they are a recording and distribution industry. Thanks but we can record and distribute things ourselves now.
This just drives me nuts.
I really find it hard to believe the stuff that is supposed to come out of usability studies. I have seen some usability stuff at the sharp end and it looks sensible but what actually ends being released is beyond logic to me. I dont believe many of these people are capable of understanding the effect their goal is on the subjects reactions.
I fail to believe that "search" is better for newbies who dont know what they are searching for. Its almost as dumb as thinking context sensitive menus are a good idea. The most important learning tool in any system, even a text book is the chance of accidently seeing things you werent looking for. Be it, the man page for "grep" you first found while you were flicking through looking for the man page for "ls" or the option on a menu for "Save profile web browsing" while looking for the option to "exit", this is useful stuff to become aware of. People dont look for things they dont know about for christ sake!
Dont get me started on who thought it was a good idea to move the "clear the url line" button from the left the right in konqueror. I dont know about most people but I start writing in that box on the left and not only that, thats where the cursor ends up after youve pressed it.
Oh and big grey boxes with tools on when you hover over a plasmoid. Pretty but dumb. I see that now, at least, the little tool icons dont swap sides depending on which part of the screen your on. Thank god for one small mercy from the "how people work gurus". I had to laugh when my excitement at getting rid of the things (by "locking" the desktop) made it impossible to change your background image. Logical to some extent until you realise that, given the "set image as background image" disappears from the desktop menu, there are no clues whatsoever to tell you in six months time that the steps to change your background are 1) unlock desktop, 2) Go to menu that two seconds ago didnt mention anything about this task and 3) select the option to change the background.
It is utter, utter nonsense and we are being taken in by the human interface sales pitch.
I really, realy get some of the technology improvements in KDE4. I think they are a marvel and have the potential to be world beating. It is streets ahead of anything else. Sadly, it will become just a demo application for technology if this philosophy continues.
My 65 year old mother hates it and she is one of the target users.
God it makes me baity!
Believe me, you are not alone. I have been a KDE user on many machines since the pre-kde 1.0. I started with KDE Beta 2 or Beta 3, cant remember.
KDE 4 is, as you say, a real step backwards for people that do things their own way. I really, really dislike the new philosophy and bizarre design decisions. I really wanted to like it but find I can now go back to fvwm2 or even TkDesk which is what I once ran or, if I have to have my way of working decided for me, use OSX (this post on a macbook). I really disike OSX but it has all the nastiness of modern GUI trends tempered by supporting all sorts of hardware without thinking about it. Plus I can run Photoshop and the tomTom to go software.
Ok, I still have Slackware/KDE 3.5 running in vmware on this box but how long can I keep doing that?
"Actually, nazism called itself national socialism but was rather fascist despotism"
Hitler said those who think of national socialism as a political movement have not understood it at all. His "national socialism" ideas were much grander than mere politics. He and Pol Pot might have got on quite well though.
The same process applies to the word "Freedom" too. It is the other side of the same coin.
Thus highlighting the power of the jury system. Ultimately there are enough people who actually take it seriously to persuade those who don't to think a bit more.
Amazing that some people take it so lightly but it is encouraging that, in the end, it usually gets balanced out.
I appreciate your comments regarding trying to do things the mac way and I really tried. I really wanted, particularly iTunes and iPhoto, to be good. iTunes does organize files on your machine but if it gets it wrong, which is often does, you can't do anything about it. Take for example the simple problem of having a CD by an artist that has one track by that artist and one other artist too. In iTunes you get two albums, one of which has only one track. You cant edit the id3 tags. Amarok, just reads the tags but if can't it guesses, usually correctly, what you meant. If it's wrong you just edit it yourself. iTunes is rather limited in moving, deleting and organizing files itself (say you have an mp3 and an mp4 of the same song) and therefore, I think the file manager is the best way to organize. Amarok is good for that.
Amarok, also looks up the lyrics for your song, gets detailed information on the artist from Wikipedia and syncs with practically anything you care to mention. Amarok also gives you choices of album artwork rather than just displaying the wrong one which iTunes regularly does. For me, iTunes focus is on downloading from the iTunes store (which is it very good at) and syncing with an iPod. The actual music playing and organizing seems just an add on.
iPhoto suffers much the same things in my view. It splits up all your images into dates regardless of how you want to organize things, it is slow and image editing and touch up features are really limited. Again, it is very good at trying to get me to buy stuff though.
In the next few months Digikam and Amarok will be available natively on the mac though as they will be part of KDE 4, I presume they will be much less useable than the current versions. However, in a year or two, I guess we can have proper comparisons.
Is there any software that comes with OSX that people use for more than a couple of weeks apart from iPhot and iTunes?
They are both awful
iTunes does actually work and plays tunes. Feature wise it's a cripple and it is really stupid at collecting songs into an album even if you actually rip them from a single CD. It's main focus is on getting you to spend money, not playing tunes.
iPhoto is pathetic. I like the feature of quickly flicking through the pictures in an "event" by side scrolling the mouse but that is it. Other than that, it is dumb and featureless. Just compare it to Digikam and you'll see why.
Try putting this in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in the InputDevice section.
Option "Buttons" "11"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
Should get the multitouch mousepad thing going. Vertically at least.
Well run vmware on Linux too then. It's free on Linux and works just as well as Fusion though has a slightly more fussy interface.
My experiences are
iTunes = Irritating pile of rubbish that can't even recognise a track on the same album with an additional artist is in fact still the same album and nearly always gets album artwork wrong. Can't even edit tags. Great at syncing an iPod but not much else
Amarok = Rock solid, incredible feature set, sync anything and now can even output to an airport express box.
I will admit to seeing very buggy installations of Amarok though. I can only presume the problem is one of package management. My built from source installs are always flawless though I'm not expecting everyone should do that. More work required on packaging it for the distros.
"And since Leopard OS X is a certified UNIX, so please tell me what makes your Linux box so mega superior to OS X?"
1) It can be an NFS server without being stupid, slow and unbelievably convoluted
2) rsync works properly
3) X works works properly ( this could end up a long list so I will stick with ---)
4) Most things work properly
5) X rarely crashes (though doesn`t say "Don't worry OSX was not affected")
6) It supports a huge range of filesystems
7) It doesn't try and sell him stuff all the time
8) It doesn't have that god awful "Finder"
9) It supports more media types out of the box
10) It has a reliable DVD ripper that doesn't occasionally chop the end of things off
11) It comes with a DVD ripper!
12) Applications stop running when you hit a "quit" button on the window decorations
13) It has logical volume management that doesn't suck
14) It has a keyboard layout that means you can actually find the pipe symbol
15) It's cheap
16) etc etc etc
To be fair, the Mac shows promise. It's just that about 95% of everthing it does is pretty good but it's the most important 5% that sucks.
Only had three Linux kernel panics in twelve years and two of those were within five minutes of each other. Admittedly that is two more than I've had on HP-UX in even longer and about the same as I had with SCO Unix/Xenix. I have pulled out ps/2 cables plenty of times on the Linux boxen too. However, ps/2 mice drivers were always unable to re-connect after a cable pull until very recently so you always ended up rebooting anyway, even with Windows.
The company at which I work recently allowed some of its staff to go purchase a computer for use at home on condition that it could connect to the office network over a vpn.
All of these people bought a mac because they look cool. Three bought iMac and two bought a mac book pro. By con-incidence three of these people used Windows at work and two used Linux.
After about three weeks every body had got so fed up with the OSX interface that the Windows guys installed Windows on their machines and the Linux guys installed Linux.
I don't think the "slick Apple UI" is slick for everyone. Personally I think the GUI is worse than Windows but the "terminal" application is its saving grace.
Maybe you are right but i don't think so.
I have two macs and a Linux box at home. I have only recently purchased the macs. Sadly OSX doesnt yet run Amarok or Digikam and therefore 99.9% of the time my mac book pro runs Slackware in a VMware fusion virtual machine. There is not one bit of software I have on either of my macs that comes close in features and ease of use to the Linux equivalent except "bibble" and "Firefox" but that is only because I have both of those on Linux too.
I am glad someone from the security industry is talking a least some sense.
Security has become a mantra and almost a religion. I have been in the industry for many years and even worked on C1/B2 secure systems in the past.
In industry people seem to forget the cost benefit. What is the cost of an intrusion set against the cost of bringing your systems down once a month to patch them?
Obviously it can depends. However, the risk of a seriously damaging intrusion is significantly less than just an inconvenient one and even that is low with basic security policies in place. This calculation is rarely made and consideration of the negative effect on users less so.
Really tight security is extremely expensive to the business who are often shown dramtic examples of grabbing a users web sessions to basically instill a largely unrealistic fear. For a few oraganizations extreme security measures maybe profitable but for most, basic security and good firewalling is probably all that is required.