I think the businessman poster is saying that he has in the dynamics of how a board runs. The board may serve to further a corporation's profitability, or it may serve to further a free desktop environment. Either way, the board members have to be able to work together cohesively and handle objection with civility and rationality. If you have a board member who frequently disrupts meetings, refuses to see the viewpoints of others, and is not "diplomatic," the board may get little done. If little is done, the organization the board serves may suffer, no matter what the organization's purpose.
So, I think the businessman poster has a good point and doesn't need to be flamed because he didn't identify himself as a hacker.
I'd put a vote in for Ursula K. LeGuin on both the fantasy and Scifi sides. Her worlds aren't as fleshed out as Tolkien's, and her characters lacked the whimsy of a Gandalf or a Tom Bombadil, but her writing contains poetic observation, if that means anything. Her descriptions of the flight of dragons in "The Wizard of Earthsea" or of the ice flows in "The Left Hand of Darkness" outstrip Tolkien, IMHO.
With LeGuin, you get inside the head of one character (or maybe two) in a deep, moving way, and you see the world in which the character is residing through the internal sketch of the character itself. Thus, you get a narrower vision of the world, but it's more intimately wound up with the character through whom you see it.
I particularly recommend "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Wizard of Earthsea" among her works. Check them out: they're beautiful.
It makes me sad that slashdotters are so quick (and eager!) to jump on GNOME. There is *a lot* going on in the GNOME world that is exciting. The above post mentions many of them. GNOME's infrastructure has been undergoing a major overhaul and that takes time. Remember how long it took for KDE to rewrite itself for 2.0? A long time. More people should be like the above poster and encourage other free software developers, not gather like buzzards around (what they hope is) a dying project.
I'm a bit of a newbie; so forigive my ignorance. Could the Unix/Linux/*BSD community not come up with some sort of graphical shell output with standardized API's? The console has stdout, stdin, stderr, etc. If you create a utility gsout (for output to the graphical shell), which could be accessed with >>>, then a command in an *term would know to display the results in whatever graphical shell you might be using (Nautilus, Konquerer, EFM, etc -- I suppose this would be an environmental variable). >>> would essentially be a pipe to the graphical shell. Gsout would analyze what is coming from the *term and relay the info to the graphical shell, which would have its own specialized way of representing that info.
Just a thought...
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I think the businessman poster is saying that he has in the dynamics of how a board runs. The board may serve to further a corporation's profitability, or it may serve to further a free desktop environment. Either way, the board members have to be able to work together cohesively and handle objection with civility and rationality. If you have a board member who frequently disrupts meetings, refuses to see the viewpoints of others, and is not "diplomatic," the board may get little done. If little is done, the organization the board serves may suffer, no matter what the organization's purpose.
So, I think the businessman poster has a good point and doesn't need to be flamed because he didn't identify himself as a hacker.
I'd put a vote in for Ursula K. LeGuin on both the fantasy and Scifi sides. Her worlds aren't as fleshed out as Tolkien's, and her characters lacked the whimsy of a Gandalf or a Tom Bombadil, but her writing contains poetic observation, if that means anything. Her descriptions of the flight of dragons in "The Wizard of Earthsea" or of the ice flows in "The Left Hand of Darkness" outstrip Tolkien, IMHO.
With LeGuin, you get inside the head of one character (or maybe two) in a deep, moving way, and you see the world in which the character is residing through the internal sketch of the character itself. Thus, you get a narrower vision of the world, but it's more intimately wound up with the character through whom you see it.
I particularly recommend "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Wizard of Earthsea" among her works. Check them out: they're beautiful.
It makes me sad that slashdotters are so quick (and eager!) to jump on GNOME. There is *a lot* going on in the GNOME world that is exciting. The above post mentions many of them. GNOME's infrastructure has been undergoing a major overhaul and that takes time. Remember how long it took for KDE to rewrite itself for 2.0? A long time. More people should be like the above poster and encourage other free software developers, not gather like buzzards around (what they hope is) a dying project.
Si quis linguam latinam cognosceret, sciret nuntium tuum non altum esse. Vale, Ambrosius
I'm a bit of a newbie; so forigive my ignorance. Could the Unix/Linux/*BSD community not come up with some sort of graphical shell output with standardized API's? The console has stdout, stdin, stderr, etc. If you create a utility gsout (for output to the graphical shell), which could be accessed with >>>, then a command in an *term would know to display the results in whatever graphical shell you might be using (Nautilus, Konquerer, EFM, etc -- I suppose this would be an environmental variable). >>> would essentially be a pipe to the graphical shell. Gsout would analyze what is coming from the *term and relay the info to the graphical shell, which would have its own specialized way of representing that info. Just a thought...