Although I understand the need for the newbie user, I've never understood why Nautilus is so important to the initiated GNOME user. I very rarely have a need to use a graphical file manager, and when I do, I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar. No matter what version I've tried, its always had problems. I don't believe I've ever been actively using it for more than a few minutes where it hasn't crashed (don't even bother on Solaris...) Its new and large, so I understand it will take a while, but I don't know that it is ready to have a central role in GNOME.
Yes, its nice eye candy, but how much is it actually used, aside from showing new users that you can drag and drop and preview just like Explorer?
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
I'm not flaming, just wondering if anyone else doesn't feel the same.
Sheesh, for a minute I thought you were kidding, but I guess not.
Yes, many languages are very powerful and allow you to do many things, but just because a language exists doesn't mean it magically includes support for everything -- including things that didn't exist at the time the language was created.
Generally, a language has a core set functionality that only provides a framework to build applications. Most languages then have a standard set of libraries implementing common functionality, and extended libraries implementing features outside the spec of the core and common APIs.
Anyway, Cocoa isn't written in Python, so you can't just use it from Python without an interface into the Cocoa framework. So, someone has provided an interface to Cocoa. Its not that Python was semantically unable to work with Cocoa, but that the mechanism didn't exist.
You should try something other than Visual Basic, maybe you'd learn about how software really works.:-)
This letter is to inform you of a class action lawsuit filed against Pets Warehouse ("the Company") on behalf of the rest of the world ("Everybody").
Everybody asserts that the Company has caused irreversible harm and mental anguish by the use of excessive blink tags and animated gifs on the Company's website. Everybody hereby claims the right to compensation for the aforementioned ailments caused by the Company's lack of taste.
I would agree, but I can't get IE to install the certificates permanently. I click through the install dialogue every session, but it never sticks. Mozilla is fine after the first run.
It can actually be significantly faster, given that much of the web is point-click oriented so your hand is probably already on your mouse. (Unless you're too cool for mice and use lynx, of course.)
I thought this sounded like some nifty gee-whiz crappy feature when I first heard about it, but after trying it in Opera I was quite impressed. It quickly became a normal browsing habit.
The only problem was that on occasion I would accidently make the gesture for "close window" and my pages would magically disappear.
It'd be ultra-nifty if there was a mouse gesture training app, so I could map commands to custom gestures. Then I could bind the movement made when I throw my mouse at my monitor to Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Yeah, even God fell for the optimist marketing hype. But after several reverse splits Earth (ERTH) was eventually delisted and its IP slowly sold off to the convicted monopolist, Entropy Corp. (S).
Genetic information stored in DNA is read out - transcribed - every time living cells make a new protein...
IIRC, some mRNA transcripts stay in the cytoplasm and are translated multiple times. In addition multiple ribosomes can "read" a single mRNA strand at once. So, it isn't a one transcription to one protein relationship.
Not really. An OS can't stake it's reputation on software out of it's control. No one is going to claim that their OS has been secure for every user who runs it, including users who've incorrectly installed/configured software on the OS. The best you can say is that the way it was distributed was clean, and you've done the best possible job of providing security support for user apps.
We've gone through a similar transition but things are now getting better.
The only thing that really works is to cut the problem off at the the root. Get rid of the preppy Ivy-league MBAs who don't know anything about building real software. A lot them are probably hold overs from the.com bust, and probably thought they could hide in the glut without any technical knowledge -- not anymore.
Replace them with seasoned sales/marketing folks who've been burned by over promising before. Best situation is to get some former engineers into the business side who are willing to push back against the unrealistic.
The market ought to be full of good people these days, the trick is to have some software experts on the interview panel, rather than accepting blind recommendations from someone's rich parents' friend (unless you're interviewing prospective US Presidents, rich parents are apparently enough).
why don't you use a free perl binary [perl.com] and a free installer system [nullsoft.com]?
Several reasons:
1) That's not a binary, it's source code. My clients can't be required to make Perl on they're own. They'd have to install Cygwin/GCC on windows and GCC + binutils + fileutils, etc. on Solaris.
2) They'd still have to download and install the PMs themselves.
3) Can't use Nullsoft because it only runs on NT.
4) Our install is much too complicated for a pre-built install system. Way to much interdependency on up to a dozen modules, scripted HTTP posts, and all sorts of custom hackery. Tried nearly everything, didn't work.
I wanted to distribute ActiveState with our application, but it's licensing doesn't cater well to it. When we were interested (maybe 2 years ago) ActiveState required a certain sized logo to be printed on the packaging and the CDs. Only a small part of the product was Perl, so no one with any sense would have an ActiveState logo the same size as our own logo on all the media.
We want to have a clean install that automates much of the work, rather than a huge pre-install guide instructing users how to setup all the required apps.
BTW, yes the clients could have installed Perl themselves, but that would have been a violation of my requirements (i.e., end users might be system admins, but that doesn't mean they know how to use computers).
I've used it to build a moderately sized installation application that was distributed to clients to install our huge application. I had mixed results.
Main problem was licensing. Because it was an installation app, the Build/CM team was responsible to maintain it. IIRC, the license was tied to a given username and host. So, developers can't build the installer themselves, the CM team must do it on request, or setup a shared perl2exe user for everyone on a build server somewhere. Developers, if they want to fix it, must go and work on the shared server. Pain in the ass.
The other issue was lack of Perl know-how. When the compiler complained, I'd have ten people at my desk while I tried to explain how to setup @INC corrrectly.
Seems like a _very_ small shop produces it, and is a little kludgey. Overall though, if my team was just me or a few Perl savvy people, I would recommend it.
As an aside, my reasons behind using perl2exe were:
1) perlcc didn't seem to work at all, and I didn't have the time to muck with it. Has anyone gotten this to work for more than just small or test programs?
2) (and most obnoxious, at least with 5.003(?)) Perl is a pain in the ass to deploy. Licensing issues didn't allow us to distribute ActiveState on NT, and Perl really wants to be compiled on the target machine for Solaris. Compiling a distribution on Solaris hard-codes the prefix-dir, so it expects the target machine to have the same dir structure--which is in violation of my requirements. I emailed the mailing list and got a reply from non other than Randall Schwarz, who basically said (heavily paraphrased), "Yeah, that sucks. Someone's going to fix it eventually." The only solution I could come up with in a short amount of time was to write a wrapper script that mucked with @INC and included paths from the environment before execing anything else.
I love the language, but this is why I don't use it. You can't depend on everyone having installed Perl + all your needed PMs themselves, and its not worth trying to automate it for them. IMHO, its the downfall of the language.
We wanted to have Perl installed with our large Java system to help in performing scripting type tasks, but it was way too big of a pain. Oh well...
The next obvious step of experimentation will be trying to activate this gene in apes, which may well produce apes of human intelligence.
I'm hoping this post is in jest, but its hard to tell. The thing that bothers me about stories like this is that it reinforces the one-gene/one-function myth that popular journalists seem to love so much. Sure, in many cases we can isolate genes that produce proteins with specific functions that are useful. But, when you start talking about genes related to development and morphology, I'd guess (being an armchair science-geek) that that things get much more complex. No one in the news wants to talk about the extreme complexity and and inter-relatedness of genes, but everyone want to say "Hey, Scientists Discovered the Intelligence Gene!"
I know its dated, but when I'm looking for some chemistry related reading I sometimes like to flip through Linus Pauling's book "General Chemistry." He wrote it with college freshmen in mind in many years ago, but its nice to pick up the Dover reprint and read the explanations straight from one of the giants of chemistry. Many times when my first college chem instructor was trying to explain something (and struggling at it), I'd look it up in Pauling's book to get another angle on it, which sometimes helped quite a bit. A good addition to scientific bookshelfs, especially for people interesting in the development and history of science, rather than just the current theory.
Re:Best where electrical power is questionable....
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 3, Funny
In a relatively undeveloped country, however, this might make a lot of sense! It could give new options to doctors who simply couldn't count on a laser-based setup to function reliably, or couldn't afford it to begin with.
Yes, like Palestine. The Israeli government could get PR points by making the technology available in the West Bank and Gaza.
Of course, then they'd setup military checkpoints and not allow Palestinians access to it. Then they'd start bulldozing hospitals with the excuse that they housed military laser technology.
Bush won't approve of the whole thing because it has something to do with solar technology. Long discussions with his advisors will then be required to explain to him why we can't just drill in national parks and focus petroleum for surgery.
Re: Tech. Review (Why Software is So Bad)
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 1
The cover story on the latest Technology Review mag, "Why Software is So Bad" claims that restrictions on publishing benchmarks are common in EULAs. It mentions that in 1999 Oracle used their EULA to prevent PC Magazine from publishing benchmarks against SQL Server, even though PC Magazine allowed both Oracle and Microsoft to setup the machines running their software. (July/August, p. 38)
Granted, Oracle is evil in its own right, but the point is that its not only Microsoft--its the industry. Rather than picking apart MS licenses and whining about what big meanies they are, perhaps we should be gathering more examples and making efforts to bring software users' rights as an issue before our local representatives. (Sorry, possibly US specific comment:)
Slashdot Mirror
Although I understand the need for the newbie user, I've never understood why Nautilus is so important to the initiated GNOME user. I very rarely have a need to use a graphical file manager, and when I do, I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar. No matter what version I've tried, its always had problems. I don't believe I've ever been actively using it for more than a few minutes where it hasn't crashed (don't even bother on Solaris...) Its new and large, so I understand it will take a while, but I don't know that it is ready to have a central role in GNOME.
Yes, its nice eye candy, but how much is it actually used, aside from showing new users that you can drag and drop and preview just like Explorer?
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
I'm not flaming, just wondering if anyone else doesn't feel the same.
Yes... you are. Get to work.
Sheesh, for a minute I thought you were kidding, but I guess not.
:-)
Yes, many languages are very powerful and allow you to do many things, but just because a language exists doesn't mean it magically includes support for everything -- including things that didn't exist at the time the language was created.
Generally, a language has a core set functionality that only provides a framework to build applications. Most languages then have a standard set of libraries implementing common functionality, and extended libraries implementing features outside the spec of the core and common APIs.
Anyway, Cocoa isn't written in Python, so you can't just use it from Python without an interface into the Cocoa framework. So, someone has provided an interface to Cocoa. Its not that Python was semantically unable to work with Cocoa, but that the mechanism didn't exist.
You should try something other than Visual Basic, maybe you'd learn about how software really works.
Welcome to 2002 douchebag.
Where the fuck have you been? Welcome to 1994.
Mr. Novak,
This letter is to inform you of a class action lawsuit filed against Pets Warehouse ("the Company") on behalf of the rest of the world ("Everybody").
Everybody asserts that the Company has caused irreversible harm and mental anguish by the use of excessive blink tags and animated gifs on the Company's website. Everybody hereby claims the right to compensation for the aforementioned ailments caused by the Company's lack of taste.
Regards,
Everybody
I would agree, but I can't get IE to install the certificates permanently. I click through the install dialogue every session, but it never sticks. Mozilla is fine after the first run.
Heeeeehhh, hahhhhhh, hhhaaaaaah, heh...
Someone in marketing has a sense of humor.
It can actually be significantly faster, given that much of the web is point-click oriented so your hand is probably already on your mouse. (Unless you're too cool for mice and use lynx, of course.)
I thought this sounded like some nifty gee-whiz crappy feature when I first heard about it, but after trying it in Opera I was quite impressed. It quickly became a normal browsing habit.
The only problem was that on occasion I would accidently make the gesture for "close window" and my pages would magically disappear.
It'd be ultra-nifty if there was a mouse gesture training app, so I could map commands to custom gestures. Then I could bind the movement made when I throw my mouse at my monitor to Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Yeah, even God fell for the optimist marketing hype. But after several reverse splits Earth (ERTH) was eventually delisted and its IP slowly sold off to the convicted monopolist, Entropy Corp. (S).
He, he, he.
Come on, that's not flamebait, its humor. If my points hadn't just expired I'd mod +1 Funny. Anyone?
Genetic information stored in DNA is read out - transcribed - every time living cells make a new protein...
IIRC, some mRNA transcripts stay in the cytoplasm and are translated multiple times. In addition multiple ribosomes can "read" a single mRNA strand at once. So, it isn't a one transcription to one protein relationship.
If I'm wrong on this, please call bullshit.
It's an important distinction to make.
Not really. An OS can't stake it's reputation on software out of it's control. No one is going to claim that their OS has been secure for every user who runs it, including users who've incorrectly installed/configured software on the OS. The best you can say is that the way it was distributed was clean, and you've done the best possible job of providing security support for user apps.
Hey! Not stupid communists -- moderately intelligent socialists.
We've gone through a similar transition but things are now getting better.
.com bust, and probably thought they could hide in the glut without any technical knowledge -- not anymore.
The only thing that really works is to cut the problem off at the the root. Get rid of the preppy Ivy-league MBAs who don't know anything about building real software. A lot them are probably hold overs from the
Replace them with seasoned sales/marketing folks who've been burned by over promising before. Best situation is to get some former engineers into the business side who are willing to push back against the unrealistic.
The market ought to be full of good people these days, the trick is to have some software experts on the interview panel, rather than accepting blind recommendations from someone's rich parents' friend (unless you're interviewing prospective US Presidents, rich parents are apparently enough).
why don't you use a free perl binary [perl.com] and a free installer system [nullsoft.com]?
Several reasons:
1) That's not a binary, it's source code. My clients can't be required to make Perl on they're own. They'd have to install Cygwin/GCC on windows and GCC + binutils + fileutils, etc. on Solaris.
2) They'd still have to download and install the PMs themselves.
3) Can't use Nullsoft because it only runs on NT.
4) Our install is much too complicated for a pre-built install system. Way to much interdependency on up to a dozen modules, scripted HTTP posts, and all sorts of custom hackery. Tried nearly everything, didn't work.
I wanted to distribute ActiveState with our application, but it's licensing doesn't cater well to it. When we were interested (maybe 2 years ago) ActiveState required a certain sized logo to be printed on the packaging and the CDs. Only a small part of the product was Perl, so no one with any sense would have an ActiveState logo the same size as our own logo on all the media.
We want to have a clean install that automates much of the work, rather than a huge pre-install guide instructing users how to setup all the required apps.
BTW, yes the clients could have installed Perl themselves, but that would have been a violation of my requirements (i.e., end users might be system admins, but that doesn't mean they know how to use computers).
I've used it to build a moderately sized installation application that was distributed to clients to install our huge application. I had mixed results.
Main problem was licensing. Because it was an installation app, the Build/CM team was responsible to maintain it. IIRC, the license was tied to a given username and host. So, developers can't build the installer themselves, the CM team must do it on request, or setup a shared perl2exe user for everyone on a build server somewhere. Developers, if they want to fix it, must go and work on the shared server. Pain in the ass.
The other issue was lack of Perl know-how. When the compiler complained, I'd have ten people at my desk while I tried to explain how to setup @INC corrrectly.
Seems like a _very_ small shop produces it, and is a little kludgey. Overall though, if my team was just me or a few Perl savvy people, I would recommend it.
As an aside, my reasons behind using perl2exe were:
1) perlcc didn't seem to work at all, and I didn't have the time to muck with it. Has anyone gotten this to work for more than just small or test programs?
2) (and most obnoxious, at least with 5.003(?)) Perl is a pain in the ass to deploy. Licensing issues didn't allow us to distribute ActiveState on NT, and Perl really wants to be compiled on the target machine for Solaris. Compiling a distribution on Solaris hard-codes the prefix-dir, so it expects the target machine to have the same dir structure--which is in violation of my requirements. I emailed the mailing list and got a reply from non other than Randall Schwarz, who basically said (heavily paraphrased), "Yeah, that sucks. Someone's going to fix it eventually." The only solution I could come up with in a short amount of time was to write a wrapper script that mucked with @INC and included paths from the environment before execing anything else.
I love the language, but this is why I don't use it. You can't depend on everyone having installed Perl + all your needed PMs themselves, and its not worth trying to automate it for them. IMHO, its the downfall of the language.
We wanted to have Perl installed with our large Java system to help in performing scripting type tasks, but it was way too big of a pain. Oh well...
This is just in celebration of the boy band super pop star getting booted from the space program. You know the cosmo/astronauts are relieved.
Of course, now they won't get a chance to silence his oh-so-sweet voice by locking him out in the vacuum.
The next obvious step of experimentation will be trying to activate this gene in apes, which may well produce apes of human intelligence.
I'm hoping this post is in jest, but its hard to tell. The thing that bothers me about stories like this is that it reinforces the one-gene/one-function myth that popular journalists seem to love so much. Sure, in many cases we can isolate genes that produce proteins with specific functions that are useful. But, when you start talking about genes related to development and morphology, I'd guess (being an armchair science-geek) that that things get much more complex. No one in the news wants to talk about the extreme complexity and and inter-relatedness of genes, but everyone want to say "Hey, Scientists Discovered the Intelligence Gene!"
I know its dated, but when I'm looking for some chemistry related reading I sometimes like to flip through Linus Pauling's book "General Chemistry." He wrote it with college freshmen in mind in many years ago, but its nice to pick up the Dover reprint and read the explanations straight from one of the giants of chemistry. Many times when my first college chem instructor was trying to explain something (and struggling at it), I'd look it up in Pauling's book to get another angle on it, which sometimes helped quite a bit. A good addition to scientific bookshelfs, especially for people interesting in the development and history of science, rather than just the current theory.
Buggy as hell, but very nice to work with.
He he... That's a good one.
In a relatively undeveloped country, however, this might make a lot of sense! It could give new options to doctors who simply couldn't count on a laser-based setup to function reliably, or couldn't afford it to begin with.
Yes, like Palestine. The Israeli government could get PR points by making the technology available in the West Bank and Gaza.
Of course, then they'd setup military checkpoints and not allow Palestinians access to it. Then they'd start bulldozing hospitals with the excuse that they housed military laser technology.
Bush won't approve of the whole thing because it has something to do with solar technology. Long discussions with his advisors will then be required to explain to him why we can't just drill in national parks and focus petroleum for surgery.
The cover story on the latest Technology Review mag, "Why Software is So Bad" claims that restrictions on publishing benchmarks are common in EULAs. It mentions that in 1999 Oracle used their EULA to prevent PC Magazine from publishing benchmarks against SQL Server, even though PC Magazine allowed both Oracle and Microsoft to setup the machines running their software. (July/August, p. 38)
:)
Granted, Oracle is evil in its own right, but the point is that its not only Microsoft--its the industry. Rather than picking apart MS licenses and whining about what big meanies they are, perhaps we should be gathering more examples and making efforts to bring software users' rights as an issue before our local representatives. (Sorry, possibly US specific comment