I second this. What IceWM needs most is a project manager and an evangelist.
Do a refresh of the website, reach out to all the known historical developers, start a blog about IceWM - little tutorials about what is good about IceWM, triage the bugs the best you can without diving into the code. If the debian and/or Fedora packages are missing, create some or work with the packaging folks to make them better. Convert the revision history to git and put it up on github, if possible.
I think there is a decent backlash going on against Unity and Gnome 3. I'm currently using Cinnamon, but I'm fairly willing to give something old-school a try. I was happy with KDE3, then went to Gnome2, and really feeling that Unity is both unstable and inappropriate for work. (I do want to search for things locally without that going to Amazon for advertising purposes) Cinnamon is workable for me, but I'm not rusted onto it.
Get the pitch right - it's probably not for Grandma, but it might appeal to seasoned developers who don't like instability and don't like any "surprises". One thing that's valuable to me is having something agreeable without much customization. I tend to have various machines with various distros installed, something solid and consistent across all those is a valuable feature to me.
I have have a Linux desktop, which my kids sometimes use. KPotatoGuy is one I can suggest. My 6 year old is starting with minecraft, but it's a bit scary and complex still. (It's fun as long as I am around to coach and make suggestions)
But what my kids (3 and 6) are really into are games on the Android and iOS tablets and phones - angry birds especially. Consider that they can touch without knowing the alphabet, knowing what "escape" or "space" or "return" are about. And the left button, right button, and scroll wheel, etc. These devices are ideal for kids, and software is generally affordable, and the stuff "just works" reliably - minimal admin, fiddling or administration.
So I really recommend they have access to an iPhone, iPod, Nexus7 (or whatever) and some different styles of easy games without the crummy adds that land them on spammy "buy now" websites.
And the best thing about it is that having YOUR computer to yourself is important too!
Aside from all the interesting suggestions made here already - one challenging area to engage with is parallel processing. Google for CUDA, OpenCL and pthreads for an idea of where things are heading for processing intensive applications, that might once have been the domain of Fortran. Indeed, there is probably a whole lot of Fortran code ready and waiting to be adapted to CUDA, and Fortran expertise a bit hard to come by.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Two significant gaps for me: - No AdBlock! - No cookie and/or blocking.
Hey, Bee Movie is a kids movie. My two-year-old likes it quite a lot, and Seinfeld injects enough adult irony to help parents not go mad when they see the DVD for the 145th time.
- Natural gas can be (and is) used as an alternative to oil for transportation.
And solar could offset natural gas currently being used for electricity generation.
(It's being proposed over at http://pickensplan.com/)
- The oil used in the U.S for electricity generation is one thing.
For gas prices, the important statistic is global use of oil for electricity generation.
C'mon Rudd, hire some advisors that have some technical understanding of the interweb.
Mandatory filtering _will_ increase costs and impair performance for all Australia internet traffic. Workarounds will be freely traded in school playgrounds. Political battles will emerge about filtering various other evils.
Don't waste people's time and energy for the sake of being seen to "do something".
I had no trouble untangling from eMusic when I needed to trim the monthly budget. I found plenty of worthwhile music on there, although it's far from complete - so I think it works for more of the "explorative" music shopper. The thing that bugged me was the "pressure" to use my credits each monthly cycle, rather than being able to splurge them when I had the time and inclination.
I had a fairly straight-forward time cruising over there to browse some Paul Van Dyk for my DRM unencumbered collection. However, Amazon still needs to work on it:
- Amarok can't handle the preview song format/mu3/url/whatever. - If I buy an album, I want a zip file, not some silly downloader tool (kubuntu here) - I don't want to go through several steps (card, billing address) to purchase each track - I'd prefer Ogg or Flac, being a spoiled magnatune cumstomer.:-) - The buy button is too far away from the track name - too easy to buy the wrong track. - Ideally, they would do some deal with http://www.last.fm/ to integrate some better functionality into the web interface.
Things like Java serve to lower the barrier to entry. This makes it cheaper for companies to churn out flawed software, than it would otherwise be. And hopefully in the padded cell environment, the exceptions/crashes won't bring down the whole system. That's a decision for businesses to make, but it does reflect badly on the profession overall.
I've got a mixture of ogg and mp3, but I expect to eliminate/replace the mp3 collection over time. I have no DRMed music in my collection, and never intend to add any. I still buy (rippable) CDs.
The portable player support is not too important to me, since am happy with radio in the car 99% of the time.
I don't see the the rationale for being critical of Wikipedia due to this political manipulation.
In fact, I think it's a strong feature of Wikipedia that the changelog is stored, and provides some kind of papertrail, providing far more transparency and accountability than other forms of media/information.
In a sense, nothing can ever be deleted from Wikipedia, merely removed from the main branch.
I would like to be able to migrate to SVG for
vector-based plotting and diagrams. At the moment
I tend to convert to PNG, but ideally there would
be solid support for SVG on Mozilla for both Linux
and Windows. We would also look at bumping SVG into
our Web3D course: http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~nigels/Web3D/
Native Mozilla support would be ideal, but a solid
plugin (Adobe SVG is broken on Linux) would be
a great step forward.
Even in the Telecom days, they figured out how to destroy the BBS scene by charging hobby BBS lines at business rates. Then, 5 years later they decide to become an ISP, and "invented" the Internet in Australia. I wonder how many BBS literates recognised the irony of it. (As well as the phreakers who would dial out of Australia at Telecom's expense as revenge)
Every time I ring them I try to trick them (a call center probably in India) with Australian slang, but I must admit, they are well educated, well trained, and very polite. (And admittedly the Indians are doing a better job than Australians would have been.)
I suppose once wireless arrives we well and truely can break free of these blood sucking pseudo public-service parasites. The ADSL experience for me is a crappy and flakey imitation of Optus cable. No alternative, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. What IceWM needs most is a project manager and an evangelist.
Do a refresh of the website, reach out to all the known historical developers, start a blog about IceWM - little tutorials about what is good about IceWM, triage the bugs the best you can without diving into the code. If the debian and/or Fedora packages are missing, create some or work with the packaging folks to make them better. Convert the revision history to git and put it up on github, if possible.
I think there is a decent backlash going on against Unity and Gnome 3. I'm currently using Cinnamon, but I'm fairly willing to give something old-school a try. I was happy with KDE3, then went to Gnome2, and really feeling that Unity is both unstable and inappropriate for work. (I do want to search for things locally without that going to Amazon for advertising purposes) Cinnamon is workable for me, but I'm not rusted onto it.
Get the pitch right - it's probably not for Grandma, but it might appeal to seasoned developers who don't like instability and don't like any "surprises". One thing that's valuable to me is having something agreeable without much customization. I tend to have various machines with various distros installed, something solid and consistent across all those is a valuable feature to me.
- Nigel
I have have a Linux desktop, which my kids sometimes use.
KPotatoGuy is one I can suggest. My 6 year old is starting
with minecraft, but it's a bit scary and complex still. (It's fun
as long as I am around to coach and make suggestions)
But what my kids (3 and 6) are really into are games on the Android and iOS tablets and phones -
angry birds especially. Consider that they can touch without knowing the alphabet, knowing
what "escape" or "space" or "return" are about. And the left button, right button, and scroll
wheel, etc. These devices are ideal for kids, and software is generally affordable, and the
stuff "just works" reliably - minimal admin, fiddling or administration.
So I really recommend they have access to an iPhone, iPod, Nexus7 (or whatever) and some
different styles of easy games without the crummy adds that land them on spammy "buy now"
websites.
And the best thing about it is that having YOUR computer to yourself is important too!
- Nigel
Aside from all the interesting suggestions made here already - one challenging area to engage with is parallel processing. Google for CUDA, OpenCL and pthreads for an idea of where things are heading for processing intensive applications, that might once have been the domain of Fortran. Indeed, there is probably a whole lot of Fortran code ready and waiting to be adapted to CUDA, and Fortran expertise a bit hard to come by.
Two significant gaps for me:
- No AdBlock!
- No cookie and/or blocking.
Uh oh.
Hey, Bee Movie is a kids movie. My two-year-old likes it quite a lot, and Seinfeld injects enough adult irony to help parents not go mad when they see the DVD for the 145th time.
At least two things to consider:
- Natural gas can be (and is) used as an alternative to oil for transportation.
And solar could offset natural gas currently being used for electricity generation.
(It's being proposed over at http://pickensplan.com/)
- The oil used in the U.S for electricity generation is one thing.
For gas prices, the important statistic is global use of oil for electricity generation.
Hey T-Mobile, so sue me: http://www.nigels.com/
Actually, I don't think I can put up with this colour for too long...
Ah yes, the illusion of improving software by dumbing down the language,
and therefore dumbing down the developers.
DRM and vendor-lock go hand in hand. M$ want media locked
to their platform and DRM fits with that. That makes M$
at least part of problem.
Are you sure that DRM can be "secure" without the OS
preventing access to the clear-text?
C'mon Rudd, hire some advisors that have some technical understanding of the interweb.
Mandatory filtering _will_ increase costs and impair performance for all Australia internet traffic. Workarounds will be freely traded in school playgrounds. Political battles will emerge about filtering various other evils.
Don't waste people's time and energy for the sake of being seen to "do something".
I had no trouble untangling from eMusic when I needed to trim the monthly budget. I found plenty of worthwhile music on there, although it's far from complete - so I think it works for more of the "explorative" music shopper. The thing that bugged me was the "pressure" to use my credits each monthly cycle, rather than being able to splurge them when I had the time and inclination.
I had a fairly straight-forward time cruising over there to browse some Paul Van Dyk for my DRM unencumbered collection. However, Amazon still needs to work on it:
:-)
- Amarok can't handle the preview song format/mu3/url/whatever.
- If I buy an album, I want a zip file, not some silly downloader tool (kubuntu here)
- I don't want to go through several steps (card, billing address) to purchase each track
- I'd prefer Ogg or Flac, being a spoiled magnatune cumstomer.
- The buy button is too far away from the track name - too easy to buy the wrong track.
- Ideally, they would do some deal with http://www.last.fm/ to integrate some better functionality into the web interface.
In a nutshell, make it more like magnatune!
I also liked: "Microsoft--please--if you think standards are so important, why not start using them?"
Things like Java serve to lower the barrier to entry. This makes it cheaper for companies to churn out flawed software, than it would otherwise be. And hopefully in the padded cell environment, the exceptions/crashes won't bring down the whole system. That's a decision for businesses to make, but it does reflect badly on the profession overall.
The pricing for proprietary use of Qt is unreasonable
You get what you pay for. Go ahead and waste your time with mind-numbing API's such as MFC...
I've got a mixture of ogg and mp3, but I expect to eliminate/replace the mp3 collection over time. I have no DRMed music in my collection, and never intend to add any. I still buy (rippable) CDs.
The portable player support is not too important to me, since am happy with radio in the car 99% of the time.
> As flawed as the Wikipedia system might be...
I don't see the the rationale for being critical
of Wikipedia due to this political manipulation.
In fact, I think it's a strong feature of
Wikipedia that the changelog is stored, and
provides some kind of papertrail, providing
far more transparency and accountability than
other forms of media/information.
In a sense, nothing can ever be deleted from
Wikipedia, merely removed from the main branch.
Thanks slashdot, now I know who to put
last on by ballot. I hope you got the
story straight, because I didn't RTFA.
Disney are busy maximising their profits and scheduling the release of Finding Nemo for mid-January in Australia.
Never mind, my DVD player is multi-region and there are PLENTY of region 1 Nemos on ebay. I'm going to be one happy vegemite on Christmas morning.
"I'm dreaming of a Region 1 Christmas"
In Australia, I would be surprised to get more than one unsolicited call a month. Including opinion surveys. And I find _that_ annoying!
The Verisign Business Model:
Embrace, extend, extinguish...
I would like to be able to migrate to SVG for vector-based plotting and diagrams. At the moment I tend to convert to PNG, but ideally there would be solid support for SVG on Mozilla for both Linux and Windows. We would also look at bumping SVG into our Web3D course:
http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~nigels/Web3D/
Native Mozilla support would be ideal, but a solid plugin (Adobe SVG is broken on Linux) would be a great step forward.
I didn't have any luck with the Corel :-(
SVG Viewer and Mozilla 1.4 on W2K.
I suppose a Linux version is totally
out of the question...
Nobody has permission to spam my mobile phone.
It is part of my personal space, I pay for
the handset, and it is not intended as a
dumping ground for commercial garbage.
Having SMS spams seriously dilutes the
usefulness of SMS.
Telstra has sucked majorly for a long, long time.
Even in the Telecom days, they figured out how
to destroy the BBS scene by charging hobby BBS
lines at business rates. Then, 5 years later
they decide to become an ISP, and "invented"
the Internet in Australia. I wonder how many
BBS literates recognised the irony of it.
(As well as the phreakers who would dial out
of Australia at Telecom's expense as revenge)
Every time I ring them I try to trick them
(a call center probably in India) with Australian
slang, but I must admit, they are well educated,
well trained, and very polite. (And admittedly
the Indians are doing a better job than
Australians would have been.)
I suppose once wireless arrives we well and
truely can break free of these blood
sucking pseudo public-service parasites.
The ADSL experience for me is a crappy and
flakey imitation of Optus cable. No
alternative, unfortunately.