Back in ancient history, the law was to avoid any of Microsoft's version 4.0 products; MS-DOS 4.0 especially was particularly bad, Windows 95 was suspect etc. From my limited experience with it, KDE seems to be more strongly influenced than Microsoft's systems than other systems, or than Gnome is. Perhaps the developers thought they'd emulate Microsoft especially well here?
As for me, of the machines I manage (my own and others in my family), the machines that cause the least troubles and have the happiest users are the ones running Debian Stable. I typically put Debian/testing (by codename) onto new computes as I acquire them, and once testing's become stable, I change them to stable. When I get a new computer, the old one goes to whoever wants it most.
The changes that happen to testing often bring nice new features with awful icky bugs that I don't really want to deal with, and change much too often to be bothered sorting things out. Stable is absolutely the way to go for home users who have someone who can manage their computer (but wouldn't manage it themselves, no matter what operating it runs), and indeed for anyone but people who want to spend too much time working with their computer instead of on their computer. The only problem is if you buy a new computer after the release it'll never support all your hardware...
In that spirit, I am excellently pleased a new Stable release will be coming up—and right on time too, because from about October I'll have much less free time to manage my computer.
I really hope this fits better with your expectations, thanks! I'll be here all week.
Hm, not really. There's not much you can say to "I didn't mean what you thought at mean at all; here's what I meant". No real scope for a decent fight. I suppose you can't offer me what I want.
Being litigious is not so bad that you can't do it? even though my sense of humor gave me no choice but to reply to clearly a joke with an apparently serious and detailed post? If that is the sort of fight you want you may talk to my lawyer, but it is much less fun than the one I was after.
The product hasn't been released yet so they have a right to privacy—even if they've given it to members of the public. What happens when the product's finished is what determines whether it really is open or not, and that hasn't happened yet. I am not singing Google's praises; I'm withholding judgement until the first Android phone is released. (On the other hand I'm unable to justify an iPhone right now, so maybe I'm just trying to rationalise the fact that I'll be in the market for a new phone around the time Android's released...)
Apple needs to become about 638% less litigious. Yes, I quantified it, wana fight about it?
Yes. Fatness is a scale which starts from a midpoint and extends out. Someone who ceases to be fat can continue to lose weight; becoming 638% less fat could refer to someone who goes from being overweight to being skin and bone.
Litigiousness, on the other hand, is naturally a scale starting from zero and extending out from there. Once you are no longer litigious at all, you cannot lose any litigiousness. If, perhaps, you cease suing everyone and begin instead to be sued by everyone, you aren't less litigious than someone not suing anyone at all; in fact, you could easily say that if someone's doing that, they're more litigious because they're still involved in the adveserial culture of common law courts.
Seeing as you haven't specified who Apple needs to become "about 638%" less litigious than, it's implied you mean than they currently are. One hundred percent refers to the entirety of something, so 638 percent refers to over six times the entire amount of Apple's litigiousness. This would imply some sort of negative value of litigiousness, but as I've argued above, no such concept is conceivable.
This is without even mentioning the strangeness of saying "about" followed by a very specific number.
Apple certainly could do with being less litigious, but I don't think "about 638%" is the amount they need to become less litigious by.
Well they were talking about the Nullarbor Plain. Now, I know nothing about lime and amount of CO2 and such like, but I do know a little bit of Latin and a little bit of Australian geography — enough to know that "null arbor" means "no trees" and that that's an accurate description of the place. The Australian outback's already a great big mine feeding the Chinese economy; we could do worse than to make our giant brown coal-burning powerplants a little less dirty.
Except there are reasons to indent besides nesting level, like continuation of a long line.
I've never found that to be a problem. It takes a fraction of a second to check to the end of the line to find out if there's a curly bracket there or not. (I also typically use a different level of indentation for wrapped lines; I prefer the style of indentation where things at the same level should start at the same part of a line, so if you have a long function you indent like so[*]:
I had written a detailed post in defence of the alternative style, but lost it when I accidentally closed the window just after previewing so the computer never prompted me about the changes, and I can't really be bothered writing it again. (Also, I reread your last paragraph and realise you might not like it, but maybe someone else will... Also, I like the sound of my own voice;)
Still, my main point was that putting the opening brackets on a separate line add too much space and make it look like the if line and the if branch are in separate paragraphs. This makes them look unrelated — whereas an if branch is almost always very strongly related to the if line — and so it slows me down. It's particularly bad when reading code by the those programmers who put any (intentional) pragraphs at all.
As for making it harder to see where the if branch is/where things line up, which I suppose to be your concern... Indentation should tell me which parts of the code are part of the if branch, and which aren't. If it doesn't, the programmer's done something wrong, so what reason have I got to suppose they've put the brackets in the right places, regardless of where they're put? I rely on my IDE to tell me where the brackets line up, using highlighting/blinking and keyboard shortcuts.
The sixty-six letter limit has to do with dense text where you're basically reading a block of text line-by-line. If you go much above sixty-six letters you start having difficulty wrapping back to the next line properly (I personally find I can read much faster with an even narrower width, so I keep my webbrowser windows narrower).
Computer programming is never formatted like that; instead you have lines frequently indented and of a very irregular length. The sixty-six letters might still hold, but I wouldn't count on it.
Still, I like to keep my all the windows on my computer as narrow as possible, especially with wide screens. That lets me put two (or more) windows side-by-side and work much more productively. But I've found that the sort of syntax you get in C-like objected-oriented lanugages, like C++, Java and C#, makes it very hard to stick to the narrow line widths I like without breaks in ugly places. This is one (of many) reason(s) I still prefer languages like Haskell and LISP even though C# now has many features that make it work more like I think than C++ or Java.
Kids can shuffle papers, pick them up, do all sorts of things. If the screen's built into the desk you're limited to shuffling your arse and picking it up.
There was a survey done of lots of countries opinions of lots of other countries. I've lost the link to it but they do it yearly. I think Australia was the only western country surveyed that had a very positive view of China — and most others had less than fifty per cent positive. Of course here in Australia we have a very high proportion of Chinese immigrants who are all nice people and Chinese companies own a lot of Australian companies. So that's probably what it takes: lots of immigration and economic dominance. We are of course used to being dominated by people from far-off lands — first the British (albeit we were British at the time, too), then the Americans. At least the Chinese aren't so far away.
China's got a big enough population "exporting" a few million of them should be no problem and it could be a big investment. The difficulty is probably immigration laws in the destination countries, but if they reckon China's so evil, there shouldn't be that much of a problem "saving" them.
This graph (EURCNY/USDCNY/USDEUR all in one) is much easier to read. But I'm not sure what you're point is. You're saying that the USD is falling against the yuan and keeping not badly inline with the euro. If we assume that the euro is a reasonable baseline then it makes it look like the yuan... well, it's not floating but it is doing a very nice smoothing of it. (Looks much neater than the behavior of the USD or the euro doesn't it? Because quality-control's exactly what China's known for.)
I've had plenty of hardware including a HP laser printer in recent history that simply don't work on Linux. (I gather it's the only HP laser winprinter, but the fact that they exist is telling.) My experience with Windows is limited to work, where I've had an XP machine since December 2006. I have administrator rights to it and I'm usually installed as administrator because I'm a developer and I gather lots of dev software doesn't run right with lesser rights. It hasn't needed to be reinstalled in all that time, and aside from the fact that I hate the Windows user interface and that Windows updates make the computer restart at the most inopportune times, I have no significant troubles with it.
It doesn't really help anyone to exaggerate the situations on either side of the fence.
What you quote doesn't really backup your story. Saying Apple dumped IBM implies IBM was hurt. In reality, it was probably to IBM's advantage; they were happy to service Apple for as long as Apple was happy to buy from them, but had no particular desire to focus their attention on desktop- and laptop-class chips. IBM was happy to talk about delivering icy cold 3 GHz laptop chips, but that doesn't mean they had any particular desire to put as much money into it as they needed to to get anywhere. So Apple did leave IBM, but they didn't dump them — they just went to someone whose main focus actually is producing icy cold laptop chips. Apple leaving IBM was probably in everyone's best interest, including IBM.
It's really sad to see future compsci graduates who never really used anything not descending from an IBM 5150
Not really. There's enough higher level stuff lots of people will see no reason to use other tools. I have a comp. sci. degree I got without needing to care what architecture the computers I was using used. Sure I got a theoretical understanding of the way computers work and we did a bit of programming in a made-up assembly language, but really? all that low level stuff? means nothing to me. In any case, anyone who really is interested in the differences between x86 and other machines will learn it anyway.
(I did, however do much of my programming on a 64-bit PPC running 32-bit Debian, but as long as I coded standards-compliant C I never had an issue with compiling it on my uni's x86 servers for submissions.)
Re:Is Linux kernel 2.6.26 == Linux 2.6.26 ?
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But in what way does calling it "Linux" benefit you there? Presumably you're going for a marketing thing; clunky names come up every now and again in business like "AOL Time Warner" or "Price Waterhouse Coopers". You might object that neither of these examples are aimed at end users, but I don't think "GNU/Linux" (or "Linux") should be either.
Calling it "GNU/Linux" or "Linux" are both bad ideas because they will give the marketee the misconception that Linux is a homogeneous whole, somewhat like Windows. It's not. Lots of software is only distributed in source form (which is useless to the people who are likely to be the subject of your marketing, if "GNU/" makes a difference) with a compiled version for only a limited number of specific distributions, and the packages in the various repositories are very much distribution-specific so you can't just say "apt-get install yeahconsole". You can't install a binary for Fedora 3 on Ubuntu 8.04. Tutorials for how to set up specific things like wireless networking won't be applicable across distributions — even binary compatible ones like Ubuntu 8.04 and Kubuntu 8.04.
Using the name of the specific distribution you have in mind is almost always a better option. In this context it doesn't matter whether you think Slackware is a GNU/Linux distribution or a Linux distribution.
(Also, I personally have never been corrected for calling the beast GNU/Linux or unadorned Linux when it has served my purpose. In general the only times I've witnessed it, other than when talking to Stallman or other people in the inner circle of the FSF, have been people who tell others it should be called one or the other.)
[Alternatively, you could be cheeky and come up with a new, simple name. I nominate "Slash" from the slash in "GNU/Linux". I doubt it'll catch on — massive uphill battle and all that — but seeing as you can imagine whatever you like on either side of the slash, from "usr/sbin" to "GNU/X.org/KDE/vim/.../Linux", it probably makes everyone happy, unless they deliberately want to belittle someone's contribution in particular. In which case they're being mean and I don't care a whit about their opinion. Another suggestion is "Plus" from Stallman's revised GNU+Linux suggestion, and also from the fact that Linux is better than other operating systems in some circumstances whenever people are advocating it. At least I hope it is; I'd hate for people to knowingly advocate its use in a situation where it's bad. But I'm just rambling now.]
Re:Is Linux kernel 2.6.26 == Linux 2.6.26 ?
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Wrong again. The article your replying to — you know, the one that says "Linux 2.6.26" shows you're wrong. Now more than ever I think the kernel is called "Linux" just like that, and now more than ever I think people are recognising that Debian GNU/Linux is a different operating system from SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Many people call the family "GNU/Linux"; I myself vacillate depending on the phase of the moon but usually I say neither and circumlocute because neither "GNU/Linux" nor "Linux" are really mainstream concepts. But considering many people less affiliated with the Free Software Foundation than me call it GNU/Linux all the time, and seeing as most people agree that e.g. "Linux 2.6.26" is a perfectly valid designation for the latest kernel version, to say that anyone's "lost" is a bit of a stretch.
Quite why it matters to you what anyone wants to call it I don't understand. The FSF have an egotistical justification for it, and don't deny it, but in what way shape or form does it help you if no-one calls it "GNU/Linux" any more? how does it hurt you if anyone chooses of their own free will to call it "Linux"?
Re:Clever new tools for kernel config
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Um, how do you make a kernel compile in three minutes? I'm well and truly past the 386-era with my most recent purchase a high-end laptop earlier this year with more RAM than I know what to do with and plentiful CPU power but if a kernel compile took three minutes I'd be spending the next twenty working out what went wrong...
Practically speaking, the Framers of the Constitution would not construct a careful balance of power, then undo it all with one clause.
Not necessarily true. The federal arrangement in Australia mirrors the arrangement in the US, although rather than interstate commerce the federal government here tends to use its power to make tied financial grants to the states to regulate things outside of its explicit control. (In particular, one of the larger tied financial grants is given only if the states don't draw their own income tax — and the Commonwealth government's income tax is large enough it would be suicide for a state to try to ignore it.)
Anyway, it is commonly regarded that this was done explicitly because just like in the EU the founders of our federation wanted a very power central government and very weak state governments — eventually to be entirely irrelevant. But politically that would've been impossible at the time; everyone needed to agree. Victorians were generally happy; so far as they were concerned they might've been founding the Victorian empire[*] with a few concessions to New South Wales, but the smaller colonies would've rathered stay under Britain's control. So they put in all this language "the federal government can only eat cheese and five past six in the morning and can only make laws regarding how frequently people can hop between 11.53 am and 5.42 pm blah blah blah", but a couple of those "blahs" were expected eventually to become the basis of all or most of the federal government's power. And it has, and the people of Australia suffer for it, even though we don't all realise it.
Now of course America was founded by terroris — ahem, that is — revolutionaries rather than by politicians, who got what they wanted by fighting a war rather than by holding referendum after referendum until they got the desired result, but I see no reason to believe they'd be any less cunning or centralist than anyone else, rhetoric notwithstanding.
[*]: Of course Sydney and New South Wales quickly outgrew Melbourne and Victoria...
IIRC it's not all that odd at all. Russians are allowed to have a few scientists going around naming things if they want. Wikipedia (which may be my original source) agrees with me: "In geology, Rodinia (from the Russian [rodina], or 'motherland')..."
Indeed; a rare case when the slashdot summary is pretty much as long as (or longer than) the article it links to.
Has anyone worked out what the changes in Gtk+ 3.0 and Gnome 3.0 are meant to be? In particular,.0 releases are meant to break backwards compatibility with the API and the ABI. What warrants these changes? A simple "it's been long enough" excuse seems unlikely; there's no reason that the passage of time should mean backwards compatibility should be lost. (An accumulation of minor niggling issues might, but I would hope the reason is more like "we want to do x which we can't without a break"; I don't want to have to deal with a conversion just because there's a hundred deprecated methods.)
Will these.0 releases have major user-visible implications? I use a Gtk+-based desktop, and mostly Gtk+-based programs; will this switch mean anything to me?
Can we please have a discussion here that doesn't focus on the silly "KDE 4" comment in the original post, but instead comments on the topic at hand i.e. Gtk+ 3.0 and Gnome 3.0?
Slashdot Mirror
Back in ancient history, the law was to avoid any of Microsoft's version 4.0 products; MS-DOS 4.0 especially was particularly bad, Windows 95 was suspect etc. From my limited experience with it, KDE seems to be more strongly influenced than Microsoft's systems than other systems, or than Gnome is. Perhaps the developers thought they'd emulate Microsoft especially well here?
No matter.
As for me, of the machines I manage (my own and others in my family), the machines that cause the least troubles and have the happiest users are the ones running Debian Stable. I typically put Debian/testing (by codename) onto new computes as I acquire them, and once testing's become stable, I change them to stable. When I get a new computer, the old one goes to whoever wants it most.
The changes that happen to testing often bring nice new features with awful icky bugs that I don't really want to deal with, and change much too often to be bothered sorting things out. Stable is absolutely the way to go for home users who have someone who can manage their computer (but wouldn't manage it themselves, no matter what operating it runs), and indeed for anyone but people who want to spend too much time working with their computer instead of on their computer. The only problem is if you buy a new computer after the release it'll never support all your hardware...
In that spirit, I am excellently pleased a new Stable release will be coming up—and right on time too, because from about October I'll have much less free time to manage my computer.
Ah, it was late afternoon where I am, so I was bored at work ;) Still, we both seem to have got a bit of free karma from it so it's not all bad :)
I really hope this fits better with your expectations, thanks! I'll be here all week.
Hm, not really. There's not much you can say to "I didn't mean what you thought at mean at all; here's what I meant". No real scope for a decent fight. I suppose you can't offer me what I want.
Being litigious is not so bad that you can't do it? even though my sense of humor gave me no choice but to reply to clearly a joke with an apparently serious and detailed post? If that is the sort of fight you want you may talk to my lawyer, but it is much less fun than the one I was after.
The product hasn't been released yet so they have a right to privacy—even if they've given it to members of the public. What happens when the product's finished is what determines whether it really is open or not, and that hasn't happened yet. I am not singing Google's praises; I'm withholding judgement until the first Android phone is released. (On the other hand I'm unable to justify an iPhone right now, so maybe I'm just trying to rationalise the fact that I'll be in the market for a new phone around the time Android's released...)
Apple needs to become about 638% less litigious. Yes, I quantified it, wana fight about it?
Yes. Fatness is a scale which starts from a midpoint and extends out. Someone who ceases to be fat can continue to lose weight; becoming 638% less fat could refer to someone who goes from being overweight to being skin and bone.
Litigiousness, on the other hand, is naturally a scale starting from zero and extending out from there. Once you are no longer litigious at all, you cannot lose any litigiousness. If, perhaps, you cease suing everyone and begin instead to be sued by everyone, you aren't less litigious than someone not suing anyone at all; in fact, you could easily say that if someone's doing that, they're more litigious because they're still involved in the adveserial culture of common law courts.
Seeing as you haven't specified who Apple needs to become "about 638%" less litigious than, it's implied you mean than they currently are. One hundred percent refers to the entirety of something, so 638 percent refers to over six times the entire amount of Apple's litigiousness. This would imply some sort of negative value of litigiousness, but as I've argued above, no such concept is conceivable.
This is without even mentioning the strangeness of saying "about" followed by a very specific number.
Apple certainly could do with being less litigious, but I don't think "about 638%" is the amount they need to become less litigious by.
Well they were talking about the Nullarbor Plain. Now, I know nothing about lime and amount of CO2 and such like, but I do know a little bit of Latin and a little bit of Australian geography — enough to know that "null arbor" means "no trees" and that that's an accurate description of the place. The Australian outback's already a great big mine feeding the Chinese economy; we could do worse than to make our giant brown coal-burning powerplants a little less dirty.
Except there are reasons to indent besides nesting level, like continuation of a long line.
I've never found that to be a problem. It takes a fraction of a second to check to the end of the line to find out if there's a curly bracket there or not. (I also typically use a different level of indentation for wrapped lines; I prefer the style of indentation where things at the same level should start at the same part of a line, so if you have a long function you indent like so[*]:
rather than:
Again I think this is clearer and easier to read for semantic reasons.)
[*] Well, approximately. /. seems to be eating some of the spaces so that it's not possible to make it line up.
I had written a detailed post in defence of the alternative style, but lost it when I accidentally closed the window just after previewing so the computer never prompted me about the changes, and I can't really be bothered writing it again. (Also, I reread your last paragraph and realise you might not like it, but maybe someone else will... Also, I like the sound of my own voice ;)
Still, my main point was that putting the opening brackets on a separate line add too much space and make it look like the if line and the if branch are in separate paragraphs. This makes them look unrelated — whereas an if branch is almost always very strongly related to the if line — and so it slows me down. It's particularly bad when reading code by the those programmers who put any (intentional) pragraphs at all.
As for making it harder to see where the if branch is/where things line up, which I suppose to be your concern... Indentation should tell me which parts of the code are part of the if branch, and which aren't. If it doesn't, the programmer's done something wrong, so what reason have I got to suppose they've put the brackets in the right places, regardless of where they're put? I rely on my IDE to tell me where the brackets line up, using highlighting/blinking and keyboard shortcuts.
The sixty-six letter limit has to do with dense text where you're basically reading a block of text line-by-line. If you go much above sixty-six letters you start having difficulty wrapping back to the next line properly (I personally find I can read much faster with an even narrower width, so I keep my webbrowser windows narrower).
Computer programming is never formatted like that; instead you have lines frequently indented and of a very irregular length. The sixty-six letters might still hold, but I wouldn't count on it.
Still, I like to keep my all the windows on my computer as narrow as possible, especially with wide screens. That lets me put two (or more) windows side-by-side and work much more productively. But I've found that the sort of syntax you get in C-like objected-oriented lanugages, like C++, Java and C#, makes it very hard to stick to the narrow line widths I like without breaks in ugly places. This is one (of many) reason(s) I still prefer languages like Haskell and LISP even though C# now has many features that make it work more like I think than C++ or Java.
Kids can shuffle papers, pick them up, do all sorts of things. If the screen's built into the desk you're limited to shuffling your arse and picking it up.
I find it interesting how how many of the people who've replied to you are anonymous cowards. Do they fear China that much?
There was a survey done of lots of countries opinions of lots of other countries. I've lost the link to it but they do it yearly. I think Australia was the only western country surveyed that had a very positive view of China — and most others had less than fifty per cent positive. Of course here in Australia we have a very high proportion of Chinese immigrants who are all nice people and Chinese companies own a lot of Australian companies. So that's probably what it takes: lots of immigration and economic dominance. We are of course used to being dominated by people from far-off lands — first the British (albeit we were British at the time, too), then the Americans. At least the Chinese aren't so far away.
China's got a big enough population "exporting" a few million of them should be no problem and it could be a big investment. The difficulty is probably immigration laws in the destination countries, but if they reckon China's so evil, there shouldn't be that much of a problem "saving" them.
This graph (EURCNY/USDCNY/USDEUR all in one) is much easier to read. But I'm not sure what you're point is. You're saying that the USD is falling against the yuan and keeping not badly inline with the euro. If we assume that the euro is a reasonable baseline then it makes it look like the yuan ... well, it's not floating but it is doing a very nice smoothing of it. (Looks much neater than the behavior of the USD or the euro doesn't it? Because quality-control's exactly what China's known for.)
I've had plenty of hardware including a HP laser printer in recent history that simply don't work on Linux. (I gather it's the only HP laser winprinter, but the fact that they exist is telling.) My experience with Windows is limited to work, where I've had an XP machine since December 2006. I have administrator rights to it and I'm usually installed as administrator because I'm a developer and I gather lots of dev software doesn't run right with lesser rights. It hasn't needed to be reinstalled in all that time, and aside from the fact that I hate the Windows user interface and that Windows updates make the computer restart at the most inopportune times, I have no significant troubles with it.
It doesn't really help anyone to exaggerate the situations on either side of the fence.
What you quote doesn't really backup your story. Saying Apple dumped IBM implies IBM was hurt. In reality, it was probably to IBM's advantage; they were happy to service Apple for as long as Apple was happy to buy from them, but had no particular desire to focus their attention on desktop- and laptop-class chips. IBM was happy to talk about delivering icy cold 3 GHz laptop chips, but that doesn't mean they had any particular desire to put as much money into it as they needed to to get anywhere. So Apple did leave IBM, but they didn't dump them — they just went to someone whose main focus actually is producing icy cold laptop chips. Apple leaving IBM was probably in everyone's best interest, including IBM.
It's really sad to see future compsci graduates who never really used anything not descending from an IBM 5150
Not really. There's enough higher level stuff lots of people will see no reason to use other tools. I have a comp. sci. degree I got without needing to care what architecture the computers I was using used. Sure I got a theoretical understanding of the way computers work and we did a bit of programming in a made-up assembly language, but really? all that low level stuff? means nothing to me. In any case, anyone who really is interested in the differences between x86 and other machines will learn it anyway.
(I did, however do much of my programming on a 64-bit PPC running 32-bit Debian, but as long as I coded standards-compliant C I never had an issue with compiling it on my uni's x86 servers for submissions.)
But in what way does calling it "Linux" benefit you there? Presumably you're going for a marketing thing; clunky names come up every now and again in business like "AOL Time Warner" or "Price Waterhouse Coopers". You might object that neither of these examples are aimed at end users, but I don't think "GNU/Linux" (or "Linux") should be either.
Calling it "GNU/Linux" or "Linux" are both bad ideas because they will give the marketee the misconception that Linux is a homogeneous whole, somewhat like Windows. It's not. Lots of software is only distributed in source form (which is useless to the people who are likely to be the subject of your marketing, if "GNU/" makes a difference) with a compiled version for only a limited number of specific distributions, and the packages in the various repositories are very much distribution-specific so you can't just say "apt-get install yeahconsole". You can't install a binary for Fedora 3 on Ubuntu 8.04. Tutorials for how to set up specific things like wireless networking won't be applicable across distributions — even binary compatible ones like Ubuntu 8.04 and Kubuntu 8.04.
Using the name of the specific distribution you have in mind is almost always a better option. In this context it doesn't matter whether you think Slackware is a GNU/Linux distribution or a Linux distribution.
(Also, I personally have never been corrected for calling the beast GNU/Linux or unadorned Linux when it has served my purpose. In general the only times I've witnessed it, other than when talking to Stallman or other people in the inner circle of the FSF, have been people who tell others it should be called one or the other.)
[Alternatively, you could be cheeky and come up with a new, simple name. I nominate "Slash" from the slash in "GNU/Linux". I doubt it'll catch on — massive uphill battle and all that — but seeing as you can imagine whatever you like on either side of the slash, from "usr/sbin" to "GNU/X.org/KDE/vim/.../Linux", it probably makes everyone happy, unless they deliberately want to belittle someone's contribution in particular. In which case they're being mean and I don't care a whit about their opinion. Another suggestion is "Plus" from Stallman's revised GNU+Linux suggestion, and also from the fact that Linux is better than other operating systems in some circumstances whenever people are advocating it. At least I hope it is; I'd hate for people to knowingly advocate its use in a situation where it's bad. But I'm just rambling now.]
Wrong again. The article your replying to — you know, the one that says "Linux 2.6.26" shows you're wrong. Now more than ever I think the kernel is called "Linux" just like that, and now more than ever I think people are recognising that Debian GNU/Linux is a different operating system from SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Many people call the family "GNU/Linux"; I myself vacillate depending on the phase of the moon but usually I say neither and circumlocute because neither "GNU/Linux" nor "Linux" are really mainstream concepts. But considering many people less affiliated with the Free Software Foundation than me call it GNU/Linux all the time, and seeing as most people agree that e.g. "Linux 2.6.26" is a perfectly valid designation for the latest kernel version, to say that anyone's "lost" is a bit of a stretch.
Quite why it matters to you what anyone wants to call it I don't understand. The FSF have an egotistical justification for it, and don't deny it, but in what way shape or form does it help you if no-one calls it "GNU/Linux" any more? how does it hurt you if anyone chooses of their own free will to call it "Linux"?
Um, how do you make a kernel compile in three minutes? I'm well and truly past the 386-era with my most recent purchase a high-end laptop earlier this year with more RAM than I know what to do with and plentiful CPU power but if a kernel compile took three minutes I'd be spending the next twenty working out what went wrong...
Practically speaking, the Framers of the Constitution would not construct a careful balance of power, then undo it all with one clause.
Not necessarily true. The federal arrangement in Australia mirrors the arrangement in the US, although rather than interstate commerce the federal government here tends to use its power to make tied financial grants to the states to regulate things outside of its explicit control. (In particular, one of the larger tied financial grants is given only if the states don't draw their own income tax — and the Commonwealth government's income tax is large enough it would be suicide for a state to try to ignore it.)
Anyway, it is commonly regarded that this was done explicitly because just like in the EU the founders of our federation wanted a very power central government and very weak state governments — eventually to be entirely irrelevant. But politically that would've been impossible at the time; everyone needed to agree. Victorians were generally happy; so far as they were concerned they might've been founding the Victorian empire[*] with a few concessions to New South Wales, but the smaller colonies would've rathered stay under Britain's control. So they put in all this language "the federal government can only eat cheese and five past six in the morning and can only make laws regarding how frequently people can hop between 11.53 am and 5.42 pm blah blah blah", but a couple of those "blahs" were expected eventually to become the basis of all or most of the federal government's power. And it has, and the people of Australia suffer for it, even though we don't all realise it.
Now of course America was founded by terroris — ahem, that is — revolutionaries rather than by politicians, who got what they wanted by fighting a war rather than by holding referendum after referendum until they got the desired result, but I see no reason to believe they'd be any less cunning or centralist than anyone else, rhetoric notwithstanding.
[*]: Of course Sydney and New South Wales quickly outgrew Melbourne and Victoria...
IIRC it's not all that odd at all. Russians are allowed to have a few scientists going around naming things if they want. Wikipedia (which may be my original source) agrees with me: "In geology, Rodinia (from the Russian [rodina], or 'motherland') ..."
Indeed; a rare case when the slashdot summary is pretty much as long as (or longer than) the article it links to.
Has anyone worked out what the changes in Gtk+ 3.0 and Gnome 3.0 are meant to be? In particular, .0 releases are meant to break backwards compatibility with the API and the ABI. What warrants these changes? A simple "it's been long enough" excuse seems unlikely; there's no reason that the passage of time should mean backwards compatibility should be lost. (An accumulation of minor niggling issues might, but I would hope the reason is more like "we want to do x which we can't without a break"; I don't want to have to deal with a conversion just because there's a hundred deprecated methods.)
Will these .0 releases have major user-visible implications? I use a Gtk+-based desktop, and mostly Gtk+-based programs; will this switch mean anything to me?
Can we please have a discussion here that doesn't focus on the silly "KDE 4" comment in the original post, but instead comments on the topic at hand i.e. Gtk+ 3.0 and Gnome 3.0?