First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one).
That's hardly true. The OpenOffice.org codebase is licenced under the GNU LGPL, and while it is designed as a free software licence, it certainly meets the definition of open source.
Secondly, the fact that you sign over your contributions to Sun doesn't stop it from open source. Many people call GNU software open-source, and you must sign your contributions to the FSF... Doing this sort of a thing makes copyright easier to deal with, according to the FSF.
Thanks for the rest of your comments, but I'm a little confused on...
BTW - that the EU is not a country is why so many people, especially in the US, were fighting the decision to create the ".eu" TLD. The member countries are sovereign, not bound into the EU such as the States are to the Federal in the US, and have their own TLDs.
Why is that so objectionable? We have.int already,.com,.museum etc., which are clearly not for sovereign states. The EU treads the line between nation and supernational organisation in many ways. To a large extent the economic union they have there, as close as it is, would seem to justify on its own a TLD.
I think it surely couldn't be too hard to make all *.gov and *.mil domains duplicated under *.gov.us and *.mil.us, have new domains registered (almost) only in the *.gov.us and *.mil.us namespaces, and deprecate the *.gov and *.mil namespaces (on new stuff giving out addresses with *.gov.us and *.mil.us, on the web having *.gov and *.mil rewritten in the address bar via redirects as *.gov.us and *.mil.us, etc.), but leave all the domains there for as long as is neccesary, and all time if needs be.
The US would still have the *.gov and *.mil TLDs, but I think it would be a decent start, a nice impression for the rest of the world.
As I understand "sovereignty", and I admit to only having a cursory understanding of the topic, a federation like the US has no entity that actually has the sovereignty, instead it's distributed between the levels as is the power. (Different sorts of federations have different ways of handling this though...) OTOH, in the EU, the EU government has no power on its own, no sovereignty; the constituent governments give it its authority, and they can walk away at the drop of a hat. The EU government can't do anything the constituent governments can't do, whereas the the US Federal Government can (at least, I assume it can).
None of those definitions say "in thrall to" means "is controlled by"; do you know what control is? You might interpret the difference to be so minor as to be irrelevant, but that's your own fault.
No, it is not necessary to continue. I certainly won't bother.
The point about the political system is hardly a straw man. If you think it is, you should perhaps look up the definition of "straw man". And you were commenting on a comment that was commenting on our political system, in such a way that you needed to have at least a basic understanding unless you wanted to look a fool (the thing in brackets). You didn't have an understanding, or at least you didn't use it...
"Controlled" is not the actual definition of "in thrall to" (you can look it up, if you wish); your interpretation is no closer to the actual definition than mine. That gives us three definitions, at least; at this stage I see no reason not to posit a fourth (that of the OP).
Only by your interpretation of the OP is the US necessarily the cause of our problems.
And in any case, the definition of "in thrall to" is not relevant to whether the US is the cause of our problems, because—thank god—the Prime Minister is not our supreme dictator. We have a federal system and many things that the are relevant here need to be dealt with by the states, which are all controlled by the federal opposition (the Labor Party). Labor is not considered to be in thrall to the US, and goes to great lengths to ensure in fact it does not come of as anti-American. Also, we have a legislative arm to our federal government, of which the upper house is relatively independent of the executive. The Senate could've prevented this law, and most people wouldn't describe the person most likely to have voted "no" (Sen. Barnaby Joyce) as being controlled by the US/US interests.
A foreigner (I assume you are one, otherwise you do need a better understanding) is not expected to know the ins and outs of the political system of another relatively minor and benign country. Still, if one wishes to comment on the political system (or the implications of a post on it), you should have at least a basic understanding. It's this stuff I was talking about in my first post, and not the definition of "in thrall to".
??? He didn't blame it on the US. He compared us to the US, and criticised our Prime Minister for appearing to be more loyal to the US than us. I know the US gets given a lot of shit, but you really should calm down in your defences... you don't need to defend against something that's not happening!
As I understood the new laws wouldn't've outlawed your post: I thought there was some "good faith" escape clause put in at the last minute so that you could make criticisms in "good faith" and not be breaking the law.
Still, I think I've worked out what a Second Amendment is good for. Pity ours gave the Commonwealth Government the ability to take over the debts of the states.
More like, if it appeals to John Howard and one of Senators Joyce or Fielding, not a problem. Fielding would probably love it and give Howard everything he wanted for the next five and a half years. And Senator Joyce always capitulates eventually.
Unlike American politics, Australian politics tends to be very party-based. A combination of two things: an early pact by the Labor Party (when they were a minority party, they agreed to vote as a bloc... now some hundred years later and a major party, they still vote as a bloc on most issues), and compulsory voting. Most members of Parliament don't really need to care so much what the voters in their electorate think; about the only thing a holder of a safe seat can't do is retire mid-term, and obviously that hardly affects *them*. Australian electors don't much like by-elections and punish the party of whoever left!
As for the Senate (elected proportionally by state, with each state getting six senators each election and the territories getting three), for the most part the major parties just get a fixed number of seats: 2 or 3 to the Coalition and 2 to Labor for each State. Sometimes Labor gets the last seat, mostly it goes to a minor party. So really in the Senate, the major party Senators must appeal not to the electorate, but to the party, to ensure that they get preselected next time.
(Explanations for Foreigners: John Howard is Prime Minister. The Liberal (i.e. right-wing) Party-controlled Coalition has control of both houses of Parliament at the moment, though the majority is only one. The Coalition isn't a European-style coalition that collapses at the drop of a hat; it's stronger even than US parties--or even British ones, it seems. "Family First" Senator for Victoria Steven Fielding, as you'd expect from a religious-oriented party, will at times side with the Liberals. Nationals Senator for Queensland Barnaby Joyce is a member of the Coalition, but his main job is to give the Australian public a glimmer of hope that perhaps the Senate is still doing its job even though it's controlled by the Government and that perhaps not everything Howard suggests will get through. Still, he knows which side his bread's buttered on...)
My guess is the OP is either confused about our federal structure... we have parliaments in many cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart; two in Canberra and one in Darwin). Of course, these cities are all capitals of the jurisdictions(?) for which the parliaments exist (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania; the Commonwealth and the ACT and the Northern Territory, respectively). I would've thought that happened by definition, mind. (It never clicked before now that there must be *two* Parliaments in Canberra—thank Christ I don't live there!)
Alternatively, it could be a bad attempt at a joke: everyone knows the capital of Australia is Sydney.
I would be quite concerned about the ethics of a person who wastes the time of medical personelle by faking injuries to make a political point. I'm sure the hospitals in question keep statistics of waiting times. If these were incomparable, better would've been to take your own stats---surely you won't have to wait long for someone with a broken leg to walk in who agrees to have their waiting time recorded!
It's a little offputting, and a fair bit harder to avert your eyes:)
And for you, that's likely to have been very important! I'm surprised you managed to get away at all to write this message! (I assume you meant "avert your eyes from your own reflection".)
Also, "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org".
Are you saying you've never seen a metal wall urinal before? Are they rare in America (I assume that's where you come from), you almost always have individual porcelain urinals? Or is is the fact it didn't actually reach the floor that baffled you? (I've seen that before, but it's relatively rare. Normally wall urinals reach the floor, or a raised platform just above the floor, often with a grill beneath your feet so that you couldn't miss unless you tried.)
Given that, I imagine you did indeed use the wrong urinal.
In my experience, the wall urinals are much the commoner in Australia, or at least in Melbourne. I remember the first time I saw an individual urinal (as a child), I had no idea what to do with it so I went and asked my mum, but she wasn't about to come in so I just used the normal toilet. Wall urinals have the significant advantage that it doesn't matter how tall you are, the urinal's always in front of you, so I couldn't comprehend a school using individual urinals...
It does use some css, but since the people who do the updates (like me) are generally very busy with their own normal work, we just haven't had the time to move everything over to css.
Would it help if I helped? I have knowledge of CSS (though I've only done my own website and related stuff), and now that the Uni summer holidays are here, I have very few obligations between my last exam on Wednesday and Uni starting again in March, so I'm sure I could contribute some time & effort.
Jehova's Witnesses view blood as sacred. They will not allow it to be used in medicine. It doesn't matter whose blood it is. It isn't the fact that it's someone else's blood, it's the fact that it's blood. (Just the same, they don't donate blood.)
I don't know if this would be permissible or not. I understand what's been done here is that blood vessels have been created. Blood vessels aren't blood, so it might be permissible. But, I'm not a Jehova's Witness, and I haven't read the article, so this is just hypothesis and conjecture from a random Slashdot reader.
But I do like Rhythmbox and it claims to have UI based on iTunes. Therefore, iTunes must have a decent UI:)
Rhythmbox was inspired by iTunes, but is not a perfect clone of iTunes. iTunes has many annoying features such as its habit of not allowing you to search when a category (e.g. artist, genre) is selected, so you can't search for all rock songs with "frog" in their artist or title, or all of Frog's songs with "pompous" in them, or whatever. This is horribly annoying and I personally wanted to shoot the designers of iTunes until I modified my computer so it wouldn't run it without an emulator of sorts.
It's quite easy to like Rhythmbox's interface and think iTunes's is the son of Satan. I'm sure there will be people who think the reverse.
Chorded menus, like the right click menu are faster to access than menus at the edge of the screen, provided there is only one of them and provided you are working in a language that normally reads horizontally.
Do you know why the language you use makes a difference? It doesn't seem to make sense to me.
The problem with them is that you can only have one, relatively short menu, which is either very big, or has many levels to fit the same number of items as can exist along the top of the screen.
Well, usually I find if a program needs too much to fit comfortably on a right-click menu, it's probably trying to do too much, and it's hard to remember exactly where the option is in the menubar anyway; there's probably a better solution than just adding an extra menu. Maybe I have a higher upper-limit for one and lower upper-limit for the other than most people, though.
Actually, muscle memory makes it easy to quickly hit the same target along an edge from anywhere. It is one of those hardwired things....
On the mac you can click at the top of the screen and it opens a menu.
But for that, you have to be at the right place, otherwise you have to navigate back. I find it as hard to stop in the right place when "flicking up" as going to some random place near the top, because I rarely if ever flick straight up. If you flick at an angle, once you reach the top, you keep travelling horizontally till you actually do stop. That often puts me in on the wrong item, so I don't "just flick", I always navigate with the same care I would if I was just using a Windows menu. (I suppose the target's infinitely still infinitely high even if it's only finitely wide is the right way of thinking, but once the limitation of width is relevant (as it usually is for me!), the unlimitation of height is irrelevant. Maybe I'm funny, I'm trying to counter your research with annecdotal evidence;)
Various Windows distributions often win out on one of these.
I assume you mean "GNU/Linux distributions", but I'm not sure how. For the most part, they package either Gnome or KDE as their default, and both of those emulate the Windows way of doing things. You need to get to more exotic things before you can find other ideas, and usually they try to avoid menu bars in one way or another. Maybe I missed your point.
Indeed, and even Fitt's law says that right here is quicker to get to than the edges of the screen. Thus, we should all be using right-click menus. (They've got other advantages besides.) The common argument that they aren't discoverable is only true so long as most applications don't use them. If they become the default, then people will naturally right-click if they want to see what they can do.
And you can't just "fling your mouse" anyway, because you have to pick which menu you want, so once you've flung it, you have to re-aim. If (as is common on Windows) you run your windows all maximised anyway, the menubar is just slightly below the top of the screen; the re-aiming needed to find the right menu item isn't a whole lot more than it is on the Mac. The flexibility that per-window and context menus (compared to top-of-screen ones) buy with respect to reducing the distinction between "application" and "window" is also something that must be considered when designing your new GUI.
You yourself have some points, but unfortunately I think you've often made too strict an interpretation of the parent poster's post.
Your point being... what, exactly ? You *are* aware that the kernel in OS X is open-source, aren't you ? That all the source code is there, available for anyone to hack on ?
Well of course, the kernel is only a small part of the operating system, and for most people it's certainly not the part that counts. I've never touched the kernel's source code on my GNU/Linux box, but you realise that the entire GUI, from windowing/display engine to my text editor and webbrowser also have the source code. And I have made changes to some of these. In fact, all the software on my computer is free (having relatively recently mkfs.xfs'd my old HFS+ partition).
You're probably right about there being no direct free software equivalent to the iLife suite, but people make entire movies on GNU/Linux using free software, too.
Still, regardless of the technical superiority of either operating system, I think a free software solution is a must, and I'm very glad that they've chosen GNU/Linux. Although for any organisation aiming at educating new computer users having source code available is a must even if almost no-one cares about it, I think more important for the hundred dollar laptop's market is the redistribution rights that free software require. Also, I kinda like the idea of the free software "lock-in" this'll hopefully cause;)--I'm sure Red Hat do to!
Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well
Of course he has ulterior motives. In fact, I've been led to all-but believe it's pratically illegal for the CEO of a publically-traded company not to have ulterior motives.
but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source
I don't really think that you can maintain the claim that Aqua/the OS X gooey is not a part of the core of Mac OS X. It mightn't be the kernel, but it is Mac OS X.
Anyway, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source shows a certain level of fore-sight and wisdom that most people lack. This is precisely the time that free software is most required, and precisely the time that the temptations of restrictive software are hardest to resist. (If you want my justifications, you'll find most in the GNU Project's philosophy section. Also, I just noticed an earlier poster with the sig "-- No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. --Theodore Roosevelt", which I think is most appropriate to this thread.)
A laptop still costs a decent chunk of money. Not everyone can afford to have a desktop computer for what they need the desktop for, and a laptop for the occasions when they're out-of-town or whatever to run GNU/Linux on.
There is actually a product called the Black Dog which is apparently somewhat similar: A Linux distro (Debian-based in this case) on a USB drive, except that the Black Dog acts as the computer, and when you plug it in it essentially turns the host into a dumb terminal (assuming it's running GNU/Linux, Windows or Mac OS X), presumably running an X server via the autorun feature on Windows or manually on GNU/Linux and MacOS X. I'm somewhat interested in one of these things (it'd be very useful!), but there doesn't seem to be any reviews for them on the web (there's a bunch of introductory-type things, but they're just regurgitating the same hype-info distributed by the company).
From what I can see, the major differences appear to be that one is just GNU/Linux on a USB drive, whereas the other is a portable screenless, keyboardless computer; and that one has a big hard drive whereas the other has a smaller, flash-based drive. I'd be somewhat wary about running an OS running of a flash drive (I understand they have a fairly limited number of reads/writes you can do), and also even 512 MB doesn't sound like nearly enough space to do anything on it.
Indeed. I think that a lot of American forget that (I'm pretty sure) the only modern western democracy still without a bill of rights or equivalent is Australia (for which we will pay dearly in the years to come, I fear). So unless all countries that are not the US are equivalent to Australia, then I don't think they "need a bill of rights" or anything of the sort.
(There was even a referendum in Australia on whether we should have a (very limited) "bill of rights and freedoms" in our constitution in 1988; it was rejected by a majority of all Australians as well as a majority in all states and territories and so did not pass. I imagine that the line of thinking that leads to this is we could've done better. Still, I was only four years old at the time, so I don't really know the details. Additionally, while there was some discussion in the lead up to the creation of our constitution, this was in the days when people actually respected tradition, and it was believed that a British Common Law based constitution & the traditions so implied would necessarily prevent anyone restricting the rights that are rightfully ours.)
(It should be noted that our activist High Court judges have interpreted the fact that ours is a democratic constitution as necessarily implying that we must have a right to free speech (for how else could we fully exercise the necessary public discourse for democracy to be meaningful?), but of course this is dependent on who the High Court judges are, and I'm pretty sure that since they've done this they've said gone off and said the exact opposite anyway. And of course I think our activist judges have done a lot more harm than good over the hundred and few years since they came into existence.)
Slashdot Mirror
First, OpenOffice.org is anything *but* an 'open-source'; Sun basically owns any of the contributions that you submit to the project, so the OOo core is more-or-less only developed by Sun (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one).
That's hardly true. The OpenOffice.org codebase is licenced under the GNU LGPL, and while it is designed as a free software licence, it certainly meets the definition of open source.
Secondly, the fact that you sign over your contributions to Sun doesn't stop it from open source. Many people call GNU software open-source, and you must sign your contributions to the FSF... Doing this sort of a thing makes copyright easier to deal with, according to the FSF.
Thanks for the rest of your comments, but I'm a little confused on...
.int already, .com, .museum etc., which are clearly not for sovereign states. The EU treads the line between nation and supernational organisation in many ways. To a large extent the economic union they have there, as close as it is, would seem to justify on its own a TLD.
BTW - that the EU is not a country is why so many people, especially in the US, were fighting the decision to create the ".eu" TLD. The member countries are sovereign, not bound into the EU such as the States are to the Federal in the US, and have their own TLDs.
Why is that so objectionable? We have
I think it surely couldn't be too hard to make all *.gov and *.mil domains duplicated under *.gov.us and *.mil.us, have new domains registered (almost) only in the *.gov.us and *.mil.us namespaces, and deprecate the *.gov and *.mil namespaces (on new stuff giving out addresses with *.gov.us and *.mil.us, on the web having *.gov and *.mil rewritten in the address bar via redirects as *.gov.us and *.mil.us, etc.), but leave all the domains there for as long as is neccesary, and all time if needs be.
The US would still have the *.gov and *.mil TLDs, but I think it would be a decent start, a nice impression for the rest of the world.
As I understand "sovereignty", and I admit to only having a cursory understanding of the topic, a federation like the US has no entity that actually has the sovereignty, instead it's distributed between the levels as is the power. (Different sorts of federations have different ways of handling this though...) OTOH, in the EU, the EU government has no power on its own, no sovereignty; the constituent governments give it its authority, and they can walk away at the drop of a hat. The EU government can't do anything the constituent governments can't do, whereas the the US Federal Government can (at least, I assume it can).
None of those definitions say "in thrall to" means "is controlled by"; do you know what control is? You might interpret the difference to be so minor as to be irrelevant, but that's your own fault.
No, it is not necessary to continue. I certainly won't bother.
The point about the political system is hardly a straw man. If you think it is, you should perhaps look up the definition of "straw man". And you were commenting on a comment that was commenting on our political system, in such a way that you needed to have at least a basic understanding unless you wanted to look a fool (the thing in brackets). You didn't have an understanding, or at least you didn't use it...
"Controlled" is not the actual definition of "in thrall to" (you can look it up, if you wish); your interpretation is no closer to the actual definition than mine. That gives us three definitions, at least; at this stage I see no reason not to posit a fourth (that of the OP).
Only by your interpretation of the OP is the US necessarily the cause of our problems.
And in any case, the definition of "in thrall to" is not relevant to whether the US is the cause of our problems, because—thank god—the Prime Minister is not our supreme dictator. We have a federal system and many things that the are relevant here need to be dealt with by the states, which are all controlled by the federal opposition (the Labor Party). Labor is not considered to be in thrall to the US, and goes to great lengths to ensure in fact it does not come of as anti-American. Also, we have a legislative arm to our federal government, of which the upper house is relatively independent of the executive. The Senate could've prevented this law, and most people wouldn't describe the person most likely to have voted "no" (Sen. Barnaby Joyce) as being controlled by the US/US interests.
A foreigner (I assume you are one, otherwise you do need a better understanding) is not expected to know the ins and outs of the political system of another relatively minor and benign country. Still, if one wishes to comment on the political system (or the implications of a post on it), you should have at least a basic understanding. It's this stuff I was talking about in my first post, and not the definition of "in thrall to".
??? He didn't blame it on the US. He compared us to the US, and criticised our Prime Minister for appearing to be more loyal to the US than us. I know the US gets given a lot of shit, but you really should calm down in your defences ... you don't need to defend against something that's not happening!
As I understood the new laws wouldn't've outlawed your post: I thought there was some "good faith" escape clause put in at the last minute so that you could make criticisms in "good faith" and not be breaking the law.
Still, I think I've worked out what a Second Amendment is good for. Pity ours gave the Commonwealth Government the ability to take over the debts of the states.
More like, if it appeals to John Howard and one of Senators Joyce or Fielding, not a problem. Fielding would probably love it and give Howard everything he wanted for the next five and a half years. And Senator Joyce always capitulates eventually.
... now some hundred years later and a major party, they still vote as a bloc on most issues), and compulsory voting. Most members of Parliament don't really need to care so much what the voters in their electorate think; about the only thing a holder of a safe seat can't do is retire mid-term, and obviously that hardly affects *them*. Australian electors don't much like by-elections and punish the party of whoever left!
Unlike American politics, Australian politics tends to be very party-based. A combination of two things: an early pact by the Labor Party (when they were a minority party, they agreed to vote as a bloc
As for the Senate (elected proportionally by state, with each state getting six senators each election and the territories getting three), for the most part the major parties just get a fixed number of seats: 2 or 3 to the Coalition and 2 to Labor for each State. Sometimes Labor gets the last seat, mostly it goes to a minor party. So really in the Senate, the major party Senators must appeal not to the electorate, but to the party, to ensure that they get preselected next time.
(Explanations for Foreigners: John Howard is Prime Minister. The Liberal (i.e. right-wing) Party-controlled Coalition has control of both houses of Parliament at the moment, though the majority is only one. The Coalition isn't a European-style coalition that collapses at the drop of a hat; it's stronger even than US parties--or even British ones, it seems. "Family First" Senator for Victoria Steven Fielding, as you'd expect from a religious-oriented party, will at times side with the Liberals. Nationals Senator for Queensland Barnaby Joyce is a member of the Coalition, but his main job is to give the Australian public a glimmer of hope that perhaps the Senate is still doing its job even though it's controlled by the Government and that perhaps not everything Howard suggests will get through. Still, he knows which side his bread's buttered on...)
Shows what you know: Australia is in Europe!
My guess is the OP is either confused about our federal structure ... we have parliaments in many cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart; two in Canberra and one in Darwin). Of course, these cities are all capitals of the jurisdictions(?) for which the parliaments exist (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania; the Commonwealth and the ACT and the Northern Territory, respectively). I would've thought that happened by definition, mind. (It never clicked before now that there must be *two* Parliaments in Canberra—thank Christ I don't live there!)
Alternatively, it could be a bad attempt at a joke: everyone knows the capital of Australia is Sydney.
I would be quite concerned about the ethics of a person who wastes the time of medical personelle by faking injuries to make a political point. I'm sure the hospitals in question keep statistics of waiting times. If these were incomparable, better would've been to take your own stats---surely you won't have to wait long for someone with a broken leg to walk in who agrees to have their waiting time recorded!
It's a little offputting, and a fair bit harder to avert your eyes :)
And for you, that's likely to have been very important! I'm surprised you managed to get away at all to write this message! (I assume you meant "avert your eyes from your own reflection".)
Also, "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "haitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org".
Are you saying you've never seen a metal wall urinal before? Are they rare in America (I assume that's where you come from), you almost always have individual porcelain urinals? Or is is the fact it didn't actually reach the floor that baffled you? (I've seen that before, but it's relatively rare. Normally wall urinals reach the floor, or a raised platform just above the floor, often with a grill beneath your feet so that you couldn't miss unless you tried.)
Given that, I imagine you did indeed use the wrong urinal.
In my experience, the wall urinals are much the commoner in Australia, or at least in Melbourne. I remember the first time I saw an individual urinal (as a child), I had no idea what to do with it so I went and asked my mum, but she wasn't about to come in so I just used the normal toilet. Wall urinals have the significant advantage that it doesn't matter how tall you are, the urinal's always in front of you, so I couldn't comprehend a school using individual urinals...
Indeed. Talking as someone who obviously doesn't enjoy symmetry as much as you two do, I saw that and thought the asymmetry made it look very nice!
It does use some css, but since the people who do the updates (like me) are generally very busy with their own normal work, we just haven't had the time to move everything over to css.
Would it help if I helped? I have knowledge of CSS (though I've only done my own website and related stuff), and now that the Uni summer holidays are here, I have very few obligations between my last exam on Wednesday and Uni starting again in March, so I'm sure I could contribute some time & effort.
Jehova's Witnesses view blood as sacred. They will not allow it to be used in medicine. It doesn't matter whose blood it is. It isn't the fact that it's someone else's blood, it's the fact that it's blood. (Just the same, they don't donate blood.)
I don't know if this would be permissible or not. I understand what's been done here is that blood vessels have been created. Blood vessels aren't blood, so it might be permissible. But, I'm not a Jehova's Witness, and I haven't read the article, so this is just hypothesis and conjecture from a random Slashdot reader.
--
A. Random Slashdot-Reader
But I do like Rhythmbox and it claims to have UI based on iTunes. Therefore, iTunes must have a decent UI :)
Rhythmbox was inspired by iTunes, but is not a perfect clone of iTunes. iTunes has many annoying features such as its habit of not allowing you to search when a category (e.g. artist, genre) is selected, so you can't search for all rock songs with "frog" in their artist or title, or all of Frog's songs with "pompous" in them, or whatever. This is horribly annoying and I personally wanted to shoot the designers of iTunes until I modified my computer so it wouldn't run it without an emulator of sorts.
It's quite easy to like Rhythmbox's interface and think iTunes's is the son of Satan. I'm sure there will be people who think the reverse.
Chorded menus, like the right click menu are faster to access than menus at the edge of the screen, provided there is only one of them and provided you are working in a language that normally reads horizontally.
...
;)
Do you know why the language you use makes a difference? It doesn't seem to make sense to me.
The problem with them is that you can only have one, relatively short menu, which is either very big, or has many levels to fit the same number of items as can exist along the top of the screen.
Well, usually I find if a program needs too much to fit comfortably on a right-click menu, it's probably trying to do too much, and it's hard to remember exactly where the option is in the menubar anyway; there's probably a better solution than just adding an extra menu. Maybe I have a higher upper-limit for one and lower upper-limit for the other than most people, though.
Actually, muscle memory makes it easy to quickly hit the same target along an edge from anywhere. It is one of those hardwired things.
On the mac you can click at the top of the screen and it opens a menu.
But for that, you have to be at the right place, otherwise you have to navigate back. I find it as hard to stop in the right place when "flicking up" as going to some random place near the top, because I rarely if ever flick straight up. If you flick at an angle, once you reach the top, you keep travelling horizontally till you actually do stop. That often puts me in on the wrong item, so I don't "just flick", I always navigate with the same care I would if I was just using a Windows menu. (I suppose the target's infinitely still infinitely high even if it's only finitely wide is the right way of thinking, but once the limitation of width is relevant (as it usually is for me!), the unlimitation of height is irrelevant. Maybe I'm funny, I'm trying to counter your research with annecdotal evidence
Various Windows distributions often win out on one of these.
I assume you mean "GNU/Linux distributions", but I'm not sure how. For the most part, they package either Gnome or KDE as their default, and both of those emulate the Windows way of doing things. You need to get to more exotic things before you can find other ideas, and usually they try to avoid menu bars in one way or another. Maybe I missed your point.
Indeed, and even Fitt's law says that right here is quicker to get to than the edges of the screen. Thus, we should all be using right-click menus. (They've got other advantages besides.) The common argument that they aren't discoverable is only true so long as most applications don't use them. If they become the default, then people will naturally right-click if they want to see what they can do.
And you can't just "fling your mouse" anyway, because you have to pick which menu you want, so once you've flung it, you have to re-aim. If (as is common on Windows) you run your windows all maximised anyway, the menubar is just slightly below the top of the screen; the re-aiming needed to find the right menu item isn't a whole lot more than it is on the Mac. The flexibility that per-window and context menus (compared to top-of-screen ones) buy with respect to reducing the distinction between "application" and "window" is also something that must be considered when designing your new GUI.
You yourself have some points, but unfortunately I think you've often made too strict an interpretation of the parent poster's post.
... what, exactly ? You *are* aware that the kernel in OS X is open-source, aren't you ? That all the source code is there, available for anyone to hack on ?
;)--I'm sure Red Hat do to!
Your point being
Well of course, the kernel is only a small part of the operating system, and for most people it's certainly not the part that counts. I've never touched the kernel's source code on my GNU/Linux box, but you realise that the entire GUI, from windowing/display engine to my text editor and webbrowser also have the source code. And I have made changes to some of these. In fact, all the software on my computer is free (having relatively recently mkfs.xfs'd my old HFS+ partition).
You're probably right about there being no direct free software equivalent to the iLife suite, but people make entire movies on GNU/Linux using free software, too.
Still, regardless of the technical superiority of either operating system, I think a free software solution is a must, and I'm very glad that they've chosen GNU/Linux. Although for any organisation aiming at educating new computer users having source code available is a must even if almost no-one cares about it, I think more important for the hundred dollar laptop's market is the redistribution rights that free software require. Also, I kinda like the idea of the free software "lock-in" this'll hopefully cause
Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well
Of course he has ulterior motives. In fact, I've been led to all-but believe it's pratically illegal for the CEO of a publically-traded company not to have ulterior motives.
but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source
I don't really think that you can maintain the claim that Aqua/the OS X gooey is not a part of the core of Mac OS X. It mightn't be the kernel, but it is Mac OS X.
Anyway, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source shows a certain level of fore-sight and wisdom that most people lack. This is precisely the time that free software is most required, and precisely the time that the temptations of restrictive software are hardest to resist. (If you want my justifications, you'll find most in the GNU Project's philosophy section. Also, I just noticed an earlier poster with the sig "-- No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. --Theodore Roosevelt", which I think is most appropriate to this thread.)
Three cheers to the Project!
A laptop still costs a decent chunk of money. Not everyone can afford to have a desktop computer for what they need the desktop for, and a laptop for the occasions when they're out-of-town or whatever to run GNU/Linux on.
There is actually a product called the Black Dog which is apparently somewhat similar: A Linux distro (Debian-based in this case) on a USB drive, except that the Black Dog acts as the computer, and when you plug it in it essentially turns the host into a dumb terminal (assuming it's running GNU/Linux, Windows or Mac OS X), presumably running an X server via the autorun feature on Windows or manually on GNU/Linux and MacOS X. I'm somewhat interested in one of these things (it'd be very useful!), but there doesn't seem to be any reviews for them on the web (there's a bunch of introductory-type things, but they're just regurgitating the same hype-info distributed by the company).
From what I can see, the major differences appear to be that one is just GNU/Linux on a USB drive, whereas the other is a portable screenless, keyboardless computer; and that one has a big hard drive whereas the other has a smaller, flash-based drive. I'd be somewhat wary about running an OS running of a flash drive (I understand they have a fairly limited number of reads/writes you can do), and also even 512 MB doesn't sound like nearly enough space to do anything on it.
Indeed. I think that a lot of American forget that (I'm pretty sure) the only modern western democracy still without a bill of rights or equivalent is Australia (for which we will pay dearly in the years to come, I fear). So unless all countries that are not the US are equivalent to Australia, then I don't think they "need a bill of rights" or anything of the sort.
(There was even a referendum in Australia on whether we should have a (very limited) "bill of rights and freedoms" in our constitution in 1988; it was rejected by a majority of all Australians as well as a majority in all states and territories and so did not pass. I imagine that the line of thinking that leads to this is we could've done better. Still, I was only four years old at the time, so I don't really know the details. Additionally, while there was some discussion in the lead up to the creation of our constitution, this was in the days when people actually respected tradition, and it was believed that a British Common Law based constitution & the traditions so implied would necessarily prevent anyone restricting the rights that are rightfully ours.)
(It should be noted that our activist High Court judges have interpreted the fact that ours is a democratic constitution as necessarily implying that we must have a right to free speech (for how else could we fully exercise the necessary public discourse for democracy to be meaningful?), but of course this is dependent on who the High Court judges are, and I'm pretty sure that since they've done this they've said gone off and said the exact opposite anyway. And of course I think our activist judges have done a lot more harm than good over the hundred and few years since they came into existence.)