I've already done this. Grind is a web based jukebox that supports playback of a wide range of media formats (mp3, ogg, wav, and flac to name a few). It has a small install footprint (no database overkill, just Apache, Perl, and some mediaplayers). It supports playback of internet streams as well.
It is beta software because more metainformation in media files needs to be supported, along with perfecting its automatic installation proceedure. That said, I use it almost daily with no problems at all.
The main feature that sets Grind apart from other jukebox software is that it supports intellegent autoqueuing. Grind monitors what songs, artists, and albums you frequently listen to, and which songs you frequently skip. The user can then set Grind basically in autopilot (autodj?) mode and it will automatically play songs from your favorite and similar artists. There may be another open source project that does that, but I've yet to find one.
The FDA makes sure that when you tell people that you're cooking up medicine, it's actually is the safe and effective medicine you claim it to be. As I said, not everyone is honest.
But the solution is not inspectors, with their abusable powers. (precisely because they are abusable) The proper solution is to assume that each meat plant is operating safely until it is proven otherwise, And then make them pay for the damage that they caused. (courts) This is harder to abuse because you have to convince 12 random joes to go along with it. This can provide the actuall penalties you want - yes, they are probablly needed sometimes, too many greedy crooks out there.
What you're essentially proposing is moving from a preventive safety regime to a reactive safety regime. Now I would argue that society has an interest to prevent forseeable violations of the social contract (which in free society is codified in its laws). We as a society should shutdown the unsafe chemical plant before an accident kills an injures the entire town, not after.
The relatively small number of possible violators makes it easy monitor them. Furthermore a monitoring regime would likely cost less than the subtantial penalties required in a reactive regime.
The other argument you put forth is corruption of inspection officials. I just don't think there's evidence of widespread blackmail by inspectors, no more than there is widespread abuse by police officers or soldiers. Yes, such people exist. Yes, they're a problem and should be removed and prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law. But do they exist in such numbers to terminally undermine their institutions, no. I would go as far as cite that the recent widespread coverage of abuse by police and soldiers illustrates just how infrequent such behavior is.
It was mostly, until the 20th century. The founding fathers were libertarian; back then it was simply called "liberal". Nowadays we would say "classical liberal", as liberal now means socialist.
Well as a liberal, let me tell you "liberal" does not mean "socialist". Contrary to Fox News, it never has, and it never will. No more than "conservative" means "facist". It's just as stupid, and just as offensive.
United States has been a libertarian society, for the most part.
The US government has always acted beyond national defense and criminal justice. You need to look no further than the consititution itself for evidence of this. The federal government is ordered to create roads, regulate interstate trade, and provide a postal system among other things. Also every American government, has regulated commerce and provided social programs, such as basic education for all citizens. None of these are provided by a libertarian government. Rather in a libertarian society all of the services listed would be provided by private sector institutions.
Federal spending as % of GDP is still "only" 30% compared to most other countries that have 50%. And our spending as % of GDP was extremely low until it exploded in the second half of the 20th century.
I would also point out the amount of government spending isn't limited to extra-libertarian sectors. The largest recipient of federal funds is the military. Prior to World War II, the United States historically had a dangerously small and underfunded military in times of peace. We're talking so underfunded that not everyone in the army had actual rifles, but rather rifle shaped pieces of wood. We're talking soliders would taught how to shoot, but not be given bullets to actually shoot. Since WWII, the military budget has steadily increased in response to both real and percived threats.
I say this not to debate the current military funding, but rather to point out that even with the "everything but military and law enforcement should be eliminated" worldview of the libertarian party, federal spending would still have increased dramatically in the second half the 20th century.
seriously considered pooling money among my friends and family (many of whom suffer from it) so that we could produce [Imitrex] ourselves, but trying to comply with the FDA would have been too cost-prohibitive and I didn't want to end up being sentenced to life imprisonment for operating a drug lab.
You've basically described something that has all the expertise and quality control, of your average meth lab. Furthermore, you want your cardre of amature chemists to sell homemade chemicals to desperate people to inject.
And you wonder why anyone would have a problem with this? Well, given the general tone of of your comment, I imagine you do, so I'll let you in on the secret.
Imagine the "big bad government restrictions" are gone and you and everyone else can now make persecription drugs in their basement. Initially only honest people that actually know what they're doing setup labs. They sell their perfectly safe (relative to the current safety regime) drugs at a discount. Other honest people decide they want to sell the same drugs, but only for less. Some manage to do so through safe cost reductions, but others cut costs by using lower quality components. Drug safety and/or effectivness drops. Now not-so-honest people get in the game. They take a break from selling lead paint chips in motor oil as a "crunchy watercress salad in a light viniagrette", and start selling tap water (since it's basically the same thing as saline, but less expensive) as Imitrex, but at a hefty discount since the packaging is now the most expensive part of the operation. We now have a situation where the market is flooded with apparently identical medical products of widely varying efficacy and safety. Now even if society would tolerate the inevitable deaths from this situation, you still couldn't rely on market forces to sort out the bad from good, because the bad is always a moving target.
I'm not so naive to think under the current regime counterfit drugs aren't entering the market, but amount is much less if no safety regulations existed at all.
Maybe you think it's ridiculous, but spending $50/shot when you need to administer 3 or 4 shots a week makes you seriously weigh your options.
There's lots of problems with the healthcare system in the United States. Not allowing armchair biochemists to whip up generic versions of perscription drugs in their kitchens, just isn't the solution.
The most interesting and telling point is that the Republicans are loudly complaining about federal judge vacancies under Bush2 when in fact less vacancies than under Clinton when it wasn't a problem. Basically it comes down to, "We're the only one who get to hold up nominations." Orin Hatch is the most vocal hypocrite on this issue.
Now hold on here. Of course most libertarians, just like anyone else in a civil society, see the value in laws and regulations. People always stereotype Libertarians as wanting to start some anarchist society, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The whole idea behind Libertarianism is that people have a fundamental right to do as they please as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. And when someone does infringe on the rights of others, they must take full responsiblity for their actions. Of course we need laws and regulations... how else would you decide when someone does something wrong?
That all sounds good and no one would object to having laws that limit individual freedom the least, while simultaneously protecting society as a whole. Like the old adage says, "The right to swing your fists stops where my nose begins."
The problem with the libertarian party, and the reason why they're viewed as antiregulation zealots, is because that's the image the party's official statements paint.
Now I could go through their platform and official statements over the years, and write treatise on how the perfectly reasonable political philosophy has been perverted and drastically undermined by the reactionary zealots of the Libertarian Party, but I won't. Instead I'll lillustrate the point by examining the party's opposition to the thousands of year old role of government ensuring the health and safety of its citizenry. A role that is not only considered reasonable by the vast majority, but also popular with the citizens. A role of government that widely regarded, that the LP's oposition to which is typically used by the party's detractors to illustrate just how out of touch the party is. I'm going to talk the about meat inspectors.
The Libertarian Party is against meat inspectors because people are smart enough not to buy infected meat, therefore anyone selling infected meat would go out of buisness. That all may be true, but there's typically no way for the average person to stand at the meat counter at the local Kroger's and start testing for E.Coli.
Furthermore, they argue that the "USDA Approved" sticker lulls the public into a false sense of safety since all the meat they buy is "USDA approved". They then turn around and argue that this "false sense of safety" doesn't exist with the ubiquitous "UL Approved" stickers because Underwriter's Labs is an industrial organization. Figuring out why the average citizen would be deadened to a sticker because of who was putting them on rather than by the sticker's ubiquity is apparently left as an exercise for the reader.
The LP in every case touts "voluntary self-regulation of industry", like a mantra. The sole reason for this is "less taxes". Yes, VSR would ideally result in less taxes, but there's a catch. VSR doesn't work.
There exists an intrinisic advesarial relationship between the regulator and the regulated. This doesn't mean that they're always at each others' throats, ideally they're not, but it's not, nor should it every be, an relationship between equals. VSR puts the regulated in a superior position over the regulators. First, those being regulated decide what the rules should be. Typically, they're initially set just beyond current practices, because VSR is almost always introduced as a fix to an industry-wide PR disaster. So right off, the regulations are weak. Next there's no penaltys for violating even these regulations because they're voluntary. If you group didn't comply, it's because they didn't have to. So in the end, nothing changes, and the VSR industry is just as unregulated as before. Conversely, when strong government regulations exist, and when there's proper funding of enforcement of the the regulations (I say this, because cutting of enforcement budgets has been a popular tactic of late because it effectively eliminates the regulations, without the political fallout of actually eliminating the regulations.) there's actually penalties such as fines and possible jail time for violators.
My grandparents were Irish. Can I get away with telling Irish jokes? Well, sometimes, because the Irish tend to laugh at everything, but they also laugh while beating the crap out of you for crossing the offensiveness line.
But then they'll start crying about it. Drink does that to people.:)
The law of the bottom dollar says that if people can provide a service for themselves for free, they will. Most of them anyway. HTPCs increasingly become easier to build and cheaper to buy.
Most people, including myself, would rather pay a premium for a system that's guaranteed to work out of the box than screw around making a homebrew system they may or may not work completely.
You see that all the time. People buy furniture rather than make it. People buy clothes rather than make them. People pay to have the oil changed in their car. Not because they can't do it, but because they don't want to do it. Most appropriately, people buy computers rather than build them. Sure you could do any of these things, but you don't because there's other things you would rather do.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity.
That's the way the game is played. You can thank Frank Luntz of "death tax" and "clear skies"/"healthy forests" fame for that. Trully a genius. A genius for evil, but still a genius.
It's sad when all of this liberal's politcal heros are whack job Republicans. They're just so much better at playing the game.
That's because you were what is called a "mule" in the world of drug dealing. A mule is the low-end pusher/dealer, the person that deals with individual users, and always the fall guy. Not that I'm saying file sharing and drug dealing are analogous...
No. The guy who deals with the customers is the dealer. The mule is the guy who smuggles drugs from the growers/chemists to the dealers. They're pack animals. That's why they're called "mules".
The problem, then, is not the registry's binary nature, nor its weak hierarchical model, nor the lack of scripting tools (although the latter impairs its usefulness). It is that there's no glue between the owner of the information and the information itself; the ideal situation, a registry with no orphaned information, is architecturally not a bad design.
GConf, which is exactly what Elektra is reimplenting, has these same problems. (Most likely because gconf is pretty much an xml registry.) When keys change or become defunct many applications (GNOME Panel! I'm talking to you!) just simply leave them.
Right now my gconf has droppings from every instance of every applet I've ever added to my panel. I'm never going to readd keyboard indicator, yet there it is. Infact if I ever do readd keyboard indicator, it will create a new hierarchy.
I have/desktop/gnome/applications/browser and/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http. They both semantically do the same thing, but browser is defunct, but still there. Hell, under/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http, I've keys needs_terminal and need-terminal. One of these is wrong. I have no idea which because some url-handlers only have needs_terminal, but others only have need-terminal.
How is this any different from the Windows registry, one of it's most hated "features"?
It's text based. So they're not exactly reimpleneting windows' registry, but rather GNOME's gconf, which is of course, windows' registry only xml based.
GConf means well. It's something that makes sense for the GNOME as a system (e.g. being able to query what is the default web browser for instance). I'm just not convinced for its use for individual apps, especially since state information is meant to be stored outside of gconf. Also, while GConf isn't explicitly tied to GNOME, I doubt it will be used by anything besides GNOME. Just like every other platform invented tool.
I really think that we (slashdotters) should launch a project aiming at redesigning Tahoma, Georgia, Verdana, Mono, Comic, Courier New, Impact, Arial, Arial Black, Lucida and Trebuchet. It wouldn't be exactly the same fonts, but their properties (size, spacing, kerning) and looks would be equivalents to those they clone, so that interchanging them with MS's ones wouldn't break any documents / web pages.
*gasp*
Didn't you read the HOWTO!?!? That would be wrong! That would be creating a "ripoff"! We're all supposed to create brand new fonts from all original ideas by copying Guttenberg's interchangeable typefaces, not by copying some font that costs $100 for plain text, and then another $100 for bold, and italics. Bold-italics for $150. That's a savings of 25% over buying a bold and italic individually! WOW! What a deal! But what ever we should do, we shouldn't buy cheap fonts. That's wrong. ("Southern Software, Inc [...] but don't buy any of their fonts!")
Re:They're improving the file dialogs...
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
What's your point? That we should all point to and bash free software developers cause they are behind respect to enterprises that have been working on UI at least 10 years before we got a free OS with an usable free GUI?
Well just because something is gratis and has liberal licenses doesn't give it an execuse for incompetence. Many of these useability problems have been well researched and fixed years ago. There's no point in rediscovering all these advances. The new toolkits should just use them. That's the problem
P.S.: and even after your post, the path buttonbar in the GTKfilechooser looks incredibly nice and unique to me.
It may add to usability, but it's not unique. It's a feature that various toolkits over the years have incorporated. I believe NeXTStep had something similar with a graphical view of the full path above the 3 pane (grandparent dir, parent dir, current dir) chooser. I've also seen it in some other old school toolkit (not Motiff, not Tk, but one of their contemporaries).
Re:They're improving the file dialogs...
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There should be a text input working in parallel with the gui. Sometimes, it's easier to just type the name, especially with the help of auto completion. It's also convenient to cut/paste the pathname in the file selector.
A lot of people agree with you. [url:http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136 541] The gtk2.4 filechooser was a big mistake. I have no idea if this is fixed in 2.6. It really should be since people have been bitching about this dialog the moment it was placed in wide release. Of course this isn't the only dubious "improvement" in GTK/GNOME's usability.
From the article: Sivakumar is also guilty in places of wielding the same kind of broad brush he sees being used to paint Indian programmers; he provides cultural sketches of several other groups that may be meant merely as casual observations rather than any sort of final word, but end up doing the same disservice as any other stereotype. (Of his first trip through customs, he says "That was the first time I ever talked to an African American. I never understood their accent even in the movies." This kind of glib generalization doesn't advance the cause of the book; often "they" are hard to characterize so blithely, no matter which "they" is at issue.)
I imagine this has something to do with growing up in a largely monoculture society. Yes I know India isn't strictly one large monolith, but on the whole their internal differences aren't nearly as great as "immigrant nations" like the United States and Canada.
I've noticed anecdotaly that some immigrants from racially homogenous countries sometimes have racist views of black Americans. Not blacks in general, but black Americans specifically. Which at first seems odd since they've most likely never met one prior to coming to America. I believe the reason is how blacks are depicted in American popular media. Predominately blacks are depicted as dumb, lazy, and criminal. All all play basketball. All black men are oversexed, and all black women are prone to loud violent outbursts. None of this is true, but this is how they're protrayed. Sadly, "black media" often reinforces these streotypes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've already done this. Grind is a web based jukebox that supports playback of a wide range of media formats (mp3, ogg, wav, and flac to name a few). It has a small install footprint (no database overkill, just Apache, Perl, and some mediaplayers). It supports playback of internet streams as well.
It is beta software because more metainformation in media files needs to be supported, along with perfecting its automatic installation proceedure. That said, I use it almost daily with no problems at all.
The main feature that sets Grind apart from other jukebox software is that it supports intellegent autoqueuing. Grind monitors what songs, artists, and albums you frequently listen to, and which songs you frequently skip. The user can then set Grind basically in autopilot (autodj?) mode and it will automatically play songs from your favorite and similar artists. There may be another open source project that does that, but I've yet to find one.
The FDA makes sure that when you tell people that you're cooking up medicine, it's actually is the safe and effective medicine you claim it to be. As I said, not everyone is honest.
But the solution is not inspectors, with their abusable powers. (precisely because they are abusable) The proper solution is to assume that each meat plant is operating safely until it is proven otherwise, And then make them pay for the damage that they caused. (courts) This is harder to abuse because you have to convince 12 random joes to go along with it. This can provide the actuall penalties you want - yes, they are probablly needed sometimes, too many greedy crooks out there.
What you're essentially proposing is moving from a preventive safety regime to a reactive safety regime. Now I would argue that society has an interest to prevent forseeable violations of the social contract (which in free society is codified in its laws). We as a society should shutdown the unsafe chemical plant before an accident kills an injures the entire town, not after.
The relatively small number of possible violators makes it easy monitor them. Furthermore a monitoring regime would likely cost less than the subtantial penalties required in a reactive regime.
The other argument you put forth is corruption of inspection officials. I just don't think there's evidence of widespread blackmail by inspectors, no more than there is widespread abuse by police officers or soldiers. Yes, such people exist. Yes, they're a problem and should be removed and prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law. But do they exist in such numbers to terminally undermine their institutions, no. I would go as far as cite that the recent widespread coverage of abuse by police and soldiers illustrates just how infrequent such behavior is.
It was mostly, until the 20th century. The founding fathers were libertarian; back then it was simply called "liberal". Nowadays we would say "classical liberal", as liberal now means socialist.
Well as a liberal, let me tell you "liberal" does not mean "socialist". Contrary to Fox News, it never has, and it never will. No more than "conservative" means "facist". It's just as stupid, and just as offensive.
United States has been a libertarian society, for the most part.
The US government has always acted beyond national defense and criminal justice. You need to look no further than the consititution itself for evidence of this. The federal government is ordered to create roads, regulate interstate trade, and provide a postal system among other things. Also every American government, has regulated commerce and provided social programs, such as basic education for all citizens. None of these are provided by a libertarian government. Rather in a libertarian society all of the services listed would be provided by private sector institutions.
Federal spending as % of GDP is still "only" 30% compared to most other countries that have 50%. And our spending as % of GDP was extremely low until it exploded in the second half of the 20th century.
I would also point out the amount of government spending isn't limited to extra-libertarian sectors. The largest recipient of federal funds is the military. Prior to World War II, the United States historically had a dangerously small and underfunded military in times of peace. We're talking so underfunded that not everyone in the army had actual rifles, but rather rifle shaped pieces of wood. We're talking soliders would taught how to shoot, but not be given bullets to actually shoot. Since WWII, the military budget has steadily increased in response to both real and percived threats.
I say this not to debate the current military funding, but rather to point out that even with the "everything but military and law enforcement should be eliminated" worldview of the libertarian party, federal spending would still have increased dramatically in the second half the 20th century.
seriously considered pooling money among my friends and family (many of whom suffer from it) so that we could produce [Imitrex] ourselves, but trying to comply with the FDA would have been too cost-prohibitive and I didn't want to end up being sentenced to life imprisonment for operating a drug lab.
You've basically described something that has all the expertise and quality control, of your average meth lab. Furthermore, you want your cardre of amature chemists to sell homemade chemicals to desperate people to inject.
And you wonder why anyone would have a problem with this? Well, given the general tone of of your comment, I imagine you do, so I'll let you in on the secret.
Imagine the "big bad government restrictions" are gone and you and everyone else can now make persecription drugs in their basement. Initially only honest people that actually know what they're doing setup labs. They sell their perfectly safe (relative to the current safety regime) drugs at a discount. Other honest people decide they want to sell the same drugs, but only for less. Some manage to do so through safe cost reductions, but others cut costs by using lower quality components. Drug safety and/or effectivness drops. Now not-so-honest people get in the game. They take a break from selling lead paint chips in motor oil as a "crunchy watercress salad in a light viniagrette", and start selling tap water (since it's basically the same thing as saline, but less expensive) as Imitrex, but at a hefty discount since the packaging is now the most expensive part of the operation. We now have a situation where the market is flooded with apparently identical medical products of widely varying efficacy and safety. Now even if society would tolerate the inevitable deaths from this situation, you still couldn't rely on market forces to sort out the bad from good, because the bad is always a moving target.
I'm not so naive to think under the current regime counterfit drugs aren't entering the market, but amount is much less if no safety regulations existed at all.
Maybe you think it's ridiculous, but spending $50/shot when you need to administer 3 or 4 shots a week makes you seriously weigh your options.
There's lots of problems with the healthcare system in the United States. Not allowing armchair biochemists to whip up generic versions of perscription drugs in their kitchens, just isn't the solution.
The most interesting and telling point is that the Republicans are loudly complaining about federal judge vacancies under Bush2 when in fact less vacancies than under Clinton when it wasn't a problem. Basically it comes down to, "We're the only one who get to hold up nominations." Orin Hatch is the most vocal hypocrite on this issue.
Yeah, I'd say the Unitd States have been a huge failure.
And I would counter with the obvious that the United States isn't a libertarian society.
Now hold on here. Of course most libertarians, just like anyone else in a civil society, see the value in laws and regulations. People always stereotype Libertarians as wanting to start some anarchist society, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The whole idea behind Libertarianism is that people have a fundamental right to do as they please as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. And when someone does infringe on the rights of others, they must take full responsiblity for their actions. Of course we need laws and regulations... how else would you decide when someone does something wrong?
That all sounds good and no one would object to having laws that limit individual freedom the least, while simultaneously protecting society as a whole. Like the old adage says, "The right to swing your fists stops where my nose begins."
The problem with the libertarian party, and the reason why they're viewed as antiregulation zealots, is because that's the image the party's official statements paint.
Now I could go through their platform and official statements over the years, and write treatise on how the perfectly reasonable political philosophy has been perverted and drastically undermined by the reactionary zealots of the Libertarian Party, but I won't. Instead I'll lillustrate the point by examining the party's opposition to the thousands of year old role of government ensuring the health and safety of its citizenry. A role that is not only considered reasonable by the vast majority, but also popular with the citizens. A role of government that widely regarded, that the LP's oposition to which is typically used by the party's detractors to illustrate just how out of touch the party is. I'm going to talk the about meat inspectors.
The Libertarian Party is against meat inspectors because people are smart enough not to buy infected meat, therefore anyone selling infected meat would go out of buisness. That all may be true, but there's typically no way for the average person to stand at the meat counter at the local Kroger's and start testing for E.Coli.
Furthermore, they argue that the "USDA Approved" sticker lulls the public into a false sense of safety since all the meat they buy is "USDA approved". They then turn around and argue that this "false sense of safety" doesn't exist with the ubiquitous "UL Approved" stickers because Underwriter's Labs is an industrial organization. Figuring out why the average citizen would be deadened to a sticker because of who was putting them on rather than by the sticker's ubiquity is apparently left as an exercise for the reader.
The LP in every case touts "voluntary self-regulation of industry", like a mantra. The sole reason for this is "less taxes". Yes, VSR would ideally result in less taxes, but there's a catch. VSR doesn't work.
There exists an intrinisic advesarial relationship between the regulator and the regulated. This doesn't mean that they're always at each others' throats, ideally they're not, but it's not, nor should it every be, an relationship between equals. VSR puts the regulated in a superior position over the regulators. First, those being regulated decide what the rules should be. Typically, they're initially set just beyond current practices, because VSR is almost always introduced as a fix to an industry-wide PR disaster. So right off, the regulations are weak. Next there's no penaltys for violating even these regulations because they're voluntary. If you group didn't comply, it's because they didn't have to. So in the end, nothing changes, and the VSR industry is just as unregulated as before. Conversely, when strong government regulations exist, and when there's proper funding of enforcement of the the regulations (I say this, because cutting of enforcement budgets has been a popular tactic of late because it effectively eliminates the regulations, without the political fallout of actually eliminating the regulations.) there's actually penalties such as fines and possible jail time for violators.
My grandparents were Irish. Can I get away with telling Irish jokes? Well, sometimes, because the Irish tend to laugh at everything, but they also laugh while beating the crap out of you for crossing the offensiveness line.
:)
But then they'll start crying about it. Drink does that to people.
Not to beat a dead horse, but there's the inherent irony of the country of stupids saving the the countries of intelligence from their wise ideas.
my grandparents were from poland.
Well to be pedantic, "pedantic" isn't a synonym for "contrarian". You should know what the big words mean before you use them.
Q: How many polocks does it take to stop software patents from being created in Europe?
A: A simple majority.
Wait. That's not funny.
The law of the bottom dollar says that if people can provide a service for themselves for free, they will. Most of them anyway. HTPCs increasingly become easier to build and cheaper to buy.
Most people, including myself, would rather pay a premium for a system that's guaranteed to work out of the box than screw around making a homebrew system they may or may not work completely.
You see that all the time. People buy furniture rather than make it. People buy clothes rather than make them. People pay to have the oil changed in their car. Not because they can't do it, but because they don't want to do it. Most appropriately, people buy computers rather than build them. Sure you could do any of these things, but you don't because there's other things you would rather do.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity.
That's the way the game is played. You can thank Frank Luntz of "death tax" and "clear skies"/"healthy forests" fame for that. Trully a genius. A genius for evil, but still a genius.
It's sad when all of this liberal's politcal heros are whack job Republicans. They're just so much better at playing the game.
That's because you were what is called a "mule" in the world of drug dealing. A mule is the low-end pusher/dealer, the person that deals with individual users, and always the fall guy. Not that I'm saying file sharing and drug dealing are analogous...
No. The guy who deals with the customers is the dealer. The mule is the guy who smuggles drugs from the growers/chemists to the dealers. They're pack animals. That's why they're called "mules".
The problem, then, is not the registry's binary nature, nor its weak hierarchical model, nor the lack of scripting tools (although the latter impairs its usefulness). It is that there's no glue between the owner of the information and the information itself; the ideal situation, a registry with no orphaned information, is architecturally not a bad design.
/desktop/gnome/applications/browser and /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http. They both semantically do the same thing, but browser is defunct, but still there. Hell, under /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http, I've keys needs_terminal and need-terminal. One of these is wrong. I have no idea which because some url-handlers only have needs_terminal, but others only have need-terminal.
GConf, which is exactly what Elektra is reimplenting, has these same problems. (Most likely because gconf is pretty much an xml registry.) When keys change or become defunct many applications (GNOME Panel! I'm talking to you!) just simply leave them.
Right now my gconf has droppings from every instance of every applet I've ever added to my panel. I'm never going to readd keyboard indicator, yet there it is. Infact if I ever do readd keyboard indicator, it will create a new hierarchy.
I have
Applications should clean up after themselves.
How is this any different from the Windows registry, one of it's most hated "features"?
It's text based. So they're not exactly reimpleneting windows' registry, but rather GNOME's gconf, which is of course, windows' registry only xml based.
GConf means well. It's something that makes sense for the GNOME as a system (e.g. being able to query what is the default web browser for instance). I'm just not convinced for its use for individual apps, especially since state information is meant to be stored outside of gconf. Also, while GConf isn't explicitly tied to GNOME, I doubt it will be used by anything besides GNOME. Just like every other platform invented tool.
Don't forget to start the cracked version with "sys 64738" :)
I really think that we (slashdotters) should launch a project aiming at redesigning Tahoma, Georgia, Verdana, Mono, Comic, Courier New, Impact, Arial, Arial Black, Lucida and Trebuchet. It wouldn't be exactly the same fonts, but their properties (size, spacing, kerning) and looks would be equivalents to those they clone, so that interchanging them with MS's ones wouldn't break any documents / web pages.
*gasp*
Didn't you read the HOWTO!?!? That would be wrong! That would be creating a "ripoff"! We're all supposed to create brand new fonts from all original ideas by copying Guttenberg's interchangeable typefaces, not by copying some font that costs $100 for plain text, and then another $100 for bold, and italics. Bold-italics for $150. That's a savings of 25% over buying a bold and italic individually! WOW! What a deal! But what ever we should do, we shouldn't buy cheap fonts. That's wrong. ("Southern Software, Inc [...] but don't buy any of their fonts!")
What's your point? That we should all point to and bash free software developers cause they are behind respect to enterprises that have been working on UI at least 10 years before we got a free OS with an usable free GUI?
Well just because something is gratis and has liberal licenses doesn't give it an execuse for incompetence. Many of these useability problems have been well researched and fixed years ago. There's no point in rediscovering all these advances. The new toolkits should just use them. That's the problem
P.S.: and even after your post, the path buttonbar in the GTKfilechooser looks incredibly nice and unique to me.
It may add to usability, but it's not unique. It's a feature that various toolkits over the years have incorporated. I believe NeXTStep had something similar with a graphical view of the full path above the 3 pane (grandparent dir, parent dir, current dir) chooser. I've also seen it in some other old school toolkit (not Motiff, not Tk, but one of their contemporaries).
There should be a text input working in parallel with the gui. Sometimes, it's easier to just type the name, especially with the help of auto completion. It's also convenient to cut/paste the pathname in the file selector.
6 541] The gtk2.4 filechooser was a big mistake. I have no idea if this is fixed in 2.6. It really should be since people have been bitching about this dialog the moment it was placed in wide release. Of course this isn't the only dubious "improvement" in GTK/GNOME's usability.
A lot of people agree with you. [url:http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13
Long story short, they got drunk and rowdy, got into a fight with locals and got stabbed. All the maries were banned from leave.
:)
In other words they acted American.
From the article:
Sivakumar is also guilty in places of wielding the same kind of broad brush he sees being used to paint Indian programmers; he provides cultural sketches of several other groups that may be meant merely as casual observations rather than any sort of final word, but end up doing the same disservice as any other stereotype. (Of his first trip through customs, he says "That was the first time I ever talked to an African American. I never understood their accent even in the movies." This kind of glib generalization doesn't advance the cause of the book; often "they" are hard to characterize so blithely, no matter which "they" is at issue.)
I imagine this has something to do with growing up in a largely monoculture society. Yes I know India isn't strictly one large monolith, but on the whole their internal differences aren't nearly as great as "immigrant nations" like the United States and Canada.
I've noticed anecdotaly that some immigrants from racially homogenous countries sometimes have racist views of black Americans. Not blacks in general, but black Americans specifically. Which at first seems odd since they've most likely never met one prior to coming to America. I believe the reason is how blacks are depicted in American popular media. Predominately blacks are depicted as dumb, lazy, and criminal. All all play basketball. All black men are oversexed, and all black women are prone to loud violent outbursts. None of this is true, but this is how they're protrayed. Sadly, "black media" often reinforces these streotypes.
I fear we may have a new meme on our hands: In China, X is always positive.
In Korea, only old people search for new memes.