It's a matter of getting used to, I guess. You can always use sloppy focus and move the mouse to the root window once your target window is activated, or have the mouse cursor disabled on text input (I think KDE has this).
With click-to-focus you always have to be careful not to click on a button or if you click on an editor, it automatically moves your cursor from where it should be.
You might have misunderstood me. I find it great that KDE/GNOME folks are making a newbie-friendly interface that people who are used to Win/Mac can use.
I believe they should have the chance to use Linux the way they want to, just like I want to use it the way that suits me. What I don't like is the push to outlaw anything that isn't a Win/Mac clone because the proverbial average user will be confused. All I care about is that I have the choice to use whatever I like precisely because everybody's tastes are different.
Not quite. Both KDE and GNOME are infinitely more themable than WinXP (look, feel, window title etc), and this still leave many other options for window managers, program launchers, applet-containers, desktop-based utils like Karamba etc. As long as I have a choice not to use the start menu, but a NextSTEP-like wharf, or a root menu to launch apps, I don't mind what the majority uses.
Sure, you can use shell replacements for windows like LiteStep but I see it as more of a hack than the Windows Way (tm):)
As for the second point, neither Windows nor OS X have 100% accelerated desktop. Not even close. This is being worked on in the freedesktop.org X server and it will quite probably be finished before either Win or Mac have it. There are many multimedia codecs/filter systems available, though you are correct in saying that there is no standard. Hopefully KDE and GNOME will find some solution to this (GStreamer seems poised to become the next standard multimedia system).
Both GNOME and KDE can already act as a stripped-down version of Windows/Mac. That's great. As long as I have the option of running Afterstep or some strange applet or a window-manager running in Emacs LISP, I'm happy because I have a choice. This new 3d thing is similar. I don't care whether the market accepts it or not. All that matters is that I have a choice to accept it or not. That's the essence of Linux desktop, IMHO. Not shoving average-joe stuff down my throat and killing any progress on any front because it might be too complex for mom and pop. Well, maybe it isn't meant for mom and pop?
The ultimate goal of Linux desktops should be the ability to set it up to work exactly the way you want it to, not to imitate the Mac.
I don't give a shit about the average home user. I like focus-follows mouse, magic desktop borders and transparent thingies. I don't think the goal of Linux desktops should be to take away all the things I like about them. If this new-fangled interface is good, people will use it, the average home user can use a stripped-down KDE set to emulate Windows or Mac if he/she wants to.
They probably thought that RMS would be tempted to switch over to Harvard, now that they also have a Microsoft-inspired building.
If nothing else, it could lure Eben Moglen from Columbia; as far as I know, there are no Bill Gates buildings over there, and he will surely be tempted!
Gates has been cooperating with Cambridge for quite a while. There is a Bill and Melinda Gates scholarship for computer science that's been running for a really long time.
Xvid is Free Software, but it's an implementation of MPEG4, which is patent-encumbered. It's the same reason that Ogg Vorbis is seen as the champion of free music, although there are GPL MP3 encoders.
Don't know about DivX (tm), but XviD is a Free Software implementation of MPEG4, compatible with DivX and works like a charm on Linux. There are also the FFMpeg implementations (used by mplayer and xine) which play all DivX movies without problems and encode to a compatible format. Who cares how well DivX works under Linux? There are better substitutes.
Slashdot used to report on Ogg Tarkin (next-generation, wavelet-based video codec) a lot in the past, but since Theora showed up as a stop-gap solution, nobody's mentioning Tarkin. Is this project still alive?
Dieting is generally a bad idea for weight loss (although useful for other purposes). The reason for this is that the body which is starved reacts by breaking down muscle tissue instead of fat. It tries to keep as much fat as possible as a response to the lack of food. This is why you see people diet for a long time and still have fat all over their body even after their muscle loses all definition.
In fact, the best way to lose weight is to cut down on fat (obviously), eat more carbohydrates and do it regularly (no starving yourself in the evening and such) and eat a reasonable amount of protein. Then do a lot of aerobic exercise (steppers, jogging, long-distance swimming and similar). You need carbohydrates to be able to withstand the exercise without feeling dead (most of it gets burnt during this process) and protein to support and rebuild the muscles as they get hit by the exercises.
My post was somewhat simplistic, but correct. Let me explain.
There are three ways of generating energy for your muscles:
1) Instant (using the ATP stores in the muscles themselves) 2) Anaerobic (without oxygen): This generally is done by burning carbohydrates in your body 3) Aerobic (using oxygen): This is burning fat with the presence of oxygen.
Now, the aerobic power kicks in only a few minutes after you start the exercise, that's why running for hours is good for burning fat. On the other hand, any power-related exercise like sprinting, jumping, weight-lifting etc is highly dependent on the anaerobic sources (read: carbohydrates). No amount of fat will get you jumping higher.
The point they were making is that it is useful for this particular person (who is a marathon runner). In this specific case, it might work, because long-distance running is almost purely aerobic -- as long that person has enough fat to support it. But any other sport activity (requiring carbohydrates or ATP stores which are derived from them) would suffer like hell after such a diet and be counter-productive. Also, your muscle tissue atrophies as a result of protein deprivation if your intake is not large enough.
You are correct in saying that specialised diets can make your body adapt and process foods differently, but I'm not sure if such a thing is always positive. I'll give you an example from a carbohydrate loading diet (lots of carbs, absolutely no fat). Here, athletes reacted excellently to the diet, but their body 'forgot' how to process fat as a result, giving a yo-yo bounce after the diet was finished. So, while I acknowledge the cleansing effect of fasting, I don't think it's the best thing for athletes on a regular basis.:-)
Oh come on, don't pretent you hold up every single assertion to a microscope. We all take this shortcut. Some of us just have better bs detectors. Also happenstance is everpresent (some people call this luck).
Of course you can't examine everything in detail (nor does anyone have the ability to always do it), but some critical thinking is really necessary.
I know a person who was convinced that dogs in Egypt say 'meow meow' instead of 'bow wow'. She thought it was cool and told all her friends about it. You don't really need a microscope for this:)
People are much more likely to accept something as a fact if it comes from 'a scientist'. It is as if thinking is a chore delegated to a few, and something most people shouldn't be concerned about. I always get a chuckle when reading about the great discoveries 'American scientists have proved' (for some reason, it always seem to be American scientists): children who chew bubble-gum are more intelligent; people who drink kool-aid grow more facial hair, etc etc etc.
I have recently had a discussion about dieting with a group of engineers (one of them a PhD). It was about a two-week diet where the person only drinks water. It is supposed to clean the body of toxins (very easily true) and improve one's sport performance (WTF?!). Apparently, they read in a book that after the body gets used to not having food, it draws the energy from the body itself and doesn't need food anymore. And these were educated people. Made me understand why so many people buy the etheric oil and penis enlargement crap.
How is Qt's licensing abysmal, please? It's licensed under the GPL. Just like Linux, GNU, GCC, Emacs, MySQL, MPlayer, The GIMP, and just about any other Free Software program.
So, what's so abysmal about the GPL? You sound like you think the world would be much better off if Linux, GNU, GCC, Emacs etc. all changed to proprietary licensing (like "WindowsXP from NewEgg") and available for "less than $100 from NewEgg".
Well, SuSE is not as platform-agnostic as Debian, but they do have x86, AMD64, PPC and SPARC versions, which means that YaST is quite likely portable enough.
Despite all the horror that DeBeers causes in third-world countries, from a European anti-trust perspective they only hurt diamond buyers: rich, bland, unimaginative money wasting types. I mean, they are getting ripped off for buying a glorified piece of coal they don't need and which serves no purpose at all. It means more taxes, great!
Microsoft, on the other hand, hurts all computer users, which is pretty much everyone in the EU.
On the other hand, you don't get support from Microsoft when using WordPerfect on their system either. It's difficult to support every single piece of software there is for Linux.
Personally, I've never had a problem with the packages on SuSE's webpage, but things sometimes break. I recently bought a laptop (of course, it came with a shiny new WinXP installed on it whether I wanted it or not) and the operating system crashed on me several times already for no apparent reason. SuSE never did that.
They were extradited for crimes they did in their own countries, while they were in their own countries.
Here we are talking about Australians being extradited to the US because they broke US law while living in Australia. That would be like US turning over Charlton Heston to China (for example) because it's illegal to own a rifle in China.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually read your sentence as "force them to record the MP3s at GNUpoint".
Way too much Slashdot...
That's what a pager is for :-)
It's a matter of getting used to, I guess. You can always use sloppy focus and move the mouse to the root window once your target window is activated, or have the mouse cursor disabled on text input (I think KDE has this).
With click-to-focus you always have to be careful not to click on a button or if you click on an editor, it automatically moves your cursor from where it should be.
You might have misunderstood me. I find it great that KDE/GNOME folks are making a newbie-friendly interface that people who are used to Win/Mac can use.
I believe they should have the chance to use Linux the way they want to, just like I want to use it the way that suits me. What I don't like is the push to outlaw anything that isn't a Win/Mac clone because the proverbial average user will be confused. All I care about is that I have the choice to use whatever I like precisely because everybody's tastes are different.
Not quite. Both KDE and GNOME are infinitely more themable than WinXP (look, feel, window title etc), and this still leave many other options for window managers, program launchers, applet-containers, desktop-based utils like Karamba etc. As long as I have a choice not to use the start menu, but a NextSTEP-like wharf, or a root menu to launch apps, I don't mind what the majority uses.
:)
Sure, you can use shell replacements for windows like LiteStep but I see it as more of a hack than the Windows Way (tm)
As for the second point, neither Windows nor OS X have 100% accelerated desktop. Not even close. This is being worked on in the freedesktop.org X server and it will quite probably be finished before either Win or Mac have it. There are many multimedia codecs/filter systems available, though you are correct in saying that there is no standard. Hopefully KDE and GNOME will find some solution to this (GStreamer seems poised to become the next standard multimedia system).
Both GNOME and KDE can already act as a stripped-down version of Windows/Mac. That's great. As long as I have the option of running Afterstep or some strange applet or a window-manager running in Emacs LISP, I'm happy because I have a choice. This new 3d thing is similar. I don't care whether the market accepts it or not. All that matters is that I have a choice to accept it or not. That's the essence of Linux desktop, IMHO. Not shoving average-joe stuff down my throat and killing any progress on any front because it might be too complex for mom and pop. Well, maybe it isn't meant for mom and pop?
The ultimate goal of Linux desktops should be the ability to set it up to work exactly the way you want it to, not to imitate the Mac.
I don't give a shit about the average home user. I like focus-follows mouse, magic desktop borders and transparent thingies. I don't think the goal of Linux desktops should be to take away all the things I like about them. If this new-fangled interface is good, people will use it, the average home user can use a stripped-down KDE set to emulate Windows or Mac if he/she wants to.
You probably wouldn't if those same utilities weren't developed for Linux/BSD/GNU first. Consider it a gift from the Free Software community :)
I think I saw it in the prospectus 5-6 years ago. I could be wrong, though.
His charity work should be commended, but I would respect it even more if much of it weren't in intangibles like MS Windows licenses.
They probably thought that RMS would be tempted to switch over to Harvard, now that they also have a Microsoft-inspired building.
If nothing else, it could lure Eben Moglen from Columbia; as far as I know, there are no Bill Gates buildings over there, and he will surely be tempted!
Gates has been cooperating with Cambridge for quite a while. There is a Bill and Melinda Gates scholarship for computer science that's been running for a really long time.
Xvid is Free Software, but it's an implementation of MPEG4, which is patent-encumbered. It's the same reason that Ogg Vorbis is seen as the champion of free music, although there are GPL MP3 encoders.
Don't know about DivX (tm), but XviD is a Free Software implementation of MPEG4, compatible with DivX and works like a charm on Linux. There are also the FFMpeg implementations (used by mplayer and xine) which play all DivX movies without problems and encode to a compatible format. Who cares how well DivX works under Linux? There are better substitutes.
Slashdot used to report on Ogg Tarkin (next-generation, wavelet-based video codec) a lot in the past, but since Theora showed up as a stop-gap solution, nobody's mentioning Tarkin. Is this project still alive?
Sorry for double post, but before I forget...
Dieting is generally a bad idea for weight loss (although useful for other purposes). The reason for this is that the body which is starved reacts by breaking down muscle tissue instead of fat. It tries to keep as much fat as possible as a response to the lack of food. This is why you see people diet for a long time and still have fat all over their body even after their muscle loses all definition.
In fact, the best way to lose weight is to cut down on fat (obviously), eat more carbohydrates and do it regularly (no starving yourself in the evening and such) and eat a reasonable amount of protein. Then do a lot of aerobic exercise (steppers, jogging, long-distance swimming and similar). You need carbohydrates to be able to withstand the exercise without feeling dead (most of it gets burnt during this process) and protein to support and rebuild the muscles as they get hit by the exercises.
My post was somewhat simplistic, but correct. Let me explain.
:-)
There are three ways of generating energy for your muscles:
1) Instant (using the ATP stores in the muscles themselves)
2) Anaerobic (without oxygen): This generally is done by burning carbohydrates in your body
3) Aerobic (using oxygen): This is burning fat with the presence of oxygen.
Now, the aerobic power kicks in only a few minutes after you start the exercise, that's why running for hours is good for burning fat. On the other hand, any power-related exercise like sprinting, jumping, weight-lifting etc is highly dependent on the anaerobic sources (read: carbohydrates). No amount of fat will get you jumping higher.
The point they were making is that it is useful for this particular person (who is a marathon runner). In this specific case, it might work, because long-distance running is almost purely aerobic -- as long that person has enough fat to support it. But any other sport activity (requiring carbohydrates or ATP stores which are derived from them) would suffer like hell after such a diet and be counter-productive. Also, your muscle tissue atrophies as a result of protein deprivation if your intake is not large enough.
You are correct in saying that specialised diets can make your body adapt and process foods differently, but I'm not sure if such a thing is always positive. I'll give you an example from a carbohydrate loading diet (lots of carbs, absolutely no fat). Here, athletes reacted excellently to the diet, but their body 'forgot' how to process fat as a result, giving a yo-yo bounce after the diet was finished. So, while I acknowledge the cleansing effect of fasting, I don't think it's the best thing for athletes on a regular basis.
Oh come on, don't pretent you hold up every single assertion to a microscope. We all take this shortcut. Some of us just have better bs detectors. Also happenstance is everpresent (some people call this luck).
:)
Of course you can't examine everything in detail (nor does anyone have the ability to always do it), but some critical thinking is really necessary.
I know a person who was convinced that dogs in Egypt say 'meow meow' instead of 'bow wow'. She thought it was cool and told all her friends about it. You don't really need a microscope for this
People are much more likely to accept something as a fact if it comes from 'a scientist'. It is as if thinking is a chore delegated to a few, and something most people shouldn't be concerned about. I always get a chuckle when reading about the great discoveries 'American scientists have proved' (for some reason, it always seem to be American scientists): children who chew bubble-gum are more intelligent; people who drink kool-aid grow more facial hair, etc etc etc.
I have recently had a discussion about dieting with a group of engineers (one of them a PhD). It was about a two-week diet where the person only drinks water. It is supposed to clean the body of toxins (very easily true) and improve one's sport performance (WTF?!). Apparently, they read in a book that after the body gets used to not having food, it draws the energy from the body itself and doesn't need food anymore. And these were educated people. Made me understand why so many people buy the etheric oil and penis enlargement crap.
How is Qt's licensing abysmal, please? It's licensed under the GPL. Just like Linux, GNU, GCC, Emacs, MySQL, MPlayer, The GIMP, and just about any other Free Software program.
So, what's so abysmal about the GPL? You sound like you think the world would be much better off if Linux, GNU, GCC, Emacs etc. all changed to proprietary licensing (like "WindowsXP from NewEgg") and available for "less than $100 from NewEgg".
Well, SuSE is not as platform-agnostic as Debian, but they do have x86, AMD64, PPC and SPARC versions, which means that YaST is quite likely portable enough.
My girlfriend is an engineer :)
Despite all the horror that DeBeers causes in third-world countries, from a European anti-trust perspective they only hurt diamond buyers: rich, bland, unimaginative money wasting types. I mean, they are getting ripped off for buying a glorified piece of coal they don't need and which serves no purpose at all. It means more taxes, great!
Microsoft, on the other hand, hurts all computer users, which is pretty much everyone in the EU.
On the other hand, you don't get support from Microsoft when using WordPerfect on their system either. It's difficult to support every single piece of software there is for Linux.
Personally, I've never had a problem with the packages on SuSE's webpage, but things sometimes break. I recently bought a laptop (of course, it came with a shiny new WinXP installed on it whether I wanted it or not) and the operating system crashed on me several times already for no apparent reason. SuSE never did that.
They were extradited for crimes they did in their own countries, while they were in their own countries.
Here we are talking about Australians being extradited to the US because they broke US law while living in Australia. That would be like US turning over Charlton Heston to China (for example) because it's illegal to own a rifle in China.