> Does that look like the Death Star to anyone else??
*sigh*
That's the POINT. It looks like the Death Star to EVERYONE.
That's why Mimas is cool. That and the fact that if the asteroid that created that crater was a tad larger, it would've destroyed the moon, which is pretty neat to think about.
> KDE and GNOME aren't much better. > It doesn't help that I find myself constantly dropping to the command line to do simple things > that should have an easy GUI equivalent - kill and ps, for example.
In KDE: kill: 1) press CTRL+ALT+ESC, pointer turns into skull, click on a window to kill its process 2) press CTRL+ESC, a graphical ps appears. click on processes to select them and click the kill button to kill them.
> I would like to see an extension to tabbed browsing where you could grab a tab and make a > new window out of it and pull it out of the current window. And I guess the inverse transform > would be handy - allow merging of windows into tabs.
I'm pretty sure that Multizilla does something like this.
> At least that's where Bill Gates & Steve Jobs are light years ahead of the open sauce crowd. The > interface is built into the OS, and if your app can't hook in, then you're only a script kiddie.
I'm not sure that I follow you. My web browser is Opera. It uses Qt. My mail client is Mozilla, which is XUL-based. I have a few cmd.exe windows open, which don't even try to emulate any widget set (in XP, the titlebar is even non-standard, which is something that even the most trivial of X11 window managers get right!). MS Office uses a different widget set than the OS itself, even though it's made by the same company. My editor, EditPad (really awesome), also appears to use different widgeting.
Where is this magic world where Win32 third-party apps are guaranteed to have the same interface as built-in apps? I get a slightly better degree of consistency with KDE than with Win2k, but the prevailing opinion is that Win2k should be solidly the same everywhere, and KDE should be confusing at every turn. Huh??
> I'd like an X window manager that let me grab the edge of a window and turn it, so it looked like it was > facing to the left, right, up, or down, depending on which direction I turned it. You would still see the > window, and it would still respond to events, but it would look compressed in the dimension you pushed > it.
metisse ("http://insitu.lri.fr/~chapuis/metisse/") does this.
Opera 7.60 P3 on Linux and Konqueror 3.3.1 on Linux do not display the symptoms of this New Vulnerability Does this mean that they are not part of All Browsers?
Incidentally, this IE/Moz-only exploit does make Opera's page-loading usually-hidden yellow bar thing sort of slightly go crazy before you click the "Consumer Alert" image, but it amounts to an extremely minor annoyance at most.
For some reason, I'm really pissed off that this topic's creator only checks IE and Mozilla to determine that an exploit is universal. I'm smooth enough to let snubs at lynx, links, elinks, Eudora Web, Blazer and Pocket Internet Explorer (for these browsers, though in current use, likely do not show the exploit) go, due to the nature of those particular browsers, but Konqueror and Opera -- my two most commonly run browsers -- are at least as full-featured as IE and arguably so against Mozilla.
> Mac's always have had the lowest cost of ownership over PC's.
> When the average turnover rate for a Dell is two years and the average turnover rate for Mac's is > several years it's not to hard to figure out which platform is cheaper in the long run.
> Of course Mac OS X is just plain gourgeous and very user friendly, happens to be very secure as well.
I wouldn't mind running OS X on a Mac at all. From what I've seen of it, the merger of a BSD back end with a glossy front end would really suit me.
But your argument has a flaw, and it is this: You're ignoring the DIY computer crowd. Yeah, Dell might have a higher total cost of ownership than Apple. But Dell isn't the cheapest route to go for a good computer.
I got my Duron-800 around when it came out, and I got it with a really cheap motherboard and graphics card and etcetera. The total cost was a few hundred bucks (actually, the chip and some associated parts were a donation from AMD, but ignore that for now). Because it was a cheap motherboard, the capacitors eventually burned out, and I had to go it again. This was a few months ago, and I bought an Athlon XP 2600+ with a higher quality motherboard, half a gigabyte of memory and a neato black case. The total cost of this upgrade was something like $360 after shipping costs.
I expect this combination to last me quite a while (though my 21" monitor, which has cost me a total of something like $900 (initial cost at online auction plus one repair after a stupid attempt of raising the refresh rate too high), may not have too many more years left, as I think I've had it since Clinton's first term in office). This means that I could concevably get a total of eight years (four years for the Duron plus four years from this Athlon) out of my sub-$1000 purchase without being horrifyingly obsolete.
If I bought a Mac back when I got the Duron, then I would have had to get an iMac, which was at the time an all-in-one machine, which means that I might have had to buy another entire computer to upgrade a single part (say, the monitor). In addition, it is doubtful that I would have been able to make this purchase for nearly the cost of my original Duron setup. More than that, I would not have had the benefit of using OS X, and -- given its extreme superiority to Mac OS 9 -- I probably would have spent another thousand dollars on a G4 upgrade.
Macs look pretty awesome. But I can't afford them with the salary of an experienced computer specialist, so all my programs and server work will have to remain on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows (which I use occasionally, because I got a Windows 2000 disk as a hand-me-down and it happens to work with my Linux machine's hardware).
> As a matter of fact, no, it didn't. Opera had MDI, which is child windows inside a parent window. > Opera didn't have a tabbed interface until version 6, which wasn't released until several months after > Hyatt implemented tabs in Mozilla.
I downloaded copies of a few older versions of Opera to test your hypothesis out. The link I used was below: http://www.markschenk.com/opera/history.ht ml
Opera 4.02 supports a tabbed interface much like the one in Opera 7. The tab bar can be docked at the top, left, right and bottom of the window. Tabs can't be moved around in this early version, though.
It's probably a safe bet that 4.00 supports the same features (though I'm told it was rather buggy).
I don't remember offhand when it came out, but it was a long time before Multizilla came out, and Multizilla preceded Mozilla's built-in tabs by a decent amount of time.
> and if everyone would switch to Linux it would be as you state, > a homogenus computing environment - which would be bad as well.
I disagree. Each distro is slightly different from the next in non-trivial ways. They have different packaging systems, they open different ports by default, they have different default web browsers, different default email clients... the list goes on.
Individual companies, organizations and agencies can customize their OS so that it differs even more from the norm. They can simply, for instance, only open port 15395 and communicate through that port via ssh and nothing else. They can have only the tty programs installed, and no client software from which other Linux users might be getting viral infections. Heck, they could run Linux on ARM or PowerPC processors if they wanted to, and that would really make the x86-based Linux viruses less than irritants to them.
Linux is sort of more a *class* of operating systems, not a singular operating systems. Even better, it's similar to other POSIXish systems, so you could mix it with FreeBSD and OS X and Cygwin (interesting idea, that) and others, and you'd have similar methodologies all over the place, but you would not have a homogeneous environment.
But, yes, I agree that you can't just spontaneously shift large organizations across operating systems given the OS dependence of many programs. Still, this is the sort of thing that organizations really, really should think about when they're signing onto a platform in the first place -- use Java, use web apps, use stuff based on Qt or Perl or Python or maybe even ".NET". Use a centralized server for the applications and use the machines as a terminal, or squeeze the testicles of your supplier until they offer cross platform friendly applications.
When I write Linux applications, I write them in Perl and C++/Qt instead of C++/KDE. More often than not, after I fool around with an app, I can take it to work and just recompile it (or, in the case of Perl, run it straight away) on my Windows 2000 machine, or I could upload it to our FreeBSD server and run it on that. Holy crap, this sort of thing should be *natural* to programmers. I'm not all that experienced, and I can clearly see that this would really solve some major problems for consumers and clients.
> The Last Starfighter was kind of pioneering in its use of CGI, but it was by no means the first film to use > CGI special effects. Tron, made two years before The Last Starfighter, used a lot of CGI (watching it > today, you sit there screaming "use some Gouroud shading, you lazy bums" at the screen in some parts). > For that matter, the trench run briefing in A New Hope, way back in 1977, was CGI.
So... perhaps we can say that Last Starfighter was the first instance of CGI being used to model real-world objects? After all, both the Star Wars and Tron instances were CGI aping computer graphics, while TLS's CGI was modeling "real" space ships.
> > and other things they say in describing the strenght of the ribbon; "3-5 times as strong as > > needed", what about correct english as in 3 to 5 times stronger than needed.
> I think your suggested correction is the incorrect phrase. Do you say "twice stronger than > needed" or "twice as strong as needed". The "3 to 5 times as strong as" phrase translates > directly into a mathematical value, e.g. between 300 and 500% of the strength needed. "3 to 5 times > stronger than" has no comparative equivalent.
Both technically work. "3 to 5 times as strong as" means "between 300% and 500% of the strength needed", while "3 to 5 times stronger than" means "between 400% and 600% of the strength needed", in the same way that "100% faster" means "200% as fast".
> Everyone complains about CGI Jabba, Han shooting first, and so on (why doesn't anyone complain about > the godawful music video in Jedi?), but I've not seen any complaints about the additions to the Sarlacc, the > skies of Bespin, or the 'sneak preview' of Coruscant at the end of Jedi.
Er. This past Sunday, I and my friends were having a discussion on this very subject, and I covered two of the above three points in my ranting of the changes. I absolutely *hated* the Sarlacc pit changes. The creature initially was something really alien, a monster without any features traditionally associated with carnivores. And then they turned it into a damned Audrey II. Bah!
The end of RotJ was a mix for me. The montage of celebration scenes were okay, I guess, but the original "Jub Jub" song had this rather neat crescendo leading into the Star Wars theme song, and I really missed that after they changed the music.
The changes over Bespin were phenomenal. Empire was the only movie whose coolness wasn't detracted by the Special Edition alterations.
--
-JC
PS: I also object to the removal of RotJ's brief nude scene in Jabba's Palace.
> Frankly, I was always a little annoyed by konquerer, and all the little buttons that I didn't use.
For what it's worth, you can completely get rid of any KDE button that you don't like. And you can remove every single one of those side-tabs. Konqueror is insanely configurable (after all, KDE's mantra is one of anal retentiveness...). You just get rid of unnecessary stuff from the toolbars, then save the current profile (which can be done under Settings menu).
No attack on GNOME intended, mind you. It's not what I prefer, but they're doing a lot of interesting things there (stuff with hal and dashboard).
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
Re:Everyone has lost their minds
on
GNOME 2.8 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Prediction: As soon as Longhorn comes out with its secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets like > picture slideshows and analog clocks (like OSX is doing now I believe too), no matter how bad of an > idea it is to start with, all major window managers in Linux will have one too. It's the, "What! They have > something we don't have?! Who cares if it sucks, IMPLEMENT IT!" mentality.
You can already have a secondary panel (what you above call a "taskbar") in both GNOME and KDE. Heck, you can probably have more than that. Both environments are built around the idea of having multiple panels which contain the taskbar, pager, notification area ("system tray" in winspeak) and multipurpose applets. I run KDE with a top and bottom panel -- the top has a news ticker, a dictionary field, the apps menu and a list of currently mounted media (CD-ROM discs and so forth), while the bottom has my taskbar and notification area, as well as a digital clock, a binary clock, the show desktop button, a weather applet and some system monitoring stuff.
Yep, that's right: KDE and GNOME were *first* with the idea of a "secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets". Heck, I didn't even tell you about the "fuzzy" clock. "Half past ten" indeed!
We like having the best of all worlds. That's why you can change between applications using any or all of the windows way (task bar), the Apple way (Kompose, which acts like OS X's Expose) or the Unix way (multiple desktops plus focus-follows-mouse. The beauty of it is that any of these features that you don't like can simply be deactivated so that you never have to see them again.
> > what the hell does this have to do with BSD > Because Gnome runs on BSD as well as Linux.
Bah. I've been running KDE 3.1.4 on Windows 2000 (courtesy of Cygwin). Does that mean that we should see a Microsoft logo the next time KDE is updated?
For what it's worth, I run FreeBSD and any one of several flavours of Linux, so I'm all interested and stuff about installing GNOME 2.8.:)
> Yes, same here. I read the first part of 'uesdnatnrd' as 'used' (and I dunno if thats a typo in your comment) > and then as the second part made no sense, the word was interpreted as 'understand', based on the > context.
Holy crap.... I would have *never* worked that out if you hadn't pointed it out. I cannot comprehend how anybody would see "uesdnatnrd" and read it as "understand". The closest I could figure was "who's that nerd?".
> Although I agree with Asimov being ranked first in the authors polls. I would have put Clarke second. > Certainly before Wells, Hoyle and Wyndham.
> Every time I read a book by Clarke it routinely blows my mind. Take Childhoods End for example, > that is probably the best sci fi book I have read. I originally read it when I was 15 and even after many > rereads I am still blown away (I find it somewhat depressing)
Clarke's early books were great. But the past two or three decades of his career have been filled with tremendously bad sequels with surprisingly poor stories. Blame Gentry Lee if you wish, but Clarke still said "yes" to them.
If Welles made Kane then filled out the rest of his career by acting for Ed Wood, then the guy wouldn't've been seen as such a legend, although Ed's films might have been better off.
It's like Rutger Hauer. He's done some great work. But 90% of his later career has been weak B movies and silly TV spots.
> Can you set individual windows in Firefox to specific refresh times? Haven't found that yet.
The "ReloadEvery" extension ("http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph p?id=115&vid=293") might do that.
> I assume Firefox can save sessions, haven't used it that much yet.
You have to install extensions for that. There's nothing for this (that I know of) at update.mozilla.org, but you could try the "Tabbrowser Extensions" over at "http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextension s.html.en".
It's possible that MultiZilla ("http://multizilla.mozdev.org") may also work. I use that for Seamonkey (the Mozilla suite).
It is rather dismaying that such a critical feature isn't built-in to Firefox.
> Can it set windows home pages, the way Opera used to?
Unfortunately, despite being an Opera user since v3.x, I have no idea what "windows home pages" are.
> There are no safe browsers (yet?), just ones that haven't been picked on much.
While "safe" as an absolute is an impossibility (after all, your house could be nuked, and your browser can't protect you from that particular brand of hack), it can be reasonably stated that some web browsers are safe in terms of not having huge, gaping mac truck holes in them.
For one thing, I'm pretty certain that Konqueror and Opera, the browsers that I run on Linux and FreeBSD, are safe and would only require occasional patching, even if they became suddenly megapopular.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
Re:Does it matter? Opera's still the best browser.
on
Netscape 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
> How are sessions different from profiles?
By "session", OP means that when you quit then restart the browser, the same pages/tabs/windows that were open on close open again. Firefox only does this if you install extensions that aren't even yet available on "update.mozilla.org".
> Firefox has far more customizablility when it comes to layout, Try getting the bookmark bar under the > address bar in Opera.
Er. My "Personal Bar" (as it is called in Opera) *is* under my address bar. I have both situated at the bottom of my browser window, with the status bar at the bottom, the personal bar above it, and the address bar above that. My page bar (that's the "tab bar" in mozspeak) is running down the right edge of the window.
Now for putting the address bar above the personal bar, but at the *top* of the window. Hmmm. You're sort of right. The address bar refuses to move above the personal bar. All is not lost, though. The "Main Bar" lives above the personal bar at the top of the window, and all you'd really need to do is drag the address field widget from the address bar to the main bar.
Opera is insanely customizable, to a level that makes Firefox blush. I can't even set my Firefox navigation buttons to be full size while having buttons on another bar being small size, and that's a major annoyance! I do like the ability to put random widgets onto the menu bar in Firefox, though.
> In Firefox its a matter of drag and drop. Customizability in Opera is a bunch of > confusing settings in two places in the menus.
In Opera, it's right click on thing you want to move or modify.
Your other points are probably more valid. I know little about its rendering ability, save for that I almost never have problems (as a little jab, I should note that Opera doesn't have, for instance, Mozilla's slashdot bug).
> tabbed browsing is now just an annoyance thanks to expose.. > I use tabbed browsing and Expose (and Desktop Manager) and your comment made no more sense to > me than someone saying "loud dogs are now just annoyance thanks to my new wrist-watch".
I have to agree with you. I use MDI ("tabs") in web browsers for the advantage of session management. Right now, I have forty web pages opened in Opera, six opened in Mozilla, and an assortment of miscellaneous apps -- this is simply normal for me, just as closing every existing window before starting up a new application is normal for many home MS Windows users. If I were running OS X (or Metisse on Linux) and I activated the Expose feature without the benefit of MDI in my web browsers, then all I'd see is a bunch of little incomprehensible dots on the screen.
> If you do email, thats all you do. It's like working a government job.
Um. The highest paid peer in my clique works for the government. He makes twice as much money as any of the rest of us. He gets to go to all sorts of varied training classes in other states, with hotel charges being paid for by the government. The stuff he does is like a stripped down version of what I do, but it is varied. He's a network admin, and he performs the tasks generally associated with this, which aren't all that limiting.
I'd kill for a government job. Being a programmer and a Windows/FreeBSD/Novell admin and a computer repair guy and the guy with sole responsibility over setting up web/mail servers and implementing web pages and spam/virus filters and handling transmission and translation of EDI as well as inventory data from a thousand miles away and handling in-house service calls and being responsible for updating the company's line card and designing the company's ISO 900x documents doesn't pay enough to get me out of my parents house after eight years in the real world.
Fuck the private sector!
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: I wouldn't really *kill* for that government job. But I might "go gay" or do something similar that most people would consider extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
If you hold SHIFT when doing in Opera, it will open the search in a new tab. If you hold CTRL+SHIFT, it'll open in a new background tab.
> I've never heard anything quite like that before!
:p
Yeah, but in this particular context, the statement is correct. OP was talking about the ISS, which *is* a space station.
> Does that look like the Death Star to anyone else??
*sigh*
That's the POINT. It looks like the Death Star to EVERYONE.
That's why Mimas is cool. That and the fact that if the asteroid that created that crater was a tad larger, it would've destroyed the moon, which is pretty neat to think about.
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-JC
> KDE and GNOME aren't much better.
> It doesn't help that I find myself constantly dropping to the command line to do simple things
> that should have an easy GUI equivalent - kill and ps, for example.
In KDE:
kill:
1) press CTRL+ALT+ESC, pointer turns into skull, click on a window to kill its process
2) press CTRL+ESC, a graphical ps appears. click on processes to select them and click the kill button to kill them.
ps:
1) CTRL-ESC
--
-JC
> I would like to see an extension to tabbed browsing where you could grab a tab and make a
> new window out of it and pull it out of the current window. And I guess the inverse transform
> would be handy - allow merging of windows into tabs.
I'm pretty sure that Multizilla does something like this.
> At least that's where Bill Gates & Steve Jobs are light years ahead of the open sauce crowd. The
> interface is built into the OS, and if your app can't hook in, then you're only a script kiddie.
I'm not sure that I follow you. My web browser is Opera. It uses Qt. My mail client is Mozilla, which is XUL-based. I have a few cmd.exe windows open, which don't even try to emulate any widget set (in XP, the titlebar is even non-standard, which is something that even the most trivial of X11 window managers get right!). MS Office uses a different widget set than the OS itself, even though it's made by the same company. My editor, EditPad (really awesome), also appears to use different widgeting.
Where is this magic world where Win32 third-party apps are guaranteed to have the same interface as built-in apps? I get a slightly better degree of consistency with KDE than with Win2k, but the prevailing opinion is that Win2k should be solidly the same everywhere, and KDE should be confusing at every turn. Huh??
--
-JC
> I'd like an X window manager that let me grab the edge of a window and turn it, so it looked like it was
> facing to the left, right, up, or down, depending on which direction I turned it. You would still see the
> window, and it would still respond to events, but it would look compressed in the dimension you pushed
> it.
metisse ("http://insitu.lri.fr/~chapuis/metisse/") does this.
Opera 7.60 P3 on Linux and Konqueror 3.3.1 on Linux do not display the symptoms of this New Vulnerability Does this mean that they are not part of All Browsers?
Incidentally, this IE/Moz-only exploit does make Opera's page-loading usually-hidden yellow bar thing sort of slightly go crazy before you click the "Consumer Alert" image, but it amounts to an extremely minor annoyance at most.
For some reason, I'm really pissed off that this topic's creator only checks IE and Mozilla to determine that an exploit is universal. I'm smooth enough to let snubs at lynx, links, elinks, Eudora Web, Blazer and Pocket Internet Explorer (for these browsers, though in current use, likely do not show the exploit) go, due to the nature of those particular browsers, but Konqueror and Opera -- my two most commonly run browsers -- are at least as full-featured as IE and arguably so against Mozilla.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Mac's always have had the lowest cost of ownership over PC's.
> When the average turnover rate for a Dell is two years and the average turnover rate for Mac's is
> several years it's not to hard to figure out which platform is cheaper in the long run.
> Of course Mac OS X is just plain gourgeous and very user friendly, happens to be very secure as well.
I wouldn't mind running OS X on a Mac at all. From what I've seen of it, the merger of a BSD back end with a glossy front end would really suit me.
But your argument has a flaw, and it is this: You're ignoring the DIY computer crowd. Yeah, Dell might have a higher total cost of ownership than Apple. But Dell isn't the cheapest route to go for a good computer.
I got my Duron-800 around when it came out, and I got it with a really cheap motherboard and graphics card and etcetera. The total cost was a few hundred bucks (actually, the chip and some associated parts were a donation from AMD, but ignore that for now). Because it was a cheap motherboard, the capacitors eventually burned out, and I had to go it again. This was a few months ago, and I bought an Athlon XP 2600+ with a higher quality motherboard, half a gigabyte of memory and a neato black case. The total cost of this upgrade was something like $360 after shipping costs.
I expect this combination to last me quite a while (though my 21" monitor, which has cost me a total of something like $900 (initial cost at online auction plus one repair after a stupid attempt of raising the refresh rate too high), may not have too many more years left, as I think I've had it since Clinton's first term in office). This means that I could concevably get a total of eight years (four years for the Duron plus four years from this Athlon) out of my sub-$1000 purchase without being horrifyingly obsolete.
If I bought a Mac back when I got the Duron, then I would have had to get an iMac, which was at the time an all-in-one machine, which means that I might have had to buy another entire computer to upgrade a single part (say, the monitor). In addition, it is doubtful that I would have been able to make this purchase for nearly the cost of my original Duron setup. More than that, I would not have had the benefit of using OS X, and -- given its extreme superiority to Mac OS 9 -- I probably would have spent another thousand dollars on a G4 upgrade.
Macs look pretty awesome. But I can't afford them with the salary of an experienced computer specialist, so all my programs and server work will have to remain on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows (which I use occasionally, because I got a Windows 2000 disk as a hand-me-down and it happens to work with my Linux machine's hardware).
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> As a matter of fact, no, it didn't. Opera had MDI, which is child windows inside a parent window.
t ml
> Opera didn't have a tabbed interface until version 6, which wasn't released until several months after
> Hyatt implemented tabs in Mozilla.
I downloaded copies of a few older versions of Opera to test your hypothesis out. The link I used was below:
http://www.markschenk.com/opera/history.h
Opera 4.02 supports a tabbed interface much like the one in Opera 7. The tab bar can be docked at the top, left, right and bottom of the window. Tabs can't be moved around in this early version, though.
It's probably a safe bet that 4.00 supports the same features (though I'm told it was rather buggy).
I don't remember offhand when it came out, but it was a long time before Multizilla came out, and Multizilla preceded Mozilla's built-in tabs by a decent amount of time.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> and if everyone would switch to Linux it would be as you state,
... the list goes on.
> a homogenus computing environment - which would be bad as well.
I disagree. Each distro is slightly different from the next in non-trivial ways. They have different packaging systems, they open different ports by default, they have different default web browsers, different default email clients
Individual companies, organizations and agencies can customize their OS so that it differs even more from the norm. They can simply, for instance, only open port 15395 and communicate through that port via ssh and nothing else. They can have only the tty programs installed, and no client software from which other Linux users might be getting viral infections. Heck, they could run Linux on ARM or PowerPC processors if they wanted to, and that would really make the x86-based Linux viruses less than irritants to them.
Linux is sort of more a *class* of operating systems, not a singular operating systems. Even better, it's similar to other POSIXish systems, so you could mix it with FreeBSD and OS X and Cygwin (interesting idea, that) and others, and you'd have similar methodologies all over the place, but you would not have a homogeneous environment.
But, yes, I agree that you can't just spontaneously shift large organizations across operating systems given the OS dependence of many programs. Still, this is the sort of thing that organizations really, really should think about when they're signing onto a platform in the first place -- use Java, use web apps, use stuff based on Qt or Perl or Python or maybe even ".NET". Use a centralized server for the applications and use the machines as a terminal, or squeeze the testicles of your supplier until they offer cross platform friendly applications.
When I write Linux applications, I write them in Perl and C++/Qt instead of C++/KDE. More often than not, after I fool around with an app, I can take it to work and just recompile it (or, in the case of Perl, run it straight away) on my Windows 2000 machine, or I could upload it to our FreeBSD server and run it on that. Holy crap, this sort of thing should be *natural* to programmers. I'm not all that experienced, and I can clearly see that this would really solve some major problems for consumers and clients.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> The Last Starfighter was kind of pioneering in its use of CGI, but it was by no means the first film to use
... perhaps we can say that Last Starfighter was the first instance of CGI being used to model real-world objects? After all, both the Star Wars and Tron instances were CGI aping computer graphics, while TLS's CGI was modeling "real" space ships.
> CGI special effects. Tron, made two years before The Last Starfighter, used a lot of CGI (watching it
> today, you sit there screaming "use some Gouroud shading, you lazy bums" at the screen in some parts).
> For that matter, the trench run briefing in A New Hope, way back in 1977, was CGI.
So
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> > and other things they say in describing the strenght of the ribbon; "3-5 times as strong as
> > needed", what about correct english as in 3 to 5 times stronger than needed.
> I think your suggested correction is the incorrect phrase. Do you say "twice stronger than
> needed" or "twice as strong as needed". The "3 to 5 times as strong as" phrase translates
> directly into a mathematical value, e.g. between 300 and 500% of the strength needed. "3 to 5 times
> stronger than" has no comparative equivalent.
Both technically work. "3 to 5 times as strong as" means "between 300% and 500% of the strength needed", while "3 to 5 times stronger than" means "between 400% and 600% of the strength needed", in the same way that "100% faster" means "200% as fast".
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Everyone complains about CGI Jabba, Han shooting first, and so on (why doesn't anyone complain about
> the godawful music video in Jedi?), but I've not seen any complaints about the additions to the Sarlacc, the
> skies of Bespin, or the 'sneak preview' of Coruscant at the end of Jedi.
Er. This past Sunday, I and my friends were having a discussion on this very subject, and I covered two of the above three points in my ranting of the changes. I absolutely *hated* the Sarlacc pit changes. The creature initially was something really alien, a monster without any features traditionally associated with carnivores. And then they turned it into a damned Audrey II. Bah!
The end of RotJ was a mix for me. The montage of celebration scenes were okay, I guess, but the original "Jub Jub" song had this rather neat crescendo leading into the Star Wars theme song, and I really missed that after they changed the music.
The changes over Bespin were phenomenal. Empire was the only movie whose coolness wasn't detracted by the Special Edition alterations.
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-JC
PS: I also object to the removal of RotJ's brief nude scene in Jabba's Palace.
> Frankly, I was always a little annoyed by konquerer, and all the little buttons that I didn't use.
For what it's worth, you can completely get rid of any KDE button that you don't like. And you can remove every single one of those side-tabs. Konqueror is insanely configurable (after all, KDE's mantra is one of anal retentiveness...). You just get rid of unnecessary stuff from the toolbars, then save the current profile (which can be done under Settings menu).
No attack on GNOME intended, mind you. It's not what I prefer, but they're doing a lot of interesting things there (stuff with hal and dashboard).
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Prediction: As soon as Longhorn comes out with its secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets like
> picture slideshows and analog clocks (like OSX is doing now I believe too), no matter how bad of an
> idea it is to start with, all major window managers in Linux will have one too. It's the, "What! They have
> something we don't have?! Who cares if it sucks, IMPLEMENT IT!" mentality.
You can already have a secondary panel (what you above call a "taskbar") in both GNOME and KDE. Heck, you can probably have more than that. Both environments are built around the idea of having multiple panels which contain the taskbar, pager, notification area ("system tray" in winspeak) and multipurpose applets. I run KDE with a top and bottom panel -- the top has a news ticker, a dictionary field, the apps menu and a list of currently mounted media (CD-ROM discs and so forth), while the bottom has my taskbar and notification area, as well as a digital clock, a binary clock, the show desktop button, a weather applet and some system monitoring stuff.
Yep, that's right: KDE and GNOME were *first* with the idea of a "secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets". Heck, I didn't even tell you about the "fuzzy" clock. "Half past ten" indeed!
We like having the best of all worlds. That's why you can change between applications using any or all of the windows way (task bar), the Apple way (Kompose, which acts like OS X's Expose) or the Unix way (multiple desktops plus focus-follows-mouse. The beauty of it is that any of these features that you don't like can simply be deactivated so that you never have to see them again.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> > what the hell does this have to do with BSD
:)
> Because Gnome runs on BSD as well as Linux.
Bah. I've been running KDE 3.1.4 on Windows 2000 (courtesy of Cygwin). Does that mean that we should see a Microsoft logo the next time KDE is updated?
For what it's worth, I run FreeBSD and any one of several flavours of Linux, so I'm all interested and stuff about installing GNOME 2.8.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Yes, same here. I read the first part of 'uesdnatnrd' as 'used' (and I dunno if thats a typo in your comment)
> and then as the second part made no sense, the word was interpreted as 'understand', based on the
> context.
Holy crap.... I would have *never* worked that out if you hadn't pointed it out. I cannot comprehend how anybody would see "uesdnatnrd" and read it as "understand". The closest I could figure was "who's that nerd?".
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Although I agree with Asimov being ranked first in the authors polls. I would have put Clarke second.
> Certainly before Wells, Hoyle and Wyndham.
> Every time I read a book by Clarke it routinely blows my mind. Take Childhoods End for example,
> that is probably the best sci fi book I have read. I originally read it when I was 15 and even after many
> rereads I am still blown away (I find it somewhat depressing)
Clarke's early books were great. But the past two or three decades of his career have been filled with tremendously bad sequels with surprisingly poor stories. Blame Gentry Lee if you wish, but Clarke still said "yes" to them.
If Welles made Kane then filled out the rest of his career by acting for Ed Wood, then the guy wouldn't've been seen as such a legend, although Ed's films might have been better off.
It's like Rutger Hauer. He's done some great work. But 90% of his later career has been weak B movies and silly TV spots.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Can you set individual windows in Firefox to specific refresh times? Haven't found that yet.
h p?id=115&vid=293") might do that.
n s.html.en".
The "ReloadEvery" extension ("http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.p
> I assume Firefox can save sessions, haven't used it that much yet.
You have to install extensions for that. There's nothing for this (that I know of) at update.mozilla.org, but you could try the "Tabbrowser Extensions" over at "http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensio
It's possible that MultiZilla ("http://multizilla.mozdev.org") may also work. I use that for Seamonkey (the Mozilla suite).
It is rather dismaying that such a critical feature isn't built-in to Firefox.
> Can it set windows home pages, the way Opera used to?
Unfortunately, despite being an Opera user since v3.x, I have no idea what "windows home pages" are.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> There are no safe browsers (yet?), just ones that haven't been picked on much.
While "safe" as an absolute is an impossibility (after all, your house could be nuked, and your browser can't protect you from that particular brand of hack), it can be reasonably stated that some web browsers are safe in terms of not having huge, gaping mac truck holes in them.
For one thing, I'm pretty certain that Konqueror and Opera, the browsers that I run on Linux and FreeBSD, are safe and would only require occasional patching, even if they became suddenly megapopular.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> How are sessions different from profiles?
By "session", OP means that when you quit then restart the browser, the same pages/tabs/windows that were open on close open again. Firefox only does this if you install extensions that aren't even yet available on "update.mozilla.org".
> Firefox has far more customizablility when it comes to layout, Try getting the bookmark bar under the
> address bar in Opera.
Er. My "Personal Bar" (as it is called in Opera) *is* under my address bar. I have both situated at the bottom of my browser window, with the status bar at the bottom, the personal bar above it, and the address bar above that. My page bar (that's the "tab bar" in mozspeak) is running down the right edge of the window.
Now for putting the address bar above the personal bar, but at the *top* of the window. Hmmm. You're sort of right. The address bar refuses to move above the personal bar. All is not lost, though. The "Main Bar" lives above the personal bar at the top of the window, and all you'd really need to do is drag the address field widget from the address bar to the main bar.
Opera is insanely customizable, to a level that makes Firefox blush. I can't even set my Firefox navigation buttons to be full size while having buttons on another bar being small size, and that's a major annoyance! I do like the ability to put random widgets onto the menu bar in Firefox, though.
> In Firefox its a matter of drag and drop. Customizability in Opera is a bunch of
> confusing settings in two places in the menus.
In Opera, it's right click on thing you want to move or modify.
Your other points are probably more valid. I know little about its rendering ability, save for that I almost never have problems (as a little jab, I should note that Opera doesn't have, for instance, Mozilla's slashdot bug).
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> What word do you suggest replacing the "American" in "I am American"
> (don't reply with some smartass answer either)?
How about "a US citizen"?
> tabbed browsing is now just an annoyance thanks to expose..
> I use tabbed browsing and Expose (and Desktop Manager) and your comment made no more sense to
> me than someone saying "loud dogs are now just annoyance thanks to my new wrist-watch".
I have to agree with you. I use MDI ("tabs") in web browsers for the advantage of session management. Right now, I have forty web pages opened in Opera, six opened in Mozilla, and an assortment of miscellaneous apps -- this is simply normal for me, just as closing every existing window before starting up a new application is normal for many home MS Windows users. If I were running OS X (or Metisse on Linux) and I activated the Expose feature without the benefit of MDI in my web browsers, then all I'd see is a bunch of little incomprehensible dots on the screen.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> If you do email, thats all you do. It's like working a government job.
Um. The highest paid peer in my clique works for the government. He makes twice as much money as any of the rest of us. He gets to go to all sorts of varied training classes in other states, with hotel charges being paid for by the government. The stuff he does is like a stripped down version of what I do, but it is varied. He's a network admin, and he performs the tasks generally associated with this, which aren't all that limiting.
I'd kill for a government job. Being a programmer and a Windows/FreeBSD/Novell admin and a computer repair guy and the guy with sole responsibility over setting up web/mail servers and implementing web pages and spam/virus filters and handling transmission and translation of EDI as well as inventory data from a thousand miles away and handling in-house service calls and being responsible for updating the company's line card and designing the company's ISO 900x documents doesn't pay enough to get me out of my parents house after eight years in the real world.
Fuck the private sector!
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: I wouldn't really *kill* for that government job. But I might "go gay" or do something similar that most people would consider extreme.