> Why are there obvious muppets as main characters? > Is this a Sci-Fi show or a puppet show?
It's no more a puppet show than Star Wars was. And using puppetry is no better or worse than using bad cgi. Have you seen some of the horrid cgi work (read: species... 8472, I believe they were called) done on the far more expensive "Star Trek: Voyager"?
> Why is one of them farting an on-going joke?
It was a species thing. It wasn't meant to be funny on its own, and it usually wasn't particularly funny, except that the emissions of whcih you speak were helium gas and had nothing in particular to do with digestive processes. And they were fairly rarely done.
Mind you, I can easily see how somebody could be put off by this show. I enjoyed it a lot, but I found the final season to be absolutely horrid, an example of how to avoid good storytelling. My primary draw to the show were characters who weren't written with monochrome strokes (that it, nobody was "Good" or "Evil", save for the antagonist in the final season).
> Moore's law is still in effect, but it doesn't dictate die sizes, only speed and cost
I... no, wait. Moore's Law does dictate die sizes, and it doesn't dictate speed and cost! Moore's Law has to do with the increasing density of transistors inside microchips, which directly ties into the size of the die (if you double the number of transistors per square millimeter, you can have the same number of transistors in a smaller die!). Speed is just an occasional side effect that has to do with shorter pathways caused by the smaller die.
The local members of a student organization at my alma mater have three computers. One of them was old and slow and not quite stable enough to survive a Windows installation. So one of the tech guys there installed Red Hat. You'd think that's okay, right? I mean, the computer is there essentially for people to browse the web and do basic stuff, and if it can't do it with Windows, there's little reason to just have the thing lying there as a paperweight.
But nearly everybody complained. They didn't complain about it being difficult to use. They simply *didn't like Linux*. They complained, for weeks, and rallied with shouts along the lines of "LINUX SUCKS, GET RID OF LINUX!". The *only* wanted Windows, and they would prefer a dead computer to a computer running Linux.
The head of the techs there eventually had to issue a public apology at one of the meetings in order to placate the people. He started his apology with the words "Listen, I know that Linux sucks the cock...".
I have never, ever seen any user of any other operating system (even Mac OS!) act in this irrational, insane manner. Even the most aggressive Linux zealot will (in my experience) respect other peoples' wishes to run Windows or Mac OS or FreeBSD. FreeBSD users will respect Linux users. Mac OS users will frown at -- but accept -- the people who run Windows. But there happen to, in at least one place that I hold dear, be Windows users who turn into rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth sociopaths whenever anybody so much as mentions the word "Linux".
> Because without a large "evil" bad guy to rail > against, no-one would bother writing OSS.
Open source software predates closed source software. Or, at least, the two developed at the same time in parallel. At one point in the past, it was *normal* for people to share code in their programs, especially among hobbyists. Code was frequently printed out in magazines for people to implement on their systems. Computing was a largely *scientific* endeavor, so the impulse to lock everything down wasn't very strong until the profit motive started really kicking in.
Movements like GNU were started in reaction to when companies and universities started rejecting OSS. One of the big events back then was when Bill Gates sent out a letter to the hobbyist community urging them to stop freely giving out their code, because (according to him) it encouraged theft.
Yeah, Linux wouldn't be around (or, at least, strong) without Microsoft. But we'd probably have a heterogenous computing world where simple macro worms couldn't take down ninety percent of the planet, and Apple would be duking it out with IBM, Atari and Commodore for the desktop. And they'd all be bastards, but the fact that nobody's dominant would mean that everybody would have to interoperate with everybody else.
And FreeBSD would probably have still come out, and certain types of open source software (like office suites) would be more advanced than they are today, because file format standards would be a bit more rigidly applied (and these particular programs would support more file formats than the proprietaries, which would actually be more important in this hypothetical world).
Trolltech has no impetus or obligation to port GPL Qt to Win32. But GPL is GPL, so anybody with enough skill can -- and did -- port the codebase to MS Windows. Yeah, it's not perfect (yet), but I've compiled and run stuff written in Qt2.3NC with this GPL'd version of Qt3.x.
> You fail to see the long term benefits. What will take bash$> for tif in > `ls *.tif` ; do convert $tif -border 50 -bordercolor \#FFFFFF -quality 100 > -scale 25% -resolution 96 `cat $tif | cut -f1 -d"."`.jpg for every conversion job will, > on the GUI side, now require only > 1) Select file(s) > 2) Drag > 3) Drop
I should point out that you could have the same basic functionality on the command line, by taking the command line from before and pasting an alias for it into the user's startup file. And you could then type ' ' whenever you want to do the conversion.
But yeah, there are advantages to using the gui sometimes.:)
> Reading the patent document, the key point is that the users hits a key and all the desktops > are scaled within the window using animation. So if I have a 3 x 3 virtual desktop and hit the > desktop view button, my screen is shrunk to (say) the top left 9th of the screen and 8 other > mini desktops become visible. If I select another desktop it zooms towards me filling the > screen. They make a number of references to background images and I guess animating 9 > different background images for the demo above would look very cool.
>I haven't seen this implemented before. The nearest is Mac OS X.3 which allows all > application windows to be minimised and switched between, I use it a lot and it is excellent, > particularly if you have a number of quicktime movies or similar playing. As I recall, Apple > patented this and I think this is Microsoft's answer
This sounds a lot like 3ddesktop, a rather flashy paging program for X11 (well, at least Linux)computers. It's an OpenGL application. When you click a particular button or hotkey, the screen that you're looking at scales down so that you can select another virtual desktop. The desktops can be viewed in several ways (for example, if you have four virtual desktops, you can have them displayed as the faces on a rotating cube). It's not exactly the same thing as you describe, but it's somewhat similar, and I find it interesting.
> The length of day will makes no difference to the amount of > solar energy the planet receives. > You can't get away from the fact that Venus is far too close > to the Sun for a stable earth like climate to exist.
Grandparent poster was positing placing a big object between Venus and Sol. This would block a nontrivial amount of radiation coming to the planet.
> Now if only Opie had A DECENT WORDPROCESSOR THAT WORKED!!!!!!! Someone, please! Something that > would read/write Openoffice files would be amazing.
Hancom Office is pretty good. It's only free with the Zaurus, though. Otherwise, you might have to give up some of those little green pieces of paper that nobody has anymore.
> Work for the federal government. The pay may not be as sexy as private industry was during the dot > com boom, but I've had a steady job for 6 years now since I got out of college, good raises every > year, flexible hours, relaxed work environment, etc.
I dunno about you, but civil service (Federal, State, County, etc..) jobs appear sexy as hell to me. I'd have a major orgasm of some sort or another if I could get one.
In my three man clique, I do -- by far -- the most technical, most advanced, most time consuming work, and I have to spend much of my personal time learning more about job related stuff (for example, I'm always lurking on the Yahoo Groups Qt programmers list, and I spend tons of my own time working out how to get ezmlm (just got it perfect this week!) and jabber (damned jabberd2 keeps crapping out with an "sm died" message; I'll have to recompile everything with debugging enabled)), but I also recieve -- by far -- the lowest salary, with Peter the File Clerk showing off as runner up for lowest salary at a pay rate 16% above mine, and that's before you count that my commute is a thousand dollars per year more expensive than his (or anyone else's that I know).
Anthony the network admin, whose job is similar to mine minus the programming, remote administration of out-of-state machine, server maintenance, manual EDI translation and heavy data entry, happens to work for the Federal government. Specifically, he lives it large for the FAA, earning well over twice my own salary. I can't complain, because he's one of the nicest guys in the universe. But I am a bit envious, especially since I have no talent whatsoever in the "job getting" department, and he had a conveniently placed family member who could help him out a bit with the position.
Er. Anyway, government labour is the great equalizer. In financially great times, the pay is substandard but reliable. In financially average times, the pay is standard and reliable. In times like today, the pay is amaing and reliable. After a year of work, the job of LAN Technician in my local county would pay two and a half the salary that I'm getting now, and that's with work that seems extremely low key to me.
Private sector work sucks. I want out!
Sorry for the rant. I had meant to actually say something insightful. Oh well....
> If Qt was free, you'd see all that free Qt-based > software running on Windows. Since it's not, all > it is is a convenient free GUI library for X > programmers...forget the cross-platform idea.
There actually is a GPL'd native Qt for Win32. Trolltech didn't release one, but the community eventually got around to it. They're still working on it, but the feature set is mostly complete, although it does need performance improvements.
By the way, don't confuse this with the version of Qt made for Cygwin. This Qt does not need to be on Cygwin's X implementation.
> I find that Konqueror is one of the things I > really miss when i move from my Linux machine at > home to the Windows one at work.
I personally got latched into using the command line (it's odd... most people start from the command line and move to the gui; I went the opposite way). But there are a lot of problems with explorer.exe, particularly in its file selector widget (the "open file" dialog box), which seems to totally forget that Windows is multithreaded whenever I click on the "Location" drop-down (the box freezes for as much as ten to fifteen seconds, searching for available drives, even wasting time scanning the floppy, which only really exists for flashing ROMs and running memtest).
That said, Konqueror has one really, really annoying bug that's lasted at least several months: In the file management mode, when files are listed in Detailed view, standard mouse settings are ignored. I can't double-click on folders and files. I can either single-click to open them, or (in the other mode) I can double-click to select them, but I have to hit to open them. Totally annoying.:/
> I don't know of any Windows app that needs to be > *run* as admin - even most services can be run > as a defined user without admin rights.
We had to go through hoops here to get ICQ to run as a Power User instead of an Administrator. There are a few applications like that.
Still, it is a valid position to state that any program that requires to be root in order to run normal user type tasks should be simply counted out as an installable option.
> When I started using a GUI, the close icon for a window was in the top left > hand corner and the iconise (Minimise in Microsoft terminology) was > in the top right hand corner So I could quickly iconise a window without > fearing that I'd accidentally close the window instead.
> Now with GNOME & KDE slavishly following Microsoft, the close icon > is on the top right hand side and is one of 3, so I need to be more careful > which of the icons I click.
Bah. The KDE *defaults* are Win32-like. I'm running KDE 3.1.something on Mandrake 9.2, and my close widget is on the upper-left of the window. On the upper-right corner, reading from right to left, are the Sticky, Minimize and Maximize widgets. Double-clicking the title-bar shades the window (everything except the title-bar disappears).
Putting the make-window-bigger widget right next to the destroy-application widget is insanity. But the nice thing about KDE is that you can configure everything without having to purchase third party accessories.
I don't know if there's a way to fix the scroll bar (and changes sadly wouldn't propogate to other widget sets, a problem also prevalent in Win32), but don't stop trying.:)
> There's a feature in konqueror that I like even more than this: Web Shortcuts.
Opera has had this capability since the dawn of time. Mozilla has had it for at least a year and a half (probably before 1.0, though I can't be sure). I have it set up so that I type "g example" to bring up a google search on "example".Doing this in Opera requires editing a text file (Opera comes with the 'g' keyword and a bazillion others already built in, though), whereas to do it in Mozilla you have to bookmark a page, open the bookmark for editing, change the search term in the URL to '%s', and type in a letter or word in the "keyword" field.
Konqueror was second to last of the major web browsers to implement this feature.
> Opera Software obviously has a single-minded focus to produce an excellent > browser but in the long run all of that effort will likely be for naught.
> unless they change their license to the GPL (or some equivalent)....yeah, because it's completely impossible to be innovative if your source is closed, right?
Bah. Small design and development groups can do wonders with the right talent and under the right direction, even if they're not sharing secret sauce. There are an assload of features that Opera does (and this assload increases dramatically with every point release!) that will take quite some time to be matched by other providers, whether they be Free or that other kind.
Opera has enough business acumen to stay afloat. They're like Apple: open to their customers, really good at inventing innovative features, competent at putting together smooth interfaces, and with a growing fanbase that will buy their crap even if they turn evil. Additionally, they're pretty good at adapting their product for out of the way platforms, like in the embedded sector.
I use mozilla now and then, but Opera has many advantages not covered by Moz, which include (but are not limited to): * the ability to put the page bar (that's the "tab" widgets) on the right or left side of the screen, a feature that allows me to have forty web pages open in one window (that's pretty normal for me) with all page titles being readable (in Mozilla, the tabs shrink so that you can't read the title, and in MozFirebird, after the fifteenth or so tab you have to scroll back and forth to see available pages!). * dragging pages between windows. If you use various Mozilla Extensions or something like Multizilla, you can drag within a window, but I think you have to right-click to move to a different window * out-of-the-box session management. I have to install Multizilla in Moz1.5 in order to get session management, and that doesn't always work properly. * out of the box gestures * out of the box, on the fly browser ID changing * on the fly skinning (no restart needed!) * ability to quickly disable page's styles and special effects * in-page print preview * download manager docked in sidebar * can drag individual "tabs" into bookmarks. * hold right button, scroll wheel to change pages (Mozilla can do this with the proper add-ons) * "G" key makes graphics disappear if you accidentally click on a goatse.cx link (this is much faster than closing the page in either Opera or Moz) * SHIFT+Up/Dn/Lt/Rt to navigate among links on the active page * auto-reload menu option * "Fast Forward", which lets you navigate through multipage articles with a single gesture or keypress (instead of hunting down the "Next" link on the article page each time). * Undo if you accidentally closed the wrong page (I think Moilla-Firebird can do this, though). * toolbars can be moved around. I remember when you could put the address bar above the navigation bar in Netscape 4.x. You can't do that in Mozilla or Netscape 7.x. You can't do that (AFAIK) in Mozilla-Firebird. Hmmm. Well, maybe you can't do that in Opera, either, but it does allow me to put the address bar on the bottom of the screen, which is where I prefer it. * CTRL-J pops up a list of links from the current page. You can emulate this functionality in Mozilla with either Linky (that's at mozdev.org) or with a bookmarklet (if you're not using bookmarklets, you're not interested in power browsing, btw). * SHIFT-F11 to emulate PDA browsing mode (this is for web page developers that really do care)
I usually have a Mozilla window open, but the majority of my web pages open up with Opera, because the interface is smoother (and faster) and the session management is better. Nothing cooler than starting up your computer with your applications in the same state that you left them.
Heh! Zaurus runs ARM code. x86 is a different instruction set architecture. However, It's almost pathetically easy to port programs from x86 Linux to ARM linux, especially if the programs are Qt-based. Most of the games I've written pretty much cleanly compile for the Zaurus, as well as x86 Linux and Win32. Of course, setting up the cross compiler in the first place was a bitch and a half....
> Would it be in compliance with the GPL if the only way you offered your source > was printed on paper?
I suspect not.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html It says here that the copy of the source that you distribute has to be machine-readable, which probably means that paper copies are right out as an option, unless you happen to have the mother of all OCR programs.
> The concept of being 'user-friendly' has yet to seep into > the murky underworld of Linux development, so no.
That's not exactly fair. Although installing a kernel independently of a distro isn't easy, program installation in general is far, far easier than it is in MS Windows. In debian, you just type "apt-get programname". In Mandrake, you type "urpmi programname".
In Windows, you open your web browser, go to download.com, type "programname" into the search field, click on the most likely link to the program from the search results, click on the "Download Now" link, click on the closest mirror, wait a few seconds, tell the app to "Run" instead of "Save", pray that the app is safe for your system (in the above apt-get and urpmi examples, programs are generally added into the installable app databases only after they make sure that the programs are reasonably secure and reliable), wait for the graphical installer to come up, click next, select the program components to install in one of several different ways (checkboxes, checkboxes in a scrollview, that tree-based Office2k method with the little dropdown buttons, etc..), verify the install location, click Finish, then delete the stupid excess shortcuts placed on the desktop, the shortcut bar, above the "Programs" entry in the Start menu, etc...
Then you agree to a surprisingly restrictive and needlessly redundant ("you agree to not do the following already illegal things...") license agreement. Then, maybe, it'll make you reboot.
BTW, if you have multiple program names in Debian or Mandrake Linux, you can install all of them with a single command line (or a single button in the install gui).
> You know, Gimp's primary platform is not windows. > And there's no Paintshop Pro for linux that I know of.
For what it's worth, Paint Shop Pro reportedly works well with wine (the windows compatibility layer for Linux and similar platforms). I haven't tried it, and it probably takes some tweaking to get past the installer, though.
> Of course, most people are referring to Windows and their poor taskbar being clogged up. > D'uh! Get a decent OS or WinXP that'll solve that for you.
Bah. WinXP's handling of the taskbar is *awful*. If I'm viewing a webpage in an SDI web browser, and I want to switch to another one, I have to click on the task bar entry for the application, then examine the tasks that pop upwards for the entry that corresponds for the window that I want to go to. But a typical MDI browser has its own personal version of the taskbar, whether it's Opera's original system or Mozilla's tabbed version. I can navigate between the pages in a single application with one click. Additionally, with Windows XP's method, there's no standardized keyboard shortcut for changing to different windows within the same application. In most MDI applications, ALT-Tab changes the application, while CTRL-Tab changes the document within the application. It'd be great if I could change between my GIMP windows with CTRL-Tab, but instead I have to either clutter up my task bar, waste time with ALT-Tab, or waste even more time with XP's taskbar grouping.
Bah!
FWIW, I'm a frequent Linux/FreeBSD user. I'd use OS X, but I have no money. KDE's konsole program simplified command line work so well for me that, in Win32, I make sure that I install Cygwin, X11, the ion window manager and xterm so that I can fake similar functionality (mutiple bash shells, SHIFT-Left and SHIFT-Right to change the active shell, CTRL-SHIFT-N to make a new one, with clickable buttons added to switch back and forth with the rodentia).
That said, I haven't yet reached the point of condemnation of The GIMP. I did have some problems working with 1.x, but they weren't UI related (for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to paint a single, non-textured pixel!). And I don't really mind having floating toolbars. Personally, I would have liked it if the window that holds the actual image would act with an MDI (maybe optionally, with a control/widget that [un]groups them?), but that'd only be a problem in those rare instances when I need to open up dozens of images (ecch, where in a taskbar would they go if there were a hundred of them open at once??). Heck, I haven't really played with 2.0, so maybe it does that anyway!
Heh. If I wait long enough, some crazy guy will just make a KParts interface for The GIMP (so that it's forced inside a konqueror-like window with tabs), like they're doing for OpenOffice. That might be icky, though.
Slashdot Mirror
> Why are there obvious muppets as main characters?
... 8472, I believe they were called) done on the far more expensive "Star Trek: Voyager"?
> Is this a Sci-Fi show or a puppet show?
It's no more a puppet show than Star Wars was. And using puppetry is no better or worse than using bad cgi. Have you seen some of the horrid cgi work (read: species
> Why is one of them farting an on-going joke?
It was a species thing. It wasn't meant to be funny on its own, and it usually wasn't particularly funny, except that the emissions of whcih you speak were helium gas and had nothing in particular to do with digestive processes. And they were fairly rarely done.
Mind you, I can easily see how somebody could be put off by this show. I enjoyed it a lot, but I found the final season to be absolutely horrid, an example of how to avoid good storytelling. My primary draw to the show were characters who weren't written with monochrome strokes (that it, nobody was "Good" or "Evil", save for the antagonist in the final season).
> Moore's law is still in effect, but it doesn't dictate die sizes, only speed and cost
... no, wait. Moore's Law does dictate die sizes, and it doesn't dictate speed and cost! Moore's Law has to do with the increasing density of transistors inside microchips, which directly ties into the size of the die (if you double the number of transistors per square millimeter, you can have the same number of transistors in a smaller die!). Speed is just an occasional side effect that has to do with shorter pathways caused by the smaller die.
I
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> You know... I've never met a Windows zealot.
The local members of a student organization at my alma mater have three computers. One of them was old and slow and not quite stable enough to survive a Windows installation. So one of the tech guys there installed Red Hat. You'd think that's okay, right? I mean, the computer is there essentially for people to browse the web and do basic stuff, and if it can't do it with Windows, there's little reason to just have the thing lying there as a paperweight.
But nearly everybody complained. They didn't complain about it being difficult to use. They simply *didn't like Linux*. They complained, for weeks, and rallied with shouts along the lines of "LINUX SUCKS, GET RID OF LINUX!". The *only* wanted Windows, and they would prefer a dead computer to a computer running Linux.
The head of the techs there eventually had to issue a public apology at one of the meetings in order to placate the people. He started his apology with the words "Listen, I know that Linux sucks the cock...".
I have never, ever seen any user of any other operating system (even Mac OS!) act in this irrational, insane manner. Even the most aggressive Linux zealot will (in my experience) respect other peoples' wishes to run Windows or Mac OS or FreeBSD. FreeBSD users will respect Linux users. Mac OS users will frown at -- but accept -- the people who run Windows. But there happen to, in at least one place that I hold dear, be Windows users who turn into rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth sociopaths whenever anybody so much as mentions the word "Linux".
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Because without a large "evil" bad guy to rail
> against, no-one would bother writing OSS.
Open source software predates closed source software. Or, at least, the two developed at the same time in parallel. At one point in the past, it was *normal* for people to share code in their programs, especially among hobbyists. Code was frequently printed out in magazines for people to implement on their systems. Computing was a largely *scientific* endeavor, so the impulse to lock everything down wasn't very strong until the profit motive started really kicking in.
Movements like GNU were started in reaction to when companies and universities started rejecting OSS. One of the big events back then was when Bill Gates sent out a letter to the hobbyist community urging them to stop freely giving out their code, because (according to him) it encouraged theft.
Yeah, Linux wouldn't be around (or, at least, strong) without Microsoft. But we'd probably have a heterogenous computing world where simple macro worms couldn't take down ninety percent of the planet, and Apple would be duking it out with IBM, Atari and Commodore for the desktop. And they'd all be bastards, but the fact that nobody's dominant would mean that everybody would have to interoperate with everybody else.
And FreeBSD would probably have still come out, and certain types of open source software (like office suites) would be more advanced than they are today, because file format standards would be a bit more rigidly applied (and these particular programs would support more file formats than the proprietaries, which would actually be more important in this hypothetical world).
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/main
> Oh, and there is no GPL version for Windows
As a matter of fact, there is.
Trolltech has no impetus or obligation to port GPL Qt to Win32. But GPL is GPL, so anybody with enough skill can -- and did -- port the codebase to MS Windows. Yeah, it's not perfect (yet), but I've compiled and run stuff written in Qt2.3NC with this GPL'd version of Qt3.x.
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
PS: It's Windows-native and doesn't need X11 to run, in case you're confusing it with the similar project on the same sourceforge area.
> Since then Linux has traveled around the sun ten :P
;)
> times but its still in the same old place.
OT, but Linux (and Linus) has travelled nearly seventy billion kilometers in the last ten years, courtesy of Sol's orbit around the galaxy.
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> You fail to see the long term benefits. What will take bash$> for tif in
:)
> `ls *.tif` ; do convert $tif -border 50 -bordercolor \#FFFFFF -quality 100
> -scale 25% -resolution 96 `cat $tif | cut -f1 -d"."`.jpg for every conversion job will,
> on the GUI side, now require only
> 1) Select file(s)
> 2) Drag
> 3) Drop
I should point out that you could have the same basic functionality on the command line, by taking the command line from before and pasting an alias for it into the user's startup file. And you could then type ' ' whenever you want to do the conversion.
But yeah, there are advantages to using the gui sometimes.
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-JC
coder (even gui stuff!)
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Reading the patent document, the key point is that the users hits a key and all the desktops
> are scaled within the window using animation. So if I have a 3 x 3 virtual desktop and hit the
> desktop view button, my screen is shrunk to (say) the top left 9th of the screen and 8 other
> mini desktops become visible. If I select another desktop it zooms towards me filling the
> screen. They make a number of references to background images and I guess animating 9
> different background images for the demo above would look very cool.
>I haven't seen this implemented before. The nearest is Mac OS X.3 which allows all
> application windows to be minimised and switched between, I use it a lot and it is excellent,
> particularly if you have a number of quicktime movies or similar playing. As I recall, Apple
> patented this and I think this is Microsoft's answer
This sounds a lot like 3ddesktop, a rather flashy paging program for X11 (well, at least Linux)computers. It's an OpenGL application. When you click a particular button or hotkey, the screen that you're looking at scales down so that you can select another virtual desktop. The desktops can be viewed in several ways (for example, if you have four virtual desktops, you can have them displayed as the faces on a rotating cube). It's not exactly the same thing as you describe, but it's somewhat similar, and I find it interesting.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> The length of day will makes no difference to the amount of
> solar energy the planet receives.
> You can't get away from the fact that Venus is far too close
> to the Sun for a stable earth like climate to exist.
Grandparent poster was positing placing a big object between Venus and Sol. This would block a nontrivial amount of radiation coming to the planet.
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Now if only Opie had A DECENT WORDPROCESSOR THAT WORKED!!!!!!! Someone, please! Something that
> would read/write Openoffice files would be amazing.
Hancom Office is pretty good. It's only free with the Zaurus, though. Otherwise, you might have to give up some of those little green pieces of paper that nobody has anymore.
Hmm. It doesn't support OOo, though.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Work for the federal government. The pay may not be as sexy as private industry was during the dot
> com boom, but I've had a steady job for 6 years now since I got out of college, good raises every
> year, flexible hours, relaxed work environment, etc.
I dunno about you, but civil service (Federal, State, County, etc..) jobs appear sexy as hell to me. I'd have a major orgasm of some sort or another if I could get one.
In my three man clique, I do -- by far -- the most technical, most advanced, most time consuming work, and I have to spend much of my personal time learning more about job related stuff (for example, I'm always lurking on the Yahoo Groups Qt programmers list, and I spend tons of my own time working out how to get ezmlm (just got it perfect this week!) and jabber (damned jabberd2 keeps crapping out with an "sm died" message; I'll have to recompile everything with debugging enabled)), but I also recieve -- by far -- the lowest salary, with Peter the File Clerk showing off as runner up for lowest salary at a pay rate 16% above mine, and that's before you count that my commute is a thousand dollars per year more expensive than his (or anyone else's that I know).
Anthony the network admin, whose job is similar to mine minus the programming, remote administration of out-of-state machine, server maintenance, manual EDI translation and heavy data entry, happens to work for the Federal government. Specifically, he lives it large for the FAA, earning well over twice my own salary. I can't complain, because he's one of the nicest guys in the universe. But I am a bit envious, especially since I have no talent whatsoever in the "job getting" department, and he had a conveniently placed family member who could help him out a bit with the position.
Er. Anyway, government labour is the great equalizer. In financially great times, the pay is substandard but reliable. In financially average times, the pay is standard and reliable. In times like today, the pay is amaing and reliable. After a year of work, the job of LAN Technician in my local county would pay two and a half the salary that I'm getting now, and that's with work that seems extremely low key to me.
Private sector work sucks. I want out!
Sorry for the rant. I had meant to actually say something insightful. Oh well....
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> If Qt was free, you'd see all that free Qt-based
> software running on Windows. Since it's not, all
> it is is a convenient free GUI library for X
> programmers...forget the cross-platform idea.
There actually is a GPL'd
native Qt for Win32. Trolltech didn't release one, but the community eventually got around to it. They're still working on it, but the feature set is mostly complete, although it does need performance improvements.
By the way, don't confuse this with the version of Qt made for Cygwin. This Qt does not need to be on Cygwin's X implementation.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> I find that Konqueror is one of the things I
:/
> really miss when i move from my Linux machine at
> home to the Windows one at work.
I personally got latched into using the command line (it's odd... most people start from the command line and move to the gui; I went the opposite way). But there are a lot of problems with explorer.exe, particularly in its file selector widget (the "open file" dialog box), which seems to totally forget that Windows is multithreaded whenever I click on the "Location" drop-down (the box freezes for as much as ten to fifteen seconds, searching for available drives, even wasting time scanning the floppy, which only really exists for flashing ROMs and running memtest).
That said, Konqueror has one really, really annoying bug that's lasted at least several months: In the file management mode, when files are listed in Detailed view, standard mouse settings are ignored. I can't double-click on folders and files. I can either single-click to open them, or (in the other mode) I can double-click to select them, but I have to hit to open them. Totally annoying.
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-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> I don't know of any Windows app that needs to be
> *run* as admin - even most services can be run
> as a defined user without admin rights.
We had to go through hoops here to get ICQ to run as a Power User instead of an Administrator. There are a few applications like that.
Still, it is a valid position to state that any program that requires to be root in order to run normal user type tasks should be simply counted out as an installable option.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> When I started using a GUI, the close icon for a window was in the top left
:)
> hand corner and the iconise (Minimise in Microsoft terminology) was
> in the top right hand corner So I could quickly iconise a window without
> fearing that I'd accidentally close the window instead.
> Now with GNOME & KDE slavishly following Microsoft, the close icon
> is on the top right hand side and is one of 3, so I need to be more careful
> which of the icons I click.
Bah. The KDE *defaults* are Win32-like. I'm running KDE 3.1.something on Mandrake 9.2, and my close widget is on the upper-left of the window. On the upper-right corner, reading from right to left, are the Sticky, Minimize and Maximize widgets. Double-clicking the title-bar shades the window (everything except the title-bar disappears).
Putting the make-window-bigger widget right next to the destroy-application widget is insanity. But the nice thing about KDE is that you can configure everything without having to purchase third party accessories.
I don't know if there's a way to fix the scroll bar (and changes sadly wouldn't propogate to other widget sets, a problem also prevalent in Win32), but don't stop trying.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> There's a feature in konqueror that I like even more than this: Web Shortcuts.
Opera has had this capability since the dawn of time. Mozilla has had it for at least a year and a half (probably before 1.0, though I can't be sure). I have it set up so that I type "g example" to bring up a google search on "example".Doing this in Opera requires editing a text file (Opera comes with the 'g' keyword and a bazillion others already built in, though), whereas to do it in Mozilla you have to bookmark a page, open the bookmark for editing, change the search term in the URL to '%s', and type in a letter or word in the "keyword" field.
Konqueror was second to last of the major web browsers to implement this feature.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Opera Software obviously has a single-minded focus to produce an excellent
...yeah, because it's completely impossible to be innovative if your source is closed, right?
> browser but in the long run all of that effort will likely be for naught.
> unless they change their license to the GPL (or some equivalent).
Bah. Small design and development groups can do wonders with the right talent and under the right direction, even if they're not sharing secret sauce. There are an assload of features that Opera does (and this assload increases dramatically with every point release!) that will take quite some time to be matched by other providers, whether they be Free or that other kind.
Opera has enough business acumen to stay afloat. They're like Apple: open to their customers, really good at inventing innovative features, competent at putting together smooth interfaces, and with a growing fanbase that will buy their crap even if they turn evil. Additionally, they're pretty good at adapting their product for out of the way platforms, like in the embedded sector.
I use mozilla now and then, but Opera has many advantages not covered by Moz, which include (but are not limited to):
* the ability to put the page bar (that's the "tab" widgets) on the right or left side of the screen, a feature that allows me to have forty web pages open in one window (that's pretty normal for me) with all page titles being readable (in Mozilla, the tabs shrink so that you can't read the title, and in MozFirebird, after the fifteenth or so tab you have to scroll back and forth to see available pages!).
* dragging pages between windows. If you use various Mozilla Extensions or something like Multizilla, you can drag within a window, but I think you have to right-click to move to a different window
* out-of-the-box session management. I have to install Multizilla in Moz1.5 in order to get session management, and that doesn't always work properly.
* out of the box gestures
* out of the box, on the fly browser ID changing
* on the fly skinning (no restart needed!)
* ability to quickly disable page's styles and special effects
* in-page print preview
* download manager docked in sidebar
* can drag individual "tabs" into bookmarks.
* hold right button, scroll wheel to change pages (Mozilla can do this with the proper add-ons)
* "G" key makes graphics disappear if you accidentally click on a goatse.cx link (this is much faster than closing the page in either Opera or Moz)
* SHIFT+Up/Dn/Lt/Rt to navigate among links on the active page
* auto-reload menu option
* "Fast Forward", which lets you navigate through multipage articles with a single gesture or keypress (instead of hunting down the "Next" link on the article page each time).
* Undo if you accidentally closed the wrong page (I think Moilla-Firebird can do this, though).
* toolbars can be moved around. I remember when you could put the address bar above the navigation bar in Netscape 4.x. You can't do that in Mozilla or Netscape 7.x. You can't do that (AFAIK) in Mozilla-Firebird. Hmmm. Well, maybe you can't do that in Opera, either, but it does allow me to put the address bar on the bottom of the screen, which is where I prefer it.
* CTRL-J pops up a list of links from the current page. You can emulate this functionality in Mozilla with either Linky (that's at mozdev.org) or with a bookmarklet (if you're not using bookmarklets, you're not interested in power browsing, btw).
* SHIFT-F11 to emulate PDA browsing mode (this is for web page developers that really do care)
I usually have a Mozilla window open, but the majority of my web pages open up with Opera, because the interface is smoother (and faster) and the session management is better. Nothing cooler than starting up your computer with your applications in the same state that you left them.
In the time that Mozilla has moved from 1.0 t
> Hmm.. USB? Last time I checked Windows NT didn't have USB support.
> You should contact the manufacturer about that.
What are you talking about? Windows NT has had USB support since version 5.00!
--
-JC
> I'm white as the snow surrounding this building and I've been searched in
> at least one airport every time I've flown for the last two years.
Maybe they don't trust albinos.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Unless I'm mistaken my Zaurus runs x86 code.
Heh! Zaurus runs ARM code. x86 is a different instruction set architecture. However, It's almost pathetically easy to port programs from x86 Linux to ARM linux, especially if the programs are Qt-based. Most of the games I've written pretty much cleanly compile for the Zaurus, as well as x86 Linux and Win32. Of course, setting up the cross compiler in the first place was a bitch and a half....
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Would it be in compliance with the GPL if the only way you offered your source
> was printed on paper?
I suspect not.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
It says here that the copy of the source that you distribute has to be machine-readable, which probably means that paper copies are right out as an option, unless you happen to have the mother of all OCR programs.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Selling out? Well, true, purchasing the XBOX will result in
> the revocation of your cool status here on Slashdot.
Not if you buy it for the purpose of installing Linux on it.
> The concept of being 'user-friendly' has yet to seep into
;P
> the murky underworld of Linux development, so no.
That's not exactly fair. Although installing a kernel independently of a distro isn't easy, program installation in general is far, far easier than it is in MS Windows. In debian, you just type "apt-get programname". In Mandrake, you type "urpmi programname".
In Windows, you open your web browser, go to download.com, type "programname" into the search field, click on the most likely link to the program from the search results, click on the "Download Now" link, click on the closest mirror, wait a few seconds, tell the app to "Run" instead of "Save", pray that the app is safe for your system (in the above apt-get and urpmi examples, programs are generally added into the installable app databases only after they make sure that the programs are reasonably secure and reliable), wait for the graphical installer to come up, click next, select the program components to install in one of several different ways (checkboxes, checkboxes in a scrollview, that tree-based Office2k method with the little dropdown buttons, etc..), verify the install location, click Finish, then delete the stupid excess shortcuts placed on the desktop, the shortcut bar, above the "Programs" entry in the Start menu, etc...
Then you agree to a surprisingly restrictive and needlessly redundant ("you agree to not do the following already illegal things...") license agreement. Then, maybe, it'll make you reboot.
BTW, if you have multiple program names in Debian or Mandrake Linux, you can install all of them with a single command line (or a single button in the install gui).
So hah!
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> You know, Gimp's primary platform is not windows.
> And there's no Paintshop Pro for linux that I know of.
For what it's worth, Paint Shop Pro reportedly works well with wine (the windows compatibility layer for Linux and similar platforms). I haven't tried it, and it probably takes some tweaking to get past the installer, though.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Of course, most people are referring to Windows and their poor taskbar being clogged up.
> D'uh! Get a decent OS or WinXP that'll solve that for you.
Bah. WinXP's handling of the taskbar is *awful*. If I'm viewing a webpage in an SDI web browser, and I want to switch to another one, I have to click on the task bar entry for the application, then examine the tasks that pop upwards for the entry that corresponds for the window that I want to go to. But a typical MDI browser has its own personal version of the taskbar, whether it's Opera's original system or Mozilla's tabbed version. I can navigate between the pages in a single application with one click. Additionally, with Windows XP's method, there's no standardized keyboard shortcut for changing to different windows within the same application. In most MDI applications, ALT-Tab changes the application, while CTRL-Tab changes the document within the application. It'd be great if I could change between my GIMP windows with CTRL-Tab, but instead I have to either clutter up my task bar, waste time with ALT-Tab, or waste even more time with XP's taskbar grouping.
Bah!
FWIW, I'm a frequent Linux/FreeBSD user. I'd use OS X, but I have no money. KDE's konsole program simplified command line work so well for me that, in Win32, I make sure that I install Cygwin, X11, the ion window manager and xterm so that I can fake similar functionality (mutiple bash shells, SHIFT-Left and SHIFT-Right to change the active shell, CTRL-SHIFT-N to make a new one, with clickable buttons added to switch back and forth with the rodentia).
That said, I haven't yet reached the point of condemnation of The GIMP. I did have some problems working with 1.x, but they weren't UI related (for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to paint a single, non-textured pixel!). And I don't really mind having floating toolbars. Personally, I would have liked it if the window that holds the actual image would act with an MDI (maybe optionally, with a control/widget that [un]groups them?), but that'd only be a problem in those rare instances when I need to open up dozens of images (ecch, where in a taskbar would they go if there were a hundred of them open at once??). Heck, I haven't really played with 2.0, so maybe it does that anyway!
Heh. If I wait long enough, some crazy guy will just make a KParts interface for The GIMP (so that it's forced inside a konqueror-like window with tabs), like they're doing for OpenOffice. That might be icky, though.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
PS: heh, just realized that I said "bash shells"! ^_^