Re:can it copy and paste between apps yet?
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem is that you can cut/paste fine between gnome apps. Or KDE apps. Or java apps. Or motif apps. Each with their own way of doing it, and each with a 50% chance of being able to cut/paste from one type to another, and have it work the same way.
IE: cut in gnumeric and paste into gedit. Not a big deal. But cutting text in xarchie (the original) and paste into say, gimp? I don't think so. Or maybe, but it won't be the same way as it works for other apps.
The other thing I miss is cut/paste of non-text elements. I'm not talking full OLE, but why can't I cut an image in the gimp and paste it into abiword? That's what I want from gnome:\
Re:Some juicy screenshots - how old are these?
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
·
· Score: 2
What it looks like is that someone has posted the various ss of apps running or ported to gnome2 that have gone through the gnome2 dev list over the last few months. There's probably a lot that are out of date visually or functionally.
Anyone who wants to use this for xplanet (a very cool globe program for *nix) can. There's a nice 2400x1200 version floating around somewhere, that combined with Hans Ecke's scripts, will create just awsome images for your desktop.
I would do this if the emails I got from.ch,.th, etc weren't embedded with obvious ads and spam. A bunch of asian characters surrounded with sexyyoungteenswithhaireyebrows.com.ch type URLs is pretty obviously *not* a letter to the postmaster about something legit. Looking at the headers normally confirms this as well.
I don't recieve a lot of non-english mail, but 100% of the stuff I do get is spam, and obvious spam. I'm not blocking anyone though (though spamcop is my friend):)
As I'm born in 1975, and the 100 year lifespan is predicted for 2040 or so, I can almost make it to 2100 when the 'immortality chip' is predicted, and upload myself into the Net. I've been striving for immortality for a while, but it's nice to know that I'll almost be able to make it (seeing > C space travel would be nice as well).
To quote woody allen: "I don't want to gain immortality by doing great things, I want to do it by living a very, long time."
"it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description." Huh?
See what you're missing here is it's not so much about the specifics of how consumers are not allowed to record programs, but it's about the consumers choice, or more specifically, the studios not wanting us to have any.
It's happened time and time again, most recently with CDs. The high-ups in the industries want to decide what you watch and when. If you could watch just the new simpsons you probably would, but hollywood, or fox, or whoever has decided that unless you switch stations you have to watch show X before it, and show Y right after. The chances of those shows all appealing to you for more than two or 3 half hour segments are very slim, but give the consumer the choice to watch what they want when they want it!?
This is the same reason you have to buy a cd with 1 or 2 good tracks on it and the rest (generally) "filler", and the same reason why the RIAA wants to stop people making their own cds and mixes.
Ok, I might have chosen a bad example. The point was, there are searches that are a lot easier to ask if you can ask in natural language. EM did this, and did it very well. Even if it was just translating "who was einstein" to "eninstein +person" or whatever, it made things easier on the user.
Yup, re-implementing the 'electricmonk', a search engine that I used almost as much as google when it was still alive.
For those who don't remember it or have never heard of it, it was a natural language parser search engine that would handle searches like "how do I make tomato soup" or "what were the greatest inventions of alexander graham bell". Much easier to type in what you *mean* instead of things like "'alexander graham bell' + greatest !+inventions" or such like.
The problem with electricmonk.com was that it didn't have the huge resource to search from that google did. A combination of the two could be incrediably kick ass, especially if it was just an option to type in on the main search bar! ("why does my kernel break with a foo.o error?")
Well, I've never spoken to RMS directly, but I have seen him speak, and it really sounds like he's got a few things that are always pissing him off. The linux vs gnu/linux thing for example, is all I've ever heard him talk about, be it overhearing him on the show floor of linuxworld or accepting an award (at the same linuxworld), he did nothing but rant (and I do mean rant) about how linux should be called gnu/linux. I was wanting to go and talk to him and say how much I admired him and how I was privileged to meet him (yes, suck up to The RMS), but after hearing him go off on some kid who was talking to him at the GNU booth I decided to just stay away.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the man, especially for keeping his principles in the midst of all the opposition (like a christian girl staying a virgin when "everyone else is doing it"), but that doesn't mean I don't think he can be a bit off the edge sometimes.
IIRC.deb doesn't have some of the nice error checking that rpm has, like signing. Also compare files on a system to the originals in an.deb to check for tainted files (though while looking I see that debsums(1) might do the trick.
Other problems is the PITA it is to do an non-interactive install of debs. One of the biggest bitches I hear about debian is that when doing an initial install, and you've gotten to the part where packages are installing it goes something like this:
*install*
*install*
*install*
*ask question via debconf*
*install*
*install*
*ask another question*
*install*
*install*
*install*
*ask same question again*
*install*
*install*
etc...
Also.deb's inadequate logging is mentioned, as well as keeping the install messages somewhere, or keeping previous versions of a package (what happens when you find out that libfoo is completely b0rked in the latest version, and have to run around searching for a mirror site that hasn't been updated yet. This generally only happens in unstable, but it's still a PITA:)
There were a couple of other features that.deb didn't have, but I don't recall them right now.
Some references and info is here though that's a lot more pro-deb than discussing this exact issue, but there's good info there.
Oh, and before you start flaming, I'm a long time debian user:)
While reading the article on info world, I first thought "great! finally I won't have to filter my spam, I'll actually be able to get off the lists!", but then I realized a a few of the larger implications.
Remember when some large company (I think it might have been ebay) reset all the user preferenes for "send me newletters" and "share my info with spammers^wpartner companies", claiming that there was some problem and they were resetting the user preferences because the users didn't understand? This is very similar to that. Suddenly all the nice, mostly working spam filters on places like hotmail, yahoo mail, or pretty much any large free email service that has spam filters will stop filtering these emails. Result, now you get just as much spam, but now a chunk of that will go into your inbox instead of your spam folder.
Users then get to go through their spam, clicking on the 'click here to be removed' and wasting their time and bandwidth, until the next bout of spam comes through.
People will get just as much spam as before, just now some will be digitally signed. Chances are you will NEVER get off all the "certified spammers" lists, so you'll still get spam in your inbox, and have extra hassle as now users feel they have to go through the removal process for them. I'd much rather have a "never have any certified spammer send me any mail" service, which goes and removes you from all the certified spammers' databases. The services is to try to give the user control right? So give us the control to not get spam that we don't want!
How long do you think it'll take for these groups to really get it right? There are always glitches that show up in new systems and I'm anticipating that there'll be more than a few people who are spammed multiple times from companies that are not only certified, but the user has said "I don't want spam from you anymore!" Just a start up glitch or two, yea, that's it....
How long before someone figures out a way to beat the system? Sure, I know that it's a signed cert, but think of the potential for a non-certified spamming bastart to manage to spoof the 'seal of approval' and be assured that their spam gets into everyone's inbox. Not only that, but when people email them back with the 'remove' emails, they get a nice list of 'live ones' that they can spam merrily along using perhaps a different company name, from address or approach as not to make the user suspicious.
Along those lines, what stops companies from not spamming multiple times for different products, or from different spinoffs. Use the database of 'removes' to feed into a list of emails to send out for their next product, promotion or whatever... hell, just sell the list to non-legit spammers!
Basically, it's a good thought, but there looks (to me) to be so many potential fuckups, especially with the assumption that becuase it is "legit" people want to see it, that I don't think it'll be any better, and will probably be worse, as now you have two different types of spam to deal with. No thanks, it's spamassassin for me!:)
Well, there are actually quite a few programs that can read word documents (abiword, wv, staroffice, et all), but it's the search for something that can read word docs *WELL*. The next step would be to get something that writes word docs well.... countless hours I've heard my boss bitching about how staroffice munged up his powerpoint presentation when he imported it, changed a word or two, and exported it.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, the OSS community and in fact, anyone who doesn't use MS software is screwed when trying to find something decent to read/write word docs, but they do exist, they're just not high quality. For the stuff that is sent to me in word doc format, abiword works "well enough" to read it and let me understand what it is they are trying to communictate to me.
Actually a buddy of mine just hit on a good (obvious) point.... the problem with OE is that it's not good, but it's good enough:)
Search in the slashdot archives for kernel patches
on
UNIX Process Cryogenics?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I think it was somewhere in the list of patches from the -mjc tree (see here) that there was a patch for the entire kernel for linux. Basically it let the system save it's state, and then restore it if it detects that it was shut down at that point. I'm not sure if this is what you want (and I couldn't get it working), but it's certainly a step in the right direction to what you're looking for.
Yup, I have to agree... I used it for a bit and found it quite good for my mp3/porn/warez requirements. I don't know if they broke a file up into parts like edonkey2000 and kazaa/morpheous do, or if they had any funky technology like that, but they seemed pretty solid in the ability of the software to get from them to me.
The main problem, and the reason why I "left" them was as NewbieSpaz points out, there's no *nix client.
True, but as the business grows so should the servers, and sometimes this means that they're going to get replaced. It might be a bit of a pita to take out solution X and put in solution Y, but by the time you've outgrown it, you might be at the point where you can afford to have a network guy who has the sole responsibility of keeping things up to date and going... well, you should already, but now you can pay him more so that he and his PFY can deal with integrating a new solution.
The same can be said for a start up business not getting themselves a huge expensive sun box to do their work.. sure if they grow from 5 people to 500 people they'll need it, but at this point it's far more cost effective to get the cheaper solution, which this appears to be. Scalability works both ways.
And heck who knows, maybe these machines do recognize each other and do funky things, but I doubt it. This system IMHO is just another of the linux-based web appliances that were all the rage a year or two ago, and it just has some new auto-detect technology (which someone described how it could be (and based on my experience doing the same type of things, is) done. Bet marketing was overjoyed they could create a new paradigm shift in their action items:)
This is a shame.... this was seen (not by me, but reported here previously) at several trade shows and drew a lot of good reviews. I wonder if it was just a big pipe dream and great mockups or if was dropped for other reasons. Hardware really sucks to sell, and it's quite possible that this system was complete and ready to go, but sales would have to be unrealistically high, or the price would be unrealisticaly high to expect it to sell at all:(
I wonder if there's any chance of this system still making it out into the world in the form of GPLed software, patches, or an emulator for people to hack around with. Maybe sometime in the future this will still surface (fingers crossed).
Not many viruses are cross platform (unless you're talking about nt/2k/me/xp/98/98se being different platforms that is). Most of the virii out there aren't "email viruses" they are "Outlook express" viruses, and I don't see why this one isn't the same. To create a real cross platform virus would take a bit of doing IMHO.
Not to nitpick, as I do agree with you, but artists have labels for a reason (of course, these days labels have artists, but that's another story). Imagine your payment went right to the artist... no, I mean right to them, as in a check delivered to them. Well, what happens when you're an artist and suddenly you have to cash a million checks. That'd kinda suck. Even if it wasn't individual people but organizations (napster, gnutella, random-pay-the-artist.com, etc), that's still a fair number of checks to cash. This is why labels exists.
Nowadays of course they exist not to make life easier for the artist (and get a cut for their troubles), but to simply get their cut and make lots of cash money.
Yea, kinda;) When I upgrade nothing needs to get deleted, and everything from dependancies to shuting down and restarting services is handled by apt and dpkg. Seriously, there are two differences between every single linux distro:
1 - the install
2 - package management
And in your case, #2 will help:) After that it's just linux...
OMG! Finally! Thankyou mozilla devs for getting this in, it is the one final thing that means I can get rid of crappy ol' netscape 4.x! Those of us stuck with email that is required to be encrypted (company mail etc) and who are linux users can now leave the realm of netscape 4.x!
The UI is still very incomplete. It didn't seem to want to let me sign or encrypt email (which sucks) but I could read it, view my certs, and do other basic operations, which is all I need. The encrypting of mail is of course still needed, but I'm going to guess that the ui glitches (the menu item not recognizing that I'd selected "always encrypt") are going to be resolved in.9.7.1 or nightly builds.
Again, great job mozilla! Thank you from this linux + s/mime user!
(and no, the boss wouldn't let us just use pgp/gpg....)
Now wait a minute. Based off your User # you've obviously been reading slashdot for a while.
User numbers? Why back in my day we didn't have usernumbers, hell it wasn't even slashdot back then... why I remember when it wasn't even chips'n'dips gosh darnit!
Seriously though, it scares me when a 6 figure user id is considered "here a while":) How high are we up to these days Rob?
I don't think that's really a fair comparision. A better comparision I think would be the difference between buying a car after taking it for a test drive, vs buying it based on the companies glossy magazine ads.
To be honest, a test drive isn't quite right. A 2 week trail would be best, as driving around the block isn't going to give you the needed information that you'd get from driving it across the country or to work every day.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that you can cut/paste fine between gnome apps. Or KDE apps. Or java apps. Or motif apps. Each with their own way of doing it, and each with a 50% chance of being able to cut/paste from one type to another, and have it work the same way.
:\
IE: cut in gnumeric and paste into gedit. Not a big deal. But cutting text in xarchie (the original) and paste into say, gimp? I don't think so. Or maybe, but it won't be the same way as it works for other apps.
The other thing I miss is cut/paste of non-text elements. I'm not talking full OLE, but why can't I cut an image in the gimp and paste it into abiword? That's what I want from gnome
What it looks like is that someone has posted the various ss of apps running or ported to gnome2 that have gone through the gnome2 dev list over the last few months. There's probably a lot that are out of date visually or functionally.
There are a few links on the xplanet homepage to other xplanet ports or links.
You want xplanet and a big ass flat screen monitor that you can hang on the wall :)
Anyone who wants to use this for xplanet (a very cool globe program for *nix) can. There's a nice 2400x1200 version floating around somewhere, that combined with Hans Ecke's scripts, will create just awsome images for your desktop.
I would do this if the emails I got from .ch, .th, etc weren't embedded with obvious ads and spam. A bunch of asian characters surrounded with sexyyoungteenswithhaireyebrows.com.ch type URLs is pretty obviously *not* a letter to the postmaster about something legit. Looking at the headers normally confirms this as well.
:)
I don't recieve a lot of non-english mail, but 100% of the stuff I do get is spam, and obvious spam. I'm not blocking anyone though (though spamcop is my friend)
As I'm born in 1975, and the 100 year lifespan is predicted for 2040 or so, I can almost make it to 2100 when the 'immortality chip' is predicted, and upload myself into the Net. I've been striving for immortality for a while, but it's nice to know that I'll almost be able to make it (seeing > C space travel would be nice as well).
To quote woody allen: "I don't want to gain immortality by doing great things, I want to do it by living a very, long time."
:)
See what you're missing here is it's not so much about the specifics of how consumers are not allowed to record programs, but it's about the consumers choice, or more specifically, the studios not wanting us to have any.
It's happened time and time again, most recently with CDs. The high-ups in the industries want to decide what you watch and when. If you could watch just the new simpsons you probably would, but hollywood, or fox, or whoever has decided that unless you switch stations you have to watch show X before it, and show Y right after. The chances of those shows all appealing to you for more than two or 3 half hour segments are very slim, but give the consumer the choice to watch what they want when they want it!?
This is the same reason you have to buy a cd with 1 or 2 good tracks on it and the rest (generally) "filler", and the same reason why the RIAA wants to stop people making their own cds and mixes.
Ok, I might have chosen a bad example. The point was, there are searches that are a lot easier to ask if you can ask in natural language. EM did this, and did it very well. Even if it was just translating "who was einstein" to "eninstein +person" or whatever, it made things easier on the user.
Yup, re-implementing the 'electricmonk', a search engine that I used almost as much as google when it was still alive.
For those who don't remember it or have never heard of it, it was a natural language parser search engine that would handle searches like "how do I make tomato soup" or "what were the greatest inventions of alexander graham bell". Much easier to type in what you *mean* instead of things like "'alexander graham bell' + greatest !+inventions" or such like.
The problem with electricmonk.com was that it didn't have the huge resource to search from that google did. A combination of the two could be incrediably kick ass, especially if it was just an option to type in on the main search bar! ("why does my kernel break with a foo.o error?")
Well, I've never spoken to RMS directly, but I have seen him speak, and it really sounds like he's got a few things that are always pissing him off. The linux vs gnu/linux thing for example, is all I've ever heard him talk about, be it overhearing him on the show floor of linuxworld or accepting an award (at the same linuxworld), he did nothing but rant (and I do mean rant) about how linux should be called gnu/linux. I was wanting to go and talk to him and say how much I admired him and how I was privileged to meet him (yes, suck up to The RMS), but after hearing him go off on some kid who was talking to him at the GNU booth I decided to just stay away.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the man, especially for keeping his principles in the midst of all the opposition (like a christian girl staying a virgin when "everyone else is doing it"), but that doesn't mean I don't think he can be a bit off the edge sometimes.
-- ajb
IIRC .deb doesn't have some of the nice error checking that rpm has, like signing. Also compare files on a system to the originals in an .deb to check for tainted files (though while looking I see that debsums(1) might do the trick.
.deb's inadequate logging is mentioned, as well as keeping the install messages somewhere, or keeping previous versions of a package (what happens when you find out that libfoo is completely b0rked in the latest version, and have to run around searching for a mirror site that hasn't been updated yet. This generally only happens in unstable, but it's still a PITA :)
.deb didn't have, but I don't recall them right now.
:)
Other problems is the PITA it is to do an non-interactive install of debs. One of the biggest bitches I hear about debian is that when doing an initial install, and you've gotten to the part where packages are installing it goes something like this:
*install*
*install*
*install*
*ask question via debconf*
*install*
*install*
*ask another question*
*install*
*install*
*install*
*ask same question again*
*install*
*install*
etc...
Also
There were a couple of other features that
Some references and info is here though that's a lot more pro-deb than discussing this exact issue, but there's good info there.
Oh, and before you start flaming, I'm a long time debian user
Users then get to go through their spam, clicking on the 'click here to be removed' and wasting their time and bandwidth, until the next bout of spam comes through.
Basically, it's a good thought, but there looks (to me) to be so many potential fuckups, especially with the assumption that becuase it is "legit" people want to see it, that I don't think it'll be any better, and will probably be worse, as now you have two different types of spam to deal with. No thanks, it's spamassassin for me!
Well, there are actually quite a few programs that can read word documents (abiword, wv, staroffice, et all), but it's the search for something that can read word docs *WELL*. The next step would be to get something that writes word docs well.... countless hours I've heard my boss bitching about how staroffice munged up his powerpoint presentation when he imported it, changed a word or two, and exported it.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, the OSS community and in fact, anyone who doesn't use MS software is screwed when trying to find something decent to read/write word docs, but they do exist, they're just not high quality. For the stuff that is sent to me in word doc format, abiword works "well enough" to read it and let me understand what it is they are trying to communictate to me.
Actually a buddy of mine just hit on a good (obvious) point.... the problem with OE is that it's not good, but it's good enough
I think it was somewhere in the list of patches from the -mjc tree (see here) that there was a patch for the entire kernel for linux. Basically it let the system save it's state, and then restore it if it detects that it was shut down at that point. I'm not sure if this is what you want (and I couldn't get it working), but it's certainly a step in the right direction to what you're looking for.
Just found it here, it's the 'swsusp' patch.
Yup, I have to agree... I used it for a bit and found it quite good for my mp3/porn/warez requirements. I don't know if they broke a file up into parts like edonkey2000 and kazaa/morpheous do, or if they had any funky technology like that, but they seemed pretty solid in the ability of the software to get from them to me.
The main problem, and the reason why I "left" them was as NewbieSpaz points out, there's no *nix client.
True, but as the business grows so should the servers, and sometimes this means that they're going to get replaced. It might be a bit of a pita to take out solution X and put in solution Y, but by the time you've outgrown it, you might be at the point where you can afford to have a network guy who has the sole responsibility of keeping things up to date and going... well, you should already, but now you can pay him more so that he and his PFY can deal with integrating a new solution.
:)
The same can be said for a start up business not getting themselves a huge expensive sun box to do their work.. sure if they grow from 5 people to 500 people they'll need it, but at this point it's far more cost effective to get the cheaper solution, which this appears to be. Scalability works both ways.
And heck who knows, maybe these machines do recognize each other and do funky things, but I doubt it. This system IMHO is just another of the linux-based web appliances that were all the rage a year or two ago, and it just has some new auto-detect technology (which someone described how it could be (and based on my experience doing the same type of things, is) done. Bet marketing was overjoyed they could create a new paradigm shift in their action items
This is a shame.... this was seen (not by me, but reported here previously) at several trade shows and drew a lot of good reviews. I wonder if it was just a big pipe dream and great mockups or if was dropped for other reasons. Hardware really sucks to sell, and it's quite possible that this system was complete and ready to go, but sales would have to be unrealistically high, or the price would be unrealisticaly high to expect it to sell at all :(
I wonder if there's any chance of this system still making it out into the world in the form of GPLed software, patches, or an emulator for people to hack around with. Maybe sometime in the future this will still surface (fingers crossed).
Not many viruses are cross platform (unless you're talking about nt/2k/me/xp/98/98se being different platforms that is). Most of the virii out there aren't "email viruses" they are "Outlook express" viruses, and I don't see why this one isn't the same. To create a real cross platform virus would take a bit of doing IMHO.
I think it's more like webmin, on port 80, SUID root :)
Or in other words, a linux version of IIS/OE/IE
Not to nitpick, as I do agree with you, but artists have labels for a reason (of course, these days labels have artists, but that's another story). Imagine your payment went right to the artist... no, I mean right to them, as in a check delivered to them. Well, what happens when you're an artist and suddenly you have to cash a million checks. That'd kinda suck. Even if it wasn't individual people but organizations (napster, gnutella, random-pay-the-artist.com, etc), that's still a fair number of checks to cash. This is why labels exists.
Nowadays of course they exist not to make life easier for the artist (and get a cut for their troubles), but to simply get their cut and make lots of cash money.
</rant></bitch>
Yea, kinda ;) When I upgrade nothing needs to get deleted, and everything from dependancies to shuting down and restarting services is handled by apt and dpkg. Seriously, there are two differences between every single linux distro:
:) After that it's just linux...
1 - the install
2 - package management
And in your case, #2 will help
OMG! Finally! Thankyou mozilla devs for getting this in, it is the one final thing that means I can get rid of crappy ol' netscape 4.x! Those of us stuck with email that is required to be encrypted (company mail etc) and who are linux users can now leave the realm of netscape 4.x!
.9.7.1 or nightly builds.
The UI is still very incomplete. It didn't seem to want to let me sign or encrypt email (which sucks) but I could read it, view my certs, and do other basic operations, which is all I need. The encrypting of mail is of course still needed, but I'm going to guess that the ui glitches (the menu item not recognizing that I'd selected "always encrypt") are going to be resolved in
Again, great job mozilla! Thank you from this linux + s/mime user!
(and no, the boss wouldn't let us just use pgp/gpg....)
Now wait a minute. Based off your User # you've obviously been reading slashdot for a while.
:) How high are we up to these days Rob?
User numbers? Why back in my day we didn't have usernumbers, hell it wasn't even slashdot back then... why I remember when it wasn't even chips'n'dips gosh darnit!
Seriously though, it scares me when a 6 figure user id is considered "here a while"
I don't think that's really a fair comparision. A better comparision I think would be the difference between buying a car after taking it for a test drive, vs buying it based on the companies glossy magazine ads.
To be honest, a test drive isn't quite right. A 2 week trail would be best, as driving around the block isn't going to give you the needed information that you'd get from driving it across the country or to work every day.