I have to say that, for all the focus it gets here in Linux-world, themeable windows management is about the last thing in the world that matters. You might think that Apple - King of the UI - should be more concerned with this sort of thing than other people, but I feel quite otherwise. Let me explain.
Themes (as they stand on our desktops today) are nothing more than eye-candy. Eye candy is nice (that's why people obsess over wallpaper), but it's hardly the end-all of UI. It's the actual *interface* that is the bell-ringer for a UI. It doesn't really matter what it looks like (provided it isn't visually distracting), so much as how it works.
Take your average E-theme for example. Most of them just change a few pixmaps here and there. Nothing fundamentally different about your Desktop, changes when you alter a theme. Maybe you click somewhere else to close a window. BFD. Themes don't change how the layout of my application looks. Themes don't control what my filemanager looks like. Themes don't tuck me in a night...
Okay, forget that last one (I've heard that some of the new Sawmmill themes do just that). What's my point? I'd rather Apple/Englightenment/KDE spent their energy in developing a more usable *interface* than a prettier one. And, actually, I think Apple has done (and will continue doing) just that.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
It's interesting that he makes reference to what a bomb "New Coke" was... Coke failed miserably at creating a new image for their product, and now with a new leader at the helm, they're about to try something very very similar. Keep an eye out for the new look from Coke.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I probably would (if I was quick enough). But whether I define them or not is really inconsequential. I (along with the majority of the people on this planet) believe in some form of higher power. I use the term "God" to refer to this higher power. Why then should I retire this word from my vocabulary? Because an insignificant minority of people think my beliefs are silly? Like I give a damn.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
No I agree - whether there is a soul or not has no effect on who is the *original* Riker. But it does have an effect on whether the two Copy-Rikers are th same person as the original Riker. I ask myself the question "What is the difference between the Rikers?" and the answer is "Unless there's something to Riker that we can't see: nothing". So, while he may not be the original Riker, he is still the same Riker. Well, unless there is some property (such as a soul) that a transporter cannot duplicate.
Interesting Theseus story... Never heard that one before.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Soul is the only word, out of those three, that I would agree has a fairly dubious definitive meaning. God and conciousness are pretty easily defined. Now, your definition might vary a bit from mine, depending on your beliefs, but that hardly makes your argument any more sound.
You're saying that, because it's hard to define something, we should choose to ignore it? That's like saying: "Well, we can't agree on the answer, so none of us could possibly be correct."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Whether a soul exists has nothing to do with what you're describing. Yeah it would, of course, be murder if you disintegrated someone. My question was, would the guy on the other side of the transporter be "you". Well, if you don't believe that humans are anything more than the sum of their parts (i.e. no soul) then, for all intents and purposes, the newly cloned person *is* "you". He's just not the only you.
In the case of Riker's transportation mishap, we ask ourselves (if we actually care enough about Star Trek to even hypothesize this far) "Who is Riker?" Both of them? If one Riker is just the same as another, then I guess they are both Riker. Otherwise we're forced to accept that there is no Riker anymore, because (like you so humorously pointed out) Chief O'Brien has vaporized him a couple hundred times over.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
A *molocule* that can intelligently transmit unique radio signals... Why yes, I happen to have one of those here in my pocket, right next to my Open Sourced Natalie Portman.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's the million dollar question right there. Take a look at Star Trek for a thought-experiment. Scotty (or Chief O'Brien, or whoever you want) beams the Captain up from Planet X. All of the Captain's molocules are completely disintegrated on the planet and then copies of them are created, in the exact same sequence, back on the ship. Is it really the same person?
From all outward appearances, yes it is. Of course, from all inward appearances (that is, to the Captain) it is also. But is it? I guess it depends on whether you believe in a soul or not.
Another fun time with transporter tech: Remember the episode where Riker finds his clone living on the abandoned planet? A transporter malfunction had bounced a "copy" of him to the planet's surface. So who's the real Riker? Following the last example, neither of them are the real Riker, because the "real" Riker got disintegrated on his first day at the academy, at which time he was replaced by a complete duplicate.
What have we learned here? Star Trek has all the answers; you just have to look.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I don't think that proves anything one way or the other. All it proves is that science can duplicate through computers what nature can create. Actually "duplicate" isn't even a correct term. "Emulate" is much more appropriate, since we'd have no way of knowing if the machine really had a consciousness or simply just appeared (very convincingly) to have a consciousness.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This is something that probably every sci-fi fan has thought about. But just because you've implanted your brain into a machine and it is an exact duplicate of you, that doesn't mean you're really still living, does it?
I guess it comes down to the question of whether you believe a person is more than the sum of all their parts. The way I see it, it would just be a machine that got to live on with my personality/memory while I still got to die (eventually). Actually, unless you were killed at the very moment your brain-content was transferred, there would be an overlap in existance. Two me's?? No thanks.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't be silly: OSS man IS Natalie Portman's boyfriend. He's just trying to make everyone jealous. Or... Maybe OSS man is really Natalie Portman, trying to boost her popularity among pimply dork programmers. Ya never know;)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I think you're reading way too much into this release. All those graphics cards out there that didn't have support under Linux for OpenGL *still* don't have support under Linux for OpenGL. So, as far as your screensaver goes, you can still do it of course, but it's not going to run much faster than if you did it with Mesa.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Nvidia, yes. Glide isn't really OpenGL. And as for the "other 3d cards", well keep dreaming. Unless something new has happened recently there are only 3 companies that have cards capable of doing OpenGL under Linux.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Oh man, I almost crapped myself when I read that. I was like "Portman? What does he mean by that?" Then the light dawned on me and I laughed myself silly. Even though you're a troll, thanks.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This is almost not a bad idea. I don't know how much strain it would place on the service (which IMHO needs to be improved anyway), but customizable censor-rules would be kind of neat. I mean, it wouldn't be censorship really, just a more potent form of browsing at a higher level. That way you could still read posts at 0, but you wouldn't have to hear all the crap about Natalie Portman and whatever people are pouring down their pants nowadays.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You could do it, but it sounds like the whole system would be an awful kludge. Besides, you couldn't moderate while in NNTP mode, and anyone could hack their posts to have
X-Slashdo-Moderation: +4 (insightful)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I wouldn't worry about anyone getting mad at you. More likely you'll just see people whining about how Slashdot is going down the tubes in terms of content.
Just out of curiosity: How exactly are you an MP3 Representative?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This doesn't really have anything to do with open source. Well, certainly it makes *writing* open source versions of napster easier, but the protocol was never that complicated to begin with: there are already a number of napster-clones out there. And, on top of that, Napster is still proprietary. They're still running the servers that connect them all, and they could easily change the protocol (to something *much* more complicated) if they chose to.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Don't we already have the protocol for Napster? I mean, I've seen like 40 different Napster-clones for Linux (and even one for Java). I don't think this is revolutionary, or am I missing the picture?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Slashdot Mirror
Themes (as they stand on our desktops today) are nothing more than eye-candy. Eye candy is nice (that's why people obsess over wallpaper), but it's hardly the end-all of UI. It's the actual *interface* that is the bell-ringer for a UI. It doesn't really matter what it looks like (provided it isn't visually distracting), so much as how it works.
Take your average E-theme for example. Most of them just change a few pixmaps here and there. Nothing fundamentally different about your Desktop, changes when you alter a theme. Maybe you click somewhere else to close a window. BFD. Themes don't change how the layout of my application looks. Themes don't control what my filemanager looks like. Themes don't tuck me in a night...
Okay, forget that last one (I've heard that some of the new Sawmmill themes do just that). What's my point? I'd rather Apple/Englightenment/KDE spent their energy in developing a more usable *interface* than a prettier one. And, actually, I think Apple has done (and will continue doing) just that.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Interesting Theseus story... Never heard that one before.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You're saying that, because it's hard to define something, we should choose to ignore it? That's like saying: "Well, we can't agree on the answer, so none of us could possibly be correct."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Whether a soul exists has nothing to do with what you're describing. Yeah it would, of course, be murder if you disintegrated someone. My question was, would the guy on the other side of the transporter be "you". Well, if you don't believe that humans are anything more than the sum of their parts (i.e. no soul) then, for all intents and purposes, the newly cloned person *is* "you". He's just not the only you.
In the case of Riker's transportation mishap, we ask ourselves (if we actually care enough about Star Trek to even hypothesize this far) "Who is Riker?" Both of them? If one Riker is just the same as another, then I guess they are both Riker. Otherwise we're forced to accept that there is no Riker anymore, because (like you so humorously pointed out) Chief O'Brien has vaporized him a couple hundred times over.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If my favorite search engine can gain consciousness, then I think there's hope for all of us.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
From all outward appearances, yes it is. Of course, from all inward appearances (that is, to the Captain) it is also. But is it? I guess it depends on whether you believe in a soul or not.
Another fun time with transporter tech: Remember the episode where Riker finds his clone living on the abandoned planet? A transporter malfunction had bounced a "copy" of him to the planet's surface. So who's the real Riker? Following the last example, neither of them are the real Riker, because the "real" Riker got disintegrated on his first day at the academy, at which time he was replaced by a complete duplicate.
What have we learned here? Star Trek has all the answers; you just have to look.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
"You know what we're doing right now?"
"What?"
"We're interfacing."
"Um... I have to go now."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
"How would you tell the difference?"
"You could ask the machine if it had a consciousness."
How would it know if it had a consciousness? Maybe it just thinks it has a consciousnes."
"It thinks? It thinks therefor it is... Or maybe it just thinks it is."
I'm still confusing myself.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I guess it comes down to the question of whether you believe a person is more than the sum of all their parts. The way I see it, it would just be a machine that got to live on with my personality/memory while I still got to die (eventually). Actually, unless you were killed at the very moment your brain-content was transferred, there would be an overlap in existance. Two me's?? No thanks.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
X-Slashdo-Moderation: +4 (insightful)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Just out of curiosity: How exactly are you an MP3 Representative?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."