I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows. Some of the widgets just look awkward no matter what theme engine you use. Don't get me wrong I use Linux most of the time, but in my experience Windows still reigns in speed even compared to OSX. OSX has the appearance down pat but still is slow compared to Windows. It's minor nitpicking I know. Productivity is what counts but it would still be nice to clear these two issues up.
Technically my first computer was a TI-89. The kind you hook up to a TV. But I consider my first one to be the Kaypro II since I could actually save my Basic programs to floppy instead of leaving the computer on and hoping my little siblings don't shut the power off losing the 4 pages of code I had tediously typed in the day before on my TI-89.
I know from reading your blog that you've had to deal with some sticky issues reagarding people leaving comments to your posts. My question is: In your opinion, what do you feel would be a better way of having people comment on a story without having the moderation power of a Slashdot type site at your disposal? Or is this even feasible given the way most blog type scripts are designed.
Trolltech needs desperately to update the OSX port of QT. The widget have a cumbersome appearance and need to be updated to Panther style. Text alignment is in need of some fixing up. This isn't a complaint... the OSX version is still in its infancy and I'm sure time will allow a more integrated look... I'm just anxious.. because QT really is a great toolkit / API.
3 months of tedious training (marking spam as Junk) has paid of quite well. Haven't had a single spam get through in 8 months. IIRC I think it uses some sort of Bayesian filtering. I highly recommend going through a few months of training at least, since at the beinging I would get a few false positives. Now however I don't know how I could ever live without it.
Flash... interesting... does it support widgets such as list boxes and tabs... if so... then yes!.NET... maybe.. but we still would need a universal browser instead of downloading a.net app for each site I go to
gaim.. irrelevant to this discussion
trillian... see gaim
now if we could get rid of msn/aim/icq and stick with jabber... we could solve the IM portion at least
An organization was created devoted to promoting the new internets open standards, which is then backed my some major corporations. And while we're at it can we please ditch HTTP and the browser as well. Re-work the browser to work like a native app and not hypertext. In other words a "web site" would become a "web app". It would work the same way as a browser in that you plug in a URL and the window transofrms itself to include appropriate widgets and information. Don't say this is what web services is for... that's another clunky method that still relies on http. And while I'm at it let's throw in a universal IM protocol. Who will step up to this challenge...? As much as I'd like I don't think anyone would or even could.
Often times, technological advances only happen when it's convenient, not when it's actually needed.
It was given to staff and friends of the Firefly production team during the Christmas holidays as a gift.
Additional Info and Help for blooper clip
on
Firefly Coming to DVD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Excerpt from AICN:
"Further to the piece about Firefly coming to DVD at some point, the UK Sci-Fi channel have now added the series to their listing for May. According the listings here they have it on Sundays at 7pm starting with the first part of Serenity on May 18th. In their forums they have also confirmed they'll be showing the unaired episodes!! YEAH!!!"
Also I have a blooper quicktime clip of FireFly which is pretty funny, but more often scary. Weighing in at 57.9MB, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to host it on a BitTorrent link for our fellow Slashdotians. Reply below.
Having never used a widescreen aspect ratio screen I was curious as to how games handle these odd resolutions. Do they actually recognize and adjust for the aspect ratio or simply default to the highest available 3:4 setting which means the graphics start to blur? Anyone know?
Back in the day of 5.25" floppies, a buddy of mine left his in the back seat of my car with his school report saved on it. This is during summer time. So we come back and I open the door a wave of hot air blasts in my face wreaking of burned plastic. We look in the back to see the floppy is literally bubbling. My buddy obviously flips. After it had cooled down, just for kicks I slit open the mass of burned plastic and the plastic disc inside was perfectly fine! So I grab a new 5.24" floppy, slice it open swap it's disc with my buddies. Sealed the slit with electrical tape and all was fine. Needless to say I got a free lunch for the remaining of the semester:)
John Harrison, the screenwriter and co-producer answers (from here):
Q: What books does Children of Dune cover? Why not call it Dune Messiah?
A: After the enormous success of SCI FI's first Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries, SCI FI asked Richard Rubinstein and me to come up with a proposal for another. After a lot of thought and conversation, it seemed that the next books in Frank Herbert's epic presented unique adaptation opportunities as well as problems.
Dune Messiah by itself did not resolve completely enough to stand on its own; it set the stage for Children of Dune. But that third book couldn't be the basis for a new miniseries without the precedent of Dune Messiah. So I decided we should combine both books and create a continuation of the first miniseries. Simply put, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune would complete the saga of Muad'Dib and set the stage for what was to come.
There is a significant passage in Frank Herbert's Dune, spoken by Reverend Mother Ramallo, in which she tells Paul that "when religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows." Of course she means Muad'Dib -- he is the whirlwind. As Dune fans know, in Dune Messiah he is tortured by what that whirlwind has meant, of what has become of his revolution. And, as students of history, we know that "every revolution contains the seeds of its own destruction." In Children of Dune, those seeds have started to bloom. But there is an answer, a road that Muad'dib was unable or unwilling to take: the Golden Path. By the end of Children of Dune, Muad'dib's son, Leto II, is willing to go down that path.
So I decided to combine both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune into one seamless narrative that would complete this chapter of the Atreides on Arrakis and set the stage for the next 3,000-year era, the Golden Path, and the reign of the God Emperor.
Re:I need a clean desktop
on
Gnome 2.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
You can turn off all desktop icons from the preferences dialog in Nautilus.
Just the other day I was helping a friend install RedHat 8 on brand spanking new machine (bought just for Linux BTW:) and he had purchased a top of the line P4 2.4GHZ from DELL Desktop fully loaded. I was absolutely astonished at how quiet it was. He lives in a dead silent neighborhood so you can hear everything. Even the 48X CD-ROM was quiet and this is with a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 in it as well. In fact my Laptop was noiser than the Desktop. I guess my point is that some companies are starting to take noise seriosly and paying a bit more for a brand name does have it's perks.
I remember way back when we all used to carry around boot floppies in high school all set up to play Spectre. It was a simple game but very addicting. Worked great on a LAN. I haven't been able to find out where to get it though. Might have to dig around my box of floppies up in the attic:)
Interesting. When you say it crashes do you mean it literally blue screens or just apps crash and the taskbar gets restarted? I purposely left out Windows 9X, because it was for the most part a terrible OS (basically a GUI shell on top of DOS). As far as I'm concerned Windows 2K is Microsofts first true consumer OS with NT4.0 being their first true OS in general. Everything besides those just weren't usable.
"Microsoft users are an interesting lot. They have systems that they have NO control over. They have systems they have to reboot every sixteen minutes. They freely pay Bill Gates obscene amounts of money for buggy programs that they can't use when they upgrade to the next operating system. It's almost laughable."
Nothing in these statements is true. Please stop using the argument that Windows is unstable (beginning with Win2K). If you are using supported hardware it's as stable as Linux and dare I say MORE stable than Linux/XWindows. (Random X crashes do occur on occasion)
Please define "NO control over". If you're talking about being able to swap VM in the kernel then yes. If you're talking about being able to choose what apps to use or themes or such than no.
My father still uses a Windows 3.0 app on his XP machine with absolutely no problems whatsoever including printing! That's one thing Microsoft has done right, being able to use most legacy apps.
I totally agree that Unification is necessary to an extent but get your facts straight before you start bashing Windows.
Just yesterday I got through a week and a half of tech support of finally getting my dad's DSL up and running without going down for hours at a time and they hit me with this. I just hope whoever (if) takes over has as good tech support. Seriosuly though they had some great tech support personell, very helpfull.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows. Some of the widgets just look awkward no matter what theme engine you use. Don't get me wrong I use Linux most of the time, but in my experience Windows still reigns in speed even compared to OSX. OSX has the appearance down pat but still is slow compared to Windows. It's minor nitpicking I know. Productivity is what counts but it would still be nice to clear these two issues up.
Typo: I meant TI-99. See here: http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html
:)
TI-89 was my high school calculator...
Technically my first computer was a TI-89. The kind you hook up to a TV. But I consider my first one to be the Kaypro II since I could actually save my Basic programs to floppy instead of leaving the computer on and hoping my little siblings don't shut the power off losing the 4 pages of code I had tediously typed in the day before on my TI-89.
Good times.
I know from reading your blog that you've had to deal with some sticky issues reagarding people leaving comments to your posts. My question is: In your opinion, what do you feel would be a better way of having people comment on a story without having the moderation power of a Slashdot type site at your disposal? Or is this even feasible given the way most blog type scripts are designed.
This is a great milestone but...
Trolltech needs desperately to update the OSX port of QT. The widget have a cumbersome appearance and need to be updated to Panther style. Text alignment is in need of some fixing up. This isn't a complaint... the OSX version is still in its infancy and I'm sure time will allow a more integrated look... I'm just anxious.. because QT really is a great toolkit / API.
Good Job!
3 months of tedious training (marking spam as Junk) has paid of quite well. Haven't had a single spam get through in 8 months. IIRC I think it uses some sort of Bayesian filtering. I highly recommend going through a few months of training at least, since at the beinging I would get a few false positives. Now however I don't know how I could ever live without it.
Just my 2 cents.
Java... ummm no...
.NET... maybe.. but we still would need a universal browser instead of downloading a .net app for each site I go to
Flash... interesting... does it support widgets such as list boxes and tabs... if so... then yes!
gaim.. irrelevant to this discussion
trillian... see gaim
now if we could get rid of msn/aim/icq and stick with jabber... we could solve the IM portion at least
An organization was created devoted to promoting the new internets open standards, which is then backed my some major corporations. And while we're at it can we please ditch HTTP and the browser as well. Re-work the browser to work like a native app and not hypertext. In other words a "web site" would become a "web app". It would work the same way as a browser in that you plug in a URL and the window transofrms itself to include appropriate widgets and information. Don't say this is what web services is for... that's another clunky method that still relies on http. And while I'm at it let's throw in a universal IM protocol. Who will step up to this challenge...? As much as I'd like I don't think anyone would or even could.
Often times, technological advances only happen when it's convenient, not when it's actually needed.
Kudos to Anonymous Coward. Grab em while it's hot!
The clip is in MP4 format.
It was given to staff and friends of the Firefly production team during the Christmas holidays as a gift.
Excerpt from AICN:
"Further to the piece about Firefly coming to DVD at some point, the UK Sci-Fi channel have now added the series to their listing for May. According the listings here they have it on Sundays at 7pm starting with the first part of Serenity on May 18th. In their forums they have also confirmed they'll be showing the unaired episodes!! YEAH!!!"
Also I have a blooper quicktime clip of FireFly which is pretty funny, but more often scary. Weighing in at 57.9MB, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to host it on a BitTorrent link for our fellow Slashdotians. Reply below.
Looks like you can also use IMAP to tap into your mailbox as well:
Having never used a widescreen aspect ratio screen I was curious as to how games handle these odd resolutions. Do they actually recognize and adjust for the aspect ratio or simply default to the highest available 3:4 setting which means the graphics start to blur? Anyone know?
Back in the day of 5.25" floppies, a buddy of mine left his in the back seat of my car with his school report saved on it. This is during summer time. So we come back and I open the door a wave of hot air blasts in my face wreaking of burned plastic. We look in the back to see the floppy is literally bubbling. My buddy obviously flips. After it had cooled down, just for kicks I slit open the mass of burned plastic and the plastic disc inside was perfectly fine! So I grab a new 5.24" floppy, slice it open swap it's disc with my buddies. Sealed the slit with electrical tape and all was fine. Needless to say I got a free lunch for the remaining of the semester :)
Thanks for the info + screenshot. Appreciated!
Anyone got a link to a screenshot showing Mandrake's "Galaxy" Gnome theme that made it in this release. Just curious what it looks like.
John Harrison, the screenwriter and co-producer answers (from here):
Q: What books does Children of Dune cover? Why not call it Dune Messiah?
A: After the enormous success of SCI FI's first Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries, SCI FI asked Richard Rubinstein and me to come up with a proposal for another. After a lot of thought and conversation, it seemed that the next books in Frank Herbert's epic presented unique adaptation opportunities as well as problems.
Dune Messiah by itself did not resolve completely enough to stand on its own; it set the stage for Children of Dune. But that third book couldn't be the basis for a new miniseries without the precedent of Dune Messiah. So I decided we should combine both books and create a continuation of the first miniseries. Simply put, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune would complete the saga of Muad'Dib and set the stage for what was to come.
There is a significant passage in Frank Herbert's Dune, spoken by Reverend Mother Ramallo, in which she tells Paul that "when religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows." Of course she means Muad'Dib -- he is the whirlwind. As Dune fans know, in Dune Messiah he is tortured by what that whirlwind has meant, of what has become of his revolution. And, as students of history, we know that "every revolution contains the seeds of its own destruction." In Children of Dune, those seeds have started to bloom. But there is an answer, a road that Muad'dib was unable or unwilling to take: the Golden Path. By the end of Children of Dune, Muad'dib's son, Leto II, is willing to go down that path.
So I decided to combine both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune into one seamless narrative that would complete this chapter of the Atreides on Arrakis and set the stage for the next 3,000-year era, the Golden Path, and the reign of the God Emperor.
You can turn off all desktop icons from the preferences dialog in Nautilus.
Looks like the Bitstream Vera font family didn't make it in this release. Anyone know an ETA on it?
What has been the biggest stumbling block or surprise, if any, in attempting to re-educate yourself into today's tech world.
Cheers!
Happy Holiday Fragging!
Interesting. When you say it crashes do you mean it literally blue screens or just apps crash and the taskbar gets restarted? I purposely left out Windows 9X, because it was for the most part a terrible OS (basically a GUI shell on top of DOS). As far as I'm concerned Windows 2K is Microsofts first true consumer OS with NT4.0 being their first true OS in general. Everything besides those just weren't usable.
"Microsoft users are an interesting lot. They have systems that they have NO control over. They have systems they have to reboot every sixteen minutes. They freely pay Bill Gates obscene amounts of money for buggy programs that they can't use when they upgrade to the next operating system. It's almost laughable."
Nothing in these statements is true. Please stop using the argument that Windows is unstable (beginning with Win2K). If you are using supported hardware it's as stable as Linux and dare I say MORE stable than Linux/XWindows. (Random X crashes do occur on occasion)
Please define "NO control over". If you're talking about being able to swap VM in the kernel then yes. If you're talking about being able to choose what apps to use or themes or such than no.
My father still uses a Windows 3.0 app on his XP machine with absolutely no problems whatsoever including printing! That's one thing Microsoft has done right, being able to use most legacy apps.
I totally agree that Unification is necessary to an extent but get your facts straight before you start bashing Windows.
Just yesterday I got through a week and a half of tech support of finally getting my dad's DSL up and running without going down for hours at a time and they hit me with this. I just hope whoever (if) takes over has as good tech support. Seriosuly though they had some great tech support personell, very helpfull.
Ironic...