While I have never played the game myself, other then for a few minutes just to see what it was all about, I have had friends literally stay in the house for weeks so they could play the game. It is amazing what a hold it can have over some people.
Let's turn that around to something a bit more apropos of Slashdot....
While I have never had sex myself, other than a few minutes looking at a magazine just to see what it was all about, I have had friends literally stay in the house for weeks so they could play with each other. It is amazing what a hold it can have over some people.
Ok, so you get the rather obvious point, here. Folks get involved in activities or communities and become engrosed. This is human nature. EverQuest is NOT a video game (a fact which Sony continues to this day to fail to understand). EverQuest is a community, much like Slashdot or the local coffee house. Just as people enjoy those activities and get more involved, they do so with EQ.
When I was a teenager I spent weeks in my room working on a rubick's cube.... which is worse, that or chatting with an old friend from college while whacking on an evil dragon?
At least there's some social contact in the EQ option, which is more than many people in my field get on a regular basis.
Professional service firms, which tend to have many under 50 people offices that open and close in two or threee years often use VPN's exclusively
This conversation started around the critical services that people rely on, and how a wide-scale Internet outage would result in disaster to modern life. I don't think having "professional service firms [...] that open and close in two or three years" go away for multiple hours or a day is going to cause that level of havoc for the world.
Look at the VPN market and you'll see how many businesses rely on the internet
I've yet to see one business that relied on the Internet for anything critical. Sure, we have VPNs all over the place and most companies do, but when push comes to shove, those are all for convinience (and home users, and folks connecting laptops from hotels, etc.), and the business could run pretty much forever without them, though with some degredation.
``Brown suggests the invention of Unix (news - web sites) is an integral part of the Linux story commenting, "It is clear that people's exceptional interest in the Unix operating system made Unix one of the most licensed, imitated, and stolen products in the history of computer science." Brown writes, "Over the years, many have envied the startling and pervasive success of Unix. For almost thirty years, programmers have tried and failed to successfully build a Unix-like system and couldn't. To this day, we have a serious attribution problem in software development because people have chosen to scrupulously borrow or imitate Unix."''
Ok, so their claim boils down to: Linux is a UNIX clone and doesn't attribute that fact. They throw around terms like stealing, but failure to attribute ones sources is at worst plagarism, not theft. And is Linux plagarism? No, as noted in their quote, it's an imitation, which is not plagarism (MS Windows after all is imitation of Xerox Parc and UNIX).
So, what of this failure to attribute one's sources?! Where does Linus get off?! Well, actually:
"I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers"
So there you have it. Linux started as a Minix clone, which was, itself, a UNIX clone for low-end hardware. Nuff said, troll press releases suck, sigh.
More specifically, links to external articles that include the source. Those external sources could be taken down, but Cisco is going to be more concerned about the OTHER 797.5MB of source, not what Slashdot links to.
Also, if you take 3 8.5x11 sheets, line them up along their longer sides, attach them to eachother, put a staple through the middle of the first and second sheet join and then hang them from a height of approximately eye-level it makes the idea place for a picture of a naked "girl next door".
Part of his problem with deadlines was because he was never ever totally happy with his work.
And the other part was that the man was a raving alcoholic. Let's not over-gloss his life, it wasn't all pretty. He wrote some damn fine comedy, true. Leave it at that.
But remember, after years of dealing with what we feel is a horrible interface and being strongarmed into this and that, and let down by focus on money and not product, we have a very strong right to be skeptical about anything that Microsoft does.
Common misconception amongst everyone in the open source movement, or just anti-MS zealots in general. If Microsoft is focused on making money, they are focused on their products.
I'm not a zealot (got my Windows/XP system for running games on my other computer right next to this one), but the OP was 100% correct. Being focused on profit has nothing to do with being focused on the customer... well, that's not true, but it has nothing to do with being focused on ME, and that's the problem. MS rushes products out the door without proper QA because they need to meet marketing deadlines with their customers, and their customers are OEMs who honestly don't care if the UI is good or bad as long as the OS requirements on the new system mean that some percentage of the world will come looking for new boxes to run it on.
If you had any delusion that you were the customer, please diabuse yourself of it now. You're not the customer in most industries. A friend of mine who worked for the corporate offices of a supermarket chain pointed out that the ugly bags of mostly water (aka humans) walking through the store are actually considered to be product, not customer. That product is packaged and sold to the customers... the makers of the goods on the shelves.
The money coming out of your pocket is actually a strange by-product that isn't really a strong concern.
Same goes for most venues. Corporations are the customers, and your money is the product. Your attention, wallet and time are bought and sold like so many pork bellies. Welcome, as the band said, to the machine.
Ok, so back to MS. Yeah, they put two things on SF, but convicted abusers of their monopoly power who have failed to reform following their slap on the wrist from a friendly administration should not be taken at face value. This is either a) a PR manuever; b) an effort to guage how much MS can exploit the OSS developer base to offset their disadvantage vs Linux (not a bad thing at all, but something to mull over); or c) an effor to understand OSS development in order to re-produce its benefits in some way.
In none of those scenarios are you the customer... you are at best the product and at worst the lab-rat. Don't be critical of them just because you can, but don't be overly idealistic either.
ext2 is often very fast because it lacks all the journaling stuff which is unimportant for a temporary filesystem.
It is important to remember that journaling can SPEED performance, not slow it down in many situations.
The key question is: are you maxing out the drive's IO/bandwidth. On RAID 5 with multiple concurant writes (usually more than 3) you will often see a performance boost for journaling.
Of course, the real win is when your journal isn't a disk at all, but NVRAM. In that case (e.g. NetApp), you get vastly better performance, AND reliability.
To be fair, this guy has done some really rugged tests of these suits. In terms of raw power in a single blow, no bear on earth could hurt you in this thing.
On ther other hand, I was always a bit dicy on the idea of having a bear decide to just push you over and sit on you for a half hour or so... I don't think that would work out as well.
Still, this suit was a marvel of engineering, and anyone who thinks they could build a suit that could take a head-on hit from a swinging tree-log, please feel free to try;-)
Gnumeric has a plugin system based on shared libraries right now (which means that all plugins right now fall under the GNU GPL). A plugin exists for defining your own functions in Python.
Gnumeric exports a number of CORBA interfaces that enable programmers to control Gnumeric remotely within an authenticated GNOME desktop
In time that will be fixed, and then existing plugins and extensions could potentially be ported using an interface layer in Wine (not for emulation, but for re-compilation) or something of that ilk.
But, I will point out that discussions of this sort are moot. The "X will never be adopted until it can Y" statements can go on forever, constantly shifting to less and less obvious features. Instead, a replacement spreadsheet simply needs to be a good spreadsheet and find its own market. If it does that, it will grow and capture users. The user bases may never be 100% the same, and that's IMPORTANT for a new application. You want to have some users who uniquely use your application because of its features that they cannot get elsewhere.
Whether or not they *maintain* their dominant position through "monopolistic" practices, they got on top through purely legal means.
You're not only guessing, you're wrong.
If we go back to the 80s, you MIGHT be right, but since then, MS has been using market dominance in one area to strong-arm their way into market dominance in another. This includes using DOS to overpower the filesystem add-ons companies and DOS compatible software; using Windows to push Lotus out of the spreadsheet market; using Windows to push Corel out of the word processing market; using the Windows API to push Borland out of the compiler market; using Win32 to push Netscape out of the browser market; and the list goes on in many specialized market niches.
Microsoft has done hundreds of companies wrong by abusing their products in other markets to put companies out of business in their own markets. In some cases, Microsoft took to just announcing a "new product" to force companies out of business, even if they had no intention of releasing such a product.
If, by "maintain their dominant position" you mean "expand their sphere of dominance into more and more markets and sectors", then you are correct, except insofar as the "legal" part goes.
There are practical reasons that Novell might not want that. Regardless of how much they may be embracing open source, they're still making some money from their share of the Sun license. Would Sun just stop paying, or would they pay more because now more people have the source? It's a sticky issue, is all I'm saying, so don't expect it to be solved based on the ideals of those involved.
1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL, period (unless SCO and Novell agree it's ok;-)
2. Solaris includes many products that Sun has incorporated over the years. Most of them would likely have to be replaced, since I doubt the contracts involved allow Sun to just GPL the whole mess.
3. They would just be asking to have SCO add them to the list of companies targetted for a "tainting" suit, though honestly Sun may not care.
In the end, I think it would make far more sense for Sun to open source their SMP code by working with IBM on modifications to Linux. Sun+IBM could probably get Linux deployed on both of their very-high-end boxes in short order.
The SMP stuff is, as far as I know, most of what's left that Solaris does better than Linux, so what's the point in open sourcing the whole OS anyway?
Which, AGAIN, has nothing to do with Miguel's points (in fact, in so far as it MIGHT, you seem to be defending his assertions).
You select the applications that users prefer. You integrate them tightly with eachother and make them work well under various dekstop environments that people use.
But the apps listed, for the most part, weren't Gnome apps anyway, so it's moot point. Stop playing political football with applications and use them to get work done.
Why is it that KDE folks get upset every time someone advocates using a non-KDE app? Isn't that the kind of provincial thinking we're trying to get back away from? I use some KDE programs and some Gnome programs along with apps like Mozilla, XMMS, Open Office, Emacs, and other non-Gnome/KDE apps. Why would I want to limit myself in any other way?
If you are a real OSS (and not a cryptic MS zeelot), you should push real OSS project that can benefit the commuity
You mean like the Linux Kernel (an open source re-implementation of a closed source OS kenerl -- AT&T's UNIX at the time), Gaim (an open source re-implementation of a closed source IM client -- AIM from AOL), GCC (an open source re-implementation of a closed source compiler for a language developed by the same vendor that developed the OS -- PCC for the C language from AT&T), Linux NFS (an open source re-implementation of a closed source networked filesystem which the vendor published the protocol for while retaining patents on the technology -- NFS by Sun Microsystems), The Gimp (an open source re-implementation of a closed source photo editor -- Photoshop from Adobe), The X Window System (an open source re-implementation of a closed source windowing system -- PARC from Xerox), Samba (an open source re-implementation of a closed source file system -- SMB by Microsoft) or did you mean something else?
Face it: Open source software has been BLINDINGLY SUCCESSFUL at re-implementing closed-source software and making it popular. Why would we stop now?
I fail to see how this different than all the other attempts in the past at declarative programming. XAML simply tries to catch up to what people have been doing for years.
And that has been Miguel's assertion from the start. This is nothing new. It's nothing terribly great. But in a very real, NON-TECHNICAL way this is the killer app that Microsoft needs to maintain their edge. If you're interested in taking that edge away (and you might not be), then you must counter XAML's threat. Miguel points out (rightly so) that every time MS has done something like this in the past, the OSS community has sat around talking about how terribly un-original it is right up until the time they find that people don't want to use open source software because the un-original thing isn't available there.
His assertion is crystal-clear on these points, so let's not have the "XAML isn't interesting" discussion again.
However I feel that the choice to support both KDE and Gnome was a political decision [...] all you are doing is loading Gnomes services and libraries behind KDE, which isn't really supporting KDE
First off, no it's not political it's practical. There are KDE desktops out there. The goal is to target them for deployment of this suite along with everything else. Nothing surprising or political here.
And why on earth is "running under KDE" not "supporting KDE"?! If it said on the box "supports KDE" and I took it home to find that it ran under KDE, I can't see being too upset about that.
I think you're tilting at windmills. Everything said in the article, as far as I can tell, is true. You just don't like that the apps chosen based on popularity aren't the apps you want to use. I understand you pain. Please don't try to share it any further.
Until the 'anointed' apps have stuff like DCOP interfaces, desktop notification, KDE theme support, etc.. I'll stick with the KDE stuff. I like kicker popups, they're almost as slick as OS X bouncing dock icons.
Which, of course, you are welcome to do. KDE vs Gnome was not the question at hand (and can we all just grow up and get over waving our desktop's flag around?). The question was centered around the choice of applications, in theory being based on their popularity alone, but in the final analysis being Gnome-centric. I think I covered those issues well enough in my original post.
You've fallen into your own logic trap. Re-read what he said: you choose the successes.
Mozilla is not the ideal browser for Gnome, nor is it the default Gnome browser, but you choose it because it's the one that's most widely used.
Open Office is not the ideal office suite for Gnome, nor is it the default office suite for gnome, but you choose it because it's the one that's most widely used.
Evolution is probably the most widely used groupware client for Unix-like systems, but honestly it's also a Ximian product, and I think Miguel would have cited it regardless;-)
Gaim is the default messenger for Gnome, but it's also the most widely used IM client uner Unix-like systems.
Your choices on the other hand are: go with the KDE default. Not exactly the break from the desktop you seemed to advocate....
The "end of the world" crowd will, of course, latch on to genetically engineered food as a bane of all humanity, but that doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems.
The most pronounced revolve around the idea that we're introducing traits from wildly different species into eachother with little or no knowledge of what that will do to the immediate environment. If a strain of wheat is particularly good at resisting bugs and it starts growing in the wild... will it supplant other grasses? What will that impact?
What you really need is a larger model than we can currently manage in order to understand what the impact of these large, and yet subtle changes will have. Until then, caution is wise. Of course, the concerns over eating such foods are somewhat silly, but concerns over supporting ill-researched efforts by buying the foods are not.
You are, of course, correct (my appologies for being too limiting). However, taking that statement and expanding it to, "a feature used for viewing the next image in a series can ONLY be used for violent, hardcore pornography" is far, far beyond incorrect, it's utter nonesense.
Excuse me while I go browse some User Friendly strips using that feature... Hmm, then again, given your definition of porn...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
While I have never played the game myself, other then for a few minutes just to see what it was all about, I have had friends literally stay in the house for weeks so they could play the game. It is amazing what a hold it can have over some people.
Let's turn that around to something a bit more apropos of Slashdot....
While I have never had sex myself, other than a few minutes looking at a magazine just to see what it was all about, I have had friends literally stay in the house for weeks so they could play with each other. It is amazing what a hold it can have over some people.
Ok, so you get the rather obvious point, here. Folks get involved in activities or communities and become engrosed. This is human nature. EverQuest is NOT a video game (a fact which Sony continues to this day to fail to understand). EverQuest is a community, much like Slashdot or the local coffee house. Just as people enjoy those activities and get more involved, they do so with EQ.
When I was a teenager I spent weeks in my room working on a rubick's cube.... which is worse, that or chatting with an old friend from college while whacking on an evil dragon?
At least there's some social contact in the EQ option, which is more than many people in my field get on a regular basis.
Professional service firms, which tend to have many under 50 people offices that open and close in two or threee years often use VPN's exclusively
This conversation started around the critical services that people rely on, and how a wide-scale Internet outage would result in disaster to modern life. I don't think having "professional service firms [...] that open and close in two or three years" go away for multiple hours or a day is going to cause that level of havoc for the world.
Let's try to stay on topic.
Look at the VPN market and you'll see how many businesses rely on the internet
I've yet to see one business that relied on the Internet for anything critical. Sure, we have VPNs all over the place and most companies do, but when push comes to shove, those are all for convinience (and home users, and folks connecting laptops from hotels, etc.), and the business could run pretty much forever without them, though with some degredation.
Anything else would be irresponsible.
Ok, so their claim boils down to: Linux is a UNIX clone and doesn't attribute that fact. They throw around terms like stealing, but failure to attribute ones sources is at worst plagarism, not theft. And is Linux plagarism? No, as noted in their quote, it's an imitation, which is not plagarism (MS Windows after all is imitation of Xerox Parc and UNIX).
So, what of this failure to attribute one's sources?! Where does Linus get off?! Well, actually:So there you have it. Linux started as a Minix clone, which was, itself, a UNIX clone for low-end hardware. Nuff said, troll press releases suck, sigh.
More specifically, links to external articles that include the source. Those external sources could be taken down, but Cisco is going to be more concerned about the OTHER 797.5MB of source, not what Slashdot links to.
Most important business functions rely on private lines which are not directly connected to the Internet.
For the most part, the Internet is a luxury at this point, and I can't think of a single critical service that relies on it.
Also, if you take 3 8.5x11 sheets, line them up along their longer sides, attach them to eachother, put a staple through the middle of the first and second sheet join and then hang them from a height of approximately eye-level it makes the idea place for a picture of a naked "girl next door".
My buddy Heff taught me that trick.
Part of his problem with deadlines was because he was never ever totally happy with his work.
And the other part was that the man was a raving alcoholic. Let's not over-gloss his life, it wasn't all pretty. He wrote some damn fine comedy, true. Leave it at that.
But remember, after years of dealing with what we feel is a horrible interface and being strongarmed into this and that, and let down by focus on money and not product, we have a very strong right to be skeptical about anything that Microsoft does.
Common misconception amongst everyone in the open source movement, or just anti-MS zealots in general. If Microsoft is focused on making money, they are focused on their products.
I'm not a zealot (got my Windows/XP system for running games on my other computer right next to this one), but the OP was 100% correct. Being focused on profit has nothing to do with being focused on the customer... well, that's not true, but it has nothing to do with being focused on ME, and that's the problem. MS rushes products out the door without proper QA because they need to meet marketing deadlines with their customers, and their customers are OEMs who honestly don't care if the UI is good or bad as long as the OS requirements on the new system mean that some percentage of the world will come looking for new boxes to run it on.
If you had any delusion that you were the customer, please diabuse yourself of it now. You're not the customer in most industries. A friend of mine who worked for the corporate offices of a supermarket chain pointed out that the ugly bags of mostly water (aka humans) walking through the store are actually considered to be product, not customer. That product is packaged and sold to the customers... the makers of the goods on the shelves.
The money coming out of your pocket is actually a strange by-product that isn't really a strong concern.
Same goes for most venues. Corporations are the customers, and your money is the product. Your attention, wallet and time are bought and sold like so many pork bellies. Welcome, as the band said, to the machine.
Ok, so back to MS. Yeah, they put two things on SF, but convicted abusers of their monopoly power who have failed to reform following their slap on the wrist from a friendly administration should not be taken at face value. This is either a) a PR manuever; b) an effort to guage how much MS can exploit the OSS developer base to offset their disadvantage vs Linux (not a bad thing at all, but something to mull over); or c) an effor to understand OSS development in order to re-produce its benefits in some way.
In none of those scenarios are you the customer... you are at best the product and at worst the lab-rat. Don't be critical of them just because you can, but don't be overly idealistic either.
ext2 is often very fast because it lacks all the journaling stuff which is unimportant for a temporary filesystem.
It is important to remember that journaling can SPEED performance, not slow it down in many situations.
The key question is: are you maxing out the drive's IO/bandwidth. On RAID 5 with multiple concurant writes (usually more than 3) you will often see a performance boost for journaling.
Of course, the real win is when your journal isn't a disk at all, but NVRAM. In that case (e.g. NetApp), you get vastly better performance, AND reliability.
To be fair, this guy has done some really rugged tests of these suits. In terms of raw power in a single blow, no bear on earth could hurt you in this thing.
;-)
On ther other hand, I was always a bit dicy on the idea of having a bear decide to just push you over and sit on you for a half hour or so... I don't think that would work out as well.
Still, this suit was a marvel of engineering, and anyone who thinks they could build a suit that could take a head-on hit from a swinging tree-log, please feel free to try
But, I will point out that discussions of this sort are moot. The "X will never be adopted until it can Y" statements can go on forever, constantly shifting to less and less obvious features. Instead, a replacement spreadsheet simply needs to be a good spreadsheet and find its own market. If it does that, it will grow and capture users. The user bases may never be 100% the same, and that's IMPORTANT for a new application. You want to have some users who uniquely use your application because of its features that they cannot get elsewhere.
Whether or not they *maintain* their dominant position through "monopolistic" practices, they got on top through purely legal means.
You're not only guessing, you're wrong.
If we go back to the 80s, you MIGHT be right, but since then, MS has been using market dominance in one area to strong-arm their way into market dominance in another. This includes using DOS to overpower the filesystem add-ons companies and DOS compatible software; using Windows to push Lotus out of the spreadsheet market; using Windows to push Corel out of the word processing market; using the Windows API to push Borland out of the compiler market; using Win32 to push Netscape out of the browser market; and the list goes on in many specialized market niches.
Microsoft has done hundreds of companies wrong by abusing their products in other markets to put companies out of business in their own markets. In some cases, Microsoft took to just announcing a "new product" to force companies out of business, even if they had no intention of releasing such a product.
If, by "maintain their dominant position" you mean "expand their sphere of dominance into more and more markets and sectors", then you are correct, except insofar as the "legal" part goes.
There are practical reasons that Novell might not want that. Regardless of how much they may be embracing open source, they're still making some money from their share of the Sun license. Would Sun just stop paying, or would they pay more because now more people have the source? It's a sticky issue, is all I'm saying, so don't expect it to be solved based on the ideals of those involved.
1. Sun would have to replace all of the UNIX code. They can't put that under the GPL, period (unless SCO and Novell agree it's ok ;-)
2. Solaris includes many products that Sun has incorporated over the years. Most of them would likely have to be replaced, since I doubt the contracts involved allow Sun to just GPL the whole mess.
3. They would just be asking to have SCO add them to the list of companies targetted for a "tainting" suit, though honestly Sun may not care.
In the end, I think it would make far more sense for Sun to open source their SMP code by working with IBM on modifications to Linux. Sun+IBM could probably get Linux deployed on both of their very-high-end boxes in short order.
The SMP stuff is, as far as I know, most of what's left that Solaris does better than Linux, so what's the point in open sourcing the whole OS anyway?
Which, AGAIN, has nothing to do with Miguel's points (in fact, in so far as it MIGHT, you seem to be defending his assertions).
You select the applications that users prefer. You integrate them tightly with eachother and make them work well under various dekstop environments that people use.
Done.
But the apps listed, for the most part, weren't Gnome apps anyway, so it's moot point. Stop playing political football with applications and use them to get work done.
Why is it that KDE folks get upset every time someone advocates using a non-KDE app? Isn't that the kind of provincial thinking we're trying to get back away from? I use some KDE programs and some Gnome programs along with apps like Mozilla, XMMS, Open Office, Emacs, and other non-Gnome/KDE apps. Why would I want to limit myself in any other way?
If you are a real OSS (and not a cryptic MS zeelot), you should push real OSS project that can benefit the commuity
You mean like the Linux Kernel (an open source re-implementation of a closed source OS kenerl -- AT&T's UNIX at the time), Gaim (an open source re-implementation of a closed source IM client -- AIM from AOL), GCC (an open source re-implementation of a closed source compiler for a language developed by the same vendor that developed the OS -- PCC for the C language from AT&T), Linux NFS (an open source re-implementation of a closed source networked filesystem which the vendor published the protocol for while retaining patents on the technology -- NFS by Sun Microsystems), The Gimp (an open source re-implementation of a closed source photo editor -- Photoshop from Adobe), The X Window System (an open source re-implementation of a closed source windowing system -- PARC from Xerox), Samba (an open source re-implementation of a closed source file system -- SMB by Microsoft) or did you mean something else?
Face it: Open source software has been BLINDINGLY SUCCESSFUL at re-implementing closed-source software and making it popular. Why would we stop now?
I fail to see how this different than all the other attempts in the past at declarative programming. XAML simply tries to catch up to what people have been doing for years.
And that has been Miguel's assertion from the start. This is nothing new. It's nothing terribly great. But in a very real, NON-TECHNICAL way this is the killer app that Microsoft needs to maintain their edge. If you're interested in taking that edge away (and you might not be), then you must counter XAML's threat. Miguel points out (rightly so) that every time MS has done something like this in the past, the OSS community has sat around talking about how terribly un-original it is right up until the time they find that people don't want to use open source software because the un-original thing isn't available there.
His assertion is crystal-clear on these points, so let's not have the "XAML isn't interesting" discussion again.
However I feel that the choice to support both KDE and Gnome was a political decision [...] all you are doing is loading Gnomes services and libraries behind KDE, which isn't really supporting KDE
First off, no it's not political it's practical. There are KDE desktops out there. The goal is to target them for deployment of this suite along with everything else. Nothing surprising or political here.
And why on earth is "running under KDE" not "supporting KDE"?! If it said on the box "supports KDE" and I took it home to find that it ran under KDE, I can't see being too upset about that.
I think you're tilting at windmills. Everything said in the article, as far as I can tell, is true. You just don't like that the apps chosen based on popularity aren't the apps you want to use. I understand you pain. Please don't try to share it any further.
Until the 'anointed' apps have stuff like DCOP interfaces, desktop notification, KDE theme support, etc.. I'll stick with the KDE stuff. I like kicker popups, they're almost as slick as OS X bouncing dock icons.
Which, of course, you are welcome to do. KDE vs Gnome was not the question at hand (and can we all just grow up and get over waving our desktop's flag around?). The question was centered around the choice of applications, in theory being based on their popularity alone, but in the final analysis being Gnome-centric. I think I covered those issues well enough in my original post.
You've fallen into your own logic trap. Re-read what he said: you choose the successes.
;-)
Mozilla is not the ideal browser for Gnome, nor is it the default Gnome browser, but you choose it because it's the one that's most widely used.
Open Office is not the ideal office suite for Gnome, nor is it the default office suite for gnome, but you choose it because it's the one that's most widely used.
Evolution is probably the most widely used groupware client for Unix-like systems, but honestly it's also a Ximian product, and I think Miguel would have cited it regardless
Gaim is the default messenger for Gnome, but it's also the most widely used IM client uner Unix-like systems.
Your choices on the other hand are: go with the KDE default. Not exactly the break from the desktop you seemed to advocate....
Wow, drsmack1, I'd like to appologize on behalf of the moderators who were clearly drinking when the modded you.
Folks: he was making a joke... you know "another window manager?!", etc., etc....
The moderation flag you were looking for was "funny"
The "end of the world" crowd will, of course, latch on to genetically engineered food as a bane of all humanity, but that doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems.
The most pronounced revolve around the idea that we're introducing traits from wildly different species into eachother with little or no knowledge of what that will do to the immediate environment. If a strain of wheat is particularly good at resisting bugs and it starts growing in the wild... will it supplant other grasses? What will that impact?
What you really need is a larger model than we can currently manage in order to understand what the impact of these large, and yet subtle changes will have. Until then, caution is wise. Of course, the concerns over eating such foods are somewhat silly, but concerns over supporting ill-researched efforts by buying the foods are not.
You are, of course, correct (my appologies for being too limiting). However, taking that statement and expanding it to, "a feature used for viewing the next image in a series can ONLY be used for violent, hardcore pornography" is far, far beyond incorrect, it's utter nonesense.
;-)
Excuse me while I go browse some User Friendly strips using that feature... Hmm, then again, given your definition of porn...