Quality control, no truncation, pops or glitches of any kind.
I would pay up to $2/song, $10/album.
(Note: I don't use p2p: even if were legal, even if I didn't have to work around campus firewalls to get it, even if it were lossless, there's still no quality control)
One of the things I have been considering alot lately is, in an MFC environment, why does the language 'short' variables (aside from backwards compatibility issues). I mean really, in a Moore's Law world with minimal desktop machines packing 256M+ ram, the saving you get in using a short versus an int are insignificant.
Maybe one short vs. one int is insignificant. But when you have an array of 100,000 shorts (think '16-bit audio buffer on its way to the sound card') the savings become more significant.
Also consider a data structure that is being read or written from disk; say, the header of an audio file. If the format of the header includes 16-bit integers, you want to be sure that exactly 16 bits are allocated for that variable in the structure. Having this power of the in-memory layout of a structure makes it possible to read straight from the file into the memory structure and have all the structure's members take on the correct values.
Your code, in order to operate, must be combined with the GPL'd code, forming a new combined work, which under GPL section 2(b) must be distributed under the terms of the GPL and only the GPL.
Section 2(b) of the GPL does not contain the "only under the GPL" part of that statement. It is my understanding that if I write a program that links against a GPL library, I may distribute the source code to my own program under the terms of (say) the MIT license as long as I also provide it under the terms of the GPL.
This article is the biggest troll i've ever seen. In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line before the Windows install, stock them somewhere marked differently from the generic (Windows) laptops, update their inventory database, notify their distibutors who will then have to notify the stores... all adding up to a hell of a lot more than it would cost them to just put Windows on it and say "reformat at home if you like".
You just very eloquently explained why calling it "the microsoft tax" is really not far from the truth. If it is really that hard to obtain a product in a particular market without sending 5% of the purchase price to a company in a different market, how can you call that anything but a tax?
That was in no way a rant. I just wanted to prevent "thatguywhoiam" from becoming frustrated at trying to improve the usability of a project like mplayer. I don't think you can really dispute these facts:
the top priority of the mplayer developers is the raw power of the program
an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface is not a priority
the mplayer developers are basically hostile to efforts to make binary packages of mplayer, therefore expecting end-users to compile from source. This clearly demonstrates the low priority of making mplayer easily usable by laypeople.
I myself use mplayer because it is powerful. I am not anti-mplayer. But mplayer would not be a good project to approach with usability improvement ideas.
I'm a graphic designer who's done a lot of interface design, as well as being an avid follower of human-computer interface trends and issues.
You are a precious resource!
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how someone like myself would help contribute to an Open Source project? While I am not a programmer by any means, the interface is definitely somewhere that can use some help in all the Linux distros I've seen and used.
I'm an open-source author, and my experience says that some projects care about this kind of stuff and some don't. By and large I think you'll find that the software that is part of the major desktops (KDE and GNOME) is developed by people who are much more in tune with this kind of thing. They have a vision of a slick, easy-to-use, well-integrated desktop, and usability is important to them.
More independent apps can go either way: sometimes it will be a small group of developers and users who are happy with things the way they are and fairly resistant to usability improvements. Mplayer is a good example of this. They are most concerned with the raw power of the program, and don't care much that there is no GUI support worth mentioning, and they expect you to be compiling from source. If you ask questions they'll tell you "man mplayer, it's all in there." There's no point in approaching a project like this, they're just not concerned with UI or usability issues and your suggestions will fall on deaf ears.
Other times independent projects are concerned with usability, and the project I work on, Audacity, is one of them. UI issues are frequently discussed, mockups created and refined. We are receptive to UI suggestions.
So my advice would be to find a few applications that interest you that you think would be receptive to suggestions. Come up with a few ideas for improving these applications, and approach the developer list with them. Maybe create mockups of your ideas and link to them from your email. Gauge the response to determine whether you think you would work well the the developers or not, and if so you're started!
Also, being a Mac person, I don't really know which direction to turn in; i.e. does Gnome need help? Debian? etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hmm. Plain old non-developer users are most likely going to be using KDE and/or GNOME (and their associated applications), so Linux usability in general is most greatly increased when these applications become more usable. On the other hand, both of these projects already have a pretty good handle on usability, and have somewhat firm ideas about their plan for how they will achieve usability. So you would probably encounter more inertia approaching applications like this, and you would have to become more deeply involved to really be able to accomplish anything.
I'm just making this up, but probably the applications that could use the most help are KDE or GNOME applications that are farther from the core of these desktops. Don't look to Abiword, Galeon, Kword, or Konqueror. Look for lesser-known but promising applications that have a good technical basis (programmers who know what they are doing) but not much thought into the UI yet.
Another strategy is just to use Linux for a while and see what you are drawn to. If there's something that nags you about the interface to a program you use regularly, bring it up to the developers and propose a solution.
I hope you manage to find a project that can use you!
The texts are quite well preserved in ASCII. Sure, some formatting is missing, but it's relatively minor for the majority of books in question. And given the existance of this unformatted text it's alot easier to create formatted text than from scratch, so you even get a benefit there.
Given a choice between more information and less, which would you choose? You can always throw away excess information, but you cannot create information that was not there to begin with.
I think you're a bit confused on semantic markup. By and large publishers aren't interested in semantics of the documention, just the formtting.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the monstrosity of CSS-less HTML.
Books are not plain text. Chapter titles are usually typeset in bigger, heavier text. They italicize the names of terms or emphatically pronounced dialog. They often have diagrams and tables. These things can be approximated with plain text, but books definitely convey more information visually than plain text can accommodate.
Hello? Did you read the message you are replying to? I specifically said that marked up source can be converted to plan text, and therefore still remain compatible with anything.
I cannot believe that Project Gutenberg continues to use plain text as their source code! I can see why it would have been compelling in 1971, and it still may be true that there are systems out there that can only read 7-bit ASCII.
But that's absolutely no reason why the source shouldn't be marked up. Marked up source can always be converted to ASCII, but you cannot derive semantic markup from ASCII.
Last time I checked, murder was illegal, punishable by death in many states, yet it still occurs.
People spam because it is rational to do so (or at least spammers make them think so). Very low costs, the possibility of a good return, and nothing to lose since there are virtually no spam laws.
A better comparison than murder is the practice of child labor. While it was legal it was a rational practice to engage in, because the return was high and the risk was low -- if a kid gets eaten by a machine you just find another kid. Now that is illegal the practice is almost completely extinct because it is no longer rational -- the police would come knocking at the door, which impedes the goal of running a profitable business.
Here is a direct quote from Debian User's Guide Section on desktops [debian.org], "The default graphical interface for Debian is gnome (gnu Network Object Model Environment). This chapter describes the features of gnome.
Progeny wrote that manual, not Debian. Another direct quote, from the abstract: This "User's Guide" is nothing but a reformatted "Progeny User's Guide". Contents are adjusted for the standard Debian system. Calling Gnome the default desktop is something that should have been changed, but apparently wasn't.
I really think the majority of Debian developers and users would agree with me that Gnome is no more of a default desktop than KDE.
This much is clear, and if the FSF did have an official distribution (which they don't) Gnome would almost certainly be the default desktop.
FSF founded Gnome and it actively led a boycott against KDE.
The FSF and Debian had completely different reasons for "boycotting" (as you put it) KDE.
The FSF has a known agenda of all-out war with non-free software. The founding of gnome was an attempt to win a battle against non-free software (Qt/KDE) by forming an opposing army (Gnome). I have no doubt that RMS said all the things you quoted him as saying (though I would have appreciated links to be able to actually read these).
There are plenty of free software zealots who are Debian developers and users, but as a body Debian is much more neutral and pragmatic on these issues. Debian's reason for refusing to distribute KDE was very pragmatic and unpolitical: the consensus among the people who argued on debian-legal was that it was simply illegal to distribute binaries of GPL'd programs linked to Qt. The second Qt became GPL'd Debian started distributing KDE, true to its word.
On the contrary, here is the description of the "Desktop" task in Debian, which is the closest you could come to talking about Debian's "default desktop:"
This task provides basic "desktop" software, including a variety
of session managers, file managers and web browsers. It incorporates
both the GNOME and KDE desktops, and provides a display manager
which lets the user choose between the two.
Debian itself has made major contributions to Gnome.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. It's not as if there was a meeting where Debian's head honchos decided that Debian would invest effort into improving Gnome. It just so happened that some of Debian's developers were independently interested in Gnome, so they worked on it. The same happens with KDE.
I won't argue with this, especially since I am not very familiar with Mandrake.
So what are you debating? That the two communities don't have a difference in attitude in this regard? Remember the proposal is not for sharing but rather for Mandrake to disband directly into Debian.
I was not meaning to comment, directly or indirectly, on the proposal itself, only on this point that I, as a Debian developer, do not find accurate.
1) Mandrake started as a Redhat + KDE. In many ways Mandrake is the "home" distribution for KDE. Conversely Debian and Redhat are the core supporters of Gnome.
Huh? Debian is a "supporter" of Gnome just as much as it is a "supporter" of KDE or a "supporter" of GNU fileutils. In all cases, if there is a Debian developer who produces packages that conform to Debian policy (and are legal to distribute), it goes in.
People tried to portray Debian as anti-KDE since it refused to ship KDE before Qt was GPL, but any accusations of anti-KDEism were empiracally disproven when Debian started shipping KDE the moment Qt was GPL.
Look what a minute of Googling turned up about Suzanne Lloyd and her grandfather's movies! (She is the one the LA times holds up as the reason this ruling is good for the little guy).
Posted on a message board, after Suzanne announces DVD will not be available yet (emphasis mine)
I'm not going to tell you how to run your life. That's not my business.
You've done some wonderful things: the book MASTER COMEDIAN was a delight. The film rep showings have been wonderful. The TCM showings have been terrific, and all Lloyd fans [and all fans of film comedy] are looking forward to the April 03 TCM showings.
But enough is enough. Cut a deal on the DVD issues and video reissues. The up-front money is not what counts - the back end is what you should be aiming for. Make sure the distribution deal is global - silent film is a small market relative to mainstream film, but cumulatively it's a larger market than most people realize since it's so easy to program multiple language intertitles on silent film and create a global product.
Maybe you're reaching for the moon in your negotiations. I don't know; I'm only assuming. I may be assuming wrongly, and if so I offer my sincere apologies. But if you yourself are an obstacle, if not the obstacle, to a production and distribution deal, then re-think your negotiating strategy. There are DVD burners out there already and people will start burning their own Lloyd DVDs without you. That's money out of your pocket.
Speak to people in similar situations - those in control of the Chaplin estate, the Keaton films, the Pickford films. Perhaps they can assist you in re-formulating your strategy.
Pop culture is ephemeral; even Elvis, the Beatles and Bob Dylan have to be repackaged for new generations. Without the films issued on DVD, which is eclipsing video as the most popular format for media, you are not doing yourself any good, you are not doing the fans of Lloyd and film comedy any good, and, most significantly, you are not doing the reputation of Harold Lloyd any good.
These are magnificent films. You'll make a handsome profit off them. Not immediately, but over time. Please re-think your approach and focus on what is not just a business proposition involving short-term gains, but the perpetuation of a significant cultural legacy.
Rick Levinson
And another:
"Why can't we give Suzanne the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she is doing her best to get a fair DVD deal"
because there are no dvds, and NO sign at all anything will be released on dvd anytime in the future. "Final negotiations are being made"..", "We are working on a deal...", "2002 will see a series of box sets..." etc etc, I'm getting really tired of this crap. I dunno what's behind this but the Trust is doing an extremely @#$ job in trying to get the movies out on DVD.
It goes on and on. A lot of Harold Lloyd fans are feeling stiffed by the trust, it seems.
No, your code must be made available under the terms of the GPL. It can also be made available under any other license you choose, including BSD, proprietary, etc.
Never allow yourself to confuse a powerful idea with a fully realized implementation of the idea. While it's tempting to think that the important part is the raw capability and the GUI is just details, the design and power of the GUI is what will make or break the implementation of a good idea.
Attributes were never a part of any BeOS "Save" or "Open" dialog. Attributes were not integrated into BeOS applications, they were not a part of everyday computing.
Because KDE and Gnome are free software, it is feasable to build this into their infrastructure so that this capability is available from any KDE or Gnome application. Free software makes it possible for independent innovators to tinker with this kind of infrastructure in a way that is not possible with vendor controlled and closed infrastructure.
Re:Just an FYI....NO FLAME
on
Build Your Own Mac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh please. You know perfectly well what people mean when they say they built their PC "from scratch," they mean they didn't buy a pre-assembled package from a retailer. They mean they chose each part and then assembled it.
Whenever someone comes to me claiming to have built their PC, I ask them to describe their technique for etching multi-layer circuit boards.
How enlightened you are. You must also ask your mother her technique for grinding flour and raising chickens when she bakes your birthday cake "from scratch."
I'd rather have something like this where the From: address is guaranteed. Additionally, it doesn't require 100% participation from all mail servers. If yahoo.com decided they wanted to implement this to prevent @yahoo.com addresses from being forged, they would be able to without requiring support from other mail servers. Essentially, anyone would be able to ask an ISP whether the mail actually came from them and from that user.
Unfortunately this is not nearly as far along as STARTTLS. I guess STARTTLS would be better than nothing.
Re:Merits of PHP compared to Perl?
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 2
I agree with most of your post, but "Perl's documentation is excellent?" It works well as a reference for someone already familiar with Perl, but as an explanation of the language it's hideous. It's written as manpages, with names like "perlsyn," "perldata," and "perlre."
The Camel Book, on the other hand, is great.
But for electronic documentation, PHP has perl beat by a mile. It is organized, comprehensive, and user-annotated.
User: "So what do you want for this?" Tech: "If you find my service useful, please consider contributing $25 to blah blah blah" (at this point user has tuned tech out) User: (Internal monologue) "He doesn't want my money, apparently. Very well. I shall buy bread and circuses. Huzzah!"
I admit I have thought this way before. I've gotten a lot of use out of VIM, but I've never:helped uganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Losslessly compressed in an open format, no DRM.
A good selection, especially classical and jazz.
Quality control, no truncation, pops or glitches of any kind.
I would pay up to $2/song, $10/album.
(Note: I don't use p2p: even if were legal, even if I didn't have to work around campus firewalls to get it, even if it were lossless, there's still no quality control)
One of the things I have been considering alot lately is, in an MFC environment, why does the language 'short' variables (aside from backwards compatibility issues). I mean really, in a Moore's Law world with minimal desktop machines packing 256M+ ram, the saving you get in using a short versus an int are insignificant.
Maybe one short vs. one int is insignificant. But when you have an array of 100,000 shorts (think '16-bit audio buffer on its way to the sound card') the savings become more significant.
Also consider a data structure that is being read or written from disk; say, the header of an audio file. If the format of the header includes 16-bit integers, you want to be sure that exactly 16 bits are allocated for that variable in the structure. Having this power of the in-memory layout of a structure makes it possible to read straight from the file into the memory structure and have all the structure's members take on the correct values.
Your code, in order to operate, must be combined with the GPL'd code, forming a new combined work, which under GPL section 2(b) must be distributed under the terms of the GPL and only the GPL.
Section 2(b) of the GPL does not contain the "only under the GPL" part of that statement. It is my understanding that if I write a program that links against a GPL library, I may distribute the source code to my own program under the terms of (say) the MIT license as long as I also provide it under the terms of the GPL.
This article is the biggest troll i've ever seen. In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line before the Windows install, stock them somewhere marked differently from the generic (Windows) laptops, update their inventory database, notify their distibutors who will then have to notify the stores... all adding up to a hell of a lot more than it would cost them to just put Windows on it and say "reformat at home if you like".
You just very eloquently explained why calling it "the microsoft tax" is really not far from the truth. If it is really that hard to obtain a product in a particular market without sending 5% of the purchase price to a company in a different market, how can you call that anything but a tax?
Parent is score 3, Informative when it's completely false? It's not that hard to paste the link and try it!
Umm, I did and it checked out. Try clicking on this. It contains exactly the quote that the parent says it does.
That was in no way a rant. I just wanted to prevent "thatguywhoiam" from becoming frustrated at trying to improve the usability of a project like mplayer. I don't think you can really dispute these facts:
I myself use mplayer because it is powerful. I am not anti-mplayer. But mplayer would not be a good project to approach with usability improvement ideas.
I'm a graphic designer who's done a lot of interface design, as well as being an avid follower of human-computer interface trends and issues.
You are a precious resource!
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how someone like myself would help contribute to an Open Source project? While I am not a programmer by any means, the interface is definitely somewhere that can use some help in all the Linux distros I've seen and used.
I'm an open-source author, and my experience says that some projects care about this kind of stuff and some don't. By and large I think you'll find that the software that is part of the major desktops (KDE and GNOME) is developed by people who are much more in tune with this kind of thing. They have a vision of a slick, easy-to-use, well-integrated desktop, and usability is important to them.
More independent apps can go either way: sometimes it will be a small group of developers and users who are happy with things the way they are and fairly resistant to usability improvements. Mplayer is a good example of this. They are most concerned with the raw power of the program, and don't care much that there is no GUI support worth mentioning, and they expect you to be compiling from source. If you ask questions they'll tell you "man mplayer, it's all in there." There's no point in approaching a project like this, they're just not concerned with UI or usability issues and your suggestions will fall on deaf ears.
Other times independent projects are concerned with usability, and the project I work on, Audacity, is one of them. UI issues are frequently discussed, mockups created and refined. We are receptive to UI suggestions.
So my advice would be to find a few applications that interest you that you think would be receptive to suggestions. Come up with a few ideas for improving these applications, and approach the developer list with them. Maybe create mockups of your ideas and link to them from your email. Gauge the response to determine whether you think you would work well the the developers or not, and if so you're started!
Also, being a Mac person, I don't really know which direction to turn in; i.e. does Gnome need help? Debian? etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hmm. Plain old non-developer users are most likely going to be using KDE and/or GNOME (and their associated applications), so Linux usability in general is most greatly increased when these applications become more usable. On the other hand, both of these projects already have a pretty good handle on usability, and have somewhat firm ideas about their plan for how they will achieve usability. So you would probably encounter more inertia approaching applications like this, and you would have to become more deeply involved to really be able to accomplish anything.
I'm just making this up, but probably the applications that could use the most help are KDE or GNOME applications that are farther from the core of these desktops. Don't look to Abiword, Galeon, Kword, or Konqueror. Look for lesser-known but promising applications that have a good technical basis (programmers who know what they are doing) but not much thought into the UI yet.
Another strategy is just to use Linux for a while and see what you are drawn to. If there's something that nags you about the interface to a program you use regularly, bring it up to the developers and propose a solution.
I hope you manage to find a project that can use you!
The texts are quite well preserved in ASCII. Sure, some formatting is missing, but it's relatively minor for the majority of books in question. And given the existance of this unformatted text it's alot easier to create formatted text than from scratch, so you even get a benefit there.
Given a choice between more information and less, which would you choose? You can always throw away excess information, but you cannot create information that was not there to begin with.
I think you're a bit confused on semantic markup. By and large publishers aren't interested in semantics of the documention, just the formtting.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the monstrosity of CSS-less HTML.
Books are not plain text. Chapter titles are usually typeset in bigger, heavier text. They italicize the names of terms or emphatically pronounced dialog. They often have diagrams and tables. These things can be approximated with plain text, but books definitely convey more information visually than plain text can accommodate.
Hello? Did you read the message you are replying to? I specifically said that marked up source can be converted to plan text, and therefore still remain compatible with anything.
I cannot believe that Project Gutenberg continues to use plain text as their source code! I can see why it would have been compelling in 1971, and it still may be true that there are systems out there that can only read 7-bit ASCII.
But that's absolutely no reason why the source shouldn't be marked up. Marked up source can always be converted to ASCII, but you cannot derive semantic markup from ASCII.
...and how have your experiences with it been?
No one I know has found a compelling reason to switch from Apache 1.
Last time I checked, murder was illegal, punishable by death in many states, yet it still occurs.
People spam because it is rational to do so (or at least spammers make them think so). Very low costs, the possibility of a good return, and nothing to lose since there are virtually no spam laws.
A better comparison than murder is the practice of child labor. While it was legal it was a rational practice to engage in, because the return was high and the risk was low -- if a kid gets eaten by a machine you just find another kid. Now that is illegal the practice is almost completely extinct because it is no longer rational -- the police would come knocking at the door, which impedes the goal of running a profitable business.
Here is a direct quote from Debian User's Guide Section on desktops [debian.org], "The default graphical interface for Debian is gnome (gnu Network Object Model Environment). This chapter describes the features of gnome.
Progeny wrote that manual, not Debian. Another direct quote, from the abstract: This "User's Guide" is nothing but a reformatted "Progeny User's Guide". Contents are adjusted for the standard Debian system. Calling Gnome the default desktop is something that should have been changed, but apparently wasn't.
I really think the majority of Debian developers and users would agree with me that Gnome is no more of a default desktop than KDE.
Debian is the official distribution of the FSF
You would win this entire argument if this were true, but it isn't. The FSF ceased sponsorship and broke all official ties with Debian in 1996.
Gnome is the default desktop for Debian
See above, I still dispute this.
Gnome is official an FSF founded project.
This much is clear, and if the FSF did have an official distribution (which they don't) Gnome would almost certainly be the default desktop.
FSF founded Gnome and it actively led a boycott against KDE.
The FSF and Debian had completely different reasons for "boycotting" (as you put it) KDE.
The FSF has a known agenda of all-out war with non-free software. The founding of gnome was an attempt to win a battle against non-free software (Qt/KDE) by forming an opposing army (Gnome). I have no doubt that RMS said all the things you quoted him as saying (though I would have appreciated links to be able to actually read these).
There are plenty of free software zealots who are Debian developers and users, but as a body Debian is much more neutral and pragmatic on these issues. Debian's reason for refusing to distribute KDE was very pragmatic and unpolitical: the consensus among the people who argued on debian-legal was that it was simply illegal to distribute binaries of GPL'd programs linked to Qt. The second Qt became GPL'd Debian started distributing KDE, true to its word.
Gnome is the default desktop.
On the contrary, here is the description of the "Desktop" task in Debian, which is the closest you could come to talking about Debian's "default desktop:"
This task provides basic "desktop" software, including a variety
of session managers, file managers and web browsers. It incorporates
both the GNOME and KDE desktops, and provides a display manager
which lets the user choose between the two.
Debian itself has made major contributions to Gnome.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. It's not as if there was a meeting where Debian's head honchos decided that Debian would invest effort into improving Gnome. It just so happened that some of Debian's developers were independently interested in Gnome, so they worked on it. The same happens with KDE.
There is definitely an active base of KDE users and developers in Debian. The debian-kde list is getting more traffic recently than the debian-gtk-gnome list.
Mandrake is fundamentally a KDE based system
I won't argue with this, especially since I am not very familiar with Mandrake.
So what are you debating? That the two communities don't have a difference in attitude in this regard? Remember the proposal is not for sharing but rather for Mandrake to disband directly into Debian.
I was not meaning to comment, directly or indirectly, on the proposal itself, only on this point that I, as a Debian developer, do not find accurate.
1) Mandrake started as a Redhat + KDE. In many ways Mandrake is the "home" distribution for KDE. Conversely Debian and Redhat are the core supporters of Gnome.
Huh? Debian is a "supporter" of Gnome just as much as it is a "supporter" of KDE or a "supporter" of GNU fileutils. In all cases, if there is a Debian developer who produces packages that conform to Debian policy (and are legal to distribute), it goes in.
People tried to portray Debian as anti-KDE since it refused to ship KDE before Qt was GPL, but any accusations of anti-KDEism were empiracally disproven when Debian started shipping KDE the moment Qt was GPL.
Posted on a message board, after Suzanne announces DVD will not be available yet (emphasis mine)
And another:
It goes on and on. A lot of Harold Lloyd fans are feeling stiffed by the trust, it seems.
If you use GPL code, your code must also be GPL.
No, your code must be made available under the terms of the GPL. It can also be made available under any other license you choose, including BSD, proprietary, etc.
Big difference.
Never allow yourself to confuse a powerful idea with a fully realized implementation of the idea. While it's tempting to think that the important part is the raw capability and the GUI is just details, the design and power of the GUI is what will make or break the implementation of a good idea.
Attributes were never a part of any BeOS "Save" or "Open" dialog. Attributes were not integrated into BeOS applications, they were not a part of everyday computing.
Because KDE and Gnome are free software, it is feasable to build this into their infrastructure so that this capability is available from any KDE or Gnome application. Free software makes it possible for independent innovators to tinker with this kind of infrastructure in a way that is not possible with vendor controlled and closed infrastructure.
Oh please. You know perfectly well what people mean when they say they built their PC "from scratch," they mean they didn't buy a pre-assembled package from a retailer. They mean they chose each part and then assembled it.
Whenever someone comes to me claiming to have built their PC, I ask them to describe their technique for etching multi-layer circuit boards.
How enlightened you are. You must also ask your mother her technique for grinding flour and raising chickens when she bakes your birthday cake "from scratch."
Ironically enough, "Kings Quest: Collection 2" is no longer made and has itself become rare. On Amazon they are offered second-hand starting at $199!
I'd rather have something like this where the From: address is guaranteed. Additionally, it doesn't require 100% participation from all mail servers. If yahoo.com decided they wanted to implement this to prevent @yahoo.com addresses from being forged, they would be able to without requiring support from other mail servers. Essentially, anyone would be able to ask an ISP whether the mail actually came from them and from that user.
Unfortunately this is not nearly as far along as STARTTLS. I guess STARTTLS would be better than nothing.
I agree with most of your post, but "Perl's documentation is excellent?" It works well as a reference for someone already familiar with Perl, but as an explanation of the language it's hideous. It's written as manpages, with names like "perlsyn," "perldata," and "perlre."
The Camel Book, on the other hand, is great.
But for electronic documentation, PHP has perl beat by a mile. It is organized, comprehensive, and user-annotated.
User: "So what do you want for this?"
:helped uganda.
Tech: "If you find my service useful, please consider contributing $25 to blah blah blah" (at this point user has tuned tech out)
User: (Internal monologue) "He doesn't want my money, apparently. Very well. I shall buy bread and circuses. Huzzah!"
I admit I have thought this way before. I've gotten a lot of use out of VIM, but I've never
* MIDI workstation: logic audio | cubase | or even (puke) cakewalk
:)
I've heard that MusE and Rosegarden are pretty decent, though I haven't really used either.
* Powerful trackers: buzz | FT2 | IT
Have you tried SoundTracker? I don't know much about tracking so I wasn't able to evaluate how good it is.
* Advanced outboard softsynths: reaktor | absynth | Q1 | grainlab
What about Spiral Synth Modular?
* Powerful sample editing tools: cool edit/96/pro | soundforge
I think Audacity is pretty capable. There's also WaveSurfer, and Sweep.
Btw, I'd be glad to be wrong, if someone would only point out the links to *stable* and *feature-filled* tools.
I see I've been conned into doing your homework for you.