Re:Did Bill Gates pay Shuttleworth to create Ubunt
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Linux 2.6.27 Out
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· Score: 1, Troll
Nonsense. The reason Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance (if it's gaining any at all) is that people even have to consider asking for help with it on web forums and mailing lists. That's the big barrier right there.
Irrespective of how helpful the responses are, if you have to ask the Internet for help in the first place, it's too difficult.
For the same reason that the Rebels and Imperials had to rely on humans to do their fighting, while the baddies in Star Wars 1 (who were so forgettable that I can't even remember their name) had kick-ass war robots.
Basically, it's hard to make a decent sci-fi prequel when your corporate masters are demanding you appeal to teenaged boys who want bigger bangs every time.
Oh, that's okay then. As long as it's going to make my roleplaying of a nano-engineered superman with bungee tentacles more realistic, I guess I don't care whether it ruins the gameplay or not.
Think of it like the typical game alarm system. You fuck up but hide, the alert level goes down over time.
I never understood this.
"Sir, Sergeant Smith's been brutally murdered!" "That was nearly a whole minute ago, Private. Return to your regular patrol route immediately, completely ignoring the corpse every time you pass it, and don't let me catch you looking over your shoulder as you pass that shadowy corner by the crates."
Oops, did I let that security camera see me? Oh well, I'll just duck behind this crate here and snipe at enemies, regenerating health when necessary, until they're all dead.
Possibly. Possibly not, if the AI's good enough. Maybe once you've been spotted, they'll just surround the room with mechs and then start lobbing in gas grenades, while keeping the security camera trained on the crate so they'll see if you make a break for it.
Deus Ex 1 had regenerating health, if you took the right aug. It made things a hell of a lot easier, but it didn't break the game.
Back in the '80s and early '90s, people coped perfectly well with competing computers and operating systems. Sure, an Amiga was a bit different from an Atari, which was a bit different from a PC, which was a bit different from a Mac, which was a bit different from an Archimedes... but so what? People coped, just like they cope with the way every washing machine or DVD player today has a different interface. When you started using computers, you became computer literate, just like everyone's more or less washing-machine-literate and DVD-player-literate. And once you're literate in a technology, you can learn to use any form of it relatively easily.
What the Windows monoculture has done is to destroy computer literacy among most users. Now, instead of learning to use a computer, people are trained to use Microsoft Windows. Instead of learning about launching applications and using word processors, they're trained to click on the big button at the bottom left of the screen that says "start", then to click where it says "Microsoft Word". And so as soon as that button turns into a picture of a foot at the top left of the screen, and the icon they're looking for says "Word Processor", they're left bewildered and uncomfortable.
Of course, this has now bitten Microsoft too: it's one reason why Vista and Office 2007 are so unpopular. (Semantics nazis: does that count as irony?)
What proportion of people actually re-sell their games, though? I know I've certainly never bothered. The value of a game to me is the entertainment it provides, full stop, and once I've had that entertainment I don't expect to get any of the money back -- any more than I expect to be able to re-sell my tickets after I've watched a movie, or re-sell my holiday when I get back home.
I do know that 'his' was used as the neutral/unspecified gender pronoun as well as the masculine pronoun (but we tend to use their now, it's what I would use) and that it has nothing to do with negative sexual discrimination.
And "nigger" used just to mean "black", with nothing to do with negative racial discrimination. Sadly, language changes, and what was harmless a few hundred years ago can very easily carry a very genuine negative connotation today.
The simple fact is that "his", today, implies masculine. "Every doctor should know his patients" does, whether you like it or not, imply to most people that the speaker believes that being a doctor is strongly correlated with being male. And most people find that sentences like "every nurse should know his patients" sound, well, subtly wrong. That's because nobody believes that there's a strong correlation between being a nurse and being male.
Those that think women are denigrated by the use of "his" (eg "If a soldier lays down his arms...") should really wonder why they think so little of women that they might need the rules of grammar to be changed to promote them.
Who said anything about promoting women, or changing grammar? The meanings of some words have changed over time, and inclusive language means making sure that you use those words with their modern meanings to describe the modern world, where "he" is no longer a suitable pronoun to describe a soldier or doctor of unspecified gender.
Let window management be handled by the window manager.
If there were any window managers that actually managed to manage GIMP's windows in a convenient way, I might even support that sentiment. Back in the real world, GIMP is hard to use with most of the popular window managers, and that is GIMP's problem, not theirs.
Where exactly in what you quoted is Photoshop's price criticised? The only bit that mentions pricing is explicitly talking about software available for Linux, which does not include Photoshop.
As for "mentioning", the only mentioning in what you quoted is in the context of explaining what a raster editor is, in which context Photoshop is mentioned as one of three well-known examples, along with Microsoft Paint. GIMP does not compete with either of those products, and nothing in the FAQ implies it does.
I suppose, if by "very nice" you mean "does only the very minimum essential to provide basic support for one particularly simple use case".
But this is largely irrelevant, as pretty much anyone who actually needs CMYK support already owns a professional-grade graphics program, so why would they want to use the GIMP?
maybe if they had talent they would be performing their own material.
Nonsense. Performance and composition are different talents. There's a reason why "singer-songwriter" is a category of its own. There's a reason why some of the all-time great songwriters, like Dylan, have been rubbish performers.
the geek's notion of creativity
Hang on, where do geeks come into this? We're talking about Guitar Hero World Tour here, not Cantina Band: Mos Eisley. We're talking about a mass-market game aimed squarely at people who want something to play for an hour or so with their friends, not a niche title for hardcore gamers.
And, yes, the vast majority of these "ordinary" people will also instinctively want to play covers. (Half of them barely can write. Give them a video camera, and their first thought will be to video their mates getting drunk and doing something stupid...)
Yes, I suppose TPB is a convenient place for children and the morally immature to violate copyright law. Some of us, however, are adults, and have grasped that if something costs money then either you pay for it or you do without. For us, services like Steam are quite useful.
Of course there are more people shooting other people in NY than in, say, London. When people are helpless against the (gun owning) criminals, they have to do what they tell them, or die.
What? Do please show me your statistics that show a rocketing rate of armed burglaries in London.
(Hint: one reason why hardly anyone gets shot during burglaries in London is, in fact, that burglars in London generally don't have guns. There's a reason why even the police in Britain generally see no need to carry a lethal weapon.)
But there's a question. Why do you have to use the same editor on each platform? Are you moving around often enough that it becomes an issue?
I don't know about you, but I have several computers on my desk, and the number multiplies considerably if you take VMs and remote servers into account, running a wide variety of different operating systems.
When you're developing cross-platform software, you'd be stupid not to test it on as many platforms as possible. And when you're testing software on a platform, it's really much more convenient to edit the code on the same platform you're testing it on, instead of constantly copying it back and forwards.
I consider it a great advantage of the editor I use that it runs equally well on all those platforms, using the same configuration files so all my preferences are always there, and letting me just get on with the job of editing instead of constantly having to try to remember what feature's in which menu or what keys to press to get it. My life has become much simpler since I abandoned the Windows-only editor I used to love...
Ugh. Syndicate was awesome, but Magic Carpet was another classic case of "great idea, disappointing implementation". The graphics were incredible for the time, but the gameplay was repetitive and quickly became tiresome. I don't know anyone who got past the first few levels.
Then again, as there was allegedly a bug that made it impossible to finish the game, maybe that was a good thing...
No grind system either. Skills are trained in real time even if you are logged off. You won't be able to max out your skills in this game!
So, what you're saying is, if I join EVE today then (a) my character will be weaker than every single other person in the galaxy, and (b) it is absolutely guaranteed that I will never catch up?
Boy, with incentives like that, how could I possibly resist?
To the "average" user, the Internet is a blue "e" on their desktop. Firefox and IceWeasel are more or less the same to him/her.
Not really. Firefox has market share in the region of 20-30%, depending on who you ask. It has been promoted extensively in the mass media, and has been installed by default by major manufacturers such as Dell. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that most computer users had heard of it, even if they don't all know exactly what it does.
More to the point, there exists a large class of computer users who are neither clueless nor gurus. These are the people GP was referring to, that Ubuntu is targeted at. They have heard of Firefox. Many of them even use it. If they log into Ubuntu and see a Firefox logo, they will feel at home. If there's no logo they recognise at all, they will have a few moments' trouble finding the web browser. This will not be good for their all-important first impression of Linux.
Fundamentally: Ubuntu isn't Linux for free-software zealots, it's Linux for human beings. It would be stupid to make Ubuntu less friendly just to make a political point. If you want a version of GNU/Linux that excludes useful and familiar software in the pursuit of political goals, then don't use Ubuntu. Use Debian, or gNewSense, or whatever else takes your fancy.
Anyway, I wonder if this means that Firefox is violating the GPL? After all, Firefox itself is offered under the GPL (and other licenses) and uses GPL code, right? Doesn't the GPL state that you can't force additional restrictions?
The source code that is compiled into browsers such as Firefox and Iceweasel is triple-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. You have the option of choosing any or all of those when you distribute it. When Mozilla distributes it as Firefox, they choose to use only the MPL, which does allow them to add this EULA.
No, not Web 2.0 at all -- Web 2.0 is about open standards, open-source platforms, user-generated content, public APIs, mashups, etc, all of which are a million miles away from a proprietary DRM-infested iPod/Nike link.
Windows provides basic support for POSIX.1, but it's always been a second-class citizen and was only added to meet some US government requirement or other.
There is also SFU, or whatever they're calling it these days, but IIRC that's never been easy to integrate with the Windows GUI, and isn't available for major OSes like XP Home anyway.
To all intents and purposes, if you want to target Windows you either need to use a proprietary Microsoft API, or you need to use a compatibility layer or cross-platform library that translates to a proprietary Microsoft API; this last option is the one used by real cross-platform browsers like Firefox and Opera.
You might reasonably think that all DRM is bad, but you can't seriously be saying you think it's all equally bad.
Steam is good enough that I've never even noticed that DRM is involved;it's a pleasantly convenient way of buying games without having to waste fuel shopping or waiting for a delivery, and if I'm going to burn in geek hell for liking it then so be it.
Mass Effect, on the other hand, had terrible DRM that was so badly broken that it failed with misleading messages just because Windows was set up to use Japanese as the default language for non-Unicode applications, and I shall indeed be avoiding all EA games until I hear that they've ditched whatever system it uses.
It doesn't in OpenOffice, KOffice, Word, Notepad, VI, emacs or vim. OK, the last few don't have a notion of 'Page.'
I don't know about Notepad, vi, or vim, but Emacs certainly has a notion of pages. Naturally the precise definition of "page" is customisable, but by default pages are delimited by lines beginning with form-feed characters. The Emacs equivalents of PgUp and PgDn are C-x [ and C-x ].
otherwise, you could [...] simply use the operating system's task bar which is detached from the browser.
Internet Explorer might be able to do that, since it's tied to a single operating system that is guaranteed to have a task bar. Nothing else can, because all other browsers run on operating systems that don't have any such concept.
(And good for them, I say. The task bar is a very poor interface: for example, it's neither structured nor spatial, so a program will never be found in any predictable location on the screen.)
Tabs at the side would take up even more space than tabs at the top or bottom.
But the space they're taking up is less useful.
Increasingly people these days have wide-aspect displays, while web pages are generally designed to have a single fairly narrow column that scrolls vertically. I have this Slashdot window quite wide and it's still only using slightly over half the width of my screen. I could well afford to have tabs containing a decent-length page title beside it.
Not to mention that with tabs at the side, you can have the tab title take up more than one line of text without making the useful page area smaller.
Before I read your comment and started thinking about it, I would have been dead set against tabs at the side. But now I'm starting to quite like the idea...
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. The reason Linux is only slowly gaining acceptance (if it's gaining any at all) is that people even have to consider asking for help with it on web forums and mailing lists. That's the big barrier right there.
Irrespective of how helpful the responses are, if you have to ask the Internet for help in the first place, it's too difficult.
For the same reason that the Rebels and Imperials had to rely on humans to do their fighting, while the baddies in Star Wars 1 (who were so forgettable that I can't even remember their name) had kick-ass war robots.
Basically, it's hard to make a decent sci-fi prequel when your corporate masters are demanding you appeal to teenaged boys who want bigger bangs every time.
Oh, that's okay then. As long as it's going to make my roleplaying of a nano-engineered superman with bungee tentacles more realistic, I guess I don't care whether it ruins the gameplay or not.
I never understood this.
"Sir, Sergeant Smith's been brutally murdered!"
"That was nearly a whole minute ago, Private. Return to your regular patrol route immediately, completely ignoring the corpse every time you pass it, and don't let me catch you looking over your shoulder as you pass that shadowy corner by the crates."
Possibly. Possibly not, if the AI's good enough. Maybe once you've been spotted, they'll just surround the room with mechs and then start lobbing in gas grenades, while keeping the security camera trained on the crate so they'll see if you make a break for it.
Deus Ex 1 had regenerating health, if you took the right aug. It made things a hell of a lot easier, but it didn't break the game.
Back in the '80s and early '90s, people coped perfectly well with competing computers and operating systems. Sure, an Amiga was a bit different from an Atari, which was a bit different from a PC, which was a bit different from a Mac, which was a bit different from an Archimedes... but so what? People coped, just like they cope with the way every washing machine or DVD player today has a different interface. When you started using computers, you became computer literate, just like everyone's more or less washing-machine-literate and DVD-player-literate. And once you're literate in a technology, you can learn to use any form of it relatively easily.
What the Windows monoculture has done is to destroy computer literacy among most users. Now, instead of learning to use a computer, people are trained to use Microsoft Windows. Instead of learning about launching applications and using word processors, they're trained to click on the big button at the bottom left of the screen that says "start", then to click where it says "Microsoft Word". And so as soon as that button turns into a picture of a foot at the top left of the screen, and the icon they're looking for says "Word Processor", they're left bewildered and uncomfortable.
Of course, this has now bitten Microsoft too: it's one reason why Vista and Office 2007 are so unpopular. (Semantics nazis: does that count as irony?)
What proportion of people actually re-sell their games, though? I know I've certainly never bothered. The value of a game to me is the entertainment it provides, full stop, and once I've had that entertainment I don't expect to get any of the money back -- any more than I expect to be able to re-sell my tickets after I've watched a movie, or re-sell my holiday when I get back home.
And "nigger" used just to mean "black", with nothing to do with negative racial discrimination. Sadly, language changes, and what was harmless a few hundred years ago can very easily carry a very genuine negative connotation today.
The simple fact is that "his", today, implies masculine. "Every doctor should know his patients" does, whether you like it or not, imply to most people that the speaker believes that being a doctor is strongly correlated with being male. And most people find that sentences like "every nurse should know his patients" sound, well, subtly wrong. That's because nobody believes that there's a strong correlation between being a nurse and being male.
Who said anything about promoting women, or changing grammar? The meanings of some words have changed over time, and inclusive language means making sure that you use those words with their modern meanings to describe the modern world, where "he" is no longer a suitable pronoun to describe a soldier or doctor of unspecified gender.
If there were any window managers that actually managed to manage GIMP's windows in a convenient way, I might even support that sentiment. Back in the real world, GIMP is hard to use with most of the popular window managers, and that is GIMP's problem, not theirs.
Oh, please. You're clutching at straws.
Where exactly in what you quoted is Photoshop's price criticised? The only bit that mentions pricing is explicitly talking about software available for Linux, which does not include Photoshop.
As for "mentioning", the only mentioning in what you quoted is in the context of explaining what a raster editor is, in which context Photoshop is mentioned as one of three well-known examples, along with Microsoft Paint. GIMP does not compete with either of those products, and nothing in the FAQ implies it does.
I suppose, if by "very nice" you mean "does only the very minimum essential to provide basic support for one particularly simple use case".
But this is largely irrelevant, as pretty much anyone who actually needs CMYK support already owns a professional-grade graphics program, so why would they want to use the GIMP?
Nonsense. Performance and composition are different talents. There's a reason why "singer-songwriter" is a category of its own. There's a reason why some of the all-time great songwriters, like Dylan, have been rubbish performers.
Hang on, where do geeks come into this? We're talking about Guitar Hero World Tour here, not Cantina Band: Mos Eisley. We're talking about a mass-market game aimed squarely at people who want something to play for an hour or so with their friends, not a niche title for hardcore gamers.
And, yes, the vast majority of these "ordinary" people will also instinctively want to play covers. (Half of them barely can write. Give them a video camera, and their first thought will be to video their mates getting drunk and doing something stupid...)
Yes, I suppose TPB is a convenient place for children and the morally immature to violate copyright law. Some of us, however, are adults, and have grasped that if something costs money then either you pay for it or you do without. For us, services like Steam are quite useful.
What? Do please show me your statistics that show a rocketing rate of armed burglaries in London.
(Hint: one reason why hardly anyone gets shot during burglaries in London is, in fact, that burglars in London generally don't have guns. There's a reason why even the police in Britain generally see no need to carry a lethal weapon.)
I don't know about you, but I have several computers on my desk, and the number multiplies considerably if you take VMs and remote servers into account, running a wide variety of different operating systems.
When you're developing cross-platform software, you'd be stupid not to test it on as many platforms as possible. And when you're testing software on a platform, it's really much more convenient to edit the code on the same platform you're testing it on, instead of constantly copying it back and forwards.
I consider it a great advantage of the editor I use that it runs equally well on all those platforms, using the same configuration files so all my preferences are always there, and letting me just get on with the job of editing instead of constantly having to try to remember what feature's in which menu or what keys to press to get it. My life has become much simpler since I abandoned the Windows-only editor I used to love...
Ugh. Syndicate was awesome, but Magic Carpet was another classic case of "great idea, disappointing implementation". The graphics were incredible for the time, but the gameplay was repetitive and quickly became tiresome. I don't know anyone who got past the first few levels.
Then again, as there was allegedly a bug that made it impossible to finish the game, maybe that was a good thing...
So, what you're saying is, if I join EVE today then (a) my character will be weaker than every single other person in the galaxy, and (b) it is absolutely guaranteed that I will never catch up?
Boy, with incentives like that, how could I possibly resist?
Not really. Firefox has market share in the region of 20-30%, depending on who you ask. It has been promoted extensively in the mass media, and has been installed by default by major manufacturers such as Dell. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that most computer users had heard of it, even if they don't all know exactly what it does.
More to the point, there exists a large class of computer users who are neither clueless nor gurus. These are the people GP was referring to, that Ubuntu is targeted at. They have heard of Firefox. Many of them even use it. If they log into Ubuntu and see a Firefox logo, they will feel at home. If there's no logo they recognise at all, they will have a few moments' trouble finding the web browser. This will not be good for their all-important first impression of Linux.
Fundamentally: Ubuntu isn't Linux for free-software zealots, it's Linux for human beings. It would be stupid to make Ubuntu less friendly just to make a political point. If you want a version of GNU/Linux that excludes useful and familiar software in the pursuit of political goals, then don't use Ubuntu. Use Debian, or gNewSense, or whatever else takes your fancy.
The source code that is compiled into browsers such as Firefox and Iceweasel is triple-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. You have the option of choosing any or all of those when you distribute it. When Mozilla distributes it as Firefox, they choose to use only the MPL, which does allow them to add this EULA.
So, no, nobody is violating any licenses here.
No, not Web 2.0 at all -- Web 2.0 is about open standards, open-source platforms, user-generated content, public APIs, mashups, etc, all of which are a million miles away from a proprietary DRM-infested iPod/Nike link.
Windows provides basic support for POSIX.1, but it's always been a second-class citizen and was only added to meet some US government requirement or other.
There is also SFU, or whatever they're calling it these days, but IIRC that's never been easy to integrate with the Windows GUI, and isn't available for major OSes like XP Home anyway.
To all intents and purposes, if you want to target Windows you either need to use a proprietary Microsoft API, or you need to use a compatibility layer or cross-platform library that translates to a proprietary Microsoft API; this last option is the one used by real cross-platform browsers like Firefox and Opera.
You might reasonably think that all DRM is bad, but you can't seriously be saying you think it's all equally bad.
Steam is good enough that I've never even noticed that DRM is involved;it's a pleasantly convenient way of buying games without having to waste fuel shopping or waiting for a delivery, and if I'm going to burn in geek hell for liking it then so be it.
Mass Effect, on the other hand, had terrible DRM that was so badly broken that it failed with misleading messages just because Windows was set up to use Japanese as the default language for non-Unicode applications, and I shall indeed be avoiding all EA games until I hear that they've ditched whatever system it uses.
I don't know about Notepad, vi, or vim, but Emacs certainly has a notion of pages. Naturally the precise definition of "page" is customisable, but by default pages are delimited by lines beginning with form-feed characters. The Emacs equivalents of PgUp and PgDn are C-x [ and C-x ].
Internet Explorer might be able to do that, since it's tied to a single operating system that is guaranteed to have a task bar. Nothing else can, because all other browsers run on operating systems that don't have any such concept.
(And good for them, I say. The task bar is a very poor interface: for example, it's neither structured nor spatial, so a program will never be found in any predictable location on the screen.)
But the space they're taking up is less useful.
Increasingly people these days have wide-aspect displays, while web pages are generally designed to have a single fairly narrow column that scrolls vertically. I have this Slashdot window quite wide and it's still only using slightly over half the width of my screen. I could well afford to have tabs containing a decent-length page title beside it.
Not to mention that with tabs at the side, you can have the tab title take up more than one line of text without making the useful page area smaller.
Before I read your comment and started thinking about it, I would have been dead set against tabs at the side. But now I'm starting to quite like the idea...