I've downloaded some linux apps before, unzipped them and guess what? Several files of the same name. Like the name of the application is common. There's a fooname app and a fooname thank you text file and a fooname config file and others at whatever whim of the writer or compiler of that app. So where is this superior system that doesn't have extensions and is somehow conducive to learning? 1. Filesystems do not allow multiple files with the same name to exist in the same directory. 2. Linux applications are not distributed in zip files.
Therefore you are lying. At most, you have unpacked a set of Linux executables on Windows and were hit by the very same user interface deficiency that just was described. What means that you are also stupid.
And don't tell me that I should be opening the program first and then file > open for the document. That's just stupid. why? Because the folder browser is nearly always more flexible and searchable where the file > open dialog is not. All modern file managers have default action (usually double-click on a file), and list of alternative applications and actions (usually right-click). Same as Windows, not any different from MacOS of any version.
There are many other reasons why opening a file from an application is more convenient than running application from a file manager, however it has nothing to do with file managers or file names.
Also all files on a Linux (or any Unix-like) system that are meant to be "opened" by a user, either have extension, or are text files and have names in all capitals (README, COPYING, etc.) The only files that almost never have extensions are executables -- they are supposed to be installed before you can run them, and all Linux distributions went to a great length to make installation and package management automatic. In any real-world setup the only executables a user is supposed to run by doing anything directly with their files (from a terminal or file manager) are executables the user made by himself, and for some reason decided not to install into/usr/bin (or/usr/local/bin ) where they belong.
Of course, if you actually used Linux, you would know that.
I don't understand why people are so surprised with Sugar. Sure, it's specifically designed for kids, but its user interface is not unheard of, it resembles DESQview running traditional DOS menu-driven programs such as Borland and Microsoft IDEs, Norton Utilities, games, etc.
1. All applications run in full screen (in DESQview you can resize a window, but only a part of the screen will be visible if it runs a DOS application, so most users kept everything in full screen). 2. Global menu (Frame in Sugar) pops up when a special key is pressed. 3. All applications have more or less the same menu on top ("File, "Edit..." in DOS, "Activity" in Sugar) that appears at the top of the screen.
I have heard, cocaine is pretty easy to market, and is very profitable.
Also its distribution does not negate years of work done by many people who committed their resources to OLPC project, and now have to face the question, if they want to work on it anymore, as apparently management's actions no longer serve the announced goals.
I don't think XFCE window management is any better for these kinds of screens than Gnome, and I think the XFCE dock and toolbars are considerably worse. Oh, it's not "better". Xfce is lighter on resources, and has very limited use for drag and drop, what is good when using it with a touchpad.
But that's not the goal of OLPC. The goal of OLPC is to make a system usable for kids and non-experts. Kids and non-experts have real trouble with Windows/Mac/XFCE/Gnome-style window management. Sugar may not be the right answer to this problem, but none of the traditional desktop environments are suitable. This is why I don't recommend it as a Sugar replacement. The goal is to support the way I, developers and users familiar with traditional UI use the device. As a side effect it also addresses all possible cases where, as Negroponte believes, stripped down Windows would be superior -- any amount of stripping down would get it far below the point where OpenOffice.org, Firefox and other free software already are.
I tried to cover the "consumer laptop" side because it was in the thread about those machines. Eee PC is a typical example of a small consumer laptop that was intended to be in "mobile device" class but ended up firmly in the traditional low-end laptops price range.
I find it a minor detail -- after all, it would be far beyond Intel's power to affect OLPC development if it wasn't so prone to being swayed by influence of parties THAT ARE NOT IN ANY WAY INVOLVED IN PRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION. Sure, Intel decided to "compete". Intel also had nothing even remotely involved in educational software development, software infrastructure specifically designed to be used in development of application for kids, and many other things that OLPC had, not to mention intending to sell laptops at a price I paid on Ebay for laptops with far superior specs. Intel would not be an issue if OLPC people did not turn it into an issue.
Heck, Microsoft would not be an issue apart of the need to counteract some FUD and vaporware announcements, if Nicholas Negroponte didn't start courting it.
think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh). I already have a version of Ubuntu with Xfce that has default configuration designed to be usable on those laptops -- it's my development/mobile-device configuration. I even went as far as re-painting icons from Human theme green, so they don't clash with colors usable on a white-and-green laptop. The goal was to:
1. Port a Debian-based distribution with good hardware support, development and "mainstream" connectivity tools. 2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems. 3. Demonstrate that if Windows on OLPC laptops is addressing a problem, that problem is already solved better by using existing free software.
So far I find that laptop perfectly usable -- in fact, for some things it ended up being better because slow Flash annoyed me enough to add a script, mplayer configuration and rebuilt clive package, so Youtube works in fullscreen without glitches. On my regular laptop I did not bother, and just accepted that I have to use Flash plugin with it craptastic performance on videos.
Oh, wait, I did that already -- in Russia in early 90's. And all they did was giving up control of everything government had and everything government didn't have, to domestic and foreign "businesses" that proceeded to loot the country...
I have an idea. Can I be the looting businessman this time, and you all will be cheerleading Libertarians?
That at least gets them into the universities. ...so universities dumb down their programs that actually educate, to accommodate people who see education as a ticket to easy and well-paid job. This ruins education for everyone else. Worse yet, most of people who entered university with this goal in mind, end up barely graduating or dropping out.
Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse? People are willing to pay more for houses in good school districts, which shows that they care about educating their children - it has nothing to do with getting loans. I am talking about people who already live somewhere, and want to increase their property value. New home buyers avoid poor neighborhoods because they are notoriously unsafe, and it's usually same poor neighborhoods that can't fund their schools.
Religion may be BS, but Catholic schools have low dropout rates, higher rates of college attendance, lower costs per pupil, and generally beat public schools by any objective measure. And clubbing baby seals produces more unit of finished product per month than heart surgery.
Actually, if they can be hands-down better than public school and still have extra time to waste teaching extra stuff, that supports the GP's point. Except they don't teach anything that contradicts religious dogmas, and indoctrinate students with idiocy that cripples their thinking process. This would count as education in Middle Ages, when literate dumbass and self-loathing religious zealot would be better than illiterate dumbass, however thankfully we are not in Middle Ages now, and have to live up to higher standards.
Yes, most (not all) of them will be religious schools, which may offend your tender sensibilities, but get over it and take a hard look at the education they offer. Religious education is negative education, it spreads false knowledge and promotes uncritical thinking, so it's worse than none. If anything, its popularity only confirms my point.
I know a lot of people who didn't get a lot of education (formal classroom) that really want it for their kids. No. They don't want education, they want some nebulous elite job training for their kids, so they can become "doctors and lawyers".
Just look at neighborhoods with good schools. The house prices are much much higher for those districts. You know your society is fucked when the best reason for people to support public education is getting more equity loans.
In a Capitalist economy, it assumed that there are no new products or scientific breakthroughs. Almost all progress in science and engineering happened despite intentions and policies of corporations' management. On the other hand, all mind-numbing marketing and idiotic working conditions are firmly within companies' accepted practices.
I think a lot of companies care a lot about education since they want to hire employees to expand, produce new goods and find new markets etc. Then they just hire foreigners from countries where oh-so-oppressive governments provide better public education.
"To live well", most of societies, and especially American one, need better educated people. What requires better public education system. That happens to be expensive, requires a lot of work, provides no bread and pretty lousy circuses.
There is no way, enough ignorant people will admit their deficiency and support implementation of such such education system in a democratic way. There is no way, in a republic, politicians will support public education because it is not a popular position among ignorant people. There is no way, in Capitalist economy businesses will support public education, because it will decrease their control over consumers.
The only way to do it, is for smart people to manipulate powerful elite and its decadent culture into forcing education onto the masses. When the next generation of people will get an idea WTF they are doing and talking about, maybe they will find a use for democracy, socialism, market, or whatever other things that are now touted to be important for the welfare of mankind. But until then, long live oppression.
Seriously, long live oppression, the only way to get rid of oppression.
I think this is meant to address "real" piracy, and not some guy in his basement downloading torrents. Real piracy (as in, armed robbery on high seas) seems to be pretty well regarded as a source of material for works that contribute to the wealth of people living in Los Angeles County.
drugs, gangs, prostitution and gambling. I disagree. I assume, "and" applies to all four conditions, and means that they have to be dens of drugs AND gangs AND prostitution AND gambling -- if not all those conditions are met, they are not a nuisance. Since they are merely dens of drugs and prostitution but not gangs or gambling, they are fine.
DRM is pretty toothless if everyone is allowed to break it -- I am sure, even before people would find a way to break DRM schemes on then-current generation of products, there would be a huge influx of the same products sans DRM. For manufacturer it's nothing but a headache to license a DRM scheme and implement it, with no other results than more technical support calls from pissed customers when DRM either does or doesn't work as intended.
Linksys would sell me zero routers, as opposed to four, and I would recommend my friends to buy zero their routers instead of three more, if they didn't make it possible for me modify their firmware. I would also buy more their routers if they provided an open source driver for their wireless chipset, because that would let me use Linux 2.6 (as opposed to 2.4 that I have to tolerate, thanks to our Broadcom overlords), thus allowing me support more sophisticated protocols and get rid of the damn PPTP bug, that linux 2.4 has and 2.6 doesn't.
However being mentally retarded corporate lemmings, Broadcom and Cisco people apparently don't want to sell me, and hundreds of thousands of other people, more their products, and would instead waste their time shoehorning VxWorks into their hardware, just to "stick it to The Man" (in this case, surprisingly, "The Man" being Richard Stallman).
You mean, massive decline of the quality of creative works?
I thought, it just reached bottom and kinda stays there, copyright or no copyright -- are we really worse off than when Britney Spears was at the height of her career?
I modern usage the term "think tank" is most often applied to organizations issuing authoritatively-sounding opinion pieces on controversial topics for propaganda purposes, so even patent trolls don't want to be associated with it.
MICHAEL (CONT'D) This month is going to be bigger. It's actually going to be the biggest month we've ever had. We've got a new issue I want to talk to you about. It's called Med Patent. They've just designed the world's first retractable syringe. This means that doctors and nurses will never again have to worry about infection from dirty needles. This is not going to be an alternative in the medical world, it's going to be the standard. We all know we're here to make money, but if we can do something good like this, then all the better. So I want you all to go out and buy yourselves a new car, or a house. Whatever you want. Go into debt. You will make a million inside of six months. -- from Boiler Room movie script.
Actually it's "...how can I sell users some broken Linux boxes, so my Microsoft masters will love me even more for tarnishing Linux... I wonder if we can get paid as much as Broadcom -- those guys must be getting all their revenue in Microsoft payoffs!".
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2. Linux applications are not distributed in zip files.
Therefore you are lying. At most, you have unpacked a set of Linux executables on Windows and were hit by the very same user interface deficiency that just was described. What means that you are also stupid. And don't tell me that I should be opening the program first and then file > open for the document. That's just stupid. why? Because the folder browser is nearly always more flexible and searchable where the file > open dialog is not. All modern file managers have default action (usually double-click on a file), and list of alternative applications and actions (usually right-click). Same as Windows, not any different from MacOS of any version.
There are many other reasons why opening a file from an application is more convenient than running application from a file manager, however it has nothing to do with file managers or file names.
Also all files on a Linux (or any Unix-like) system that are meant to be "opened" by a user, either have extension, or are text files and have names in all capitals (README, COPYING, etc.) The only files that almost never have extensions are executables -- they are supposed to be installed before you can run them, and all Linux distributions went to a great length to make installation and package management automatic. In any real-world setup the only executables a user is supposed to run by doing anything directly with their files (from a terminal or file manager) are executables the user made by himself, and for some reason decided not to install into
Of course, if you actually used Linux, you would know that.
I don't understand why people are so surprised with Sugar. Sure, it's specifically designed for kids, but its user interface is not unheard of, it resembles DESQview running traditional DOS menu-driven programs such as Borland and Microsoft IDEs, Norton Utilities, games, etc.
1. All applications run in full screen (in DESQview you can resize a window, but only a part of the screen will be visible if it runs a DOS application, so most users kept everything in full screen).
2. Global menu (Frame in Sugar) pops up when a special key is pressed.
3. All applications have more or less the same menu on top ("File, "Edit..." in DOS, "Activity" in Sugar) that appears at the top of the screen.
I have heard, cocaine is pretty easy to market, and is very profitable.
Also its distribution does not negate years of work done by many people who committed their resources to OLPC project, and now have to face the question, if they want to work on it anymore, as apparently management's actions no longer serve the announced goals.
I tried to cover the "consumer laptop" side because it was in the thread about those machines. Eee PC is a typical example of a small consumer laptop that was intended to be in "mobile device" class but ended up firmly in the traditional low-end laptops price range.
I find it a minor detail -- after all, it would be far beyond Intel's power to affect OLPC development if it wasn't so prone to being swayed by influence of parties THAT ARE NOT IN ANY WAY INVOLVED IN PRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION. Sure, Intel decided to "compete". Intel also had nothing even remotely involved in educational software development, software infrastructure specifically designed to be used in development of application for kids, and many other things that OLPC had, not to mention intending to sell laptops at a price I paid on Ebay for laptops with far superior specs. Intel would not be an issue if OLPC people did not turn it into an issue.
Heck, Microsoft would not be an issue apart of the need to counteract some FUD and vaporware announcements, if Nicholas Negroponte didn't start courting it.
1. Port a Debian-based distribution with good hardware support, development and "mainstream" connectivity tools.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
3. Demonstrate that if Windows on OLPC laptops is addressing a problem, that problem is already solved better by using existing free software.
So far I find that laptop perfectly usable -- in fact, for some things it ended up being better because slow Flash annoyed me enough to add a script, mplayer configuration and rebuilt clive package, so Youtube works in fullscreen without glitches. On my regular laptop I did not bother, and just accepted that I have to use Flash plugin with it craptastic performance on videos.
http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2730.msg21987#msg21987
If I missed anything, correcftions are welcome.
Something may be both human and alive, and yet not constitute a human life.
Organs in the process of being translpanted are another example of such a thing -- even blood (full of functioning living cells) qualifies.
Oh, wait, I did that already -- in Russia in early 90's. And all they did was giving up control of everything government had and everything government didn't have, to domestic and foreign "businesses" that proceeded to loot the country...
I have an idea. Can I be the looting businessman this time, and you all will be cheerleading Libertarians?
Pretty please?
With sugar on top?
...uses a system, even older than this one, that in the case of aborted mission flies crew to safety on a separate set of rocket engines.
"To live well", most of societies, and especially American one, need better educated people. What requires better public education system. That happens to be expensive, requires a lot of work, provides no bread and pretty lousy circuses.
There is no way, enough ignorant people will admit their deficiency and support implementation of such such education system in a democratic way.
There is no way, in a republic, politicians will support public education because it is not a popular position among ignorant people.
There is no way, in Capitalist economy businesses will support public education, because it will decrease their control over consumers.
The only way to do it, is for smart people to manipulate powerful elite and its decadent culture into forcing education onto the masses. When the next generation of people will get an idea WTF they are doing and talking about, maybe they will find a use for democracy, socialism, market, or whatever other things that are now touted to be important for the welfare of mankind. But until then, long live oppression.
Seriously, long live oppression, the only way to get rid of oppression.
DRM is pretty toothless if everyone is allowed to break it -- I am sure, even before people would find a way to break DRM schemes on then-current generation of products, there would be a huge influx of the same products sans DRM. For manufacturer it's nothing but a headache to license a DRM scheme and implement it, with no other results than more technical support calls from pissed customers when DRM either does or doesn't work as intended.
Linksys would sell me zero routers, as opposed to four, and I would recommend my friends to buy zero their routers instead of three more, if they didn't make it possible for me modify their firmware. I would also buy more their routers if they provided an open source driver for their wireless chipset, because that would let me use Linux 2.6 (as opposed to 2.4 that I have to tolerate, thanks to our Broadcom overlords), thus allowing me support more sophisticated protocols and get rid of the damn PPTP bug, that linux 2.4 has and 2.6 doesn't.
However being mentally retarded corporate lemmings, Broadcom and Cisco people apparently don't want to sell me, and hundreds of thousands of other people, more their products, and would instead waste their time shoehorning VxWorks into their hardware, just to "stick it to The Man" (in this case, surprisingly, "The Man" being Richard Stallman).
You mean, massive decline of the quality of creative works?
I thought, it just reached bottom and kinda stays there, copyright or no copyright -- are we really worse off than when Britney Spears was at the height of her career?
What now, asshole?
I modern usage the term "think tank" is most often applied to organizations issuing authoritatively-sounding opinion pieces on controversial topics for propaganda purposes, so even patent trolls don't want to be associated with it.
This month is going to be bigger. It's
actually going to be the biggest month
we've ever had. We've got a new issue
I want to talk to you about. It's
called Med Patent. They've just
designed the world's first retractable
syringe. This means that doctors and
nurses will never again have to worry
about infection from dirty needles.
This is not going to be an alternative
in the medical world, it's going to be
the standard. We all know we're here
to make money, but if we can do
something good like this, then all the
better. So I want you all to go out
and buy yourselves a new car, or a
house. Whatever you want. Go into
debt. You will make a million inside
of six months. -- from Boiler Room movie script.
Actually it's "...how can I sell users some broken Linux boxes, so my Microsoft masters will love me even more for tarnishing Linux... I wonder if we can get paid as much as Broadcom -- those guys must be getting all their revenue in Microsoft payoffs!".