Actually several arguments, some based on free sofware and some on the hazards of developing any kind of software under patents. The 'pros' of software patents are only for large multinational companies and patent trolls.
Stallman: "Imagine that each time you made a software design decision, and especially whenever you used an algorithm that you read in a journal or implemented a feature that users ask for, you took a risk of being sued."
The key difference is that one person can easily create a single software product that sinultaneously contains any number of 'patentable' ideas. This is the opposite of patenting in eg. chemical engineering or pharmaceuticals, which tend to focus on a single complete process or product (such as a compound).
I see the point, but what if your rules aren't deterministic? In particular, what if action A doesn't reliably cause a delta of exactly D in character property X?
Even if the genius player decodes (or even reverse-engineers) such an algorithm, it's perfectly possible that they will never be able to turn this knowledge into an easily transmissible formula for leveling up.
Another way to 'hide' character properties is to make them performance metrics relative to the playing population. If it's only possible to have a relatively better character, rather than absolutely better - then to know the exact values of character properties requires knowing the whole population's stats at that time.
To look at it another way, if accruing explicitly measured, absolute units of wealth/XP/etc is the only way of acquiring additional gameplay rewards (such as areas and experiences), then it is senseless to obfuscate the mechanism. But that is just one way of designing a MMOG. Less generic approaches can remove the incentive to 'look under the hood'.
Hear hear. As soon as XMLHttpRequest is a proper standard I'm jumping on it like a shot. Like Gmail, it's time to raise the bar on which browsers we web developers are going to support. CSS2, DOM 2, and XHTML please. IE6 just about makes the cut;)
We don't get to file class actions; we have to get some regulator to step in, I think. Anyway it looks like no-one has tested reg 2 DVDs for this problem.
Difference is that the massacre of innocents in Sudan is a consequence of broken government and long-term ethnic/regional tension. NOT a consequence of statistically unlikely natural events. People in war-torn Africa are, by and large, being killed by *other people*.
Donors seem to think that $ spent trying to overturn these factors gets a much smaller return than $ in basic aid to those who are in immediate danger of starvation and disease. And I think they might be right.
... but off the topic of the Karma: I sat down hard on top of my iRiver iHP-120, crushing the screen into oblivion. (Cue jokes about my weight.) However, it is still 100% functional through its complicated but quite usable in-line remote, which comes as standard.
(Also on the plus side, I think having a smashed LCD makes the player less attractive to opportunist thieves should I leave it unattended.)
How long before we get MP3 players with low-power, tough, thin OLED screens?:/
Nautilus doesn't set the primary selection. Why then should it support pasting it?
Suppose a user selects some text in Epiphany and tries to middle-click paste it into a Nautilus window. What should the semantics of that situation be? I don't see a use case here.
The less-configurable design isn't about 'intuitiveness'. It's about simplicity. Simplicity is very measurable, while intuitiveness is not.
User options are regarded as bad things. The user shouldn't have to think.
This is exactly right. Options are bad. When Sun asked new Gnome 1.4 users to change settings, such as Panel properties, the users were confused by the range of options available. As a result, a lot of the users either failed to carry out simple configuration tasks, or took a long time to get the right result.
The Gnome HIG demands simplicity of configuration because without simplicity, configuration tasks become impossible for some users, and more difficult for all.
Have you looked at the KDE control centre recently? Complexity is abundant. There are a lot of options, but very few truly important ones. Because the KDE team want to give every niche, every 'power user's preference' equal importance, it remains extremely difficult to identify and distinguish the significant prefs. (Lack of instant-apply doesn't help.) At least, this is how it seems to me.
Remember that even a 'power user' may have trouble with complexity, because preference dialogues are not often used. How many times have you wanted to tweak a setting slightly in an app you use every day, and suddenly become surprised by the sheer number of preferences? That negative experience is common in non-Gnome apps (XChat, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Knode) but really quite rare in Gnome.
Most X11 apps have, traditionally, used middle-click as a paste function.
No. In X11 middle-click is often interpreted as 'insert primary selection'. There is a separate mechanism for real clipboards, which now even emacs supports correctly. There is more information about this on freedesktop.org.
Nautilus, as a file manager should, supports the clipboard. There is really very little need for it to deal with the primary selection.
In any case, I disagree that existing conventions should dominate the behaviour of a file manager. Just as web browsers are different to text editors (and use middle-click differently), a file manager is different to both editors and browsers. Nautilus != konqueror, it is not supposed to resemble a web browser.
The author also suggests that if one cannot figure out how to change the application's default behavior then they should constrain themselves to the developer's idea of what the proper settings should be.
No, I think the implication is that a setting which would never normally be changed does not need to be placed in the main configuration dialogue. Perhaps it would be sensible for Nautilus to ask on first launch whether you want to use spatial mode or default to browsing.
With respect:
There may be "people who wish Linux was more like MacOS, only cheaper". But I think there are also a lot of people who wish Linux was more like MacOS, only freer.
You don't understand the Linux desktop. There are two main ways to transfer data: using a clipboard buffer, and using the primary selection. Ctrl-X/C and Ctrl-V are for the clipboard, and selecting/middle-clicking are for the primary selection. The two systems are complementary and separate.
There are some applications which just don't use the protocol the same way; but this is becoming quite uncommon since emacs was fixed.
There is also a content negotation system for negotiating what types of content can be pasted where, which KDE and Gnome both support.
One remaining difficulty, with Gnome at least, is that when an X client exits, its selections disappear (so you can't copy, close the app and then paste).
if app needs to register itself as a handler for some mime type or for some protocol - it does it on launch, every time
What? I don't use OS X, but that sounds crazy. Assuming only your web browser is running, how does the system know which email app to run when you click on a mailto: link?
My favourite example is when you try to copy a directory to a FAT filesystem (eg a cf card for my camera or PDA) and I end up typing
cp -r because mc and others just freak out because they cannot set/preserve permissions on the FAT ?
Nautilus doesn't freak out on FAT volumes. Anyway, isn't this something you can sort out with mount options (like 'quiet')?
If I could have a free (as in speech) implementation of Windows, I would jump at it (cf. codeweavers). I'm sure a lot of people here would agree. When you look at the apps and the kernel, GNU/Linux is the best free desktop solution there is right now.
Slashdot Mirror
11% in 2006: ZDNet article
19% now: study (French), this is far below the ~25% European average.
IE is extremely prevalent in the UK.
You can always watch Dogme movies.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-p
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/savingeurope.html
Stallman: "Imagine that each time you made a software design decision, and especially whenever you used an algorithm that you read in a journal or implemented a feature that users ask for, you took a risk of being sued."
The key difference is that one person can easily create a single software product that sinultaneously contains any number of 'patentable' ideas. This is the opposite of patenting in eg. chemical engineering or pharmaceuticals, which tend to focus on a single complete process or product (such as a compound).
Even if the genius player decodes (or even reverse-engineers) such an algorithm, it's perfectly possible that they will never be able to turn this knowledge into an easily transmissible formula for leveling up.
Another way to 'hide' character properties is to make them performance metrics relative to the playing population. If it's only possible to have a relatively better character, rather than absolutely better - then to know the exact values of character properties requires knowing the whole population's stats at that time.
To look at it another way, if accruing explicitly measured, absolute units of wealth/XP/etc is the only way of acquiring additional gameplay rewards (such as areas and experiences), then it is senseless to obfuscate the mechanism. But that is just one way of designing a MMOG. Less generic approaches can remove the incentive to 'look under the hood'.
I'm guessing a dead-tree memo (on headed notepaper ideally) would be a reasonable compromise.
Hear hear. As soon as XMLHttpRequest is a proper standard I'm jumping on it like a shot. Like Gmail, it's time to raise the bar on which browsers we web developers are going to support. CSS2, DOM 2, and XHTML please. IE6 just about makes the cut ;)
We don't get to file class actions; we have to get some regulator to step in, I think. Anyway it looks like no-one has tested reg 2 DVDs for this problem.
Difference is that the massacre of innocents in Sudan is a consequence of broken government and long-term ethnic/regional tension. NOT a consequence of statistically unlikely natural events. People in war-torn Africa are, by and large, being killed by *other people*.
Donors seem to think that $ spent trying to overturn these factors gets a much smaller return than $ in basic aid to those who are in immediate danger of starvation and disease. And I think they might be right.
... but off the topic of the Karma: I sat down hard on top of my iRiver iHP-120, crushing the screen into oblivion. (Cue jokes about my weight.) However, it is still 100% functional through its complicated but quite usable in-line remote, which comes as standard.
:/
(Also on the plus side, I think having a smashed LCD makes the player less attractive to opportunist thieves should I leave it unattended.)
How long before we get MP3 players with low-power, tough, thin OLED screens?
Eh? Am I missing something? TCP/IP for Windows! Download it here! Over TCP! ...
Suppose a user selects some text in Epiphany and tries to middle-click paste it into a Nautilus window. What should the semantics of that situation be? I don't see a use case here.
User options are regarded as bad things. The user shouldn't have to think.
This is exactly right. Options are bad. When Sun asked new Gnome 1.4 users to change settings, such as Panel properties, the users were confused by the range of options available. As a result, a lot of the users either failed to carry out simple configuration tasks, or took a long time to get the right result.
The Gnome HIG demands simplicity of configuration because without simplicity, configuration tasks become impossible for some users, and more difficult for all.
Have you looked at the KDE control centre recently? Complexity is abundant. There are a lot of options, but very few truly important ones. Because the KDE team want to give every niche, every 'power user's preference' equal importance, it remains extremely difficult to identify and distinguish the significant prefs. (Lack of instant-apply doesn't help.) At least, this is how it seems to me.
Remember that even a 'power user' may have trouble with complexity, because preference dialogues are not often used. How many times have you wanted to tweak a setting slightly in an app you use every day, and suddenly become surprised by the sheer number of preferences? That negative experience is common in non-Gnome apps (XChat, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Knode) but really quite rare in Gnome.
No. In X11 middle-click is often interpreted as 'insert primary selection'. There is a separate mechanism for real clipboards, which now even emacs supports correctly. There is more information about this on freedesktop.org.
Nautilus, as a file manager should, supports the clipboard. There is really very little need for it to deal with the primary selection.
In any case, I disagree that existing conventions should dominate the behaviour of a file manager. Just as web browsers are different to text editors (and use middle-click differently), a file manager is different to both editors and browsers. Nautilus != konqueror, it is not supposed to resemble a web browser.
No, I think the implication is that a setting which would never normally be changed does not need to be placed in the main configuration dialogue. Perhaps it would be sensible for Nautilus to ask on first launch whether you want to use spatial mode or default to browsing.
Free as in speech. That's the point.
With respect:
There may be "people who wish Linux was more like MacOS, only cheaper". But I think there are also a lot of people who wish Linux was more like MacOS, only freer.
No way! Which architecture? Did they have 8086 in 1789? .... hmm, hold on, that was 1978.
There are some applications which just don't use the protocol the same way; but this is becoming quite uncommon since emacs was fixed. There is also a content negotation system for negotiating what types of content can be pasted where, which KDE and Gnome both support.
One remaining difficulty, with Gnome at least, is that when an X client exits, its selections disappear (so you can't copy, close the app and then paste).
For more info see here.
What? I don't use OS X, but that sounds crazy. Assuming only your web browser is running, how does the system know which email app to run when you click on a mailto: link?
jive: a dance
jibe: to be in accord
This has been a spelling nazi announcement.
If I could have a free (as in speech) implementation of Windows, I would jump at it (cf. codeweavers). I'm sure a lot of people here would agree. When you look at the apps and the kernel, GNU/Linux is the best free desktop solution there is right now.