That comment (and it's moderation) shows that the stock market is in an even sadder state of affairs - nobody buys stock because they believe in the company that they are buying stocks in. They just buy stock because they think they are going to make money out of somebody elses hard work.
Do not, I repeat do not force a nontechnical person to use Linux.
Wha? No, wrong. My mother ain't technical and can use Linux just fine.
What you should say is do not force a non-technical person to ADMIN a Linux box. But then again, you shouldn't let a non-technical person admin any box unless you want to have to fix it every other week. I have to keep cleaning all of the games off of my Aunt's computer because she doesn't understand the concepts of "limited hard drive space" and "uninstalling stuff" no matter how short I make the words I use.
Yeah, but installing Windows XP is the equvalent of only installing the Linux kernel, XFree86 and the KDE packages. Once you add the time on to install all of the games, Office software, development tools, etc that Knoppix already comes with, that installation time doesn't look nearly as impressive.
You could either look at it as the consumerisation (is that a word?) of software, which occurs with pretty much any type of electronic product you could name (digital watches, cd players, VCR's), where the price of the product starts high and then drops when people figure out how to mass produce it cheaply.
Unfortunately, the main reason as to why the price starts out high - that the components are difficult to make in large numbers and become cheaper as time goes by and demand increases - doesn't apply to software because once you've made the first copy, you can mass produce it simply by putting it on the internet or on CD.
And because it is so easy to mass produce, the large companies have to artificially make it more difficult to mass produce, which is why everyone on Slashdot get's so pissed off with them.
The only way this cycle will break is if someone figures out a business model where
a) The programmers write the software and still get paid, and b) No artificial constraints on what can be done with the software are applied.
Personally, I think that as long as big companies think that they can make a product once and sell it millions of times, (remind you of Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless?) they are going to keep fighting this losing battle.
The solution, as companies like AOL have figured out, is that the software is a means-to-an-end. They don't try to sell you their software, they sell you their web service. Do most city database companies try and sell a generic e-commerce application, or are they selling the service to customise it to the needs of the client?
And god help the recording industry:-) The service there is to listen to the band's playing live, not in providing CD's.
Consumer software and consumer pre-recorded music are dead end industries, which is why they are fighting using every dirty trick in the book to try and stay alive at the moment.
I never played it, but was it anything like the great card game "52 card pickup?"
I just had to ask:-)
Re:Music Notation vs Intuative
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 1
And of course, the problem that both your system and the conventionaly sheet music has is the same - there is no way to precisely express how sharply a note should sound, how much vibrato, exactly how loud each note should be for it's duration for each and every note; how it should be played to sound as if the instrument has taken a "breath",how it should be played to sound as if it is someone who is crying, or happy, or to express the sound of winter or summer. Or how to play so it just sounds damn cheesy!
In short, it is very difficult to capture in paper how an instrument should be played, because it is an incredibly complex and individual task.
- KDE now 3.x, which is binary incompatable with previous verison (was 2.x) - Gnome now 2.x (is that binary incompatable? I don't follow gnome) - was 1.x - GCC changed to 3.x, which is binary incompatable (was 2.x) - Ships with Mozilla 1.0 (previously, 0.x) - Ships with Open Office 1.0 (previously 0.x)... Exactly how more more stuff do you *want* to change before you announce a major release????;-)
Please note that, due to some changes in package names and improvements made to urpmi between 8.2 and 9.0 betas, it is questionable whether Mandrake 8.2 can be upgraded to 9.0 in this manner.
The most notable change is from using GCC 2.9x to using GCC 3.2, which for C++ programs are completely binary incompatable.
If you are doing a urpmi.updae/urpmi --autoselect, be prepared for perhaps > gig of "updates" to your system.
On the plus side, as somebody who ahs followed cooker, I don't believe that you will have any significant problems updating other than the aformentioned size of the update.
1. Whilst I don't think you can dock it into the panel, the KDE pager has a "Desktop Preview" option which does what you say (you click on the up arrow just to the side of the pager and a full-color-with-icon-representations appears on the screen).
There is also the "kasbar" panel extension, which is a different style of pager in it's own panel. I don't like it very much, but it might be just what you are looking for. Add one to your desktop by right-clicking on the panel, then add->extension->kasbar.
2. KDE does this, since at least 2.0 Erm, didn't you notice?
If your talking about the "hide" butons on panel, they can be turned on and off by right clicking the panel and selecting preferences (they are in the "hiding" tab. I don't believe they are on by default anymore anyway though.
Sounds like you've come up with a great idea for a personal project! Come back in five years time when you've reached the state KDE and Gnome are in now, just in time for someone else to say "you know what, Skonke's desktop really is just a slapped together mess, the solution is to throw it out and start over from scratch...."
Really, I have a point here. If you think KDE is a "slapped together mess" (I can't speak for Gnome, I don't use it...), you haven't tried developing for it (KDE is beautiful, and it's not often you can say that about an API). If you don't think it's usable, well then that's a reason to jump on the KDE usability mailing list and start posting solutions to the things you don't like about it.
But if it's something like "GNOME apps don't work well in KDE" or visa-versa, I assure you that it will be easier to add that functionality than it will be spending the next five years developing a new desktop that may very well include that functionality but which misses out on some other "vital" piece of functionality.
No, it was because the RPM's supplied with Redhat where generally broken.
The reason for this is that Bero was the only person working on KDE packaging, and had to do it in his spare time.
That's why if you read on the KDE download page, it says (Note that the "Rehat employ mentioned in the second paragraph is Bero)
" The KDE Project strives in most cases to be distribution neutral and to never single out any particular vendor or OS for special treatment. However, the realities of the situation demands that we address Red Hat as a special case. This is because while Red Hat does have the largest user base in North America, it doesn't support KDE and will not build packages for us to release.
As a result, the quality and quantity of packages for Red Hat are spotty. The "official" ones on the servers are built by a Red Hat employee in his spare time. He has neither the time nor the resources to build packages for all permutations of the distribution, however. For some releases, we have received packages from dedicated Red Hat users that we have uploaded to our servers as "unofficial" packages.
If you are dissatisfied with the Red Hat packages (or lack thereof), please let them know that. As a profit-making company, they will respond to adequate customer demand."
On the other hand, newbies can't reliably double click anyway.
Don't you remember when you was a newbie to the mouse? I sure do (it was about 10 years ago mind), and I've seen other people new to computers grappling with the mouse recently.
Double clicking just ain't as natural an action as most computer users (who eat, sleep, breath and use a mouse) belive it is!
But how much did the mail infrastructure cost (roads being the most obvious to mind)? I'd sugget that cost quite a bit too. Not to the individual company, but it all get's paid for via taxes, and just like IT, most of the infrastructure is being paid for by *other* companies. (i.e. You don't have to build your own international cable for UK to America just so you can send an email overseas)
But if the infrastructure is already there, the cost of it is irrelevant - it is the cost of maintaining that infrastructure that is important. And I can't argue one way or the other on this point because I don't have the figures.
Re:Compare and contrast
on
Gaim For Windows
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Gaim is client side, rather than server side. The main advantage of this is that AOL, etc. cannot block GAIM from accessing their networks, whilst it is fairly simple for them to notice that a jabber server is acting as a gateway and to block that.
When some people start living on the moon, it will be those people who have claim to it, and when other countries decide to dispute this fact, we will have our first war in space.
Replying to a post in an article you have moderated on (apparently) nullifies your moderation.
This is to stop people from using their moderation points to make their comments have more weight by e.g. modding down comments of a different viewpoint.
The effect is a neat little hack, which takes advantage of the fact that whilst you are looking at a menu, none of the underlying windows or anything are going to move. This means that you can just take a screenshot of what's under the menu, and then use that as the basis for you menu when you draw it.
Sadly, it means it can't be used in the background of eterms, konsole etc. because there is no way to get a screenshot of the underlying windows.
Slashdot Mirror
That comment (and it's moderation) shows that the stock market is in an even sadder state of affairs - nobody buys stock because they believe in the company that they are buying stocks in. They just buy stock because they think they are going to make money out of somebody elses hard work.
Do not, I repeat do not force a nontechnical person to use Linux.
Wha? No, wrong. My mother ain't technical and can use Linux just fine.
What you should say is do not force a non-technical person to ADMIN a Linux box. But then again, you shouldn't let a non-technical person admin any box unless you want to have to fix it every other week. I have to keep cleaning all of the games off of my Aunt's computer because she doesn't understand the concepts of "limited hard drive space" and "uninstalling stuff" no matter how short I make the words I use.
Yeah, but installing Windows XP is the equvalent of only installing the Linux kernel, XFree86 and the KDE packages. Once you add the time on to install all of the games, Office software, development tools, etc that Knoppix already comes with, that installation time doesn't look nearly as impressive.
In my view :
:-) The service there is to listen to the band's playing live, not in providing CD's.
;-)
You could either look at it as the consumerisation (is that a word?) of software, which occurs with pretty much any type of electronic product you could name (digital watches, cd players, VCR's), where the price of the product starts high and then drops when people figure out how to mass produce it cheaply.
Unfortunately, the main reason as to why the price starts out high - that the components are difficult to make in large numbers and become cheaper as time goes by and demand increases - doesn't apply to software because once you've made the first copy, you can mass produce it simply by putting it on the internet or on CD.
And because it is so easy to mass produce, the large companies have to artificially make it more difficult to mass produce, which is why everyone on Slashdot get's so pissed off with them.
The only way this cycle will break is if someone figures out a business model where
a) The programmers write the software and still get paid, and
b) No artificial constraints on what can be done with the software are applied.
Personally, I think that as long as big companies think that they can make a product once and sell it millions of times, (remind you of Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless?) they are going to keep fighting this losing battle.
The solution, as companies like AOL have figured out, is that the software is a means-to-an-end. They don't try to sell you their software, they sell you their web service. Do most city database companies try and sell a generic e-commerce application, or are they selling the service to customise it to the needs of the client?
And god help the recording industry
Consumer software and consumer pre-recorded music are dead end industries, which is why they are fighting using every dirty trick in the book to try and stay alive at the moment.
Well, that's my view on things anyway
I never played it, but was it anything like the great card game "52 card pickup?"
:-)
I just had to ask
And of course, the problem that both your system and the conventionaly sheet music has is the same - there is no way to precisely express how sharply a note should sound, how much vibrato, exactly how loud each note should be for it's duration for each and every note; how it should be played to sound as if the instrument has taken a "breath",how it should be played to sound as if it is someone who is crying, or happy, or to express the sound of winter or summer. Or how to play so it just sounds damn cheesy!
In short, it is very difficult to capture in paper how an instrument should be played, because it is an incredibly complex and individual task.
I thought the processor was PC compatable though - why emulate when it will run on the hardware anyway?
The solution to runnning the x-box games on a pc would simply be figuring out any custom API's the xbox has and implementing them, like wine does.
There are a lot of people in OSS who are scratching the user-friendlyness itch at the moment.
Mainly on the big desktop environments, but hey, that's where user friendlyness matters the most at the moment!
Lemme see:
... Exactly how more more stuff do you *want* to change before you announce a major release???? ;-)
- KDE now 3.x, which is binary incompatable with previous verison (was 2.x)
- Gnome now 2.x (is that binary incompatable? I don't follow gnome) - was 1.x
- GCC changed to 3.x, which is binary incompatable (was 2.x)
- Ships with Mozilla 1.0 (previously, 0.x)
- Ships with Open Office 1.0 (previously 0.x)
Oops, thought you was saying Gnome was more bloated than KDE :-)
:-)
Remove the "Sorry, but" from the beginning of my post and it still stands
Sorry, but as a KDE advocate I would still recommend Gnome over KDE on low specced machines.
The problem isn't inherantly KDE's fault; more GCC's current handling of C++, which is where most of the "bloat" (i.e. startup time) is taken up.
This was mentioned ages and ages ago, but as far as I am aware, still hasn't been resolved properly.
Please note that, due to some changes in package names and improvements made to urpmi between 8.2 and 9.0 betas, it is questionable whether Mandrake 8.2 can be upgraded to 9.0 in this manner.
The most notable change is from using GCC 2.9x to using GCC 3.2, which for C++ programs are completely binary incompatable.
If you are doing a urpmi.updae/urpmi --autoselect, be prepared for perhaps > gig of "updates" to your system.
On the plus side, as somebody who ahs followed cooker, I don't believe that you will have any significant problems updating other than the aformentioned size of the update.
Just to take the opposite stance here, I have the same feelings about Gnome.
:-)
So, that put's paid to all the arguments about a "unified desktop"
1. Whilst I don't think you can dock it into the panel, the KDE pager has a "Desktop Preview" option which does what you say (you click on the up arrow just to the side of the pager and a full-color-with-icon-representations appears on the screen).
There is also the "kasbar" panel extension, which is a different style of pager in it's own panel. I don't like it very much, but it might be just what you are looking for. Add one to your desktop by right-clicking on the panel, then add->extension->kasbar.
2. KDE does this, since at least 2.0 Erm, didn't you notice?
If your talking about the "hide" butons on panel, they can be turned on and off by right clicking the panel and selecting preferences (they are in the "hiding" tab. I don't believe they are on by default anymore anyway though.
Sounds like you've come up with a great idea for a personal project! Come back in five years time when you've reached the state KDE and Gnome are in now, just in time for someone else to say "you know what, Skonke's desktop really is just a slapped together mess, the solution is to throw it out and start over from scratch...."
Really, I have a point here. If you think KDE is a "slapped together mess" (I can't speak for Gnome, I don't use it...), you haven't tried developing for it (KDE is beautiful, and it's not often you can say that about an API). If you don't think it's usable, well then that's a reason to jump on the KDE usability mailing list and start posting solutions to the things you don't like about it.
But if it's something like "GNOME apps don't work well in KDE" or visa-versa, I assure you that it will be easier to add that functionality than it will be spending the next five years developing a new desktop that may very well include that functionality but which misses out on some other "vital" piece of functionality.
No, it was because the RPM's supplied with Redhat where generally broken.
The reason for this is that Bero was the only person working on KDE packaging, and had to do it in his spare time.
That's why if you read on the KDE download page, it says (Note that the "Rehat employ mentioned in the second paragraph is Bero)
" The KDE Project strives in most cases to be distribution neutral and to never single out any particular vendor or OS for special treatment. However, the realities of the situation demands that we address Red Hat as a special case. This is because while Red Hat does have the largest user base in North America, it doesn't support KDE and will not build packages for us to release.
As a result, the quality and quantity of packages for Red Hat are spotty. The "official" ones on the servers are built by a Red Hat employee in his spare time. He has neither the time nor the resources to build packages for all permutations of the distribution, however. For some releases, we have received packages from dedicated Red Hat users that we have uploaded to our servers as "unofficial" packages.
If you are dissatisfied with the Red Hat packages (or lack thereof), please let them know that. As a profit-making company, they will respond to adequate customer demand."
I believe most people call it the RDE
(Redhat Desktop Environment)
On the other hand, newbies can't reliably double click anyway.
Don't you remember when you was a newbie to the mouse? I sure do (it was about 10 years ago mind), and I've seen other people new to computers grappling with the mouse recently.
Double clicking just ain't as natural an action as most computer users (who eat, sleep, breath and use a mouse) belive it is!
But how much did the mail infrastructure cost (roads being the most obvious to mind)? I'd sugget that cost quite a bit too. Not to the individual company, but it all get's paid for via taxes, and just like IT, most of the infrastructure is being paid for by *other* companies. (i.e. You don't have to build your own international cable for UK to America just so you can send an email overseas)
But if the infrastructure is already there, the cost of it is irrelevant - it is the cost of maintaining that infrastructure that is important. And I can't argue one way or the other on this point because I don't have the figures.
Gaim is client side, rather than server side. The main advantage of this is that AOL, etc. cannot block GAIM from accessing their networks, whilst it is fairly simple for them to notice that a jabber server is acting as a gateway and to block that.
Um, nobody currently has any claim on the moon.
Because nobody lives there.
When some people start living on the moon, it will be those people who have claim to it, and when other countries decide to dispute this fact, we will have our first war in space.
Replying to a post in an article you have moderated on (apparently) nullifies your moderation.
This is to stop people from using their moderation points to make their comments have more weight by e.g. modding down comments of a different viewpoint.
Back to the floppys....
I mean DISKS GODDAMNIT!!!!
The effect is a neat little hack, which takes advantage of the fact that whilst you are looking at a menu, none of the underlying windows or anything are going to move. This means that you can just take a screenshot of what's under the menu, and then use that as the basis for you menu when you draw it.
Sadly, it means it can't be used in the background of eterms, konsole etc. because there is no way to get a screenshot of the underlying windows.
Gestures are cool! I've set Mozilla to automatically press the submit button for me when I move my mouse like thi