"What I'd like to see is an approach where the documents are represented by thumbnails rather than just icons."
If you haven't already you should check out one of the newest Linux distros running KDE. The kde file manager can represent pretty much any file as a thumbnail (pictures, movies, word documents, powerpoint presentations, pdfs, text files, etc...). I like it quite a bit.
You know that you _can_ have a local phone... with _no_ long distance whatsoever right??
This is why my wife and I did in order to keep 911 service... even though we used our cell-phones 99% of the time. We've since dumped even that... moving to 100% cell-phones... the main reason being that the home phone was nothing but a spam machine.... we never gave the number out to anyone yet _many_ companies stilled called night and day trying to sell us stuff. We no longer have that problem...
"Another example. Do you spend all day going across town to five different stores to pick up the best of each item you need or do you hit Wal-Mart down the street and pick up all the items you need for less (both in cost and quality)."
Hah!
This is the worst example you could have used for me! I _really_ do drive all over town looking for the best price and quatlity of each item... and _never_ go to the wal-mart just down the street (Wal-mart is a terrible company... I try to give them as little money as possible... but that's a rant for another day)...;-)
But of course, your point is still well taken.
My response is that for the CEO and Mom... there will be a default... there are always defaults... just use them. For the rest of us though, there is no harm in choice!;-)
What cracks me up is that people are so used to having _shit_ shoved down their throats by "the man" that they complain when they actually have choices!
Why does there have to be only 1 clipboard manager? Open source developers were not put on this earth to serve your whims. Use your brain and just choose one! Or none if you prefer (which I do).
16bit has just finally been abandoned fairly recently (windows XP?)
I think the past has shown that dropping backwards compatibility isn't all that great of an idea... much better to slowly transition. Right now we're in a transition phase... no biggie.
My point was that using a pure 64bit environment has _zero_ advantages over the more flexible 64/32 environment. I have both a native compiled 64bit firefox and a 32-bit binary in gentoo... are you implying that simply having the choice is bad?
Yelling and screaming at companies like Macromedia/Adobe that they don't have a 64bit linux plugin isn't going to make it come any faster... even if we didn't have the ability to run the 32bit version. They'll do it when (if!?) they damn well please. A better alternative is to _not_ use flash when you are in a position to make decisions about a website's design (which several people on slashdot are). That's the only way to get through to these companies.
As for del.icio.us support... I think it's TERRIBLE in flock.
Foxylicious + Firefox works _way_ better in my opinion.
Why doesn't flock make use of my del.icio.us tags? It lists them... yes... but it really should create hierarchies like foxylicious does. Having all of my favorites in one big flat file list is a _terrible_ waste when I've spent so much time tagging them.
I do appreciate the Flickr integration... even though it's not terribly useful to me (how often are you viewing the pictures you would like to upload in your browser? there are lots of other upload tools that are better).
If they ever get around to implementing proper del.icio.us support I might use Flock. But for now firefox is doing all I need.
"I'd have to switch to the 32-bit Firefox when I wanted Flash content."
This is still the case... as far as I can tell flock is 32bit only and installs the 32bit flash plugin when you first start it up... meaning that it won't work in a pure 64bit environment (but who in their right might runs a _pure_ environment anyway? emul-x86 libraries ship with every distro I know of and every distro has 32bit emulation turned on in kernel...)
As for getting it running on a 64bit linux distro.... all I did was:
emerge firefox-bin netscape-flash
but I know that getting it going in other 64bit distros can be a bit more difficult...
Personally... I'm older now and have a job and haven't downloaded a song in years (since the middle of my college years).
I bought some from iTunes after I got my iPod, but then decided that it wasn't worth the loss in quality and freedom and have just gone back to buying CD's. I follow the bands I like and pick their CD's up when they're on sale and, for me anyway, the price is about right (about $12-$15). I definitely get alteast that much use out of the CDs I buy.
But of course I'm just one person, but I wonder how many others that were in college in the 1999-2005 range are doing the same?
The genre/game content most definitely has something to do with it.
I can't see how anyone can argue that Oblivion is _not_ a polished product. Just because a couple of small things slip through Q&A doesn't mean it's not polished. I haven't bought/used a single piece of software that didn't have atleast one bug... it's the nature of large software products. Does that mean that I've never used a "polished" piece of software? I don't think so.
What I'm trying to say is that $50 buys you a very polished game, with a couple of small flaws (maybe making up 1/1000 of the game's content). For me that's a damn good ratio. The rest of the game content (graphics/scenery/voice acting/quests/music) are so great that it more than outweighs any small flaws.
As for genre... my point is that in a 15-20 hour shooter... where all you do is run around and blow shit up (not putting these games down I own plenty of them and greatly enjoy them) and you don't have all the intracacies that are present in Oblivion I expect there to be a lot less flaws... I'm looking for a flaw/content ratio that is very low and I think Oblivion definitely delivers that.
I have also migrated to del.icio.us and it was actually for the same reason this Google Sync was created... to keep my bookmarks up to date between my _many_ computers I use throughout the day.
I use Foxylicious to pull down my del.icio.us bookmarks automatically. It creates a great hierarchy out of my tags that makes my bookmarks easy to use in firefox.
Give it a whirl, Friedmud
PS: As a del.icio.us user I think it's funny that people are so up in arms over this Google plugin... I mean thousands upon thousands of people put their bookmarks out on the web for everyone to see everyday... let alone google. What are all these people afraid of showing the world?
I have logged around 90 hours so far in this game... and it is unbelievable. I haven't hit anything that I have noticed as a bug... but I'm also an extremely careful player (hence the 90 hours).
What other game out there gives you _SO MUCH_ with so few problems? In such a huge game like this there are bound to be some issues. Have a couple of minor glitches in a couple of side quest and get castrated even though there are _hundreds_ of quests with no problems.
Good god people... get over it!
Man... people just don't appreciate things. You have to take the good with the bad. I'll take an incredible game with a couple of coding flaws in it over another FPS on rails game with no bugs anyday.... but I guess that's just me.
While I do agree with most of your comment... I will point out that Steam has great modding capabilities. Hell.. you can install the HL2 SDK directly through steam... and when you create mods with it they are automatically added as a new game in steam.
Further if you download and install third party mods they are automatically integrated into the steam system... complete with auto-updating.
Honestly, there isn't much of a better system out there for dealing with mods. Maybe Oblivion comes close, but even it doesn't have auto-updating mods.
And you tag the "Gentoo Forums" site with all three (linux,gentoo,forums). But you only tag the Gentoo main site with "gentoo" and kernel.org with "linux" you will get a bookmark folder containing:
Now this looks _etremely_ repetitive... and maybe it is for just 3 bookmarks. But what happens is as you get upwards of 50 to 100 the system makes perfect sense, and allows you to find things very quickly. For instance if I want to go to the Gentoo Forums I click on my "Del.icio.us" bookmark folder (which I have in my bookmark toolbar) and then go ->gentoo->forums->"Gentoo Forums"
You just navigate the hierarchy like you would say the words....
One word of caution. I am sure you can see how your bookmark folder will _explode_ with the number of tags you use. Try to keep a short list of relevant tags.... or else you will have this _HUGE_ mostrously long bookmark folder that will be unwieldy. You have been warned!;-)
Fire it up and set it to "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" or whatever... and there you go.
I have been using this system for a while and I love it... because between dual-boots and different labs on campus I will use 6 or so different firefox installations on any given day... it's great to have my bookmarks roam with me.
The problem is that Matrox cards don't have anywhere near as much power as dual Nvidia/Ati setups do... meaning that even though you might be able to run 3 monitors... you will have to do so at _terrible_ resolutions and low quality settings.
With this box you can enjoy _true_ high definition gaming across 3 monitors using SLI/Crossfire (preferably SLI since ATI has some issues with this box).
The one problem I see with the box is that the monitors all look like one big monitor.... this would be annoying.... Anyone who has multiple monitors knows that your OS needs to be aware that they are multiple monitors and not just one big one.... for instance when you hit the maximize button on your browser do you really want it spanning all 3 monitors? Or just maxmizing on the current monitor?
With this box it will most likely span all 3.... but maybe they have a software hack to prevent that. Under normal multiple monitor scenarios (in both Linux and Windows) it will just maximize on the current monitor... which is exactly what you want (most of the time;-)
In fact my laptop hibernated sometime during the night last night (used it a lot yesterday... never plugged it in). Plugged it in this morning... hit the power switch and it un-hibernated (like I say though, hibernate isn't always trustworthy on PC's and I will grant that...) fine and kept right on rolling.
You can set all of these settings in the power control panel in XP (although I'm not quite sure how to do it automatically in Linux... I usually don't mess with power management stuff too much in Linux).
Once again, not trying to be argumentative... but these are _not_ Apple inventions.
You are comparing two completely different things.
I agree with you that Hibernate is pretty crappy... and as you say it doesn't work all the time. But I'm not talking about Hibernate... I'm talking about "Sleep".
"Sleep"ing is the same thing that macs do... they are still "on" but the hardrive is spun down, all peripherals are powered down and so is the screen. On my laptop the power light blinks while in sleep... just like on a mac.
It only takes a couple of seconds to recover from this state (just like on a mac)... and it doesn't suffer from the downfalls of hibernate.
But at any rate... I wasn't trying to take anything away from the mac laptops.... I think they are fine pieces of work and will be most definitely picking up a macbook either towards the end of this year or the beginning of next. All I wanted to point out is that _all_ laptops can sleep and even in the windows/linux world it works well. (also note that since mac laptops are now pc's on the inside... _both_ platforms are "sleep"ing in exactly the same way... but of course OSX probably still handles it better...)
Not too deviate too far from the conversation... but all _real_ PC laptops (ie those with mobile chips, not those "desktop replacements") can do this as well...
My tabletPC _never_ gets turned off... and can sleep for well over a week and still have plenty of juice after a full charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... I find Gnome's _featureless_ interface clunky and difficult to use as a whole! ;-)
Friedmud
PS: Yes, that really was a smily face at the end of the line... some people like one, others prefer the other... I don't think that will ever change!
"What I'd like to see is an approach where the documents are represented by thumbnails rather than just icons."
If you haven't already you should check out one of the newest Linux distros running KDE. The kde file manager can represent pretty much any file as a thumbnail (pictures, movies, word documents, powerpoint presentations, pdfs, text files, etc...). I like it quite a bit.
Friedmud
You know that you _can_ have a local phone... with _no_ long distance whatsoever right??
This is why my wife and I did in order to keep 911 service... even though we used our cell-phones 99% of the time. We've since dumped even that... moving to 100% cell-phones... the main reason being that the home phone was nothing but a spam machine.... we never gave the number out to anyone yet _many_ companies stilled called night and day trying to sell us stuff. We no longer have that problem...
Friedmud
"Another example. Do you spend all day going across town to five different stores to pick up the best of each item you need or do you hit Wal-Mart down the street and pick up all the items you need for less (both in cost and quality)."
;-)
;-)
Hah!
This is the worst example you could have used for me! I _really_ do drive all over town looking for the best price and quatlity of each item... and _never_ go to the wal-mart just down the street (Wal-mart is a terrible company... I try to give them as little money as possible... but that's a rant for another day)...
But of course, your point is still well taken.
My response is that for the CEO and Mom... there will be a default... there are always defaults... just use them. For the rest of us though, there is no harm in choice!
Friedmud
What cracks me up is that people are so used to having _shit_ shoved down their throats by "the man" that they complain when they actually have choices!
Why does there have to be only 1 clipboard manager? Open source developers were not put on this earth to serve your whims. Use your brain and just choose one! Or none if you prefer (which I do).
Repeat after me: "Choices are good!"
Friedmud
16bit has just finally been abandoned fairly recently (windows XP?)
I think the past has shown that dropping backwards compatibility isn't all that great of an idea... much better to slowly transition. Right now we're in a transition phase... no biggie.
My point was that using a pure 64bit environment has _zero_ advantages over the more flexible 64/32 environment. I have both a native compiled 64bit firefox and a 32-bit binary in gentoo... are you implying that simply having the choice is bad?
Yelling and screaming at companies like Macromedia/Adobe that they don't have a 64bit linux plugin isn't going to make it come any faster... even if we didn't have the ability to run the 32bit version. They'll do it when (if!?) they damn well please. A better alternative is to _not_ use flash when you are in a position to make decisions about a website's design (which several people on slashdot are). That's the only way to get through to these companies.
Friedmud
As for del.icio.us support... I think it's TERRIBLE in flock.
Foxylicious + Firefox works _way_ better in my opinion.
Why doesn't flock make use of my del.icio.us tags? It lists them... yes... but it really should create hierarchies like foxylicious does. Having all of my favorites in one big flat file list is a _terrible_ waste when I've spent so much time tagging them.
I do appreciate the Flickr integration... even though it's not terribly useful to me (how often are you viewing the pictures you would like to upload in your browser? there are lots of other upload tools that are better).
If they ever get around to implementing proper del.icio.us support I might use Flock. But for now firefox is doing all I need.
Friedmud
"I'd have to switch to the 32-bit Firefox when I wanted Flash content."
This is still the case... as far as I can tell flock is 32bit only and installs the 32bit flash plugin when you first start it up... meaning that it won't work in a pure 64bit environment (but who in their right might runs a _pure_ environment anyway? emul-x86 libraries ship with every distro I know of and every distro has 32bit emulation turned on in kernel...)
As for getting it running on a 64bit linux distro.... all I did was:
emerge firefox-bin netscape-flash
but I know that getting it going in other 64bit distros can be a bit more difficult...
Friedmud
Personally... I'm older now and have a job and haven't downloaded a song in years (since the middle of my college years).
I bought some from iTunes after I got my iPod, but then decided that it wasn't worth the loss in quality and freedom and have just gone back to buying CD's. I follow the bands I like and pick their CD's up when they're on sale and, for me anyway, the price is about right (about $12-$15). I definitely get alteast that much use out of the CDs I buy.
But of course I'm just one person, but I wonder how many others that were in college in the 1999-2005 range are doing the same?
Friedmud
The genre/game content most definitely has something to do with it.
I can't see how anyone can argue that Oblivion is _not_ a polished product. Just because a couple of small things slip through Q&A doesn't mean it's not polished. I haven't bought/used a single piece of software that didn't have atleast one bug... it's the nature of large software products. Does that mean that I've never used a "polished" piece of software? I don't think so.
What I'm trying to say is that $50 buys you a very polished game, with a couple of small flaws (maybe making up 1/1000 of the game's content). For me that's a damn good ratio. The rest of the game content (graphics/scenery/voice acting/quests/music) are so great that it more than outweighs any small flaws.
As for genre... my point is that in a 15-20 hour shooter... where all you do is run around and blow shit up (not putting these games down I own plenty of them and greatly enjoy them) and you don't have all the intracacies that are present in Oblivion I expect there to be a lot less flaws... I'm looking for a flaw/content ratio that is very low and I think Oblivion definitely delivers that.
Friedmud
I have also migrated to del.icio.us and it was actually for the same reason this Google Sync was created... to keep my bookmarks up to date between my _many_ computers I use throughout the day.
I use Foxylicious to pull down my del.icio.us bookmarks automatically. It creates a great hierarchy out of my tags that makes my bookmarks easy to use in firefox.
Give it a whirl,
Friedmud
PS: As a del.icio.us user I think it's funny that people are so up in arms over this Google plugin... I mean thousands upon thousands of people put their bookmarks out on the web for everyone to see everyday... let alone google. What are all these people afraid of showing the world?
My del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/friedmud
What a bunch of complainers...
I have logged around 90 hours so far in this game... and it is unbelievable. I haven't hit anything that I have noticed as a bug... but I'm also an extremely careful player (hence the 90 hours).
What other game out there gives you _SO MUCH_ with so few problems? In such a huge game like this there are bound to be some issues. Have a couple of minor glitches in a couple of side quest and get castrated even though there are _hundreds_ of quests with no problems.
Good god people... get over it!
Man... people just don't appreciate things. You have to take the good with the bad. I'll take an incredible game with a couple of coding flaws in it over another FPS on rails game with no bugs anyday.... but I guess that's just me.
Damn,
Friedmud
You're trolling right?
Just in case.... Oblivion is not a Steam game, and both can be heavily modded.
Sigh,
Friedmud
While I do agree with most of your comment... I will point out that Steam has great modding capabilities. Hell.. you can install the HL2 SDK directly through steam... and when you create mods with it they are automatically added as a new game in steam.
Further if you download and install third party mods they are automatically integrated into the steam system... complete with auto-updating.
Honestly, there isn't much of a better system out there for dealing with mods. Maybe Oblivion comes close, but even it doesn't have auto-updating mods.
Friedmud
That's just silly... everyone knows you can't get a good ab workout in only 6 minutes!
Friedmud
I think he means "free" as in freedom....
Friedmud
Just so you know the "sensor bar" doesn't "sense" anything. It only _outputs_ an IR field that the wiimote picks up and uses.
Again... there "sensor bar" is _NOT_ an input device.
This should also make sure it's dirt cheap.
Friedmud
For me: Divorce is pretty interesting... especially since I live in Austin...
Friedmud
Thanks for the heads up... I'll check it out!
Friedmud
So if you have say three tags:
linux
gentoo
forums
And you tag the "Gentoo Forums" site with all three (linux,gentoo,forums). But you only tag the Gentoo main site with "gentoo" and kernel.org with "linux" you will get a bookmark folder containing:Now this looks _etremely_ repetitive... and maybe it is for just 3 bookmarks. But what happens is as you get upwards of 50 to 100 the system makes perfect sense, and allows you to find things very quickly. For instance if I want to go to the Gentoo Forums I click on my "Del.icio.us" bookmark folder (which I have in my bookmark toolbar) and then go ->gentoo->forums->"Gentoo Forums"
You just navigate the hierarchy like you would say the words....
One word of caution. I am sure you can see how your bookmark folder will _explode_ with the number of tags you use. Try to keep a short list of relevant tags.... or else you will have this _HUGE_ mostrously long bookmark folder that will be unwieldy. You have been warned!
Have fun!
Friedmud
You can do this in firefox now... _and_ have your bookmarks stored on an external server so that wherever you are they are available.
Just go sign up at http://del.icio.us/ and start posting and tagging sites...
Then nab Foxylicious: http://dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious/
Fire it up and set it to "use tag combinations to create hierarchies" or whatever... and there you go.
I have been using this system for a while and I love it... because between dual-boots and different labs on campus I will use 6 or so different firefox installations on any given day... it's great to have my bookmarks roam with me.
Friedmud
The problem is that Matrox cards don't have anywhere near as much power as dual Nvidia/Ati setups do... meaning that even though you might be able to run 3 monitors... you will have to do so at _terrible_ resolutions and low quality settings.
;-)
With this box you can enjoy _true_ high definition gaming across 3 monitors using SLI/Crossfire (preferably SLI since ATI has some issues with this box).
The one problem I see with the box is that the monitors all look like one big monitor.... this would be annoying.... Anyone who has multiple monitors knows that your OS needs to be aware that they are multiple monitors and not just one big one.... for instance when you hit the maximize button on your browser do you really want it spanning all 3 monitors? Or just maxmizing on the current monitor?
With this box it will most likely span all 3.... but maybe they have a software hack to prevent that. Under normal multiple monitor scenarios (in both Linux and Windows) it will just maximize on the current monitor... which is exactly what you want (most of the time
Friedmud
Once again... PC laptops do the same.
In fact my laptop hibernated sometime during the night last night (used it a lot yesterday... never plugged it in). Plugged it in this morning... hit the power switch and it un-hibernated (like I say though, hibernate isn't always trustworthy on PC's and I will grant that...) fine and kept right on rolling.
You can set all of these settings in the power control panel in XP (although I'm not quite sure how to do it automatically in Linux... I usually don't mess with power management stuff too much in Linux).
Once again, not trying to be argumentative... but these are _not_ Apple inventions.
Friedmud
You are comparing two completely different things.
I agree with you that Hibernate is pretty crappy... and as you say it doesn't work all the time. But I'm not talking about Hibernate... I'm talking about "Sleep".
"Sleep"ing is the same thing that macs do... they are still "on" but the hardrive is spun down, all peripherals are powered down and so is the screen. On my laptop the power light blinks while in sleep... just like on a mac.
It only takes a couple of seconds to recover from this state (just like on a mac)... and it doesn't suffer from the downfalls of hibernate.
But at any rate... I wasn't trying to take anything away from the mac laptops.... I think they are fine pieces of work and will be most definitely picking up a macbook either towards the end of this year or the beginning of next. All I wanted to point out is that _all_ laptops can sleep and even in the windows/linux world it works well. (also note that since mac laptops are now pc's on the inside... _both_ platforms are "sleep"ing in exactly the same way... but of course OSX probably still handles it better...)
Friedmud
Not too deviate too far from the conversation... but all _real_ PC laptops (ie those with mobile chips, not those "desktop replacements") can do this as well...
My tabletPC _never_ gets turned off... and can sleep for well over a week and still have plenty of juice after a full charge.
Friedmud