Looks like I really misunderstood that. I read your text more like "everything should be one architecture".
You're right about the UI design issue. But on the other hand - I consider many Windows interfaces just as horrible as a rushed-together Linux interface.
The argument is getting tired. There is no such thing as a "Linux desktop". There's numerous different desktop environments that run on Linux, such as KDE, GNOME, *Step, you name it. If a user only uses one of those environments, he has a perfect consistent UI.
Thanks to openness, a user can use applications based on different toolkits and environments in parallel, but this has nothing to do with missing inconsistency in the "Linux Desktop", a thing that doesn't exist and, Thank God, will never exist.
German used to be rather easy to learn. It does have some funky concepts in spelling and grammar, - but once you get the hang of it, it's ok (I say that as a German, so I could be wrong).
But the sick spelling reform (sic!) in 1996 made things a complete chaos with even more exceptions than Mark Twain complains about in his famous essay. It's not so much a problem for learning the rules as it is for learning by reading native texts, which has been a great help for me with all languages I learnt.
Today, you find three different spellings in Germany: Old, like the famous FAZ newspaper still uses, producing a beautiful look to the text, new, like everybody is supposed to spell, but can't because so many rules are rubbish - it also produces extreme ugliness. Just compare "Flußschiffahrt" and "Flussschifffahrt" in their appearance.
However, most people today spell in a way totally inconsistent, incorrect and with so hideous a look to the text that it actually hurts your eyes when you read it, somewhere inbetween the old and new rules, or a combination of the two.
So much for "learning by doing" for foreigners coming to Germany. It's so sad how the government tries to destroy the language.
Well, of course gconf *does* use XML under the hood. It's so open that if it breaks, you can go into the database which is essentially a collection of xml files, and edit them by hand. It's just like/etc, just more standardised and friendly to automated parsing (i.e. use in graphical environments).
Relax. It's the same in Germany, holder of the world-record in pointless SMS messaging. IIRC, last year's figures were about 2 billion messages - per month - from about 50 million phones.
Rather than waiting for a power-saving x86, I'd buy a recent one and underclock it well. I'd imagine that an 1.8 GHz (cheap these days) CPU running at 1.2 GHz with a lowered voltage runs really cool and cheap, in terms of power. Can't measure it due to lack of equipment and 1.8 GHz processor, I'm afraid.
I'm just happy that the German translators put some diversity in there. So far we have (accordingly) "Workplace" and "Proper Documents/Pictures". They'll have an real outlet for their creativity in Longhorn...
According to the readme, an installation script will look if the stock modules from ATI is suitable for your kernel, and if not, build one. This sounds quite universal to me.
The OS doesn't matter. You say that your kids want to play games, write homework or papers, perhaps do some communication on the Internet.
Give your children the computer of your choice that fits their needs. And make sure that they don't get sucked into "learning by interface", what I mean by this is that they learn to look INTO things and won't freak out if they use a different word processor sometime just because the menu is laid out differently.
It makes no sense to teach your children an OS. If they get interested in the guts of computers, they'll figure out OSes and such themselves, and you as a technically savvy person can assist them with their learning. But it does make sense to let them know that a computer can do a lot of different things, and the same thing in different ways, and that alternatives are always available. Let them know that they are not typing a letter "with the computer", but with Microsoft Word, and that there are other programs available. They will understand the concept of programs and operating systems after a while, will perhaps look into Linux and understand the real-world differences (price, origin, etc) of the products.
If they don't, who cares, because they have learned to adapt to different environments, know that a computer is an extremely flexible tool. They don't have to be computer experts.
When they have learned to be flexible, they won't ever be among those that are afraid of Linux just because it works different. Balancing the advantages and disadvantages of the many systems available, they will come to a conclusion of what system and programs to use. This may or may not be Linux. Doesn't matter.
When your children are intelligent, thinking, flexible persons that look behind things and don't take things for the be-all and end-all just because they don't know something else, you as a father have succeeded.
This coming from an 18 year old might be ridiculous, but I feel that it is a valid point of view.
There's no need to be embarassed by programming VB. VB is in fact an excellent tool for tying together COMponents, and just perfect for database frontends.
This is a moot point, as the plethora of character encodings will eventually disappear in favor of Unicode. Language tags inside the text will then give the renderer hints which it can use to select a font according to its Unicode coverage tables. Fontconfig for Unix, e.g., can already provide Unicode coverage information and if I'm not completely mistaken, language tag development is happening in Pango, the text renderer.
The mapping of key codes to characters is done by the input driver with a keymap. Modern systems all map their keys to unambiguous Unicode values.
The problem of character encodings is dying a slow and painful death.
The best software example I can give that "makes things right" is Gtk 2. With the right fonts installed, every script supported by Unicode "just works" out of the box and in every aspect of the system.
8. Most fonts today have no more than about 225 glyphs, at most.
While most TrueType (Windows and Macintosh) fonts today have this limit, Type 1 (PostScript) fonts do not, and can be much larger.
----- That really confused me. While fighting with the dreaded Linux font setup, I cursed and cursed Type 1 fonts because they had a limit of 255 characters. TrueType fonts were better - Tahoma, for example, has well over 500 glyphs, not to mention the 20 MB Unicode font from MS.
This seems to be a result of the "security package" legislation after September 11. They liberalized wiretapping, and even home searching, I believe. I should read that law some time. Before 11/9, the police needed a court warrant to do this in most cases, but now they can do a lot more by suspection. A bit sad in a country that has phone and mail secrecy in its constitution, but the public didn't care.
I'm too cheap and just resorted to not buying crippled CDs, or CDs over 14 . As for crippled CDs, I buy the vinyl, as far as it's available, and copy that to a CD for ease of listening and conservation.
I don't understand the whole damn discussion! Installing alsa, from damn source code, in the dark 0.5 days, was the following for me:
tar -xjf alsa-driver-whatever.bz2./configure; make install tar -xjf alsa-utils-whatever.bz2./configure;make install modprobe snd-ymfpci
DONE. Everything worked magically just like it did before. Nothing locked my/dev/dsp. I don't understand why everybody is complaining that ALSA was "impossible to install" etc. It's complete BS, if you ask me.
Linux with Fontconfig: Install a font by dragging it to the fonts folder.
Linux with Gnome 2.1: Turn on antialiasing or subpixel AA and fine-tune it to your liking with a few checkboxes.
Getting Linux to look good on the desktop is easy. Support fontconfig. That, of course, means developers. Gnome 2.1 supports it, Mozilla does, I believe Trolltech is hacking on Qt. A bright future is very near.
(shameless rave) Keith Packard really is one of the best X hackers out there. I believe he is one of the few people who realize what X (and not only that, as fontconfig is the first universal, modern font mechanism for Linux) is lacking in *and* who is able to implement said lacking features just like they should be. I hope he keeps doing that a few more decades.
What you fail to understand is that the central principle of Microsoft's overall business model is "ALL your dollar(yen, franc, mark, yuan, drachma) are belong to us.
Looks like they've been successful... I haven't seen a franc, mark, or drachma in almost a year now.
No, NT has all the facilities for perfect user separation, ranging from private registry areas over home directories to group policies. It's the 3rd party software that's to blame here, and not Windows.
I believe they aren't that cheap, at least not in Europe. Here, a decent cell phone starts at EUR 200 (about 200 $). The more sophisticated ones that even kids under fifteen run around with easily cost EUR 300. The devices are subsidized like crazy by the wireless telephone companies. That's the reason why SMS is so extremely expensive - they have to get the money back in a way.
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Looks like I really misunderstood that. I read your text more like "everything should be one architecture".
You're right about the UI design issue. But on the other hand - I consider many Windows interfaces just as horrible as a rushed-together Linux interface.
The argument is getting tired. There is no such thing as a "Linux desktop". There's numerous different desktop environments that run on Linux, such as KDE, GNOME, *Step, you name it. If a user only uses one of those environments, he has a perfect consistent UI.
Thanks to openness, a user can use applications based on different toolkits and environments in parallel, but this has nothing to do with missing inconsistency in the "Linux Desktop", a thing that doesn't exist and, Thank God, will never exist.
German used to be rather easy to learn. It does have some funky concepts in spelling and grammar, - but once you get the hang of it, it's ok (I say that as a German, so I could be wrong).
But the sick spelling reform (sic!) in 1996 made things a complete chaos with even more exceptions than Mark Twain complains about in his famous essay. It's not so much a problem for learning the rules as it is for learning by reading native texts, which has been a great help for me with all languages I learnt.
Today, you find three different spellings in Germany: Old, like the famous FAZ newspaper still uses, producing a beautiful look to the text, new, like everybody is supposed to spell, but can't because so many rules are rubbish - it also produces extreme ugliness. Just compare "Flußschiffahrt" and "Flussschifffahrt" in their appearance.
However, most people today spell in a way totally inconsistent, incorrect and with so hideous a look to the text that it actually hurts your eyes when you read it, somewhere inbetween the old and new rules, or a combination of the two.
So much for "learning by doing" for foreigners coming to Germany. It's so sad how the government tries to destroy the language.
Well, of course gconf *does* use XML under the hood. /etc, just more standardised and friendly to automated parsing (i.e. use in graphical environments).
It's so open that if it breaks, you can go into the database which is essentially a collection of xml files, and edit them by hand. It's just like
I have a combined mail/news/gateway server running on a 486 with a 2.4.19 kernel. Would switching to a 2.2 kernel improve performance significantly?
Relax. It's the same in Germany, holder of the world-record in pointless SMS messaging. IIRC, last year's figures were about 2 billion messages - per month - from about 50 million phones.
Rather than waiting for a power-saving x86, I'd buy a recent one and underclock it well. I'd imagine that an 1.8 GHz (cheap these days) CPU running at 1.2 GHz with a lowered voltage runs really cool and cheap, in terms of power. Can't measure it due to lack of equipment and 1.8 GHz processor, I'm afraid.
I'm just happy that the German translators put some diversity in there. So far we have (accordingly) "Workplace" and "Proper Documents/Pictures". They'll have an real outlet for their creativity in Longhorn...
According to the readme, an installation script will look if the stock modules from ATI is suitable for your kernel, and if not, build one. This sounds quite universal to me.
The OS doesn't matter. You say that your kids want to play games, write homework or papers, perhaps do some communication on the Internet.
Give your children the computer of your choice that fits their needs. And make sure that they don't get sucked into "learning by interface", what I mean by this is that they learn to look INTO things and won't freak out if they use a different word processor sometime just because the menu is laid out differently.
It makes no sense to teach your children an OS. If they get interested in the guts of computers, they'll figure out OSes and such themselves, and you as a technically savvy person can assist them with their learning. But it does make sense to let them know that a computer can do a lot of different things, and the same thing in different ways, and that alternatives are always available. Let them know that they are not typing a letter "with the computer", but with Microsoft Word, and that there are other programs available. They will understand the concept of programs and operating systems after a while, will perhaps look into Linux and understand the real-world differences (price, origin, etc) of the products.
If they don't, who cares, because they have learned to adapt to different environments, know that a computer is an extremely flexible tool. They don't have to be computer experts.
When they have learned to be flexible, they won't ever be among those that are afraid of Linux just because it works different. Balancing the advantages and disadvantages of the many systems available, they will come to a conclusion of what system and programs to use. This may or may not be Linux. Doesn't matter.
When your children are intelligent, thinking, flexible persons that look behind things and don't take things for the be-all and end-all just because they don't know something else, you as a father have succeeded.
This coming from an 18 year old might be ridiculous, but I feel that it is a valid point of view.
There's no need to be embarassed by programming VB. VB is in fact an excellent tool for tying together COMponents, and just perfect for database frontends.
This is a moot point, as the plethora of character encodings will eventually disappear in favor of Unicode. Language tags inside the text will then give the renderer hints which it can use to select a font according to its Unicode coverage tables. Fontconfig for Unix, e.g., can already provide Unicode coverage information and if I'm not completely mistaken, language tag development is happening in Pango, the text renderer.
The mapping of key codes to characters is done by the input driver with a keymap. Modern systems all map their keys to unambiguous Unicode values.
The problem of character encodings is dying a slow and painful death.
The best software example I can give that "makes things right" is Gtk 2. With the right fonts installed, every script supported by Unicode "just works" out of the box and in every aspect of the system.
8. Most fonts today have no more than about 225 glyphs, at most.
While most TrueType (Windows and Macintosh) fonts today have this limit, Type 1 (PostScript) fonts do not, and can be much larger.
-----
That really confused me. While fighting with the dreaded Linux font setup, I cursed and cursed Type 1 fonts because they had a limit of 255 characters. TrueType fonts were better - Tahoma, for example, has well over 500 glyphs, not to mention the 20 MB Unicode font from MS.
Can somebody clarify what is being talked about?
This seems to be a result of the "security package" legislation after September 11. They liberalized wiretapping, and even home searching, I believe. I should read that law some time. Before 11/9, the police needed a court warrant to do this in most cases, but now they can do a lot more by suspection. A bit sad in a country that has phone and mail secrecy in its constitution, but the public didn't care.
No, it's not deprecated. The spelling reform just made it a little less widespread.
I'm too cheap and just resorted to not buying crippled CDs, or CDs over 14 . As for crippled CDs, I buy the vinyl, as far as it's available, and copy that to a CD for ease of listening and conservation.
I don't understand the whole damn discussion! Installing alsa, from damn source code, in the dark 0.5 days, was the following for me:
./configure; make install ./configure;make install
/dev/dsp. I don't understand why everybody is complaining that ALSA was "impossible to install" etc. It's complete BS, if you ask me.
tar -xjf alsa-driver-whatever.bz2
tar -xjf alsa-utils-whatever.bz2
modprobe snd-ymfpci
DONE. Everything worked magically just like it did before. Nothing locked my
Linux with Fontconfig: Install a font by dragging it to the fonts folder.
Linux with Gnome 2.1: Turn on antialiasing or subpixel AA and fine-tune it to your liking with a few checkboxes.
Getting Linux to look good on the desktop is easy. Support fontconfig. That, of course, means developers. Gnome 2.1 supports it, Mozilla does, I believe Trolltech is hacking on Qt. A bright future is very near.
I just wanted to say that.
(shameless rave)
Keith Packard really is one of the best X hackers out there. I believe he is one of the few people who realize what X (and not only that, as fontconfig is the first universal, modern font mechanism for Linux) is lacking in *and* who is able to implement said lacking features just like they should be. I hope he keeps doing that a few more decades.
I, for one, wouldn't trust a Windows-based PC so much as to put my life into its hands by giving it control over all these devices...
Looks like they've been successful... I haven't seen a franc, mark, or drachma in almost a year now.
No, NT has all the facilities for perfect user separation, ranging from private registry areas over home directories to group policies. It's the 3rd party software that's to blame here, and not Windows.
Hmm, that's where the dog bites its own tail. I always thought the EU would blindly adopt US legislation.
I believe they aren't that cheap, at least not in Europe. Here, a decent cell phone starts at EUR 200 (about 200 $). The more sophisticated ones that even kids under fifteen run around with easily cost EUR 300. The devices are subsidized like crazy by the wireless telephone companies. That's the reason why SMS is so extremely expensive - they have to get the money back in a way.
You need more three-color samples *and* you need more bits per color. 8 bit just don't cut it.