What you say is totally correct, within it's defined limits. I've been using Linux as a desktop (currently Debian) for a number of years now, and I like it. It's faster for me to work in than anything else I've tried (Mac OSX and Windows). I know that I may have some hacking to do to make things work, and I like that. I was surprised how simple it was when I plugged in a friends USB HD, and it popped up as a device, and I just needed to mount the partition on it. Mounting a partition on/dev/sda isn't an easy end-user thing to work out, but it doesn't bother me.
I used to use Mandrake on my machine, but eventually grew annoyed with it trying to do too much for me, and making it harder to get into the guts of the system. Effectively Mandrake was too easy for me, and I wasn't learning enough. This meant that I couldn't do some things well because I hadn't been exposed to them. I like the situation I have now, I have to do some things myself, but I'm happy to.
However, when I set up my parents machine, I put Mandrake on it. It has all the nice GUI userfriendlyness that I don't like. They can plug a camera in, and don't have to worry about mounting it, it just works. Same with removable harddrives. It doesn't bother them that they don't have to learn the guts to make it do what they want, they're happier without that.
What these anecdotes say to me is that you just have to find out where you are happy on the easeflexibility spectrum. I'm of the opinion that you can't add features without making things harder to use. Sure, you can perhaps hide the advanced stuff, but then you don't get the full power of the application. If you want all the power it offers, you have to be willing to get your hands a bit dirty and dig in. If you don't care about that all that much, so be it, use the program in 'simple' mode, or use a desktop-friendly distro.
Anyway, what I think my point was is that you are right: You can have power, or ease of use. It's nigh impossible to have both (of course, with a good UI, you can make the power more accessible, but still, more power == harder to use). Pick how much ease of use you are willing to trade for power, and go with it.
I asked someone about this who tends to keep in the loop of this type of thing. He said that there was a planned restructure of the X.Org code, to make it a lot nicer, and Debian is waiting for that to be done before they make X.Org packages. If they do it beforehand, then when the X.Org change is done, the Debian crew will have to redo a whole lot of work.
You're definitely not the only one. I came from using Linux, to using OSX, which I suffered for about a year. I was used to the customisability that Linux provides (focus-follows-mouse (I started UNIX on a minimal WM on Digital UNIX where that was the default), the ability to define shortcuts for all kinds of things, ability to pick a theme that behaves how I want, and so on). I was really slow working on OSX, as about the biggest customisation I could make was between the blue theme or the grey one, unless I happened to stumble into a 3rd party program that didn't require my money that would do the job.
It didn't help that the UI was very slow too, not necessarily in raw speed, but in behaviour. Like the dock to auto-hide? All well and good, but you have to mouse to the bottom, pause for a moment, then the dock comes up. Not so good if you are wanting to do that a lot, and would like it to come up instantly. So I left the dock open all the time, which loses a chunk of screen real estate. Want to get to that directory deep in the tree? Opening finder and navigating to it is much slower than "cd w[tab]m[tab]s[tab]m[tab]n[tab]b[tab]", and this can be immediately followed by "emacs C[tab]" to start work on the file.
It didn't help that I was also used to things common to the Linux desktop (alt-drag for window dragging, easy access to a useful command prompt, etc).
It got a lot better when I was able to move back to a Linux machine. A little bit of time tuning the desktop to what I wanted, and I was working a LOT faster.
(God, rereading the above it sounds like I'm astroturfing Linux or something. That's not the case damnit!)
What (ISTM) that he is saying, and I agree with him, is that we should do what is best for society (a.k.a. "users"), over what is best for the single developer. It potentially benefits many people a lot for software to be free (free in this comment is as in freedom), compared to benefitting one person (maybe a lot also). Therefore, the net benefit to society is greater. By writing non-free software, you are causing less gain (and possibly even detriment) to society. (There are also ethical issues related to this)
In typical swings-and-roundabouts form, it also serves to benefit you too. You (I expect) use more software than you develop. By it being free, you benefit (directly, because you can modify it, or indirectly, because someone modified it, made it better, and passed it on to you). So the more free software there is, the more everyone benefits. Assuming you don't put a zero value on freedom (it seems to me that if you put a zero value on freedom, it becomes Open Source Software, which has benefits of it's own, but they aren't the ones RMS cares about specifically)
My advice: get your own domain and handle your own email accounts. Create special ones that simply forward to your main email address, to use on sites that require an email address for full functionality, and when you start getting spam, you know where it came from, and can shut that particular email forwarder down. It's a bit of a pain, but a LOT LESS pain than trying to unsubscribe from spam.
You know, I do this. But it doesn't make a difference. There are only two times when the email I created got spammed. One was one I used for posting to Google groups, the other was one that was an experiment for a very spammy-looking site. All real companies I give my address to have been very good about not spamming me at it. (I'm excluding commercial newsletters that I explicitly signed up for)
In my case, as a pretty small-scale Free software programmer, it's a method of payment that gives me even more returns. I work on a Free software project, and add in features I'd like to see. Other people (and myself) get those features. This makes the program better, which helps it get a larger user base, which means more people use it who are likely to want to add features that they like. Which means that I get a still better program. I get a bit of a feel-good feeling, I've learnt some more, but mostly it's greediness (wanting a better program) with the side-effect of taking from noone, and giving to everyone. That, and I pretty much agree with RMS's views on Free software, because it's better for me (and by extension, everyone).
It doesn't bother me if what I do is used on Windows, or Mac OS (although I'd like to see them all using Linux for the same reasons. Bigger userbase = more developers = more features/bugfixes/etc.) I don't see it as the place of Free software to displace proprietory software, I think it's just a nice side effect (to butcher a Linus quote).
I think the concept of Free software benefits users and developers, and so I release all my stuff like that so that I can be one of those who reap the benefits. Running it on Windows allows people who can't/don't want to avoid that platform to get the benefit, and hopefully some will help out, and so the cycle goes. It also may help to open their eyes to the benefits and encourage them to look at more Free software.
There was something on/. ages ago about this, and the Sourcemage distro implemented it. SMGL uses a dependency-based startup, so that it ensures that the correct services have started before it starts the next, but any services for which all the deps have started are started in parallel. Initial tests showed that it didn't help much, but I don't think it was looked into too closely.
Duly noted. Most people just get their food from the shops tho'. I also suspect -- but cannot confirm -- that the original poster buys far more meat than he personally kills. So while I acknowledge that people can kill things if they so choose, I was trying to say that it's not something we have to do in order to eat (which is the case for a lion).
Sure, that's almost certainly correct, however that doesn't have all that much bearing on the food chain argument. I'd say that if you look at humans as a society, we can eat whatever we choose pretty much, so that puts us at the top of the food chain.
Oh go on, give it a try. If I flame you you need not dignify me with a response.
Alright then:)
I think it's just the 'grown up' version of pulling the wings off flies; an indulgence of the barbaric side of human nature.
This may be true - but so what? People need outlets. I program computers, or whatever. Other people may go hunting. I don't see that as a bad thing.
I appreciate that you see some kind of spiritual side to it, but the majority of hunters I encounter seem to be pissed idiots, blasting away at roadsigns and leaving beer cans and rubbish everywhere.
Don't forget, your sample is self-selecting. The 'proper' hunters don't litter, don't shoot roadsigns, and so on. The ones you see are the ones who bring themselves to your attention by being annoying. Sure, there may be that immature element to it, or the element where the hunting isn't so much the activity as doing it with friends, but this isn't inherently bad, it's the same with virtually any activity.
If people want to know their place in the food chain, they should compare their teeth and nails to those of a lion.
Your view seems pretty narrow there. Claws and teeth don't always determine what you can or can't kill. All kinds of factors matter. The ability to plan, make and use tools, and so forth. I'd wager a human alone would be better equipped against a lion than a monkey (say) would be. Humans can take trees and turn them into spears, and other things. Intelligence edges us up the food chain, not our claws and teeth.
As for the rest of your argument, it's tricky to argue with people who imply that anyone who thinks that someone with different ideas to those they now hold is stupid, so I don't think I'll bother.
It's kinda SSL like. More like SSH, with the key exchanging and so on. Personally, I prefer the GPG method as I use GPG keys for other things (like email) and so I already have web-of-trust verification in place for people that I use them with. GPG is also somewhat standard within the Jabber protocol (I don't know that it's a proper standard, but two major clients I know of (Psi and Gabber) use it, others likely do too)
But doesn't Jabber allow P2P connections where you have an SSL connection directly between you and the person you are chatting with?
No, Jabber only does P2P for things outside the normal protocol, such as filetransfers. All messages go through a server. This is for another variation of security: you're not exposing your IP address to the other person, unlike with ICQ.
Not quite the same thing. Many (most?) Jabber clients already support SSL connections, but having GPG on top of that provides a different level of protection.
SSL gives you client-server privacy, but the owner of the server can still see what is going on, and if the other party isn't using SSL then the messages will be going to them over plain text anyway. However, with GPG, then you have security between clients. The server owner can't read your messages.
So SSL is good, but only half way there, adding GPG support is necessary for more complete privacy.
The idea behind anonymous voting is to ensure that, even if they paid you or something, people don't know who you voted for. So they can attempt to buy votes but not know how it pays off, or not bother trying to buy votes at all. However, if you are provided with some way of seeing what you voted outside of the voting booth, then you can show someone else that you did indeed vote for Mickey Mouse as president like they told you, and they will pay you.
That's good to hear. Hopefully you'll see the 0.4 release come down the pipes soon. The devs are being encouraged to only put the critical new features in, fix silly UI things, and shake out as many bugs as we can before we release. Previously the release was pretty much a snapshot at a certain point in time when the appropriate features where there.
Perhaps it's changed a lot since the version 0.3 which I have
It has, we're working on getting 0.4 out soon (i.e. adding must-have features, shaking out the bugs). This fixes many issues with 0.3. The current unstable release has many of these in it, but has still a few loose ends to be tied up. Hopefully withing a few weeks/month we'll have it released.
So if p is 1/(2^160) and you generate 2^80 hashes of random (or partly random) data, then theres about a probability of 1 that two of them match each other.
Just being pedantic, but ITYM "a probability of 0.5", no? You need 2^160 to have p=1:)
Two points: 1) Try LyX, it brings WYSIWYG to LaTeX, mostly.
2) When writing, you should be concerned about the content and the structure, and that's it. Leave sorting out how it looks till later. It makes one messily-tied-together task (working with layout and content) into two cleanly separated tasks.
I suggest you have a look at iRATE radio, which downloads music from the many artists who do share their music. It takes your ratings of songs that it sends you, matches them against what other people like, and sends you more that people with similar tastes like (with a touch of randomness to allow you to find totally new genres). You will get stuff you don't like to start with, but the more the system knows about your tastes, the better it gets.
Currently we are looking for more developers/UI designers/bug reporters/users to provide ratings, and so on so that we can make it better. If you do want to try it out, I suggest getting the unstable releases as a lot of features and bugfixes have gone in since the last stable release.
We are currently sorting things out for a new stable release, so bug finding and coding is something that we can't get too much of right now.
We're not promoting it all over the place. We're asking people to look at it so we can get developers. If we did it your way, the guy who came up with the idea would have zero help until he came up with a perfect working version. Seems a little silly don't you think?
The software is released to the public -because- it is of a not-yet-perfect state and we want to get people interested in it who are willing to help rather than complain how we shouldn't put it up for download until it is perfect.
I won't deal with the mac-specific things, as I don't have a mac. However, someone has been poking at that lately. Also note that the SWT graphics toolkit isn't that mature on Mac which may contribute to some of the issues (e.g. things have had tooltips for ages)
Keep in mind that the client is still in the very early version numbers, we all know it needs work, and are getting there slowly.
w.r.t the help, I considered writing a manual for it a while back, but lack of time got in my way. I'll look into it again when time becomes less of an issue.
w.r.t downloading, there are 'delete file, but keep rating' ideas floating around and they aren't too far away from happening. Most of it is done, except the interface bits. Also, it should only download things that match your preference, however this is hard to work out, especially initially. So you will get crap tracks, but the more you rate the better it gets at getting you good ones next time.
You can see what you have rated tracks by scrolling to them and looking in the 'rating' column. You can change the rating by right-clicking and picking the new rating. You can't, however set it to unrated. What I do in that case is give it a high rating (which means it comes up more often) and see how it grows on me, and set the rating accordingly.
The more finely-tuned track controls are hard to do in a cross-platform way, as the player uses external programs to play music. When we get a solution that works across all platforms, we'll work on putting them in.
I've already dealt with most of these points, but just so they're in one place...
1: Machinae Supremacy should be in there, I suggested it ages ago. However, when the new server is done, there will be a place to submit links.
2: there is a google search function, get info on the track and then hit 'search'. It may not be in the stable client however.
3: a CD-R service is somewhat outside the scope of iRate itself. However the (unstable) client supports drag and drop, so I make CDs simply by dragging the ones I want into my burning software.
Ultimately we hope to split the client into two parts, an interface and a 'back-end' which will make creating plugins a lot easier. Cheers for the comments, they let us make it better:)
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What you say is totally correct, within it's defined limits. I've been using Linux as a desktop (currently Debian) for a number of years now, and I like it. It's faster for me to work in than anything else I've tried (Mac OSX and Windows). I know that I may have some hacking to do to make things work, and I like that. I was surprised how simple it was when I plugged in a friends USB HD, and it popped up as a device, and I just needed to mount the partition on it. Mounting a partition on /dev/sda isn't an easy end-user thing to work out, but it doesn't bother me.
I used to use Mandrake on my machine, but eventually grew annoyed with it trying to do too much for me, and making it harder to get into the guts of the system. Effectively Mandrake was too easy for me, and I wasn't learning enough. This meant that I couldn't do some things well because I hadn't been exposed to them. I like the situation I have now, I have to do some things myself, but I'm happy to.
However, when I set up my parents machine, I put Mandrake on it. It has all the nice GUI userfriendlyness that I don't like. They can plug a camera in, and don't have to worry about mounting it, it just works. Same with removable harddrives. It doesn't bother them that they don't have to learn the guts to make it do what they want, they're happier without that.
What these anecdotes say to me is that you just have to find out where you are happy on the easeflexibility spectrum. I'm of the opinion that you can't add features without making things harder to use. Sure, you can perhaps hide the advanced stuff, but then you don't get the full power of the application. If you want all the power it offers, you have to be willing to get your hands a bit dirty and dig in. If you don't care about that all that much, so be it, use the program in 'simple' mode, or use a desktop-friendly distro.
Anyway, what I think my point was is that you are right: You can have power, or ease of use. It's nigh impossible to have both (of course, with a good UI, you can make the power more accessible, but still, more power == harder to use). Pick how much ease of use you are willing to trade for power, and go with it.
I asked someone about this who tends to keep in the loop of this type of thing. He said that there was a planned restructure of the X.Org code, to make it a lot nicer, and Debian is waiting for that to be done before they make X.Org packages. If they do it beforehand, then when the X.Org change is done, the Debian crew will have to redo a whole lot of work.
You're definitely not the only one. I came from using Linux, to using OSX, which I suffered for about a year. I was used to the customisability that Linux provides (focus-follows-mouse (I started UNIX on a minimal WM on Digital UNIX where that was the default), the ability to define shortcuts for all kinds of things, ability to pick a theme that behaves how I want, and so on). I was really slow working on OSX, as about the biggest customisation I could make was between the blue theme or the grey one, unless I happened to stumble into a 3rd party program that didn't require my money that would do the job.
It didn't help that the UI was very slow too, not necessarily in raw speed, but in behaviour. Like the dock to auto-hide? All well and good, but you have to mouse to the bottom, pause for a moment, then the dock comes up. Not so good if you are wanting to do that a lot, and would like it to come up instantly. So I left the dock open all the time, which loses a chunk of screen real estate. Want to get to that directory deep in the tree? Opening finder and navigating to it is much slower than "cd w[tab]m[tab]s[tab]m[tab]n[tab]b[tab]", and this can be immediately followed by "emacs C[tab]" to start work on the file.
It didn't help that I was also used to things common to the Linux desktop (alt-drag for window dragging, easy access to a useful command prompt, etc).
It got a lot better when I was able to move back to a Linux machine. A little bit of time tuning the desktop to what I wanted, and I was working a LOT faster.
(God, rereading the above it sounds like I'm astroturfing Linux or something. That's not the case damnit!)
What (ISTM) that he is saying, and I agree with him, is that we should do what is best for society (a.k.a. "users"), over what is best for the single developer. It potentially benefits many people a lot for software to be free (free in this comment is as in freedom), compared to benefitting one person (maybe a lot also). Therefore, the net benefit to society is greater. By writing non-free software, you are causing less gain (and possibly even detriment) to society. (There are also ethical issues related to this)
In typical swings-and-roundabouts form, it also serves to benefit you too. You (I expect) use more software than you develop. By it being free, you benefit (directly, because you can modify it, or indirectly, because someone modified it, made it better, and passed it on to you). So the more free software there is, the more everyone benefits. Assuming you don't put a zero value on freedom (it seems to me that if you put a zero value on freedom, it becomes Open Source Software, which has benefits of it's own, but they aren't the ones RMS cares about specifically)
You know, I do this. But it doesn't make a difference. There are only two times when the email I created got spammed. One was one I used for posting to Google groups, the other was one that was an experiment for a very spammy-looking site. All real companies I give my address to have been very good about not spamming me at it. (I'm excluding commercial newsletters that I explicitly signed up for)
In my case, as a pretty small-scale Free software programmer, it's a method of payment that gives me even more returns. I work on a Free software project, and add in features I'd like to see. Other people (and myself) get those features. This makes the program better, which helps it get a larger user base, which means more people use it who are likely to want to add features that they like. Which means that I get a still better program. I get a bit of a feel-good feeling, I've learnt some more, but mostly it's greediness (wanting a better program) with the side-effect of taking from noone, and giving to everyone. That, and I pretty much agree with RMS's views on Free software, because it's better for me (and by extension, everyone).
It doesn't bother me if what I do is used on Windows, or Mac OS (although I'd like to see them all using Linux for the same reasons. Bigger userbase = more developers = more features/bugfixes/etc.) I don't see it as the place of Free software to displace proprietory software, I think it's just a nice side effect (to butcher a Linus quote).
I think the concept of Free software benefits users and developers, and so I release all my stuff like that so that I can be one of those who reap the benefits. Running it on Windows allows people who can't/don't want to avoid that platform to get the benefit, and hopefully some will help out, and so the cycle goes. It also may help to open their eyes to the benefits and encourage them to look at more Free software.
There was something on /. ages ago about this, and the Sourcemage distro implemented it. SMGL uses a dependency-based startup, so that it ensures that the correct services have started before it starts the next, but any services for which all the deps have started are started in parallel. Initial tests showed that it didn't help much, but I don't think it was looked into too closely.
Photos, and indeed a video, can be found on the nmap site itself.
Google cache linkified
Sure, that's almost certainly correct, however that doesn't have all that much bearing on the food chain argument. I'd say that if you look at humans as a society, we can eat whatever we choose pretty much, so that puts us at the top of the food chain.
Alright then :)
This may be true - but so what? People need outlets. I program computers, or whatever. Other people may go hunting. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Don't forget, your sample is self-selecting. The 'proper' hunters don't litter, don't shoot roadsigns, and so on. The ones you see are the ones who bring themselves to your attention by being annoying. Sure, there may be that immature element to it, or the element where the hunting isn't so much the activity as doing it with friends, but this isn't inherently bad, it's the same with virtually any activity.
Your view seems pretty narrow there. Claws and teeth don't always determine what you can or can't kill. All kinds of factors matter. The ability to plan, make and use tools, and so forth. I'd wager a human alone would be better equipped against a lion than a monkey (say) would be. Humans can take trees and turn them into spears, and other things. Intelligence edges us up the food chain, not our claws and teeth.
As for the rest of your argument, it's tricky to argue with people who imply that anyone who thinks that someone with different ideas to those they now hold is stupid, so I don't think I'll bother.
In KDE, Konsole can do this also. Use View->Send Input to All Sessions.
It's kinda SSL like. More like SSH, with the key exchanging and so on. Personally, I prefer the GPG method as I use GPG keys for other things (like email) and so I already have web-of-trust verification in place for people that I use them with. GPG is also somewhat standard within the Jabber protocol (I don't know that it's a proper standard, but two major clients I know of (Psi and Gabber) use it, others likely do too)
No, Jabber only does P2P for things outside the normal protocol, such as filetransfers. All messages go through a server. This is for another variation of security: you're not exposing your IP address to the other person, unlike with ICQ.
Not quite the same thing. Many (most?) Jabber clients already support SSL connections, but having GPG on top of that provides a different level of protection.
SSL gives you client-server privacy, but the owner of the server can still see what is going on, and if the other party isn't using SSL then the messages will be going to them over plain text anyway. However, with GPG, then you have security between clients. The server owner can't read your messages.
So SSL is good, but only half way there, adding GPG support is necessary for more complete privacy.
The idea behind anonymous voting is to ensure that, even if they paid you or something, people don't know who you voted for. So they can attempt to buy votes but not know how it pays off, or not bother trying to buy votes at all. However, if you are provided with some way of seeing what you voted outside of the voting booth, then you can show someone else that you did indeed vote for Mickey Mouse as president like they told you, and they will pay you.
That's good to hear. Hopefully you'll see the 0.4 release come down the pipes soon. The devs are being encouraged to only put the critical new features in, fix silly UI things, and shake out as many bugs as we can before we release. Previously the release was pretty much a snapshot at a certain point in time when the appropriate features where there.
It has, we're working on getting 0.4 out soon (i.e. adding must-have features, shaking out the bugs). This fixes many issues with 0.3. The current unstable release has many of these in it, but has still a few loose ends to be tied up. Hopefully withing a few weeks/month we'll have it released.
Just being pedantic, but ITYM "a probability of 0.5", no? You need 2^160 to have p=1 :)
I wouldn't. I hear it makes you paranoid.
Two points:
1) Try LyX, it brings WYSIWYG to LaTeX, mostly.
2) When writing, you should be concerned about the content and the structure, and that's it. Leave sorting out how it looks till later. It makes one messily-tied-together task (working with layout and content) into two cleanly separated tasks.
I suggest you have a look at iRATE radio, which downloads music from the many artists who do share their music. It takes your ratings of songs that it sends you, matches them against what other people like, and sends you more that people with similar tastes like (with a touch of randomness to allow you to find totally new genres). You will get stuff you don't like to start with, but the more the system knows about your tastes, the better it gets.
Currently we are looking for more developers/UI designers/bug reporters/users to provide ratings, and so on so that we can make it better. If you do want to try it out, I suggest getting the unstable releases as a lot of features and bugfixes have gone in since the last stable release.
We are currently sorting things out for a new stable release, so bug finding and coding is something that we can't get too much of right now.
We're not promoting it all over the place. We're asking people to look at it so we can get developers. If we did it your way, the guy who came up with the idea would have zero help until he came up with a perfect working version. Seems a little silly don't you think?
The software is released to the public -because- it is of a not-yet-perfect state and we want to get people interested in it who are willing to help rather than complain how we shouldn't put it up for download until it is perfect.
Get the unstable version and give it a go.
I won't deal with the mac-specific things, as I don't have a mac. However, someone has been poking at that lately. Also note that the SWT graphics toolkit isn't that mature on Mac which may contribute to some of the issues (e.g. things have had tooltips for ages)
Keep in mind that the client is still in the very early version numbers, we all know it needs work, and are getting there slowly.
w.r.t the help, I considered writing a manual for it a while back, but lack of time got in my way. I'll look into it again when time becomes less of an issue.
w.r.t downloading, there are 'delete file, but keep rating' ideas floating around and they aren't too far away from happening. Most of it is done, except the interface bits. Also, it should only download things that match your preference, however this is hard to work out, especially initially. So you will get crap tracks, but the more you rate the better it gets at getting you good ones next time.
You can see what you have rated tracks by scrolling to them and looking in the 'rating' column. You can change the rating by right-clicking and picking the new rating. You can't, however set it to unrated. What I do in that case is give it a high rating (which means it comes up more often) and see how it grows on me, and set the rating accordingly.
The more finely-tuned track controls are hard to do in a cross-platform way, as the player uses external programs to play music. When we get a solution that works across all platforms, we'll work on putting them in.
I've already dealt with most of these points, but just so they're in one place...
:)
1: Machinae Supremacy should be in there, I suggested it ages ago. However, when the new server is done, there will be a place to submit links.
2: there is a google search function, get info on the track and then hit 'search'. It may not be in the stable client however.
3: a CD-R service is somewhat outside the scope of iRate itself. However the (unstable) client supports drag and drop, so I make CDs simply by dragging the ones I want into my burning software.
Ultimately we hope to split the client into two parts, an interface and a 'back-end' which will make creating plugins a lot easier. Cheers for the comments, they let us make it better