Mod at will, but I think it's on-topic to make a shameless plug here for the distro project I'm a part of, GoboLinux, since the entire point of the distribution is to make the radical changes to Linux that we consider necessary for it to overcome the problems you listed.
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
Yes, and that is because in regular distributions, you have a "list of packages and dependencies" and then the actual files scattered through the file system, and those are held together by a database of some sort. The fact that in the actual filesystem you can move single files around, overwrite stuff regardless of the package list, etc. leads to loss of syncrhonization and corruption of the packaging control system.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
True, and that is because of traditional Unix conventions created to deal with stuff such as/usr on NFS, etc. These days we have more advanced methods to deal with this, such as UnionFS, but those legacy paths are still there, complicating the overall structure of the system.
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
That is the heart of the matter. Changing the directory layout is how we addressed problems 1 and 2 in GoboLinux. We organize all data each program under/Programs/[name]/[version] (not like Windows where parts are under windows/system, in the registry, etc.). With this total modularization, we don't need to maintain a database of "what belongs to whom", and it also gives the user a better view of what's in his/her system, and how are things organized.
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
This is indeed a problem. In GoboLinux, we apopted a small standard "base" set (inspired by Linux From Scratch) which we then build on. This helps, but standardized "frameworks" of libraries would be a good thing -- note that desktop environments like KDE and GNOME do this to some extent.
So, if you want to take a look at an actual implementation of these ideas, give GoboLinux a go.:) It's a live CD (which can also install to the HD).
But while China's ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political dissenters, there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as democracy.
Man, I HATE propaganda.
The message you quoted is courtesy of Microsoft and was not requested/demanded by the Chinese government.
What I don't know is if they're doing this to please the Chinese government, since they're after their money (also from the MSN article: "MSN this year became the first big international internet service to win a licence to offer value-added telecoms services in China") or to please the American government, by painting this picture of totaliarianism in China ("forbidden speech") so that the American people feels "more free" in comparison. Probably both. Money seems to be the only ethics in place.
To be fair and equitable why don't you ask Linus and Stallman to ask the Red Flag Linux developers to stop their work unless the Chinese government allows the word "democracy".
Remember that, according to the story, there is no Chinese law against the use of these words. Microsoft is doing it "proactively" (eh).
Come on. When I was 7 years old, I could program in Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II (and not only "Hello World", funky stuff in HGR2:) ).
These quotes are perfectly reasonable for a 7 year old, especially if his father is a major SW fan (which he surely is, having a blog in starwars.com), who probably discusses it with him, answers his questions, etc.
Children have an amazing intellectual potential, as long as they are properly encouraged.
He didn't seem so senile after he told Luke who he was. The impression I got was that he was playing a tard to wind Luke up. Testing his patience, so to speak. I'm not interested in defending the consistency of the prequels, but I didn't have any real qualms with Yoda.
Remember also the way he talked to the children in Episode II... "Mmmm, lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has. How embarrassing...."
Re:Stallman = Socialist
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
Stallman: Free and open scientific research is the only ethically satisfactory context for the conduct of biology.
Ancil: Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
Hate to go over this again, but you do realize that by "free" he is talking about "freedom", not "price", right?
Stallman's views are not against "trying to make money", still, many people believe that free and open software is the ethical choice. One thing does not preclude the other. The Debian project is built around this concept, for example. Are they socialists too? Or are software and biology fundamentally different?
IMHO, if anything, I guess humanity would benefit even more from open biology research than from open software. Also noticed that your (at this moment +3, Insightful) argument could also be used to justify software patents.
Re: When four corners is too much
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that (1) has always been limited by the FSF's unwillingness to translate the GPL into any other language.
The Creative Commons worked with the FSF and the Brazilian government and had it translated to Portuguese. Here's the press release.
Heh, interesting they chose Mathematica. Of course it was easy to port: it already ran on multiple processors (x86 included of course) and a bunch of OSes (OSX, Win, Linux). The changes were probably just a bunch of #define's.
Can you say binary incompatability?
Confirmed from the keynote transcript:
"Rosetta is a dymanic binary translator. Runs PowerPC code on Intel-baesd Macs. Transparent to users. Pretty fast. Jobs demos Rosetta used to run PowerPC macs on Intel-based Macs. Jobs shows Microsoft Excel/Word running on Intel-based Mac (without any porting and/or recompiling). Jobs also shows Photoshop CS2 with all plugins that are translated and run on Intel-based Mac without significant speed decrease."
The changes on the Brasil and Paraguay side are mainly caused by the construction of the Itaipu plant, the largest hydroelectric plant of the world (or at least it was... is the one in China finished yet?). The net result in terms of environment preservation is positive, since this is a renewable and clean energy source. In fact, Brazil is one of the world leaders in clean energy.
If my memory serves me well, it was the Newton team who came up with the name "PDA" to refer to handheld computers.
I remember thinking at the time that Personal Digital Assistant was one of the worst buzzwords ever, even though the Newton itself was kinda cool. It's funny how the machine faded away, but the acronym stuck.
In the examples page, PLO and Al Fatah are listed under "Terror Organizations". This is a horrible misrepresentation.
The PLO is the organization representing the Palestinian people that eventually evolved into the Palestinian Authority. It had observer status in the UN General Assembly and even special permission to participate on Security Council debates (sans voting rights). Al Fatah is a political party which was involved in guerilla activities in the 70s, but that has, since the Oslo Accords, accepted the statehood of Israel.
...isn't it a bit cumbersome to transfer the notes to the computer afterwards? I don't think OCR is advanced enough to actually recognize my handwriting.
Anonymous is not stupid, anonymous remembers all comments and detects dupes. You lie! You never had a roommate that uninstalled IE4. You just spit out your fragmented memory of this comment:
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:5, Informative) by darkonc (47285) <stephen_samuel@b... minus herbivore> on Tuesday May 17, @09:00AM (#12553703) (http://bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Friday April 30, @03:42PM)
Re:LMAO, AGAIN (Score:5, Interesting) by Stephen Samuel (106962) Alter Relationship <samuel.bcgreen@com> on Saturday February 12, @08:47PM (#11655462) (http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Sunday May 23, @04:03PM)
How much longer do you think we'll all be pressing a seperate button for every single letter in every word we want to express? I say rot in hell qwerty - apple give me a blue tooth headset and some new software.
I assume you're not a programmer, huh?
"Uh... if, open parentheses, current address... I mean, all run together with a lower-case c and upper-case a... equals equals null, all uppercase... close parentheses..."
I went to check if it was just a pleasant coincidence that "escória" (pronunced as you would pronounce SCORIAA if it were a word) means "scum" in Portuguese. And yeah, turns out that it means the same in English (and probably that was the intent of your joke), but I don't see it being used metaphorically in English as much as it is in Portuguese.
(Warning: this post contains movie/book spoilers.)
Okay, so I read the first book and watched the movie. I finished reading it two days before seeing the movie and, having the text still fresh in my mind, I must say I liked the movie. It was quite faithful to the book except from some plot twists, and IMO it's quite apparent that the changes were made for the sake of the pace of the movie (ie, to adapt to a different medium), not to change the author's concept.
Some of the parts I enjoyed the most were not in the book, at least not from the first one: the Vogon planet, with the thing that smacks people in the face whenever they think for themselves (which results in a planet of bureaucrats) and the point-of-view gun. Of course, the fact that I was not expecting those parts must have a lot to do with that -- but I think they very much follow the books' spirit of commentary on contemporary life. Are they from the other books?
Here's what Merriam-Webster has to say about proactive:
proactive Main Entry: proactive
Pronunciation: (")prO-'ak-tiv
Function: adjective
[1pro-] : relating to, caused by, or being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning (proactive inhibition of memory)
[2pro- + reactive] : acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes
I always paid attention to which news sites does the Google algorithm chooses to use as a primary source to a news item, and they are, more often than not, American sites. Anyway, news.google.com has been an useful source, since you can click on "all 1,777 related" and browse through the headlines and see the varying oppinions around the world. Example: this one was picked as a headline:
Bush Promotes New Plan for Social Security as Benefit to Young
In the other headlines, you see other views:
Bush Speech Fuels Capitol Debate Over Social Security's Future
Bush on offensive as ratings hit floor
Bush Plan Would Cut Benefits
Bush pitches plan to fix Social Security finances
For first time, Bush backs benefit cuts to help bolster Social...
Bush vs. The Press
And from here you can read articles from the various dissenting views. To me, that's the main utility of news.google.com. I wonder if TrustRank is going to start favoring sites such as CNN... after all, they're "America's most trusted news source" (according to themselves, at least).
In the end, nothing beats reading the news from a number of different news sources. Unfortunately, most people don't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod at will, but I think it's on-topic to make a shameless plug here for the distro project I'm a part of, GoboLinux, since the entire point of the distribution is to make the radical changes to Linux that we consider necessary for it to overcome the problems you listed.
/usr on NFS, etc. These days we have more advanced methods to deal with this, such as UnionFS, but those legacy paths are still there, complicating the overall structure of the system.
/Programs/[name]/[version] (not like Windows where parts are under windows/system, in the registry, etc.). With this total modularization, we don't need to maintain a database of "what belongs to whom", and it also gives the user a better view of what's in his/her system, and how are things organized.
:) It's a live CD (which can also install to the HD).
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
Yes, and that is because in regular distributions, you have a "list of packages and dependencies" and then the actual files scattered through the file system, and those are held together by a database of some sort. The fact that in the actual filesystem you can move single files around, overwrite stuff regardless of the package list, etc. leads to loss of syncrhonization and corruption of the packaging control system.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
True, and that is because of traditional Unix conventions created to deal with stuff such as
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
That is the heart of the matter. Changing the directory layout is how we addressed problems 1 and 2 in GoboLinux. We organize all data each program under
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
This is indeed a problem. In GoboLinux, we apopted a small standard "base" set (inspired by Linux From Scratch) which we then build on. This helps, but standardized "frameworks" of libraries would be a good thing -- note that desktop environments like KDE and GNOME do this to some extent.
So, if you want to take a look at an actual implementation of these ideas, give GoboLinux a go.
from the article
But while China's ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political dissenters, there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as democracy.
Man, I HATE propaganda.
The message you quoted is courtesy of Microsoft and was not requested/demanded by the Chinese government.
What I don't know is if they're doing this to please the Chinese government, since they're after their money (also from the MSN article: "MSN this year became the first big international internet service to win a licence to offer value-added telecoms services in China") or to please the American government, by painting this picture of totaliarianism in China ("forbidden speech") so that the American people feels "more free" in comparison. Probably both. Money seems to be the only ethics in place.
To be fair and equitable why don't you ask Linus and Stallman to ask the Red Flag Linux developers to stop their work unless the Chinese government allows the word "democracy".
Remember that, according to the story, there is no Chinese law against the use of these words. Microsoft is doing it "proactively" (eh).
Come on. When I was 7 years old, I could program in Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II (and not only "Hello World", funky stuff in HGR2 :) ).
These quotes are perfectly reasonable for a 7 year old, especially if his father is a major SW fan (which he surely is, having a blog in starwars.com), who probably discusses it with him, answers his questions, etc.
Children have an amazing intellectual potential, as long as they are properly encouraged.
The "It's a pity" sentence in the post was not a quote from the 7-year-old. Look again, it's not quoted. It's just the submitter's commentary.
He didn't seem so senile after he told Luke who he was. The impression I got was that he was playing a tard to wind Luke up. Testing his patience, so to speak. I'm not interested in defending the consistency of the prequels, but I didn't have any real qualms with Yoda.
Remember also the way he talked to the children in Episode II... "Mmmm, lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has. How embarrassing...."
Stallman: Free and open scientific research is the only ethically satisfactory context for the conduct of biology.
Ancil: Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
Hate to go over this again, but you do realize that by "free" he is talking about "freedom", not "price", right?
Stallman's views are not against "trying to make money", still, many people believe that free and open software is the ethical choice. One thing does not preclude the other. The Debian project is built around this concept, for example. Are they socialists too? Or are software and biology fundamentally different?
IMHO, if anything, I guess humanity would benefit even more from open biology research than from open software. Also noticed that your (at this moment +3, Insightful) argument could also be used to justify software patents.
The problem is that (1) has always been limited by the FSF's unwillingness to translate the GPL into any other language.
The Creative Commons worked with the FSF and the Brazilian government and had it translated to Portuguese. Here's the press release.
Could somone walk me through a legit scenario that doesn't mimic a sub-plot of 1984? I think you got no replies by now because there isn't any.
Heh, interesting they chose Mathematica. Of course it was easy to port: it already ran on multiple processors (x86 included of course) and a bunch of OSes (OSX, Win, Linux). The changes were probably just a bunch of #define's.
Can you say binary incompatability? Confirmed from the keynote transcript: "Rosetta is a dymanic binary translator. Runs PowerPC code on Intel-baesd Macs. Transparent to users. Pretty fast. Jobs demos Rosetta used to run PowerPC macs on Intel-based Macs. Jobs shows Microsoft Excel/Word running on Intel-based Mac (without any porting and/or recompiling). Jobs also shows Photoshop CS2 with all plugins that are translated and run on Intel-based Mac without significant speed decrease."
The moon keys are hidden in the Star level 3, after you pass the warp zone in the Chocolate forest. You need a cheat to get a thousand, though.
The changes on the Brasil and Paraguay side are mainly caused by the construction of the Itaipu plant, the largest hydroelectric plant of the world (or at least it was... is the one in China finished yet?). The net result in terms of environment preservation is positive, since this is a renewable and clean energy source. In fact, Brazil is one of the world leaders in clean energy.
If my memory serves me well, it was the Newton team who came up with the name "PDA" to refer to handheld computers.
I remember thinking at the time that Personal Digital Assistant was one of the worst buzzwords ever, even though the Newton itself was kinda cool. It's funny how the machine faded away, but the acronym stuck.
Apparently, you missed the point that I was not talking about Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades.
In the examples page, PLO and Al Fatah are listed under "Terror Organizations". This is a horrible misrepresentation.
The PLO is the organization representing the Palestinian people that eventually evolved into the Palestinian Authority. It had observer status in the UN General Assembly and even special permission to participate on Security Council debates (sans voting rights). Al Fatah is a political party which was involved in guerilla activities in the 70s, but that has, since the Oslo Accords, accepted the statehood of Israel.
...can make it legal.
I know it's a bit offtopic (mod down at will), but... was I the only one who read the parent's comment and heard it with the voice of Darth Sidious?
Trade Federation Viceroy: M'lord... is that... legal?
Darth Sidious: I will make it legal.
...isn't it a bit cumbersome to transfer the notes to the computer afterwards? I don't think OCR is advanced enough to actually recognize my handwriting.
Anonymous is not stupid, anonymous remembers all comments and detects dupes. You lie! You never had a roommate that uninstalled IE4. You just spit out your fragmented memory of this comment:
5 53703
... minus herbivore> on Tuesday May 17, @09:00AM (#12553703)
= 11655462
Grand-parent:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149746&cid=12
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:5, Informative)
by darkonc (47285) <stephen_samuel@b
(http://bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Friday April 30, @03:42PM)
Referenced post:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139241&cid
Re:LMAO, AGAIN (Score:5, Interesting)
by Stephen Samuel (106962) Alter Relationship <samuel.bcgreen@com> on Saturday February 12, @08:47PM (#11655462)
(http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Sunday May 23, @04:03PM)
How much longer do you think we'll all be pressing a seperate button for every single letter in every word we want to express? I say rot in hell qwerty - apple give me a blue tooth headset and some new software.
I assume you're not a programmer, huh?
"Uh... if, open parentheses, current address... I mean, all run together with a lower-case c and upper-case a... equals equals null, all uppercase... close parentheses..."
That's perfect!
I went to check if it was just a pleasant coincidence that "escória" (pronunced as you would pronounce SCORIAA if it were a word) means "scum" in Portuguese. And yeah, turns out that it means the same in English (and probably that was the intent of your joke), but I don't see it being used metaphorically in English as much as it is in Portuguese.
(Warning: this post contains movie/book spoilers.)
Okay, so I read the first book and watched the movie. I finished reading it two days before seeing the movie and, having the text still fresh in my mind, I must say I liked the movie. It was quite faithful to the book except from some plot twists, and IMO it's quite apparent that the changes were made for the sake of the pace of the movie (ie, to adapt to a different medium), not to change the author's concept.
Some of the parts I enjoyed the most were not in the book, at least not from the first one: the Vogon planet, with the thing that smacks people in the face whenever they think for themselves (which results in a planet of bureaucrats) and the point-of-view gun. Of course, the fact that I was not expecting those parts must have a lot to do with that -- but I think they very much follow the books' spirit of commentary on contemporary life. Are they from the other books?
proactive Main Entry: proactive
Pronunciation: (")prO-'ak-tiv
Function: adjective
I always paid attention to which news sites does the Google algorithm chooses to use as a primary source to a news item, and they are, more often than not, American sites. Anyway, news.google.com has been an useful source, since you can click on "all 1,777 related" and browse through the headlines and see the varying oppinions around the world. Example: this one was picked as a headline:
Bush Promotes New Plan for Social Security as Benefit to Young
In the other headlines, you see other views:
- Bush Speech Fuels Capitol Debate Over Social Security's Future
- Bush on offensive as ratings hit floor
- Bush Plan Would Cut Benefits
- Bush pitches plan to fix Social Security finances
- For first time, Bush backs benefit cuts to help bolster Social
...
- Bush vs. The Press
And from here you can read articles from the various dissenting views. To me, that's the main utility of news.google.com. I wonder if TrustRank is going to start favoring sites such as CNN... after all, they're "America's most trusted news source" (according to themselves, at least).In the end, nothing beats reading the news from a number of different news sources. Unfortunately, most people don't do that.
Tvo consecutive stories with Google on the title. And the scariest thing is that I don't know if I should post it now or wait for the next story...
(Not to mention that, as others already pointed out, this is a total non-story.)