"I nowhere said TIFF was technically superior to PNG, nor will I now."
You did. "That's liks asking "what's wrong with the mini cooper" in an aritcle about jumbo jets."
"NAME RECOGNITION."
Right. Ask the average user what PNG is. He'll probably say "oh that's one of those graphics on the Internet, right?". Ask the average user what TIFF is, and most of them will stare at you like you ate a kitten for breakfast.
You just mentioned The Gimp. Prepared to be flamed down by thousands of Slashdotters. Because, according to common Slashdot sense, Gimp is a "totally unusable piece of shit" that anybody who knows Photoshop must not even touch, even though most Slashdotters are not graphics professionals and don't need pre-press printing features.
The average user doesn't care about research, nor do they want to spend hours searching Google. Until you realize and accept that, you will never succeed on the desktop.
Yeah, right. So blame everything on "the open source zealots" huh? So everybody who doesn't know why PNG is technically unsuitable for this, is automatically an "open source zealot"? It's exactly because of people like you, why the word "zealot" has completely lost its meaning. You people abuse the word "zealot", along with "open source", to flame down everybody, including those who are not associated to open source.
For example, Gnome seems to read/etc/fstab to see which devices are "user" mountable and then displays them as an icon on the desktop, whether you want it or not.
You might wonder how this works?/lib/ld-linux.so.2 is the so-called ELF interpreter (or something like that). Each ELF binary contains information about the path of the it's ELF interpreter. The kernel reads this path, and runs the ELF interpreter, while passing the filename of the binary as a parameter. So actually, each and every ELF executable is run by/lib/ld-linux.so.2. This similar to the kernel passing the filename of a shell script to/bin/bash.
Windows 95 had mouse cursor themes. I remember that years and years ago I used to use Sonic the Hedgehog animated and colored cursors. If I remember correctly, GTK 1.2 is the first toolkit that's fully themable. But I think WindowsBlinds predates GTK 1.2 (though I also heard that WB is awfully slow).
Open Synaptic. What do you see? A *huge* list of packages. On top of that, Synaptic expects you to mark packages for upgrade/install/remove. It has toolbar buttons with names like "Dist Upgrade".
Synaptic feels too much like "just-an-apt-frontend". Whether it is one is not relevant: such a UI is simply too overwhelming for many users.
Loading time is certainly not meaningless. Research has shown that users will usually choose the product which loads the fastest. In order to achieve that, you have to load as many stuff as possible during runtime, not startup.
And this is exactly your problem. When it comes to flaming down all open source software in general as "unusable pieces of junk", or claim that "all programmers must be banned from UI design", or that "Linux will never succeed on the desktop", Slashdotters are all united and flame as a single entity. But when someone critisizes Slashdotters, you suddenly split up into thousands of individuals.
I wasn't saying you'd pirate my app. I'm saying redistributing proprietary software is just as easy as redistributing open source software.
You can tell me all about breaking the law, but that doesn't matter. The average user pirates stuff, downloads MP3s, movies and software from Kazaa, downloads cracks, etc. etc. If your collegues/friends don't ever pirate software (highly unlikely), well... take a good look at all the stuff their teenage sons are doing.
And this is exactly why Longhorn will never succeed on the desktop. Until people realize users don't give a ******* about APIs or whatever and stop being elitist bastards, Longhorn will never proceed beyond where it is now.
Ha, that's what you think. Being able to read and modify the source may be irrelevant to most people, but being able to distribute and sell it certainly isn't!
When people are first introduced to open source, they are curious about it. Most people are not we-don't-care-about-anything, like most Slashdot geeks are. Most of them do ask questions about open source, like why people release the source code and why they're not afraid someone will steal it and claim they made it, that kind of stuff. I've found that if you have two pieces of equal quality software, one proprietary and one commercial, users who have been introduced to open source before (know what it is) will usually pick the open source app.
I'm the maintainer of an open source app for Windows, which is pretty popular and used by many people. Most of our users have never been introduced to open source before. If you read our forums, you'll see that users certainly do care about it being open source.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are.
"I nowhere said TIFF was technically superior to PNG, nor will I now."
You did. "That's liks asking "what's wrong with the mini cooper" in an aritcle about jumbo jets."
"NAME RECOGNITION."
Right. Ask the average user what PNG is. He'll probably say "oh that's one of those graphics on the Internet, right?". Ask the average user what TIFF is, and most of them will stare at you like you ate a kitten for breakfast.
You just mentioned The Gimp. Prepared to be flamed down by thousands of Slashdotters. Because, according to common Slashdot sense, Gimp is a "totally unusable piece of shit" that anybody who knows Photoshop must not even touch, even though most Slashdotters are not graphics professionals and don't need pre-press printing features.
The average user doesn't care about research, nor do they want to spend hours searching Google. Until you realize and accept that, you will never succeed on the desktop.
Yeah, right. So blame everything on "the open source zealots" huh? So everybody who doesn't know why PNG is technically unsuitable for this, is automatically an "open source zealot"? It's exactly because of people like you, why the word "zealot" has completely lost its meaning. You people abuse the word "zealot", along with "open source", to flame down everybody, including those who are not associated to open source.
Then you're wrong, because that option is there.
And why would you not want it?
Nobody will listen to you until everybody knows who you are. Nobody will know who you are until they listen to you. Try to fix that.
2.4.22-1.2188.ntpl
My distribution is Fedora Core 1.
Your kernel may have a patch which fixed this security problem.
The .interp section of a ELF file contains the path to the ELF interpreter to use. This path is set by the compiler.
$ cp /usr/bin/yes ~ /lib/ld-linux.so.2 ~/yes ...
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 is the so-called ELF interpreter (or something like that). Each ELF binary contains information about the path of the it's ELF interpreter. The kernel reads this path, and runs the ELF interpreter, while passing the filename of the binary as a parameter. So actually, each and every ELF executable is run by /lib/ld-linux.so.2. This similar to the kernel passing the filename of a shell script to /bin/bash.
$ chmod -x ~/yes
$ ~/yes
bash: ~/yes: Permission denied
$
y
y
You might wonder how this works?
Your short-sighted response shows that you're just a MS zealot who can't stand criticism.
Opposite? When 0.9 came out, everybody praises how it's faster than previous releases.
Windows 95 had mouse cursor themes. I remember that years and years ago I used to use Sonic the Hedgehog animated and colored cursors.
If I remember correctly, GTK 1.2 is the first toolkit that's fully themable. But I think WindowsBlinds predates GTK 1.2 (though I also heard that WB is awfully slow).
Open Synaptic. What do you see? A *huge* list of packages. On top of that, Synaptic expects you to mark packages for upgrade/install/remove. It has toolbar buttons with names like "Dist Upgrade".
Synaptic feels too much like "just-an-apt-frontend". Whether it is one is not relevant: such a UI is simply too overwhelming for many users.
Because people can't see the different between a gray and a blue title bar, right?
Loading time is certainly not meaningless. Research has shown that users will usually choose the product which loads the fastest. In order to achieve that, you have to load as many stuff as possible during runtime, not startup.
And it eats many more MBs of memory because all the windows have to be double buffered.
And this is exactly your problem. When it comes to flaming down all open source software in general as "unusable pieces of junk", or claim that "all programmers must be banned from UI design", or that "Linux will never succeed on the desktop", Slashdotters are all united and flame as a single entity. But when someone critisizes Slashdotters, you suddenly split up into thousands of individuals.
If I have mod points (which I haven't had for a year now) I'd mod your post up as Insightful.
And why don't you grandma just save the picture as "Vacation Photos from our trip to Italy.jpg"? We've had long filenames for years.
I wasn't saying you'd pirate my app. I'm saying redistributing proprietary software is just as easy as redistributing open source software.
You can tell me all about breaking the law, but that doesn't matter. The average user pirates stuff, downloads MP3s, movies and software from Kazaa, downloads cracks, etc. etc. If your collegues/friends don't ever pirate software (highly unlikely), well... take a good look at all the stuff their teenage sons are doing.
And this is exactly why Longhorn will never succeed on the desktop. Until people realize users don't give a ******* about APIs or whatever and stop being elitist bastards, Longhorn will never proceed beyond where it is now.
Ha, that's what you think. Being able to read and modify the source may be irrelevant to most people, but being able to distribute and sell it certainly isn't!
When people are first introduced to open source, they are curious about it. Most people are not we-don't-care-about-anything, like most Slashdot geeks are. Most of them do ask questions about open source, like why people release the source code and why they're not afraid someone will steal it and claim they made it, that kind of stuff.
I've found that if you have two pieces of equal quality software, one proprietary and one commercial, users who have been introduced to open source before (know what it is) will usually pick the open source app.
I'm the maintainer of an open source app for Windows, which is pretty popular and used by many people. Most of our users have never been introduced to open source before. If you read our forums, you'll see that users certainly do care about it being open source.
Being proprietary doesn't stop people from pirating your app either.