Re:The end of GNOME.
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"And it makes me sick reading all the shit from GNOME zealots replying to KDE people how much mature GNOME is (which it definately is not)."
HUH????? When was the last time you read Slashdot? 1998? The pro-KDE anti-GNOME trolls overwhelmed Slashdot like... 3 years ago. About one year ago, they seem to have reduced exponentially.
And now YOU suddenly jumps in, claiming that there are lots of GNOME zealots posting shit, while it's more than obvious that they are almost extinct now? Get a life! THERE IS NO GNOME VS KDE WAR!!!!!!!
[quote]The nice GUI buttons and controls are there for a reason. I have no problem learning an interface to a product - I do have a problem learning how to use and identify user interface *elements*.[/quote]
There are no UI elements if you compile MPlayer without a GUI. What's left is the simplest UI possible: a window with the video inside. No buttons, no menus, only what REALLY matters: the video. Controlling the UI is extremely easy to learn AND to use: use your arrow keys to fast forward/backward, q to quit and f for fullscreen. And that's it! No weird custom widgets, no weird file selectors, just a simple, fast UI. I've installed Linux at my friend's computer. He's by no means a guru (he can't even install Windows). After he tried MPlayer a while, he loved it, *because* it's keyboard-driven.
Sorry, but after having used MPlayer for quite some time now, I will *never* use any GUI video player again. Using the keyboard is just faster and better, AND easy to learn. I will gladly reboot to Linux just to watch videos.
And about skins: argue what you want, but consumers want skins because it's "cool". They don't care about your definition of usability, they want things to look "cool". People love skins, there's nothing we can do about that. If you create a media player using standard controls, you will satisfy that small minority that demands every single pixel is consistent, but it will never become mainstream for the sole reason that it is not skinnable.
Simple, because it works better. You may have accustomed to all the nice GUI buttons and menus, but do you realize how slow they are in a media player? I can hit my Right arrow key faster than you can move your mouse and hit the scroll button. This is fear for change. There is no excuse for that. Unwilling to spend *3 minutes* to get used to a better and faster interface is just laziness.
THIS IS NOT A CUSTOMER COMPLAINT! The MPlayer/Xine/Ogle/Gstreamer developers are all volunteers! NOBODY is their customer! They are doing this for free, in the hope that you may find it useful. If they're companies, then things would have been different. But they're not, they are volunteers. What they give you is a *gift*, nothing more, nothing less. If you don't like it, then don't use it. But stamping it in the ground and calling people names using "fucking" and "retards" and "morons" is completely unresponsible and immature behavior. I repeat: those developers are VOLUNTEERS, not commercial developers!
Another point: all you people seem to like to blame all this on "open source developers". This isn't an "open source" problem, is is a "volunteer developers" "problem". Let's face it, if you tried out a freeware player for Windows, you don't like it and stamp it in the ground, insulting the developers, how do you think they (the freeware Windows developers) will respond?
"the people making the product in question need to have their egos adjusted"
Ego? JWZ's the one who needs an ego adjustment! He thinks he oh so mighty so he decides to flame and insult the developers. Sorry, but anything that contains tons of flames and insults can't possibly be "helpful". If you wrote a freeware media player for Windows, JWZ tries it and think it sucks, and actively flames you down and insults you, would you consider that helpful? I highly doubt it.
Open source is not magic. These players are made by *volunteers*. Just because they're open source doesn't change that fact. Flaming and insulting volunteers' work is NOT helpful.
"And guess what? Most people who try Linux don't want to compile or upgrade. They want it to work!"
So? 1) JWZ is not "most people". 2) "Average users" download and install the MPlayer RPM or use Xine if that's already installed. 2.1) Yes yes I know "average users shouldn't have to search the net and download RPMs". But really, when you try to watch a DivX movie (I'm pretty sure 90% of the movies files people watch are pirated DivX movies), didn't you had to download the DivX codec too? Was it hard? Did you figured out how it worked?
Yes yes I know that but the OS that will benefit most from these fonts is Linux. Windows and Mac already have good fonts, and other systems are not popular enough as desktop. Besides, I never said they are for Linux only. I said that many distros will include them.
The problem isn't free fonts, the problem is high-quality and Free (as in freedom) fonts. Sure you can download I don't know how many free beer fonts from the net, but they are either 1) not freely redistributable or 2) for fun only; not optimized for actual ready or 3) low-quality.
BitStream is donating high-quality AND Free fonts here! So soon we will get Linux distros with high-quality fonts out-of-the-box.
1. Publish their email addresses on the Internet and let the spambots send them 3000 mails a day. 2. Publish their IP addresses and let script kiddies run Sub7 on them 24 hours a day.
This isn't fragmentation
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 2
"I think the last thing I want to do is be able to take a program off of my Mandrake box, take it over to my Ark box and not be able to run it because they are two different distros."
Why do you even want that? Mandrake works fine, stick with it. Ignore ArkLinux, it doesn't exists. There is only one Linux: Mandrake. There, problem solved. This whole "fragmentation" thing is just in your head.
"Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?"
Because everybody is reinventing a different kind of wheels and see which one works best in which situations?
"Otherwise, people might get the idea that slashdoters are a bunch of whining freeloaders who complain for the very sake of complaining."
Slashdotters are a bunch of whining freeloaders who complain for the very sake of complaining. Usually their complaints even contradict earlier complaints. A lot of complaints are even outdated. Examples:
All the whining about how open source developers create bad GUIs and how usability experts are not appriciated? Have people never heard of the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Human User Interface Guidelines? And the enormous amount of effort put into making GUIs usability by developers and usability studies contributed by Sun and Ximian? Not to mention all the huge efforts spent into making KDE more usable. - outdated argument. People should read their mailing lists more often.
How OSS developers are all elitists? ("Don't even pretend this isn't true"?) Where are these so-called elitsts and how many of them exist? They are like... what? 5% of the entire community? - common prejudgement.
All the whining about how *BSD is dead while Netcraft statistics always proof them wrong? - moronic whining.
All the whining about how Lnux has no good centralized support, while commercial OSses do? And when a new release of RedHat is released, everybody whines about how their phone support (tadaa! centralized support!) should be free? - contradicting complaints.
All the whining about Slashdot is an anti-MS site, while every single MS article has more pro-MS comments than anti-MS comments ever since 2000?
Sorry, but I can only conclude that Slashdot has gone downhill. Today, it's a community composed mostly of flamers, trolls, cynics and MS advocates, who are either uninformed or just stupid.
It doesn't really matter if the users format & install Windows on that box. What matters is the sales numbers. Companies will *think* Linux's market share is increasing, which means more companies are likely to release software for Linux. This is a Good Thing(tm). Fear the power of illusion.
That doesn't mean most Chinese don't have a TV. A household as a whole (2 parents, 1 child, maybe 2 grandparents) can have 1 TV, which is more than enough.
Yes, it's true that MS has lots of cash. But doesn't MPEG4-LA also have lots of cash? It's an organization with lots of members. Surely all of them together have enough cash?
This isn't just about the codec. It's the standard. XviD implements MPEG-4. However, to use XviD, you still have to pay licensing fees to MPEG4-LA. That's why XviD calls itself an "educational project" so the developers don't have to pay the licensing fees. But the users of the codec still have to pay for a license.
I'm surprised people even think about OpenDivX today. OpenDivX is dead, for a long time now (more than a year). In case you didn't know what happened: Project Mayo suddenly closed the CVS, removed the source code and used that source code to create their own, proprietary DivX 4 codec. OpenDivX isn't developed anymore. It's codebase is dead. The latest release (from more than a year ago) is full of bugs.
Oh, and DivX is not OpenDivX in case you didn't know. They are 2 completely different things.
"I don't even attempt to mess around with multimedia on the PC because it's just not intuitive."
*gasp*! No way! Multimedia in Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP is not intuitive? But it can't be, all the Slashdotters always tell me how great and consistent and userfriendly Windows XP is! The multimedia integration in Windows first-class, Slashdotters told me so! *screems*
They don't want Microsoft to block progress to an open standard? Then they should get rid of that stupid MPEG-4 licensing fees! It should be free for anyone. The licensing fee issues have blocked the progress of a lot of open source MPEG-4 codecs, like XviD.
Slashdot Mirror
"And it makes me sick reading all the shit from GNOME zealots replying to KDE people how much mature GNOME is (which it definately is not)."
HUH????? When was the last time you read Slashdot? 1998? The pro-KDE anti-GNOME trolls overwhelmed Slashdot like... 3 years ago. About one year ago, they seem to have reduced exponentially.
And now YOU suddenly jumps in, claiming that there are lots of GNOME zealots posting shit, while it's more than obvious that they are almost extinct now? Get a life!
THERE IS NO GNOME VS KDE WAR!!!!!!!
No you can't, both Linux and FreeBSD support files > 2 GB. Apparenly you've laughed all for nothing.
[quote]The nice GUI buttons and controls are there for a reason. I have no problem learning an interface to a product - I do have a problem learning how to use and identify user interface *elements*.[/quote]
There are no UI elements if you compile MPlayer without a GUI. What's left is the simplest UI possible: a window with the video inside. No buttons, no menus, only what REALLY matters: the video.
Controlling the UI is extremely easy to learn AND to use: use your arrow keys to fast forward/backward, q to quit and f for fullscreen. And that's it! No weird custom widgets, no weird file selectors, just a simple, fast UI.
I've installed Linux at my friend's computer. He's by no means a guru (he can't even install Windows). After he tried MPlayer a while, he loved it, *because* it's keyboard-driven.
Sorry, but after having used MPlayer for quite some time now, I will *never* use any GUI video player again. Using the keyboard is just faster and better, AND easy to learn. I will gladly reboot to Linux just to watch videos.
And about skins: argue what you want, but consumers want skins because it's "cool". They don't care about your definition of usability, they want things to look "cool". People love skins, there's nothing we can do about that. If you create a media player using standard controls, you will satisfy that small minority that demands every single pixel is consistent, but it will never become mainstream for the sole reason that it is not skinnable.
"Why should I have to "get used to it"?"
Simple, because it works better. You may have accustomed to all the nice GUI buttons and menus, but do you realize how slow they are in a media player? I can hit my Right arrow key faster than you can move your mouse and hit the scroll button.
This is fear for change. There is no excuse for that. Unwilling to spend *3 minutes* to get used to a better and faster interface is just laziness.
"THIS IS A CUSTOMER COMPLAINT!"
THIS IS NOT A CUSTOMER COMPLAINT! The MPlayer/Xine/Ogle/Gstreamer developers are all volunteers! NOBODY is their customer! They are doing this for free, in the hope that you may find it useful. If they're companies, then things would have been different. But they're not, they are volunteers. What they give you is a *gift*, nothing more, nothing less. If you don't like it, then don't use it. But stamping it in the ground and calling people names using "fucking" and "retards" and "morons" is completely unresponsible and immature behavior.
I repeat: those developers are VOLUNTEERS, not commercial developers!
Another point: all you people seem to like to blame all this on "open source developers". This isn't an "open source" problem, is is a "volunteer developers" "problem". Let's face it, if you tried out a freeware player for Windows, you don't like it and stamp it in the ground, insulting the developers, how do you think they (the freeware Windows developers) will respond?
"the people making the product in question need to have their egos adjusted"
Ego? JWZ's the one who needs an ego adjustment! He thinks he oh so mighty so he decides to flame and insult the developers. Sorry, but anything that contains tons of flames and insults can't possibly be "helpful".
If you wrote a freeware media player for Windows, JWZ tries it and think it sucks, and actively flames you down and insults you, would you consider that helpful? I highly doubt it.
Open source is not magic. These players are made by *volunteers*. Just because they're open source doesn't change that fact. Flaming and insulting volunteers' work is NOT helpful.
"And guess what? Most people who try Linux don't want to compile or upgrade. They want it to work!"
So?
1) JWZ is not "most people".
2) "Average users" download and install the MPlayer RPM or use Xine if that's already installed.
2.1) Yes yes I know "average users shouldn't have to search the net and download RPMs". But really, when you try to watch a DivX movie (I'm pretty sure 90% of the movies files people watch are pirated DivX movies), didn't you had to download the DivX codec too? Was it hard? Did you figured out how it worked?
Wait a minute, isn't the general attitude of Slashdot that X is slow, bloated, outdated, and not designed for the consumer desktop?
As far as I can see, only Dustismo is optimized for actual reading.
Yes yes I know that but the OS that will benefit most from these fonts is Linux. Windows and Mac already have good fonts, and other systems are not popular enough as desktop.
Besides, I never said they are for Linux only. I said that many distros will include them.
"not optimized for actual ready"
Of course "ready" should be "reading".
The problem isn't free fonts, the problem is high-quality and Free (as in freedom) fonts. Sure you can download I don't know how many free beer fonts from the net, but they are either 1) not freely redistributable or 2) for fun only; not optimized for actual ready or 3) low-quality.
BitStream is donating high-quality AND Free fonts here! So soon we will get Linux distros with high-quality fonts out-of-the-box.
"First, all p2p-serving software on the machine is infected, which will allow it to infect other hosts on the p2p network."
/usr/bin/limewire
/usr/bin/limewire: Permission denied
[bash@localhost]$ echo >
[bash@localhost]$
1. Publish their email addresses on the Internet and let the spambots send them 3000 mails a day.
2. Publish their IP addresses and let script kiddies run Sub7 on them 24 hours a day.
"I think the last thing I want to do is be able to take a program off of my Mandrake box, take it over to my Ark box and not be able to run it because they are two different distros."
Why do you even want that? Mandrake works fine, stick with it. Ignore ArkLinux, it doesn't exists. There is only one Linux: Mandrake. There, problem solved.
This whole "fragmentation" thing is just in your head.
"Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel?"
Because everybody is reinventing a different kind of wheels and see which one works best in which situations?
"Otherwise, people might get the idea that slashdoters are a bunch of whining freeloaders who complain for the very sake of complaining."
Slashdotters are a bunch of whining freeloaders who complain for the very sake of complaining. Usually their complaints even contradict earlier complaints. A lot of complaints are even outdated.
Examples:
All the whining about how open source developers create bad GUIs and how usability experts are not appriciated? Have people never heard of the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Human User Interface Guidelines? And the enormous amount of effort put into making GUIs usability by developers and usability studies contributed by Sun and Ximian? Not to mention all the huge efforts spent into making KDE more usable. - outdated argument.
People should read their mailing lists more often.
How OSS developers are all elitists? ("Don't even pretend this isn't true"?) Where are these so-called elitsts and how many of them exist? They are like... what? 5% of the entire community? - common prejudgement.
All the whining about how *BSD is dead while Netcraft statistics always proof them wrong? - moronic whining.
All the whining about how Lnux has no good centralized support, while commercial OSses do? And when a new release of RedHat is released, everybody whines about how their phone support (tadaa! centralized support!) should be free? - contradicting complaints.
All the whining about Slashdot is an anti-MS site, while every single MS article has more pro-MS comments than anti-MS comments ever since 2000?
Sorry, but I can only conclude that Slashdot has gone downhill. Today, it's a community composed mostly of flamers, trolls, cynics and MS advocates, who are either uninformed or just stupid.
It doesn't really matter if the users format & install Windows on that box. What matters is the sales numbers. Companies will *think* Linux's market share is increasing, which means more companies are likely to release software for Linux. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Fear the power of illusion.
That doesn't mean most Chinese don't have a TV. A household as a whole (2 parents, 1 child, maybe 2 grandparents) can have 1 TV, which is more than enough.
I don't know about ffmpeg, but all the OpenDivX code in XviD have been replaced now.
Open source != open standard.
An open source codec that implements an open standard without licensing fees, now that would be sweet...
But MPEG-LA is an organization with lots of members. Don't all members together have enough money to survive this?
Yes, it's true that MS has lots of cash. But doesn't MPEG4-LA also have lots of cash? It's an organization with lots of members. Surely all of them together have enough cash?
This isn't just about the codec. It's the standard. XviD implements MPEG-4. However, to use XviD, you still have to pay licensing fees to MPEG4-LA. That's why XviD calls itself an "educational project" so the developers don't have to pay the licensing fees. But the users of the codec still have to pay for a license.
I'm surprised people even think about OpenDivX today. OpenDivX is dead, for a long time now (more than a year).
In case you didn't know what happened: Project Mayo suddenly closed the CVS, removed the source code and used that source code to create their own, proprietary DivX 4 codec. OpenDivX isn't developed anymore. It's codebase is dead. The latest release (from more than a year ago) is full of bugs.
Oh, and DivX is not OpenDivX in case you didn't know. They are 2 completely different things.
"I don't even attempt to mess around with multimedia on the PC because it's just not intuitive."
*gasp*! No way! Multimedia in Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP is not intuitive? But it can't be, all the Slashdotters always tell me how great and consistent and userfriendly Windows XP is! The multimedia integration in Windows first-class, Slashdotters told me so!
*screems*
They don't want Microsoft to block progress to an open standard? Then they should get rid of that stupid MPEG-4 licensing fees! It should be free for anyone. The licensing fee issues have blocked the progress of a lot of open source MPEG-4 codecs, like XviD.