Secondly, Firefox is still focused on only being a browser, nothing else.
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides. If it had stayed at the minimal functional level it had at the earliest levels of its development, everybody would be whining that it doesn't offer enough features.
We can't have it both ways. If we want more features, then we have to accept that they will take more codespace. Simple as that.
I read your article, but it seems at least a few people are convinced enough to spen some serious money on this project.
It seems to me that a major risk might be that of the satellite being hit by some form of space junk or other material. If that didn't knock out the satellite altogether, then it occurs to me that the energy beam might end up frying something on the ground. Like, say, Japan.
You really haven't kept up with KDE 4.x development, have you... if you want the plain-old file-manager-pane behviour back for the whole desktop, simply right click and change the desktop type.
Actually, I had kept track, I was simply unaware of the helpful hint you just supplied. I was a bit frustrated because with Gnome (or my currently preferred combo of Compiz Fusion with Gnome) you can also put whatever widgets you want on your desktop, which to me is primarily a place I use to drop whatever files I happen to be working on at the moment. In other words, I treat it the same way I do my physical dead-tree item of furniture.
Over the years I have seen a lot of egregious cockups on both sides of the Gnome/KDE border, where developers have blithely followed the latest trendy philosophical notion while creating unnecessary productivity hurdles on the way, and it seemed to me that this development was another craniorectal idiocy designed to exclude the way I prefer to work. Happy to know there's a workaround.
Incidentally, it seems some idiot has decided to orphan your post in his haste to push his agenda by modding down the post to which you replied...:-|
Would it be possible to send the audio signal through the mains in the house?
Assuming it were possible to do so without being left with that nice 50Hz buzz, you would still need an amplifier in every room, thus failing the OP's WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) problem.
It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight.
Spotlights are easy enough to steal, but the KDE developers have done themselves no favours by adopting a model where the desktop is only a place where widgets or launchers may be dropped.
I have played with KDE on and off since 1998, and found it to be usable but a bit Kluttered and Kannoying. I have more or less got over that now, but the navel-gazing in the philosophy behind KDE4.x leaves me bemused, even if it does make sense to the developers. As far as I'm concerned, the desktop is a place where one should be able to drop anything I want, and if I have to invoke a file manager to see that file again then something isn't working right.
If, however, what I've seen is an artifact of the distributions I've used (Arch and Slackware Linux), I will be very happy to hear of a decent implementation.
Microsoft is evil. Always has been. Always will be.
Maybe you're very young, but I seem to recall that Microsoft was at one time held as a sort of liberator from IBM's hegemony. I guess it's all a matter of perspective...
I haven't found anything that works as well as Skype. SIP is way down the list in performance.
I'll second that. While SIP is in many cases a little cheaper for voice communication than Skype, the other integrated features like instant messaging and SMS make Skype a killer app given its market saturation.
I know there are alternative and more truly "free" products available that accomplish the same purposes separately, but Skype is the only one to provide an easily usable cross-platform integrated product that isn't rejected by non-geeks. I'd say it's a relief that the parties have managed in a definite case of "sudden outbreak of common sense" to settle their differences so amicably.
In other words, you want to know if they're logging your porn searches;-)
Well, I guess that might be kind of important. I mostly don't bother with any Google services that require any kind of login, so this product is unlikely to tell me anything I don't already know about my browsing habits. What would interest me more is the kind of information Google is keeping that can be tied to my IP address, whether I am logged into anything or not.
I don't know about the "simulation" part, but the "psycho-acoustic" thingy has been a useful device for peddling snake-oil about the requirement for "burning-in" of expensive cables in hi-fi systems. My own feeling about the latter is that the burn-in process definitely makes a difference for essentially mechanical components like speakers and turntable cartridges, but I just can't bring myself to believe much of the voodoo about cables.
they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
Leaving aside the fact that the Beatles were a British band, and therefore not subject to Congress, EMI has apparently been recently doing its own resampling of their albums. So maybe they're infringing on their own copyright?
So, in your expert opinion, everyone involved is wrong?
Why not? I know the dumbing-down of the modern media urges us to think in terms of black and white concepts, but there should be room for this. EMI are obviously evil copyright trolls, and this Hank Risan is equally obviously selling copyrighted material. Shakespeare (as always) has a good line for this:
Every other distro I've tried has made KDE4 feel like the steaming pile of poo that everyone said it was...
Do you mean Mandriva has managed to make the KDE4 desktop usable? I'm not flaming here, I'm curious. Because every implementation of KDE4 I've seen so far has involved a "desktop" that appears to be only useful as a place to install widgets or launchers. I feel there are better ways fo accomplish this functionality - either from the start menu or by an agreed association between file(mime)-type and application. I have never been able to drop files on the KDE4 desktop without having been forced to invoke a file manager to see them. I haven't found an implementation where you can just drop whatever file you are working on on the desktop, and expect to easily find it again.
As far as I'm concerned, that is one hell of a show-stopper. I'm sure the KDE developers must have had a very sound reason for this implementation of their philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, I wish they had kept it to themselves.
Most motorcyclists who come off second-best in an altercation with a car do so because the car driver is just not paying attention. It could be argued that cars, while now "safer" in the event of a collision, have become so damned easy to drive that their owners might as well be in a taxi for all the headspace they are using for the task at hand. Hence all the bimbos we see yapping away on the phone or using the driving mirror to apply make-up.
I've driven many ancient cars with dodgy brakes where I've had to double-declutch through every gear, but the simple aspect of having to keep the brain engaged has been enough to avoid many accidents.
Heh... I still have a great old car built in the days when it was common to approximate pi as 22/7 - for those of us who didn't have a convenient notch on our slide-rules. The car's over 60 years old, and will quite probably last as long again.
If automakers wanted you to drive slower and safer, they would set the speedometer to read high...
If they wanted you to drive slower and safer, they would position the driver's seat at the front of the car like some Aztec sacrifice and force you to pay attention.
Also, a lot of people fit tyres of different diameter from those the car was designed for - so the revolutions per minute of the wheel can translate to quite a different speed from what the dial says.
The oil light problem, while serious enough, is at least fixable, even if it does tell you your engine's cooked.
But I guess there must be many of us who have reported a fault to their service agents only to be told that "we can't fault it". Meaning that rather than undo a single screw or bolt, what they've done is plug your car into their magic black box, waited for it to go "bing" and then hit you with a big bill for the "service".
Maybe what we need is a Campaign For Real Cars which can only be fixed by someone who is prepared to actually get a little bit of oil on his hands. Even then, unless you get lucky in your choice of mechanic, you're probably better off doing the work yourself.
If a lossless audio format isn't good enough for you there really isn't much left you can do...
I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil kicking around in the "audiophile" equipment industry, but I was actually being quite careful not to buy into it.
The point I tried to make in the second half of that sentence you quoted was that I'm perfectly aware that there should be no difference between the signal from a sound-card delivering a signal derived from Apple's Lossless or FLAC codecs and that derived from a typical CDDA wav file. I have to re-emphasise the word "sound-card", which in the case of the iPod is designed primarily for compactness.
I was simply making the point that if you plug an iPod into any half-decent stereo system, you will find the difference in reproduction perceptibly inferior to that from a CD player. Some have mentioned on/. that even the Zune sounds better in this regard, but I've never had the opportunity to verify this.
Is there an optimum level of resources to dedicate to creating music? How do you tell what it is?
I'm not sure that there is - or rather, if there is, then that optimum is "a shitload". A lot of my music, legitimately purchased over the last few years is recorded on the ECM label, and these recordings are so stupendously well produced and recorded that MP3 recordings just don't do them justice in any cases other than the comparatively high-ambient-noise situations in which the iPod thrives.
To be clear, I'm not knocking MP3s; I use my iPod a lot, but when I'm at home in my own living-room the compressed format just doesn't cut it. And, for that matter, neither does the so-called Apple Lossless format, as delivered by their devices.
But I digress: what I meant to say was that the readily-downloaded media are something of a trap. I think we are going to be left with a whole generation that has no idea what their music is actually supposed to sound like.
Specialization means no ability to think outside the box. Knowledge is overlapping.
Verily, forsooth. A couple of generations ago, it was regarded as a Good Thing(TM) to be a polymath. It seems that has largely been buried in a drive towards specialisation, and I believe the richness of our education has suffered as a result.
One thing I have found interesting is a tendency for mathematics professors to be quite well-read in the arts. I still remember one of my first maths professors illustrating a point regarding some misdemeanour of logic as one that would return, like Banquo's Ghost to haunt one later - complete with impromptu illustration on whiteboard of Elizabethan gentleman with ruff, carrying his head under his arm...
In the years since, where I have mostly been involved with individuals involved in chemistry and molecular biology, I have rarely encountered as much in the way of breadth of education, by which I simply mean exposure to other fields of discipline, including the arts. To be a polymath is to be much more interesting as a conversationalist.
The beta bas been around for a while, so there would be no difficulty in upgrading anything that has changed.
I happen to have tried out the beta just 3 days ago when a failed HDD forced a reinstall of any Linux distro of my choice. I loaded up the beta, and for once I stuck with it for a whole 2 days before trashing it and going back to Arch Linux, which is my current choice for a post-Slackware flavour.
I guess Ubuntu must be great for people who want everything "out of the box" without ever needing to look at the internals. I just found it incredibly irritating to have to resort to google when all I wanted to do was change one line in/etc/inittab, which the Ubuntu devs obviously consider to be beyond our ken and proceeded to make it so by burying the function in some $BIGNUMBER of subdirectories of/etc. And don't get me started on trying to set a static IP for a LAN. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't - but if I have to bust out a root terminal to use ifconfig and route to set it up manually, I would rather have a distro that offers me the option to do that easily without a GUI getting in the way.
Incidentally, coconut fibre (which I suspect might be what TFA might be referring to, rather than the shell) is a truly excellent material for producing an incredibly fine and pure charcoal (i.e. carbon) powder. The particles are so fine that they readily form nearly indelible stains on anything with which they come into contact. Especially on clothing.:-(
What I am saying is that Whereis appears to be a big believer in the "Here be Dragons" school of cartography, given the many large empty spaces in their "high quality database as used in Whereis® In Car Navigation".
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, Firefox is still focused on only being a browser, nothing else.
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides. If it had stayed at the minimal functional level it had at the earliest levels of its development, everybody would be whining that it doesn't offer enough features.
We can't have it both ways. If we want more features, then we have to accept that they will take more codespace. Simple as that.
I read your article, but it seems at least a few people are convinced enough to spen some serious money on this project.
It seems to me that a major risk might be that of the satellite being hit by some form of space junk or other material. If that didn't knock out the satellite altogether, then it occurs to me that the energy beam might end up frying something on the ground. Like, say, Japan.
I bet that would ruin someone's whole day.
You really haven't kept up with KDE 4.x development, have you... if you want the plain-old file-manager-pane behviour back for the whole desktop, simply right click and change the desktop type.
:-|
Actually, I had kept track, I was simply unaware of the helpful hint you just supplied. I was a bit frustrated because with Gnome (or my currently preferred combo of Compiz Fusion with Gnome) you can also put whatever widgets you want on your desktop, which to me is primarily a place I use to drop whatever files I happen to be working on at the moment. In other words, I treat it the same way I do my physical dead-tree item of furniture.
Over the years I have seen a lot of egregious cockups on both sides of the Gnome/KDE border, where developers have blithely followed the latest trendy philosophical notion while creating unnecessary productivity hurdles on the way, and it seemed to me that this development was another craniorectal idiocy designed to exclude the way I prefer to work. Happy to know there's a workaround.
Incidentally, it seems some idiot has decided to orphan your post in his haste to push his agenda by modding down the post to which you replied...
Would it be possible to send the audio signal through the mains in the house?
Assuming it were possible to do so without being left with that nice 50Hz buzz, you would still need an amplifier in every room, thus failing the OP's WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) problem.
It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight.
Spotlights are easy enough to steal, but the KDE developers have done themselves no favours by adopting a model where the desktop is only a place where widgets or launchers may be dropped.
I have played with KDE on and off since 1998, and found it to be usable but a bit Kluttered and Kannoying. I have more or less got over that now, but the navel-gazing in the philosophy behind KDE4.x leaves me bemused, even if it does make sense to the developers. As far as I'm concerned, the desktop is a place where one should be able to drop anything I want, and if I have to invoke a file manager to see that file again then something isn't working right.
If, however, what I've seen is an artifact of the distributions I've used (Arch and Slackware Linux), I will be very happy to hear of a decent implementation.
Microsoft is evil. Always has been. Always will be.
Maybe you're very young, but I seem to recall that Microsoft was at one time held as a sort of liberator from IBM's hegemony. I guess it's all a matter of perspective...
I haven't found anything that works as well as Skype. SIP is way down the list in performance.
I'll second that. While SIP is in many cases a little cheaper for voice communication than Skype, the other integrated features like instant messaging and SMS make Skype a killer app given its market saturation.
I know there are alternative and more truly "free" products available that accomplish the same purposes separately, but Skype is the only one to provide an easily usable cross-platform integrated product that isn't rejected by non-geeks. I'd say it's a relief that the parties have managed in a definite case of "sudden outbreak of common sense" to settle their differences so amicably.
In other words, you want to know if they're logging your porn searches ;-)
Well, I guess that might be kind of important. I mostly don't bother with any Google services that require any kind of login, so this product is unlikely to tell me anything I don't already know about my browsing habits. What would interest me more is the kind of information Google is keeping that can be tied to my IP address, whether I am logged into anything or not.
I don't know about the "simulation" part, but the "psycho-acoustic" thingy has been a useful device for peddling snake-oil about the requirement for "burning-in" of expensive cables in hi-fi systems. My own feeling about the latter is that the burn-in process definitely makes a difference for essentially mechanical components like speakers and turntable cartridges, but I just can't bring myself to believe much of the voodoo about cables.
they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
Leaving aside the fact that the Beatles were a British band, and therefore not subject to Congress, EMI has apparently been recently doing its own resampling of their albums. So maybe they're infringing on their own copyright?
*ducks*
So, in your expert opinion, everyone involved is wrong?
Why not? I know the dumbing-down of the modern media urges us to think in terms of black and white concepts, but there should be room for this. EMI are obviously evil copyright trolls, and this Hank Risan is equally obviously selling copyrighted material. Shakespeare (as always) has a good line for this:
"A plague on both your houses."
Every other distro I've tried has made KDE4 feel like the steaming pile of poo that everyone said it was...
Do you mean Mandriva has managed to make the KDE4 desktop usable? I'm not flaming here, I'm curious. Because every implementation of KDE4 I've seen so far has involved a "desktop" that appears to be only useful as a place to install widgets or launchers. I feel there are better ways fo accomplish this functionality - either from the start menu or by an agreed association between file(mime)-type and application. I have never been able to drop files on the KDE4 desktop without having been forced to invoke a file manager to see them. I haven't found an implementation where you can just drop whatever file you are working on on the desktop, and expect to easily find it again.
As far as I'm concerned, that is one hell of a show-stopper. I'm sure the KDE developers must have had a very sound reason for this implementation of their philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, I wish they had kept it to themselves.
Most motorcyclists who come off second-best in an altercation with a car do so because the car driver is just not paying attention. It could be argued that cars, while now "safer" in the event of a collision, have become so damned easy to drive that their owners might as well be in a taxi for all the headspace they are using for the task at hand. Hence all the bimbos we see yapping away on the phone or using the driving mirror to apply make-up.
I've driven many ancient cars with dodgy brakes where I've had to double-declutch through every gear, but the simple aspect of having to keep the brain engaged has been enough to avoid many accidents.
Heh... I still have a great old car built in the days when it was common to approximate pi as 22/7 - for those of us who didn't have a convenient notch on our slide-rules. The car's over 60 years old, and will quite probably last as long again.
If automakers wanted you to drive slower and safer, they would set the speedometer to read high...
If they wanted you to drive slower and safer, they would position the driver's seat at the front of the car like some Aztec sacrifice and force you to pay attention.
Also, a lot of people fit tyres of different diameter from those the car was designed for - so the revolutions per minute of the wheel can translate to quite a different speed from what the dial says.
The oil light problem, while serious enough, is at least fixable, even if it does tell you your engine's cooked.
But I guess there must be many of us who have reported a fault to their service agents only to be told that "we can't fault it". Meaning that rather than undo a single screw or bolt, what they've done is plug your car into their magic black box, waited for it to go "bing" and then hit you with a big bill for the "service".
Maybe what we need is a Campaign For Real Cars which can only be fixed by someone who is prepared to actually get a little bit of oil on his hands. Even then, unless you get lucky in your choice of mechanic, you're probably better off doing the work yourself.
If a lossless audio format isn't good enough for you there really isn't much left you can do...
/. that even the Zune sounds better in this regard, but I've never had the opportunity to verify this.
I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil kicking around in the "audiophile" equipment industry, but I was actually being quite careful not to buy into it.
The point I tried to make in the second half of that sentence you quoted was that I'm perfectly aware that there should be no difference between the signal from a sound-card delivering a signal derived from Apple's Lossless or FLAC codecs and that derived from a typical CDDA wav file. I have to re-emphasise the word "sound-card", which in the case of the iPod is designed primarily for compactness.
I was simply making the point that if you plug an iPod into any half-decent stereo system, you will find the difference in reproduction perceptibly inferior to that from a CD player. Some have mentioned on
The thing is, people don't torrent Beyonce to protest the copyright status of Richard Strauss.
This is true. But nobody would admit torrenting Beyonce at all.
Is there an optimum level of resources to dedicate to creating music? How do you tell what it is?
I'm not sure that there is - or rather, if there is, then that optimum is "a shitload". A lot of my music, legitimately purchased over the last few years is recorded on the ECM label, and these recordings are so stupendously well produced and recorded that MP3 recordings just don't do them justice in any cases other than the comparatively high-ambient-noise situations in which the iPod thrives.
To be clear, I'm not knocking MP3s; I use my iPod a lot, but when I'm at home in my own living-room the compressed format just doesn't cut it. And, for that matter, neither does the so-called Apple Lossless format, as delivered by their devices.
But I digress: what I meant to say was that the readily-downloaded media are something of a trap. I think we are going to be left with a whole generation that has no idea what their music is actually supposed to sound like.
I still think it would be more interesting if every man, woman and child started inserting keywords like
Jihad, fatwa, Allahu akbar, bomb, suicide, 72 virgins, kill infidel, blow up airport... into every single email.
It might be fun to watch their computers melt into a pile of slag on the floor.
Excuse me a moment, there's a couple of guys banging on my front door...
Specialization means no ability to think outside the box. Knowledge is overlapping.
Verily, forsooth. A couple of generations ago, it was regarded as a Good Thing(TM) to be a polymath. It seems that has largely been buried in a drive towards specialisation, and I believe the richness of our education has suffered as a result.
One thing I have found interesting is a tendency for mathematics professors to be quite well-read in the arts. I still remember one of my first maths professors illustrating a point regarding some misdemeanour of logic as one that would return, like Banquo's Ghost to haunt one later - complete with impromptu illustration on whiteboard of Elizabethan gentleman with ruff, carrying his head under his arm...
In the years since, where I have mostly been involved with individuals involved in chemistry and molecular biology, I have rarely encountered as much in the way of breadth of education, by which I simply mean exposure to other fields of discipline, including the arts. To be a polymath is to be much more interesting as a conversationalist.
The beta bas been around for a while, so there would be no difficulty in upgrading anything that has changed.
/etc/inittab, which the Ubuntu devs obviously consider to be beyond our ken and proceeded to make it so by burying the function in some $BIGNUMBER of subdirectories of /etc. And don't get me started on trying to set a static IP for a LAN. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't - but if I have to bust out a root terminal to use ifconfig and route to set it up manually, I would rather have a distro that offers me the option to do that easily without a GUI getting in the way.
I happen to have tried out the beta just 3 days ago when a failed HDD forced a reinstall of any Linux distro of my choice. I loaded up the beta, and for once I stuck with it for a whole 2 days before trashing it and going back to Arch Linux, which is my current choice for a post-Slackware flavour.
I guess Ubuntu must be great for people who want everything "out of the box" without ever needing to look at the internals. I just found it incredibly irritating to have to resort to google when all I wanted to do was change one line in
BTW I love coconut.
:-(
Incidentally, coconut fibre (which I suspect might be what TFA might be referring to, rather than the shell) is a truly excellent material for producing an incredibly fine and pure charcoal (i.e. carbon) powder. The particles are so fine that they readily form nearly indelible stains on anything with which they come into contact. Especially on clothing.
"This map server uses Whereis® map data that was developed by Sensis Pty Ltd ("Sensis") in conjunction with Universal Publishers Pty Ltd ("Universal Publishers"). This website incorporates data which is: © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2007. The Whereis® map data is based on the same high quality database as used in Whereis® In Car Navigation."
And your point is?
What I am saying is that Whereis appears to be a big believer in the "Here be Dragons" school of cartography, given the many large empty spaces in their "high quality database as used in Whereis® In Car Navigation".