Ah geez, again I foolishly fail to remember that phrasing things a certain way results in Slashdot articles which inevitably have misleading headlines and summaries. For the record, my point is not that we should do a GNOME 3 (especially right now), and it definitely isn't that I personally intend to do a GNOME 3. It's that if someone did a GNOME 3, the right way to do it is to create a fairly long-lived branch (aka fork) of the project while continuing the GNOME 2.x series on a 6-month cycle in the meantime. I'm responding to other people's blogs here, rather than proposing something.
And for the record I don't think conservatism in GNOME 2 is bad, it's just different. The important point is to recognize that you can't do two things in one branch. Doing it all in one place results in both breaking the crap out of current users, and failing to innovate or do interesting things. So you split them apart. This is also lower-risk; if the innovation fails, then you just drop the branch.
By rare, you must mean very rare. It's far easier to just not install it!
Agreed, and point taken, but I do occasionally come across sites where I have good reason to want to access content provided only in Flash form, though I always boycott such sites when there are acceptable alternatives.
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
If you're using Firefox, try the Flashblock extension - that way you can choose to view the rare Flash presentations that you might want to see, and save your bandwidth with the majority that you don't.
Flashblock has become as useful to me as my hosts-file shitlist.
If these guys don't want all the bells and whistles of a modern desktop system, there is nothing stopping them from using the 2.4 kernels, which are still being actively maintained, and indeed, still supplied by default with some distributions. In fact, the 2.2 series is still as solid as it ever was (and still IIRC being maintained), if they really want to be as stodgy as all that. In fact I am aware of quite a few server platforms still using 2.2 kernels.
Point taken (for what it was worth - i.e. not much). I get very tired of the message that "We do not support Linux/OS X/BSD/alternative operating system of your choice". OK, I am not a denizen of the US, but common sense says to me that this requirement on the part of the Grants office is inequitable.
Personally, my faith is not in politicians, so I wouldn't bother canvassing them to redress the balance, but if I had a stake in this I would consider legal action against the authority. The mills of legal systems grind slowly, but a successful action would almost guarantee a change of attitude where other forms of protest would amount to howling in the wilderness.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, Flash does nothing well except make it easy for web developers to produce bandwidth-consuming tinsel presentations with no content, and the world would be a better place without it.
It takes two people to reach an agreement. I never signed any contract.
Indeed: +1 insightful.
Just goes to show how far you have to read through a series of posts on any Slashdot thread to find one that has any relevance to the topic... but I digress.
We hear enough (and more than enough) about our supposed social contract "obliging" us to endure obtrusive and usually irrelevant advertising to offset the burden of providing content.
The simple fact is that the perception of many is that the ratio of advertising screenspace to content is excessively high. Sooner or later, web designers are going to have to face the fact that they must either provide adequate content or people won't visit. Otherwise the Internet is no more useful than an electric Yellow Pages. There are other avenues for businesses to raise money than advertising, and as long as they fail to realise that, they will continue to be thwarted by users who make technical efforts to avoid having bandwidth (that they pay for) being hijacked.
Canadians just aren't seeing as much because they are using filters.
I guess you could probably say that for everybody. I'm not Canadian, so I'm not sure this statistic would apply, but 99.2% of the spam I get here in Australia originates from the US.
Obviously it is not possible or practicable for me to "go after" a spammer in another country, and I'm sure they are perfectly aware of that, and count on it. In a frontierless world such as the internet, laws such as this are only effective if every nation has and enforces them.
Otherwise, perhaps a few public, painful and messy executions would probably be a more effective deterrent.
Something I've been a bit nervous about for a while is... (pause to don tin-foil hat)...the push in some areas of the GNU/Linux community to adopt Mono.
OK, I've never used the latter, and have no opinion as to how gratifying it is to use (or how close it is to.Net in the way it is implemented), but it strikes me as being just too easy for Microsoft to give Mono enough time to become entrenched in the OSS community, then to wheel out the lawyers for an intellectual property fight.
Maybe I'm just being overly cynical, but I'm surprised no-one else seems to see that coming, and if that happens, MS will be in a position to do an awful lot of damage.
Well said. I get mightily tired of site developers who seem to believe there is something incredibly cool about pastel text against a coloured background. But then, I guess it's probably a good way to mask a general lack of content...
The Slashdot FAQ actually recommends posting early in a discussion in order to attempt to boost karma
Trouble is, this leads to an unfortunate situation which defeats the whole purpose of karma points. Treating the whole thing as a race to get something said at the top of the page does nothing for quality of discussion, even if it does happen to score points with those moderators who can't be bothered looking at the bottom of the page.
Your point is accurate, but I'm afraid your first example is less so: bubonic plague is not a virus, it is (believed to be) a bacteriological infection of Yersinia pestis.
Fair points. But my impression is that if the original poster is aware that his machine is overheating a lot, that sort of indicates to me that there is already something wrong (e.g. as one poster mentioned, dust on components) which he should get fixed before he loses the thing.
It's better to fix the problem now than to wait until the thing fails, which Sod's law tells us will happen at the worst possible time.
If I could be bothered taking the time to report these "offences", it might just make a dent in the overall stats. I've had seventeen phishing attempts roll into my inbox in the last month, eight of them purporting to originate from banking institutions I actually deal with.
Every single one of them originated from a United States IP.
While I personally only marginally subscribe to the theory that Americans are universally the biggest crooks unhung (:-P), my spam/scam statistics point unequivocally in that direction.
There is no question here of the blogger in question "obstructing justice". Seems to me that Apple is guilty here of some fairly heavy-handed treatment, given that the blogger in question is essentially just passing on rumours, which is pretty much stock in trade for any journalist, whether "legitimate" (by whatever legal definition applies) or not.
I am aware that there is a large proportion of Mac fanboys here on Slashdot, but Apple's antics lately have borne a striking resemblance to some of those from Microsoft, and I see no particular reason why they should be applauded.
I've generally found the current 2.6 series to be reasonably solid, but I can't say I've been entirely happy with the way development has happened over the hast few "stable" releases.
I've had a policy of using mainstream brand-name hardware components for some years for ease of configuration, but using "make oldconfig" on a basis of a known-to-be-good.config file has left me with devices not working (properly) with 2.6.8, 2.6.8.1 and 2.6.10. However, 2.6.5, 2.6.7 and 2.6.9 all worked fine. I was beginning to wonder if someone had adopted an ODD_VERSION_NUMBER==unstable policy without telling anybody...
... for the flames to get fanned back and forth between Gnome and KDE.
The whole point of themes is that you customise them to how YOU want them to look.
So if you think it's fugly, change it.:-)
I've been a big fan of Gnome since ~1997 and used to hate KDE with a passion, but recently as an experiment I took the time to customise a KDE desktop to look almost identical to my Gnome desktop, and found it actually wasn't that bad (in some respects superior to Gnome), so I actually now use KDE more often.
Indeed - I'm one of those people who hates having too much stuff rattling around in pockets, so I keep a minimal toolkit in the car. (Too comprehensive a kit is just bait for thieves.)
But my recommendation for anybody who wants pliers is that they get a pair of long-nosed vice-grips (also known to English speakers as mole-grips): preferably the Irwin tools, as substitutes (in my experience) don't last the distance.
I have yet to see a webpage looking as nice as good Flash webpages, coded without Flash. Flash is about the only way when you want your page to be rendered always in the font you choose.
You could be right on that point, but I'm sure I can't be alone in having noticed that Flash webpages also have a tendency to be the least informative. Glossy window-dressing is all very well, but if it leaves out the content it's just irritating.
Dual booting is a good start (or live CD's if your chicken) but heck why not use Linux as it is bcoming now ? sheesh you might be surprised.
I've been using Linux almost exclusively for about 8 years now, and have set up quite a few boxes with Slackware and Gnome for friends and relations.
Slackware does nothing to pre-configure devices, but my feeling is that its strength is that it doesn't get in the way while you do it manually, and that's good enough for me, since I'm fairly experienced at it by now. Windows is not always as easy to set up as claimed; I have come across a great many difficult deliveries, and problems, once encountered, tend to be intractable, since there is no interface to fix them, and indeed very often no useful error message.
On the linux boxes I set up, pretty much universal feedback is that the interface is much more attractive than Windows. In particular, font rendering is now far superior to Redmond's offering, and lots of those friends find themselves getting irritated when placed in a situation where there is no alternative to Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops: meant to say pseudo-Latin... :-|
Analyse with anal eyes, and all you'll get is hindsight...
But am I the first to realise that the revised article is in Latin? Well, I thought it was funny, anyway...
Agreed, and point taken, but I do occasionally come across sites where I have good reason to want to access content provided only in Flash form, though I always boycott such sites when there are acceptable alternatives.
If you're using Firefox, try the Flashblock extension - that way you can choose to view the rare Flash presentations that you might want to see, and save your bandwidth with the majority that you don't.
Flashblock has become as useful to me as my hosts-file shitlist.
I don't see what the problem is.
Point taken (for what it was worth - i.e. not much). I get very tired of the message that "We do not support Linux/OS X/BSD/alternative operating system of your choice". OK, I am not a denizen of the US, but common sense says to me that this requirement on the part of the Grants office is inequitable.
Personally, my faith is not in politicians, so I wouldn't bother canvassing them to redress the balance, but if I had a stake in this I would consider legal action against the authority. The mills of legal systems grind slowly, but a successful action would almost guarantee a change of attitude where other forms of protest would amount to howling in the wilderness.
So maybe I was wrong, but for the time being the ultimate desktop environment (emacs, of course) copes well enough for me. ;-)
Well, as far as I'm concerned, Flash does nothing well except make it easy for web developers to produce bandwidth-consuming tinsel presentations with no content, and the world would be a better place without it.
Indeed: +1 insightful.
Just goes to show how far you have to read through a series of posts on any Slashdot thread to find one that has any relevance to the topic... but I digress.
We hear enough (and more than enough) about our supposed social contract "obliging" us to endure obtrusive and usually irrelevant advertising to offset the burden of providing content.
The simple fact is that the perception of many is that the ratio of advertising screenspace to content is excessively high. Sooner or later, web designers are going to have to face the fact that they must either provide adequate content or people won't visit. Otherwise the Internet is no more useful than an electric Yellow Pages. There are other avenues for businesses to raise money than advertising, and as long as they fail to realise that, they will continue to be thwarted by users who make technical efforts to avoid having bandwidth (that they pay for) being hijacked.
I guess you could probably say that for everybody. I'm not Canadian, so I'm not sure this statistic would apply, but 99.2% of the spam I get here in Australia originates from the US.
Obviously it is not possible or practicable for me to "go after" a spammer in another country, and I'm sure they are perfectly aware of that, and count on it. In a frontierless world such as the internet, laws such as this are only effective if every nation has and enforces them.
Otherwise, perhaps a few public, painful and messy executions would probably be a more effective deterrent.
Something I've been a bit nervous about for a while is... (pause to don tin-foil hat) ...the push in some areas of the GNU/Linux community to adopt Mono.
OK, I've never used the latter, and have no opinion as to how gratifying it is to use (or how close it is to .Net in the way it is implemented), but it strikes me as being just too easy for Microsoft to give Mono enough time to become entrenched in the OSS community, then to wheel out the lawyers for an intellectual property fight.
Maybe I'm just being overly cynical, but I'm surprised no-one else seems to see that coming, and if that happens, MS will be in a position to do an awful lot of damage.
Well said. I get mightily tired of site developers who seem to believe there is something incredibly cool about pastel text against a coloured background. But then, I guess it's probably a good way to mask a general lack of content...
Trouble is, this leads to an unfortunate situation which defeats the whole purpose of karma points. Treating the whole thing as a race to get something said at the top of the page does nothing for quality of discussion, even if it does happen to score points with those moderators who can't be bothered looking at the bottom of the page.
Your point is accurate, but I'm afraid your first example is less so: bubonic plague is not a virus, it is (believed to be) a bacteriological infection of Yersinia pestis.
...is Balderdash. For anybody who is a fan of The Superior Person's Book of Words, this is a must.
It's better to fix the problem now than to wait until the thing fails, which Sod's law tells us will happen at the worst possible time.
Every single one of them originated from a United States IP.
While I personally only marginally subscribe to the theory that Americans are universally the biggest crooks unhung (:-P), my spam/scam statistics point unequivocally in that direction.
I am aware that there is a large proportion of Mac fanboys here on Slashdot, but Apple's antics lately have borne a striking resemblance to some of those from Microsoft, and I see no particular reason why they should be applauded.
I appear to have an underdeveloped proofreading gland; that should have been ODD_VERSION_NUMBER==stable.
I've had a policy of using mainstream brand-name hardware components for some years for ease of configuration, but using "make oldconfig" on a basis of a known-to-be-good .config file has left me with devices not working (properly) with 2.6.8, 2.6.8.1 and 2.6.10. However, 2.6.5, 2.6.7 and 2.6.9 all worked fine. I was beginning to wonder if someone had adopted an ODD_VERSION_NUMBER==unstable policy without telling anybody...
The whole point of themes is that you customise them to how YOU want them to look.
So if you think it's fugly, change it. :-)
I've been a big fan of Gnome since ~1997 and used to hate KDE with a passion, but recently as an experiment I took the time to customise a KDE desktop to look almost identical to my Gnome desktop, and found it actually wasn't that bad (in some respects superior to Gnome), so I actually now use KDE more often.
But my recommendation for anybody who wants pliers is that they get a pair of long-nosed vice-grips (also known to English speakers as mole-grips): preferably the Irwin tools, as substitutes (in my experience) don't last the distance.
You could be right on that point, but I'm sure I can't be alone in having noticed that Flash webpages also have a tendency to be the least informative. Glossy window-dressing is all very well, but if it leaves out the content it's just irritating.
I've been using Linux almost exclusively for about 8 years now, and have set up quite a few boxes with Slackware and Gnome for friends and relations.
Slackware does nothing to pre-configure devices, but my feeling is that its strength is that it doesn't get in the way while you do it manually, and that's good enough for me, since I'm fairly experienced at it by now. Windows is not always as easy to set up as claimed; I have come across a great many difficult deliveries, and problems, once encountered, tend to be intractable, since there is no interface to fix them, and indeed very often no useful error message.
On the linux boxes I set up, pretty much universal feedback is that the interface is much more attractive than Windows. In particular, font rendering is now far superior to Redmond's offering, and lots of those friends find themselves getting irritated when placed in a situation where there is no alternative to Windows.