You should probably put contact information here, I know a few people in sydney that match your criteria and are looking for work (myself included). Slashdot seems like a great place to find someone who is really interested in the field, take advantage of it.
The powerful partition tools are there to allow easy operability with windows. When windows is no longer the main concern in peoples minds as they switch to linux these tools will be hidden and streamline. Until that day (if it ever comes) we will be stuck with the situation where any flaws in windows operability is judged by average users to be a detriment to linux but not vice versa. By the way, many systems such as Ubuntu and Mandrake IIRC have an automatic option just like you describe, I've used it once or twice actually but never in a duel boot situation.
How about doing a review from the perspective of someone who has never used a computer before - then lets see which one is easier to use
Someone who has never used a computer before could never be expected to install any operating system, windows or linux. Such reviews are based on installation and first impressions, the views of a totally new user doesn't mean as much because they do not yet know what to look for to perform their tasks.
(hint: the answer will be Windows XP by a massive margin).
A TOTALLY new user can only be taught on an already set up system. Such a system is one where linux's critisims about being harder to administer become invalid. A totally new user needs only to use key applications to perform common tasks, the games, third party applications, drivers and utilities that windows supposadly becomes better than linux in means nothing to new users. A new user can be taught to click on the "firefox" button on the panel in linux and windows with similar ease to surf the internet. The same can be said of open office, the calculator, an email client and the file manager. However under linux a new user will be less likely to change their settings without knowing, putting them in a situation they cannot recover from without assistance. Under linux a new user will be less likely to inadvertently install spyware or get viruses. And despite windows recent leaps and bounds in stability, Linux still is the more stable system and thus is less likely to behave strangely and confuse the user. Windows is only better than linux for those people with the skills to do basic administration but does not have a deep knowledge of the systems working. For these people windows graphical tools really shine and its ubiquity makes installing hardware easier. These people are very different to new users.
In fact it's even worse than the various Microsoft "independant" TCO studies, because at least they try to hide their bias.
That is completely contrary to my perception of bias. To me, open bias is not bias at all since it gives fair warning to the reader to assess the argument according to this bias. There is nothing more abhorent to me than someone that either doesn't know their bias, or tries to hide it. I detest advertisements that pretend to be useful tips or reviews, I hate letters to the editor written by major political parties, I hate people who claim to be the unbiases middle ground simply because they do not understand the issue. The Linux community acknowledge the fact that they like linux more than anything else the artical is hosted at a place called "madpenguin" it is obvious they like linux so people can realise that their opinion may be a little romanticised at times. However what knowledge can be gained from it without question is the love for linux that the writer has shown by giving up their time to write that satire, that says more about the product than any clever words ever can. The Microsoft studies try to trick readers into interpreting them as pure fact, they are given names to sound prestigious and independant, not to celebrate their loyalty. These studies can impart not unbiased information since they are payed for and when loyalty is bought not inspired it says nothing about the product.
Just because a summary says something doesn't mean that the article says the same thing. The article acknowledges the presence of a partition tool but bemoans the limited features of the tool.
Isn't it a contradiction to have a redundant first post? Slashcode is actually a pretty nice forum system and slashdot itself has brought hours of fun to tech fans, zealots, karma whores and trolls alike for many years now. If I wasn't so afraid of being labeled as a brownnose, I'd say that slashdot was one of the key parts of an open source system that holds the rest together.
Taboo is a cultural term anyway, it you want a non subjective term, make a new word up for it. In the mean time, canibalism is taboo for wikipedia's target audience. Wikipedia link to taboo
I know this thread has been closed for a while but I'd like to clear it up anyway.
Australians are mainly decended from free settlers that have come to the new world seeking different things by their own free will for the last 220 years. None the less, quite a few Australians are decended from the convicts already sent. Although there were many life sentances (99 years in those days) many prison sentances were short, sometimes as short as 3 years before they were released into the colony. They didn't have to be long because part of the punishment was the transportation itself, being put into a colony where transportation back was expensive and chances to raise that kind of money was limited. Thus, lots of former convicts did become free to reproduce. This was possible since there were many female convicts, or sometimes the convicts wife would follow as a settler, or sometimes a convict would take an Aboriginal wife or mistress, often by force.
By the mid 19th century however, penal settlement was a distant memory and people immegrated from England for wealth in the wool industry, Ireland to escape poverty, China and California to make money in the thriving gold industry. This is where most of the population is decended from.
and quite the opposite argument can be made, look at nobel laureates, how many of them did any significant work after the work that won them the prize, some do, but in proportion to the expectations you have?
Ever wonder why the nobel prize isn't awarded until years after the work has been done? Because they want to know if the work that was done will lead to anything major. If it is discovered that nothing can come of a discovery, no prize will be considered, that's the way it works. A brilliant discovery can cause other brilliant discoveries whether the discoverer spends the rest of their life discovering, or sitting on a couch smoking weed. This however was useful only because it is novel, thus it cannot be reused or built on. The other difference is science is a great and nobel persuit that has brought us from caves to great civilizations, advertising is merely the art of making someone change their behaviour in a way that is more profitable to your client. Sweeping dung off the road is honourable because when it is finished, there will be no dung on the road, when advertising is finished people will spend more money on frivilous things that they are suddenly told that they want, hardly a lofty aspiration.
Mr Tew has succeeded in paying for his education and has generated wealth for himself. There is nothing wrong with that of cause, but nobody owes him any admiration for what he has done, the world as a whole today and generations in the future will not benifit from this discovery and thus he should NOT be compared with nobel laureates.
Countries are known by different names in different languages, get over it. At least Brazil sounds like Brasil, you should hear what Deutschland is called in different languages: "Germany", "Allemagne", "Niemcy", "Tyskland". Slashdot involves discussions in English, if you don't like it, go to Orkut with the other 90% of speakers of Brazillian Portugese.
Lyricists make pretty much all of their money by collecting royalties on performances and recordings of the songs with lyrics they have written. Weird Al Yankovic for example has produced many albums on CD and DVD of him performing music with his modified lyrics (he is actually a surprisingly good singer) that is the way he makes all his money (4 gold and 4 platinum albums means a lot of money). Nobody here is saying that unauthorized performances of someone else's lyrics is acceptable, only that reading them isn't such a big problem.
Seriously, the grandparent was just pointing out where he found out his information, not making any connections at all. I think it is a good thing that someone on slashdot actually pointed out where they got their info for once. You don't see that much at all around here and it gets interpreted as a "thems damn wetbacks took our jerbs!" discussion.
When writing English, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Greek people will transliterate their names from their native alphabets into the English superset of the Latin alphabet. This is because it is only expected that an English speaker will know the alphabet they use. So, when they are working in an English speaking country (like the United States), why shouldn't someone who's name was originally written in another Latin superset transliterate their name as much as possible into the English Latin superset so that native speakers of English can pronounce it. In English the symbol used above that ö is known as a diaeresis mark and is used to signify that two consecutive vowels do not constitute a diphthong and thus the vowel must make its default sound (usually the long sound) which is wholly in line with the "baloney" like pronounciation.
This is not a phenomenon localised to America, it is simply caused by people only being familiar with the character set they know. Until central Europeans in general learn the difference between "w" and "v" in English, they have no right to lecture English speakers for not being able to pronounce their own additions to Latin script. While we are discussing ignorance in pronunciation, I think you are probably not aware that most American accents are Rhotic, i.e. they would pronounce the two instances of the letter r that you added as if they were at the front of words. Thus, B-[ir]-l-[ir]-ni would only in fact be pronounced like the Hungarian Bölöni by an Englishman, a New Zealander or an Australian. Pronounced by an American this name would just sound plain awful (though insistently this applies to most words Americans pronounced) with lound rs and far too much time would be spent pronouncing the awkward rl and rn consonant transitions.
They probably just love what they do, that happens in the closed source world as well (as I mentioned before). Anyway, I prefer firefox personally, but opera is pretty good.
To quote an old cliche: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I use both browsers regually and I can say, beyond a doubt that firefox has more useful features, keeps me safer, works far smoother and acts less unpredictably than IE. It doesn't matter who created them, Firefox humiliates IE in every way I measure the two. I have used IE far too much to give any credibility to a claim that it is just as good as firefox. The fact that Firefox is better than IE doesn't need to be debated any further since the answer is painfully obvious. The proponents of IE don't deserve their arguments to be listened to any more than the proponents of inteligent design, or those who claim that global warming isn't really happening. Debating such things and further is a waste of time so I will continue as if it was a given.
Now we have this established, then we can start attributing this difference I have met many programmers (or as the parent puts it: "software engineers") and I can say that I have never met a skillful programmer that programs only because they are payed. The Firefox team is composed wholly of programmers that do their work out of personal passion, this is always going to beat the blend of the two types that you get in corporate environments.
Passion is the only fuel of brilliance. Where there is passion there is accomplishment, where there is no passion there is nothing. Passion exists in corperate environments sometime, like in Bell laboritories during the 70s, in Apple during the 80s, in ID during the 90s and in Google today. But free software is pure passion, distilled and purified by removing everything else like a monk denying earthly distractions to achieve closeness to god. That's why firefox kicks IE's arse dispite being made by people of similar tallent.
Gee, this remark kinda detracts somewhat from your "down with the mentally handicapped" line, don'tcha think? Fuck you too, kid! Hope you go deaf soon!
I take comfort in the fact that if someone cared what I thought about them, they would have logged in and refrained from commenting about my choice of words before doing reaserch into what they mean and how they are used.
Spastic (n.b. always an adjective, never a noun) is a technical term for someone who has cirtain nervous damage that cause reduced muscular control and spasms. My uncle that I mentioned is spastic and lives in a place called the spastic centre. He has cerabral paulsy, thus he is spastic, a technical term.
Retarded (n.b. also never a noun) is a euphamism for slow, it is a technically correct term in the United States but derogatory everywhere else. You will notice I used the term "mentally handicapped" where a technical definition was used, but "Retard-Prod" when describing a device that was deliberately meant to illustrate a point by being morally reprehensable.
I don't really think I hurt anyone with either of these conditions. A person who is spastic probably knows its a fine term when used in the correct context and someone who is mentally handicapped probably woudn't be reading slashdot (though to be honest I think the parent comes close).
Probably for several reasons, one of which being that discrimination against teens is legal and state-sponsored. Can a 13-year-old drive a car? Buy a handgun? Drink alcohol? Buy cigarettes? Vote? There you go, state-sponsored and, many would argue, valid age discrimination. So there's a certain amount of humor for someone to say, obviously tongue-in-cheek, that you can't discriminate against teens.
You should know full well that these restrictions have nothing in common with a device designed exclusivly to annoy and frustrate a given demographic. As a 22 year old who hears high frequencies very loudly (I can hear almost all screens whistle) I can imagine the havoc this will cause not just with teenagers, but with parents that have babies (who have even higher auditory ranges), with children wating outside while their mother shops and with people walking their dogs on the footpath. There are many legitimate uses for the public land outside this store and the public has the right to use it for things like waiting and pedestrian transport regardless of their age. I've met store owners that believe that they own the public land around where they are, such as one particually charitable gentleman who demanded my spastic uncle be moved from near his shop to improve the ambience, but they are invariably wrong. Public land belongs to the public, at least where I live.
I find the public's callous attitudes towards teenagers to be disgusting. Sure, teenagers are stupid, boring to talk to and nearly everything they do is pointless, but this also applies to people who are mentally handicapped. Yet if someone was to invent the Retard-Prod(tm) that jabs everyone with an IQ less than 60, the inventor would be lynched within a day. I was a teenager 2 years ago, I was pretty stupid back when I was 15, in the same way I'll discover I'm stupid now in another six or seven years, but generally I didn't hurt anyone and only wanted to mind my own buisiness and have other people mind theirs, most teenagers are like that. Picking on kids because you don't like their demographic is not cool and it never will be.
A little of it is legal (both my parents are lawyers and I picked up a little from them when I was a kid), the bits that are legally grounded should be fairly easy to pick out. However, when discussing issues like this regarding the percieved hypocracy of slashdot mentality, the law is of very limited value. This is mainly derived from my own sense of morality because to me that is what is important in discussing things on slashdot.
That explaination aside, I will explain how the law in my country differs from what I just said. There is a huge difference in law between the first and second type I described. This is why people who sell pirate music can go to jail (criminal law) whereas downloaders get sued (civil law). However, to my knowledge isn't any major difference in the law between the second and third type I described, if there is any I havn't heard of any precedent based on it. The law has been set up to work on actual damages that are easy to measure, otherwise it would be based on speculation and undermine the certainty of the system. Thus, misattribution of credit can't really be dealt with majorly by the law. If someone sells intelectual property that they are not authorised to redistribute they are guilty of the same crime, nomatter who gets the credit for the IP.
The law and morality are often too closely linked in peoples minds. The law is not intended to make people do the right thing, its intended to limit and localise the damage that people can cause when they do the wrong thing. It is not against the law to cheat on one's spouse yet it is against the law to drive over the speed limit on a quiet country road. One should never do either of cause, but I'd personally have far more sympathy for the leadfoot. The law is there to stop you from killing your neighbour or taking their stuff, otherwise its just up to you.
B.t.w. I'm from Australia, not the US. Our legal system is similarish to that of the US, but our legal code is far smaller relying on common law (precedent based stuff) for most of the details. IIRC in Australian law, criminal law can be used for far smaller copyright violations than it can in the US, though non-profit copying has never been prosicuted in criminal courts making it essentially a civil matter here as well.
When some cheapskate downloads copyrighted MP3s from a P2P network, it's `copyright infringement', but when Sony uses GPL'd code it's `stealing', right?
There are many types of copyright violations with very different types of severity:
The first type is when someone goes out and downloads a song, lets say "...And Justice for All" by Metalica they have simply avoided paying for it by getting it through illegal means. This does not equate to any directly measurable loss of revenue because when the effective price of something is lowered, people are more likely to get it. Thus it is not only likely that someone would not have bought the CD if the pirate mp3s were not available, but it is actually more likely than not. This is of cause not a wholly moral practice, but it is cirtainly not as bad as many other evils that exist in society today. These are the infractions that occur on Kazaa and the ilk.
The second type of infraction is where one duplicates the media on which intellectual property is contained and sells it themselves at an actual monitary price. This is very different since there is a very obvious minimum bounds of loss of revinue caused by this which is of cause the markup on the pirated media. Motivation also changes in this type since there is a very clear misdirection in the chain of money where the pirate gets a clear financial benifit wheras they recieve none in the first set. This type of violation is criminal in most juristictions whereas the first type is wholly civil.
The third and most severe case is where intellectual property is rebranded and its credit is misappropriated to another party. This historically has been a result of industrial espionage but today, open source software is very vulnarable to it. This is equivalant to the Kazaa casual pirate claiming that they wrote "...And Justice for All". It means that not only does the pirate get the profit for the sale of the intellectual property instead of the legal creator, but those who are convinced to use this thing in future by seeing the rebranded thing will never go to the real author to get a copy for themselves. In either of the previous two types there is a likelyhood that the author will eventually get money or whatever they are looking for (usually an ego boost in the case of OSS) but in the third type this is not the cause. This is a far more thorough missapropriation of this IP and thus the term "stealing" is far more appropriate.
The reason that these three types are so neatly ranked is that as you can see, each one is a subset of the type before. Not everyone gets annoyed by violations every layer since OSS doesn't mind first or second type occuring but hates the third kind. SUN doesn't mind the first type occuring but hates the second and third with Java. Public domain doesn't mind any of the three. But no one will let one layer slide that is above something that annoys them.
This case with sony is clearly not a third type violation (which I would call stealing) but is a second type (which I would call piracy) since Sony did not claim to write this software or even advertise its existence. The GPL says you can do second type scenarios on the condition that you distribute the source code. Sony redistributed this IP for money but did not distribute the source code AFAIK so they voilated the rules on this level. This puts them on par with sleezy bootleg vendors on street courners and ebay pirate CD vendors but significantly worse than some kid downloading Nelly mp3s off Kazaa and significantly better than the jerks behind CherryOS.
So there you have it, why downloading some dumb pop song off the internet isn't as bad as taking credit for someone elses hard work and making millions of dollars off it and why sony are half way in between on this one.
Hmm, maybe Firefox does use the Gnome file selector when compiled in a certain way and use its own when compiled in another way. I dunno, I've always had a special firefox based dialog here.
As for the drag and copy, if you refer to inter-application dragging of text it is designed to stop you from accidently loosing data. For example, dragging a command from a word processor to a shell shouldn't cause one's document to then have a hole in it. If you find a nice colour in the gimp and drag it to the desktop, it shouldn't unset that colour, because that's a colour that you like and you might want to use it again. If you drag and image from a web page it is expected that it should copy the image, not log into the web server through SSH and delete the original image. When it isn't clear what the user wants, copying is often a safer option that moving.
As for dragging and dropping from external applications to unopened folders, I think that's probably just a mistake relating to a use case that its developers never thought of. I'm sure if you filed a bug report on Nautilus at bugzilla.gnome.org someone will take care of that when they get time (Nautilus is pretty understaffed at the moment I think). Make sure you're very specific though, I originally thought you meant dragging files from within nautilus. The Nautilus guys are very nice though and I'm sure they'll handle it well if given a properly written but report.
To be honest, I'm not exactly enamoured by the new Gnome file selector either. I think it lacks certain functionality that the old (ugly) one had (notably tab completion being well integrated), but there has been a lot of thought that has gone into it and I think it deserves to be discussed on that level. As far as it compares to other GUI file selectors I think it does ok. For some reason it doesn't have the ability to move or rename files like many other file managers yet it still supports drag and drop which I don't understand.
The whole hiding of paths in the save dialog until the little triangle is clicked thing simply confuses me. Sure, people will be wanting to save in a single directory 80% of the time, but putting the constrols required for the other 20% another click away seems like it gains little for anyone. The new file selector has a lot of shortcomings but making statements like "the GNOME file selector has to go" like that CyricZ dude did doesn't help anyone. The GNOME file selector needs to be fixed so it doesn't show an open contempt to its users' inteligence level, but generally its a good system and the fixes required to make it perfect arn't that huge.
Slashdot Mirror
See subject.
You should probably put contact information here, I know a few people in sydney that match your criteria and are looking for work (myself included). Slashdot seems like a great place to find someone who is really interested in the field, take advantage of it.
The powerful partition tools are there to allow easy operability with windows. When windows is no longer the main concern in peoples minds as they switch to linux these tools will be hidden and streamline. Until that day (if it ever comes) we will be stuck with the situation where any flaws in windows operability is judged by average users to be a detriment to linux but not vice versa. By the way, many systems such as Ubuntu and Mandrake IIRC have an automatic option just like you describe, I've used it once or twice actually but never in a duel boot situation.
Someone who has never used a computer before could never be expected to install any operating system, windows or linux. Such reviews are based on installation and first impressions, the views of a totally new user doesn't mean as much because they do not yet know what to look for to perform their tasks.
A TOTALLY new user can only be taught on an already set up system. Such a system is one where linux's critisims about being harder to administer become invalid. A totally new user needs only to use key applications to perform common tasks, the games, third party applications, drivers and utilities that windows supposadly becomes better than linux in means nothing to new users. A new user can be taught to click on the "firefox" button on the panel in linux and windows with similar ease to surf the internet. The same can be said of open office, the calculator, an email client and the file manager. However under linux a new user will be less likely to change their settings without knowing, putting them in a situation they cannot recover from without assistance. Under linux a new user will be less likely to inadvertently install spyware or get viruses. And despite windows recent leaps and bounds in stability, Linux still is the more stable system and thus is less likely to behave strangely and confuse the user. Windows is only better than linux for those people with the skills to do basic administration but does not have a deep knowledge of the systems working. For these people windows graphical tools really shine and its ubiquity makes installing hardware easier. These people are very different to new users.
That is completely contrary to my perception of bias. To me, open bias is not bias at all since it gives fair warning to the reader to assess the argument according to this bias. There is nothing more abhorent to me than someone that either doesn't know their bias, or tries to hide it. I detest advertisements that pretend to be useful tips or reviews, I hate letters to the editor written by major political parties, I hate people who claim to be the unbiases middle ground simply because they do not understand the issue. The Linux community acknowledge the fact that they like linux more than anything else the artical is hosted at a place called "madpenguin" it is obvious they like linux so people can realise that their opinion may be a little romanticised at times. However what knowledge can be gained from it without question is the love for linux that the writer has shown by giving up their time to write that satire, that says more about the product than any clever words ever can. The Microsoft studies try to trick readers into interpreting them as pure fact, they are given names to sound prestigious and independant, not to celebrate their loyalty. These studies can impart not unbiased information since they are payed for and when loyalty is bought not inspired it says nothing about the product.
Just because a summary says something doesn't mean that the article says the same thing. The article acknowledges the presence of a partition tool but bemoans the limited features of the tool.
Isn't it a contradiction to have a redundant first post? Slashcode is actually a pretty nice forum system and slashdot itself has brought hours of fun to tech fans, zealots, karma whores and trolls alike for many years now. If I wasn't so afraid of being labeled as a brownnose, I'd say that slashdot was one of the key parts of an open source system that holds the rest together.
Taboo is a cultural term anyway, it you want a non subjective term, make a new word up for it. In the mean time, canibalism is taboo for wikipedia's target audience. Wikipedia link to taboo
Australians are mainly decended from free settlers that have come to the new world seeking different things by their own free will for the last 220 years. None the less, quite a few Australians are decended from the convicts already sent. Although there were many life sentances (99 years in those days) many prison sentances were short, sometimes as short as 3 years before they were released into the colony. They didn't have to be long because part of the punishment was the transportation itself, being put into a colony where transportation back was expensive and chances to raise that kind of money was limited. Thus, lots of former convicts did become free to reproduce. This was possible since there were many female convicts, or sometimes the convicts wife would follow as a settler, or sometimes a convict would take an Aboriginal wife or mistress, often by force.
By the mid 19th century however, penal settlement was a distant memory and people immegrated from England for wealth in the wool industry, Ireland to escape poverty, China and California to make money in the thriving gold industry. This is where most of the population is decended from.
Ever wonder why the nobel prize isn't awarded until years after the work has been done? Because they want to know if the work that was done will lead to anything major. If it is discovered that nothing can come of a discovery, no prize will be considered, that's the way it works. A brilliant discovery can cause other brilliant discoveries whether the discoverer spends the rest of their life discovering, or sitting on a couch smoking weed. This however was useful only because it is novel, thus it cannot be reused or built on. The other difference is science is a great and nobel persuit that has brought us from caves to great civilizations, advertising is merely the art of making someone change their behaviour in a way that is more profitable to your client. Sweeping dung off the road is honourable because when it is finished, there will be no dung on the road, when advertising is finished people will spend more money on frivilous things that they are suddenly told that they want, hardly a lofty aspiration.
Mr Tew has succeeded in paying for his education and has generated wealth for himself. There is nothing wrong with that of cause, but nobody owes him any admiration for what he has done, the world as a whole today and generations in the future will not benifit from this discovery and thus he should NOT be compared with nobel laureates.
Countries are known by different names in different languages, get over it. At least Brazil sounds like Brasil, you should hear what Deutschland is called in different languages: "Germany", "Allemagne", "Niemcy", "Tyskland". Slashdot involves discussions in English, if you don't like it, go to Orkut with the other 90% of speakers of Brazillian Portugese.
The appropriate phrase would be: "I'd hit it"
Lyricists make pretty much all of their money by collecting royalties on performances and recordings of the songs with lyrics they have written. Weird Al Yankovic for example has produced many albums on CD and DVD of him performing music with his modified lyrics (he is actually a surprisingly good singer) that is the way he makes all his money (4 gold and 4 platinum albums means a lot of money). Nobody here is saying that unauthorized performances of someone else's lyrics is acceptable, only that reading them isn't such a big problem.
Seriously, the grandparent was just pointing out where he found out his information, not making any connections at all. I think it is a good thing that someone on slashdot actually pointed out where they got their info for once. You don't see that much at all around here and it gets interpreted as a "thems damn wetbacks took our jerbs!" discussion.
This is not a phenomenon localised to America, it is simply caused by people only being familiar with the character set they know. Until central Europeans in general learn the difference between "w" and "v" in English, they have no right to lecture English speakers for not being able to pronounce their own additions to Latin script. While we are discussing ignorance in pronunciation, I think you are probably not aware that most American accents are Rhotic, i.e. they would pronounce the two instances of the letter r that you added as if they were at the front of words. Thus, B-[ir]-l-[ir]-ni would only in fact be pronounced like the Hungarian Bölöni by an Englishman, a New Zealander or an Australian. Pronounced by an American this name would just sound plain awful (though insistently this applies to most words Americans pronounced) with lound rs and far too much time would be spent pronouncing the awkward rl and rn consonant transitions.
Macedonia is close enough to Hungary so that they can go get most of the internet's porn in person after a short trip up the Danube.
They probably just love what they do, that happens in the closed source world as well (as I mentioned before). Anyway, I prefer firefox personally, but opera is pretty good.
Now we have this established, then we can start attributing this difference I have met many programmers (or as the parent puts it: "software engineers") and I can say that I have never met a skillful programmer that programs only because they are payed. The Firefox team is composed wholly of programmers that do their work out of personal passion, this is always going to beat the blend of the two types that you get in corporate environments.
Passion is the only fuel of brilliance. Where there is passion there is accomplishment, where there is no passion there is nothing. Passion exists in corperate environments sometime, like in Bell laboritories during the 70s, in Apple during the 80s, in ID during the 90s and in Google today. But free software is pure passion, distilled and purified by removing everything else like a monk denying earthly distractions to achieve closeness to god. That's why firefox kicks IE's arse dispite being made by people of similar tallent.
Retarded (n.b. also never a noun) is a euphamism for slow, it is a technically correct term in the United States but derogatory everywhere else. You will notice I used the term "mentally handicapped" where a technical definition was used, but "Retard-Prod" when describing a device that was deliberately meant to illustrate a point by being morally reprehensable.
I don't really think I hurt anyone with either of these conditions. A person who is spastic probably knows its a fine term when used in the correct context and someone who is mentally handicapped probably woudn't be reading slashdot (though to be honest I think the parent comes close).
You should know full well that these restrictions have nothing in common with a device designed exclusivly to annoy and frustrate a given demographic. As a 22 year old who hears high frequencies very loudly (I can hear almost all screens whistle) I can imagine the havoc this will cause not just with teenagers, but with parents that have babies (who have even higher auditory ranges), with children wating outside while their mother shops and with people walking their dogs on the footpath. There are many legitimate uses for the public land outside this store and the public has the right to use it for things like waiting and pedestrian transport regardless of their age. I've met store owners that believe that they own the public land around where they are, such as one particually charitable gentleman who demanded my spastic uncle be moved from near his shop to improve the ambience, but they are invariably wrong. Public land belongs to the public, at least where I live.
I find the public's callous attitudes towards teenagers to be disgusting. Sure, teenagers are stupid, boring to talk to and nearly everything they do is pointless, but this also applies to people who are mentally handicapped. Yet if someone was to invent the Retard-Prod(tm) that jabs everyone with an IQ less than 60, the inventor would be lynched within a day. I was a teenager 2 years ago, I was pretty stupid back when I was 15, in the same way I'll discover I'm stupid now in another six or seven years, but generally I didn't hurt anyone and only wanted to mind my own buisiness and have other people mind theirs, most teenagers are like that. Picking on kids because you don't like their demographic is not cool and it never will be.
That explaination aside, I will explain how the law in my country differs from what I just said. There is a huge difference in law between the first and second type I described. This is why people who sell pirate music can go to jail (criminal law) whereas downloaders get sued (civil law). However, to my knowledge isn't any major difference in the law between the second and third type I described, if there is any I havn't heard of any precedent based on it. The law has been set up to work on actual damages that are easy to measure, otherwise it would be based on speculation and undermine the certainty of the system. Thus, misattribution of credit can't really be dealt with majorly by the law. If someone sells intelectual property that they are not authorised to redistribute they are guilty of the same crime, nomatter who gets the credit for the IP.
The law and morality are often too closely linked in peoples minds. The law is not intended to make people do the right thing, its intended to limit and localise the damage that people can cause when they do the wrong thing. It is not against the law to cheat on one's spouse yet it is against the law to drive over the speed limit on a quiet country road. One should never do either of cause, but I'd personally have far more sympathy for the leadfoot. The law is there to stop you from killing your neighbour or taking their stuff, otherwise its just up to you.
B.t.w. I'm from Australia, not the US. Our legal system is similarish to that of the US, but our legal code is far smaller relying on common law (precedent based stuff) for most of the details. IIRC in Australian law, criminal law can be used for far smaller copyright violations than it can in the US, though non-profit copying has never been prosicuted in criminal courts making it essentially a civil matter here as well.
There are many types of copyright violations with very different types of severity:
The first type is when someone goes out and downloads a song, lets say "...And Justice for All" by Metalica they have simply avoided paying for it by getting it through illegal means. This does not equate to any directly measurable loss of revenue because when the effective price of something is lowered, people are more likely to get it. Thus it is not only likely that someone would not have bought the CD if the pirate mp3s were not available, but it is actually more likely than not. This is of cause not a wholly moral practice, but it is cirtainly not as bad as many other evils that exist in society today. These are the infractions that occur on Kazaa and the ilk.
The second type of infraction is where one duplicates the media on which intellectual property is contained and sells it themselves at an actual monitary price. This is very different since there is a very obvious minimum bounds of loss of revinue caused by this which is of cause the markup on the pirated media. Motivation also changes in this type since there is a very clear misdirection in the chain of money where the pirate gets a clear financial benifit wheras they recieve none in the first set. This type of violation is criminal in most juristictions whereas the first type is wholly civil.
The third and most severe case is where intellectual property is rebranded and its credit is misappropriated to another party. This historically has been a result of industrial espionage but today, open source software is very vulnarable to it. This is equivalant to the Kazaa casual pirate claiming that they wrote "...And Justice for All". It means that not only does the pirate get the profit for the sale of the intellectual property instead of the legal creator, but those who are convinced to use this thing in future by seeing the rebranded thing will never go to the real author to get a copy for themselves. In either of the previous two types there is a likelyhood that the author will eventually get money or whatever they are looking for (usually an ego boost in the case of OSS) but in the third type this is not the cause. This is a far more thorough missapropriation of this IP and thus the term "stealing" is far more appropriate.
The reason that these three types are so neatly ranked is that as you can see, each one is a subset of the type before. Not everyone gets annoyed by violations every layer since OSS doesn't mind first or second type occuring but hates the third kind. SUN doesn't mind the first type occuring but hates the second and third with Java. Public domain doesn't mind any of the three. But no one will let one layer slide that is above something that annoys them.
This case with sony is clearly not a third type violation (which I would call stealing) but is a second type (which I would call piracy) since Sony did not claim to write this software or even advertise its existence. The GPL says you can do second type scenarios on the condition that you distribute the source code. Sony redistributed this IP for money but did not distribute the source code AFAIK so they voilated the rules on this level. This puts them on par with sleezy bootleg vendors on street courners and ebay pirate CD vendors but significantly worse than some kid downloading Nelly mp3s off Kazaa and significantly better than the jerks behind CherryOS.
So there you have it, why downloading some dumb pop song off the internet isn't as bad as taking credit for someone elses hard work and making millions of dollars off it and why sony are half way in between on this one.
I don't know, that might be something that has been changed in 2.12, that doesn't happen with 2.10, I know that.
As for the drag and copy, if you refer to inter-application dragging of text it is designed to stop you from accidently loosing data. For example, dragging a command from a word processor to a shell shouldn't cause one's document to then have a hole in it. If you find a nice colour in the gimp and drag it to the desktop, it shouldn't unset that colour, because that's a colour that you like and you might want to use it again. If you drag and image from a web page it is expected that it should copy the image, not log into the web server through SSH and delete the original image. When it isn't clear what the user wants, copying is often a safer option that moving.
As for dragging and dropping from external applications to unopened folders, I think that's probably just a mistake relating to a use case that its developers never thought of. I'm sure if you filed a bug report on Nautilus at bugzilla.gnome.org someone will take care of that when they get time (Nautilus is pretty understaffed at the moment I think). Make sure you're very specific though, I originally thought you meant dragging files from within nautilus. The Nautilus guys are very nice though and I'm sure they'll handle it well if given a properly written but report.
To be honest, I'm not exactly enamoured by the new Gnome file selector either. I think it lacks certain functionality that the old (ugly) one had (notably tab completion being well integrated), but there has been a lot of thought that has gone into it and I think it deserves to be discussed on that level. As far as it compares to other GUI file selectors I think it does ok. For some reason it doesn't have the ability to move or rename files like many other file managers yet it still supports drag and drop which I don't understand.
The whole hiding of paths in the save dialog until the little triangle is clicked thing simply confuses me. Sure, people will be wanting to save in a single directory 80% of the time, but putting the constrols required for the other 20% another click away seems like it gains little for anyone. The new file selector has a lot of shortcomings but making statements like "the GNOME file selector has to go" like that CyricZ dude did doesn't help anyone. The GNOME file selector needs to be fixed so it doesn't show an open contempt to its users' inteligence level, but generally its a good system and the fixes required to make it perfect arn't that huge.