I think Mike said it very well. Most of us internet geeks were people who were bullied as kids and young adults. We don't like bullies.
What ha happened here is someone just like me or Mike, donates their skill to take on a bully. So one guy is able to use his skills to did out this guys profile on MySpace. Someone else uses their skills to determine his website is plagiarized. Now multiply that by hundreds.
Then add in all the people that like to see a rumble.
I can't speak for Mike but I understand being willing to let it all burn down to take out a bully. I told my kids about being an outsider. How those on the inside make themselves feel better and more in by picking on those they consider on the "outside". I told them if i ever caught them doing it, they would wish they were never born. Decent people are decent, to people inside and outside their peer group.
Fluxbox, just like Openbox, Blackbox and Afterstep has a dock/wharf/slit. Back in the day. Taking 68 pixles away from the right hand side of the screen was expensive on a 640x480 or 1024x768. However with the modern 16:9 aspect ratio 1366x768 can easily afford to give up 68 pixels for the slit region. My ideal setup is image
Panel moved to the top
Panel resized to about 90% width of screen. Even with windows maximized there is always a clear spot in the top left and right hand corer to get a menu or scroll to a different desktop
Slit on the right top side of the screen. With wmbutton (launching apps) wmmsg (to know when text messages come in), wmix (to adjust volume), wmclockmon, wmkeyboard, (clock), pywmradio.py (Internet Streaming Radio App), wmwesther+, wmbiff (to track incoming email) and wmauda (multimedia control app).
This has EVERYTHING to do with software freedom. Per the GPL what they are required to do once they make their change to the affiliate link is make the source code available.
End of Story.
GPL covers copyright law, not ethics and the human heart. I can download RedHat and recompile with all references to RedHat removed and use Charlie Chaplin and call it the I-Hate-Chaplin distro. Does not matter if that is nice or ethical, What it is, is allowable by the GPL.
I think any downstream project has the right to change the revenue stream stuff. As far as I am concerned it is like a TV Commercial, there is a *posibility* that it will lead to revenue, not a guarantee. The only thing they have to do is make the source code available. Beyond that, I would say if there is a graphic or text that says donations, or purchases go back to the project, that stuff should be removed or changed to reflect who it is going to. if it is not mentioned at all, then "Mint" and anyone else is free to do what they want.
The current situation is interesting enough. What happens if the upstream affiliate code is out of date or broke? What if it causes the software to throw errors? Is it still sacred at that point?
It would be "nice" if no one ever hijacked the link. It would be "nice" if they shared revenue. But they are not required to. RMS put nothing in the software freedoms about not tampering with upstream revenue. Being a dick is showing a picture of Jerry's Kids and saying that all purchases via the music store for the month of January will go to MDA and in reality you are just pocketing the money yourself. Modifying links in the source code is what downstream projects do. Deal with it.
If you hand me an 8 year old computer without and operating system Linux is the way to go.
There is about a 90% chance I will be able to boot it and do a lspci -v to determine the hardware and what drivers are needed. Then a simple google for the pci id to find out what linux support there is and if I need to do anything to get it working with the distro at hand.
It is a total crap fest trying to find drivers for window systems that are that old. Maybe if it is a Dell or a Compaq you can still get the drivers at the website. Otherwise you end up at 100 window sites that want to see you driver doctor or some such tool for putting drivers on your system.
YMV but I have found Linux to be much more old-hardware friendly if someone does not hand you the driver CD's for it.
I would prefer to say this was open sourced over his dead body.
No kidding. He had to be in the grave before Apple would open source anything. I am just surprised by the timing. His body isn't even cold yet. I suspect there are those in Apple who are friends of open source but have been unable to do the right thing until the recent change in management. RMS was right.
I agree on the subsidies. I lived in a certain city in California back in 88-91. You could get a decent Apartment for $400 a month, usually with another $300 or so down. A dump would go for $325 with $250 deposit. Then the State implemented a "homeless" program to help homeless families. It would be up to $500 for 1 months rent and $1000 in 2nd month rent and deposits.
What soon happened is a certain portion of the welfare population would do the following. Stop paying rent, for 2 months spend the rent money on whatever they want. TV's, computers, going out on the town. Then they get the official "you must vacate" notice. take that to the Welfare Department and get a motel room for a week. During that week find a new place to stay. Welfare than pays the 1st month rent, last month rent and the deposit. Since you could only get these "homeless benefits" once a year. You spend your first month there getting to spend the money you would normally spend on rent that month on whatever, the state already paid rent for you. You then pay your rent for the next 9 months. You stop at that point. so months 11 and 12 pass and you are evicted. Back to step one, go down to the welfare department and show them your notice to vacate.
The land lords did not mind. After all. month 11 is paid for from the "last month down" and then month 12 is pretty much covered by the deposit. Also, the slum that you could normally only rent for $325 because no one that could afford to rent it would be able to come up with $325+$325+$300. However, now the homeless could get the money to move in without problem. So why not rent it out at $400 a month. Then they get $1200 from the state for someone moving in?
This had 2 other effects besides awarding those folks who were willing to stiff their landlords 3 months a year of free rent. Now the slumlords were renting for $400 a moth and you had to be able to come up with $1200 to move in. So effect one is it made it almost impossible for someone on welfare who played by the rules to be able to move from a bad place. How are they ever going to come up with $1200? The second effect in it hurt the lower middle class. What decent place that was renting for $400 and a total move in cost of $800 would keep doing that when the dump down the street rents for $400 and could get a $1200 for someone to move in? So now the decent place raised their rent to $500 with $1500 to move in.
So the "compassion" of helping homeless families did help some homeless families. It also created an incentive for dishonest land lords and welfare tenants. It also hurt many other people by driving rent prices and deposits up.
College loans are the same deal. College costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation. Why? Because you can get a loan for college no matter what it is going to cost. You don't have to shop around. Everyone does it. Colleges know if they raise tuition and other costs, students will just take out a bigger load that has no effect on them while they are in college.
If colleges could only have classes for people who could afford to go. Then there would be a lot more part time students who work a job and take 1 or 2 classes a term at night.
Colleges are horrible. A classroom costs thousands of dollars to build. There are 24 hours in a day and that room is only used 4 to 8 hours a day. It is being "wasted" 50% to 80% of the time. The last time I took a class, my instructors gave lectures that were word for word from the book. Then I took tests from the book and they graded it. I was paying $150 for a "college text book" that was not as good as a "For Dummies Book" and $300 for someone to proctor me on the questions in the book that I already knew the answer to. Unless an instructor can provide something more than what I can get from a video on Youtube or purchasing a "For Dummies Book" I see some major changes coming to education and what it costs to attend college.
While on the subject. Text books are a rip off too. There have been new books on "Algebra" published every year. You could get books from 1850 to 2011. The book from 2011 is not any better than the one from 1850. The only thing the new book offers is the fact publishers can charge more for it.
On a 1024x768 display the dock takes up precious space. On a display that is 1280x768 or 1440x900, etc the 68 pixels used by a dock on the right hand side of the screen are hardly missed. In my case my network status, download and upload speeds, the status of several servers, my volume control and mp3 player all sit in the dock. Once quick glance to my right and I know the status of everything that is important for me to keep an eye on. Actually most of the time I can just ignore it. If an indicator goes from green to red I notice it within 15 to 30 seconds most of the time.
However, 99% of the computing world are living fine with a dock/wharf free experience. To each his own.
No I mean on a 22 inch monitor it is easier to get around and get work done with only a mouse. The way the Unity and Gnome Shell interfaces work, they seem better suited for smaller touch screen devices. So the way users who don't want to constantly jockey a mouse from one edge of the screen to the other edge of the screen deal with it is by using shortcut keys.
I would say a major selling point of KDE and Gnome was that you did not have to use short cut keys to be able to be productive with their desktop. When someone complains about the amount of mouse swiping they have to do, proponents of Gnome 3 and Unity start touting shortcut keys.
Which I find ironic, if I started talking about how great life is in AfterStep or enlightenment because of my shortcut keys, Gnome 2 users would say that Gnome 2 is so good you don't need to use all of those short cut keys if you don't want to. Now those same users are saying Gnome 3 is great and anyone that mentions it's shortcomings compared to Gnome 2, are reminded they can get around those shortcomings by using hot keys.
What I am saying is that both Gnome 1-2 and KDE 1-2-3-4 were designed so that non-power users could do almost everything the needed to do easily with just a mouse and a few clicks. Of course both KDE and Gnome offered keyboard shortcuts.
The contrast is that Fluxbox/Afterstep, etc do not always provide an interface that is optimized for the user that wants to rely on only the mouse. Proponents of those desktops would say they are more productive because of the use of shortcut keys. On the other side of this was GNOME and KDE which offered an environment where a user could be very productive without ever learning a shortcut key.
Now both Unity and Gnome Shell 3 have given up some of that ease of use that Gnome 2 offered mouse-heavy users. How do they recommend those users cope with this? By using short cut keys.
The same thing those of us who use WM over DE's have said, we dont' miss those feautres that DE's offer over WMs because we make up for it with shortcut keys.
In general my hands leave the keyboard much less now as well - alt-tab switching with that drop down selector is very intuitive and the search/launch is much nicer and more idiot proof than alt-f2 or continually opening terminals.
The irony of all of this is back in the day, many linux folks who were users of Fluxbox, Openbox, Blackbox, Afterstep, E16, etc said that they were more productive with their desktops because of all of their custom short-cut keys. Users of KDE and Gnome scoffed at this and said that icons, menus and mice were the way to go. 10 years later and the users of Unity and the Gnome 3 Shell tell us how productive their environments are. Both of these environments are optimized for "touch" and small display size. With larger screen monitors they fall far short of the "mouse friendliness" that Gnome 2 possesses. How do they make up for this? By boosting their productivity with shortcut keys.
Yes, that would be the very same type of shortcut keys we were told were not needed and users would not adapt to using. Welcome back to 1999 computing 2011 style. A keyboard driven interface that needs 2 gigs of ram and an i5 processor with a 256mb nvidia graphcis card.
Of course as I say that I go back to work on my Fluxbox driven workstation. Using the same short-cut keys I defined 10 years ago and continue to take with me by moving my.keys file to every new computer I get. Maybe they will discover dock apps next.
We had a store manger who saved several years worth of email in his Outlook "Trash" folder. He took the day off and a manger from another location was covering for him and emptied the trash in Outlook. The next day when he got back to work he was VERY freaked out.
I was able to "damage" the first 8 bytes of the pst file and run fixpst to get all the mail back. At which point he was lectured on creating a folder not named "Trash" to keep email in.
I have slax set up with partimage. Here are the steps I take 1. Create a 5 gig partition for the backup image 2. Create a folder on the hard drive named slax and copy all the files from the slax CD into this folder. 3. Create a recovery script that goes in C:\slax\rootcopy\usr\bin 4. Create a link to it using a.desktop file like C:\slax\rootcopy\root\Desktop\recovery.desktop 5. Rename C:\NTLDR to C:\NTLDRXP 6. Rename the GRUB4DOS bootlader to C:\NTLDR 7. Have C:\Menu.lst have 2 options. 1 to boot the default os after 5 seconds and another option to load slax. 8. Boot to slax. If you like zero out the pagefile get get better compression dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hda1/pagefile.sys bs=1M count=1524 then umount hda1 and use partimage to create a backup on hda2.
This way slax is loaded off the hard drive and into RAM and automatically mounts both/dev/hda1 and/dev/hda2. The recovery script unmounts hda1 and uses the image on hd2 to restore hda1.
Since an XP install easily will fit on a 4GB DVD you can instead make a recovery DVD with slax where the recovery image is on the DVD instead of the hard drive.
Or you can make a recovery CD that just boots a copy of slax and expects to have a recovery image file on hda2.
In my case I work at a company with 7 locations and a server at each location. I have the slax setup on each XP workstation and the latest recovery image stored on the server. We don't use roaming profiles due to Outlook with Exchange. But if someone is having a problem with a system I convert their profile to a romaning profile, it backs up to the server, I then reboot the computer to slax (by modifying menu.lst) mount the networkshare, reimage the hard drive, reboot, rejoin the domain and log in with the roaming profile. At that point I convert the profile back to nonromaing. And set up the local printer.
I would be more than willing to provide in depth details, scripts and instructions on how to remaster slax ans necessary.
Shoot, I would be happy if I could use the scroll wheel on the volume control in the tray. Since I have been using that in Linux for the last 10 years. I have been hoping that Microsoft would notice this feature and pick it up.
My wife was a huge KDE 3.5 fan. She now uses KDE 4.6 and is liking it very much. That is an accomplishment. Here requirements were 1) A translucent kicker, 2) A classic menu 3) A classic desktop 4) A wallpaper rotator. KDE 4.2 and onward deliver.
That is the genius of KDE. Here is a gross over generalization. The plasma engine runs in the background, Then there are a few "containers". Each container has rules about how plasmoids can be arranged and provide a few menu/configuration options. Then everything else is a plasmoid. For all intent and purposes consider each plasmoid a resizeable canvas using SGV and truetype fonts.
So a menu, it is plasmoid. Tasklist, it is a plasmoid. Clock, yup, it is a plasmoid as well. Throw them into any container and away you go. Consider the desktop a container, consider the taskbar a container called a panel. Now take these parts and the dozens (if not hundreds) of plasmoids and design the desktop you want.
The cool thing here is that the "laptop" or "netbook" or "tablet" or "phone" interface uses the exact same plasmoids, and even uses many of the containers. All it takes to customize to some new device type is for someone to write a new "container" that encapsulates the behavior they want, and any new plasmoids they think will be useful. As an added bonus, those plasmoids will work on all other KDE4 systems.
The majority of KDE marches ahead doing what they have always done, working on a great desktop. Very little time or energy is wasted in working on these other environments. A small team of 2 or 3 programmers could come up with their own "container" and create a new metaphor for their device environment. All without stealing away people, mind share or resources from the main KDE project.
It depends on the union, but the problem now is it is not sustainable. When I city has to pay a lifetime pension to a firefighter who only works for 20 years. So they guy works for 20 years max, maybe from 24 to 44. Then they pay the pension from the time to are 44 till the pass away at 80 or 90. There are places where for every working firefighter there are 3 drawing a pension. Yes. A city with a force of 20 fire fighters are paying for 80 fire fighters (60 of them retired).
That is not sustainable. There is a point where taxpayers can't pay any more. There is a point where a business is bleeding money because of these things. All of these workers have been promised things (via their contract) that both the company and the union knew were not sustainable. But it was a problem someone else would have to deal with in 40 years. Then a new contract was negotiated and it was a problem that would need to be dealt with in 30 years. Now it is a problem where the people who are currently negotiating are having to say "Hey, this is not sustainable, and it will FAIL on my watch."
I am sure there are business and industries so awash in money, or that currently pay their workers so poorly, that they should pay more, more pay, more benefits and more retirement. For the must part must business and government entities that have unionized employees are looking at major shortfalls in the funding of pensions and benefits for retired workers.
If it is like anything else, the problem is not employees who are working. After all, it is easy enough to know if you can cover their pay and healthcare. It is retired workers that are the issue. Companies and Governments for the last 50 or 60 years have agreed to terms that both they and those in charge at the Unions knew would lead to a situation where for every working employee, there are 3 former employees being paid a retirement for 20, 30 or 40 years and benefits. That is not sustainable.
One of three things have to happen a) those organizations go out of business and default, leaving those retirees with nothing, b) the government will allow these organizations to default on these obligations or c) those currently working will have to pay a large burden AND be promised a lot less themselves for retirement.
No we are all evil. We are evil because we want our books, magazines, music, toasters, cars, etc at the best price possible. You know that companies like the one you work at are put out of business by Wal-Mart, yet to maximize your paycheck, you shop at Wal-Mart, not caring that it puts someone else someplace out of work. All you care about is that you are getting $240 worth of groceries for $198.
Someone always contradicts you on Slashdot. I would love to hear from the guy who only buys American, does not shop at Wal-Mart, does not order stuff online. This means you only shop at local high-priced grocery stores, prefer the local shoe store over Sears, Target or Wal-Mart. You only buy new cars, and always pay top dollar at the local car dealership. This also means you spend about 60% more than I do to live the same quality of lifestyle the rest of us are living.
I know I "should" support my local bookstore, but the prices are better at Amazon. The local book store also does not offer any titles for my ebook reader.
People keep using the term "manged code" in a manner I do not understand. Per WikiPedia Managed Code = Code managed by the CLR, thus by extension, code that runs on a VM. So if I write C++ that compiles to a normal binary, it is unmanaged code. If I write C++ that compiles to bytecode that runs on the CLR, then it is managed code. Managed Code certainly sounds better than Unmanaged Code. Wtih unmanaged having so many negative connotations who would want the old broken down badness, instead of the new hotness?
If "the value of managed code" means it byte code and runs on a VM that only runs on the win32/win64 platform then that sucks. If what people mean is garbage collection, and a rapid development gui/debugger then that is another thing. However at that point, I don't think the term "managed code" is appropriate. Unless you are also saying that Java is managed code. Since it is bytecode that runs on a VM that provides a garbage collector.
I have to agree. There is even the possibility that with only 1 hard drive manufacturer left in the game with a limited R & D budget that gains in storage capacity on hard drives will slow down. Not to mention limited production runs will increase the cost of the media.
Whereas SSD's will become more commonplace, the cost of production will fall and capacities will rise. As long as some form of optical media does not come along and make SSD's obsolete. SSD's have a bright future in front of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Mike said it very well. Most of us internet geeks were people who were bullied as kids and young adults. We don't like bullies.
What ha happened here is someone just like me or Mike, donates their skill to take on a bully. So one guy is able to use his skills to did out this guys profile on MySpace. Someone else uses their skills to determine his website is plagiarized. Now multiply that by hundreds.
Then add in all the people that like to see a rumble.
I can't speak for Mike but I understand being willing to let it all burn down to take out a bully. I told my kids about being an outsider. How those on the inside make themselves feel better and more in by picking on those they consider on the "outside". I told them if i ever caught them doing it, they would wish they were never born. Decent people are decent, to people inside and outside their peer group.
Fluxbox, just like Openbox, Blackbox and Afterstep has a dock/wharf/slit. Back in the day. Taking 68 pixles away from the right hand side of the screen was expensive on a 640x480 or 1024x768. However with the modern 16:9 aspect ratio 1366x768 can easily afford to give up 68 pixels for the slit region. My ideal setup is image
Lightweight and fast.
Well then if we are talking ethics why are we running Mint anyways?
It is also common knowledge that most people do not purchase their music via Banshee.
Since most folks will never purchase music this way, there is not much point in them being concerned in who gets the revenue.
Source code is Source code.
Hate the game, not the player.
This has EVERYTHING to do with software freedom. Per the GPL what they are required to do once they make their change to the affiliate link is make the source code available.
End of Story.
GPL covers copyright law, not ethics and the human heart. I can download RedHat and recompile with all references to RedHat removed and use Charlie Chaplin and call it the I-Hate-Chaplin distro. Does not matter if that is nice or ethical, What it is, is allowable by the GPL.
I think any downstream project has the right to change the revenue stream stuff. As far as I am concerned it is like a TV Commercial, there is a *posibility* that it will lead to revenue, not a guarantee. The only thing they have to do is make the source code available. Beyond that, I would say if there is a graphic or text that says donations, or purchases go back to the project, that stuff should be removed or changed to reflect who it is going to. if it is not mentioned at all, then "Mint" and anyone else is free to do what they want.
The current situation is interesting enough. What happens if the upstream affiliate code is out of date or broke? What if it causes the software to throw errors? Is it still sacred at that point?
It would be "nice" if no one ever hijacked the link. It would be "nice" if they shared revenue. But they are not required to. RMS put nothing in the software freedoms about not tampering with upstream revenue. Being a dick is showing a picture of Jerry's Kids and saying that all purchases via the music store for the month of January will go to MDA and in reality you are just pocketing the money yourself. Modifying links in the source code is what downstream projects do. Deal with it.
Ubuntu dropping mono is proof that there is a God and He loves us.
My apologies to Benjamin Franklin.
If you hand me an 8 year old computer without and operating system Linux is the way to go.
There is about a 90% chance I will be able to boot it and do a lspci -v to determine the hardware and what drivers are needed. Then a simple google for the pci id to find out what linux support there is and if I need to do anything to get it working with the distro at hand.
It is a total crap fest trying to find drivers for window systems that are that old. Maybe if it is a Dell or a Compaq you can still get the drivers at the website. Otherwise you end up at 100 window sites that want to see you driver doctor or some such tool for putting drivers on your system.
YMV but I have found Linux to be much more old-hardware friendly if someone does not hand you the driver CD's for it.
I would prefer to say this was open sourced over his dead body.
No kidding. He had to be in the grave before Apple would open source anything. I am just surprised by the timing. His body isn't even cold yet. I suspect there are those in Apple who are friends of open source but have been unable to do the right thing until the recent change in management. RMS was right.
I agree on the subsidies. I lived in a certain city in California back in 88-91. You could get a decent Apartment for $400 a month, usually with another $300 or so down. A dump would go for $325 with $250 deposit. Then the State implemented a "homeless" program to help homeless families. It would be up to $500 for 1 months rent and $1000 in 2nd month rent and deposits.
What soon happened is a certain portion of the welfare population would do the following. Stop paying rent, for 2 months spend the rent money on whatever they want. TV's, computers, going out on the town. Then they get the official "you must vacate" notice. take that to the Welfare Department and get a motel room for a week. During that week find a new place to stay. Welfare than pays the 1st month rent, last month rent and the deposit. Since you could only get these "homeless benefits" once a year. You spend your first month there getting to spend the money you would normally spend on rent that month on whatever, the state already paid rent for you. You then pay your rent for the next 9 months. You stop at that point. so months 11 and 12 pass and you are evicted. Back to step one, go down to the welfare department and show them your notice to vacate.
The land lords did not mind. After all. month 11 is paid for from the "last month down" and then month 12 is pretty much covered by the deposit. Also, the slum that you could normally only rent for $325 because no one that could afford to rent it would be able to come up with $325+$325+$300. However, now the homeless could get the money to move in without problem. So why not rent it out at $400 a month. Then they get $1200 from the state for someone moving in?
This had 2 other effects besides awarding those folks who were willing to stiff their landlords 3 months a year of free rent. Now the slumlords were renting for $400 a moth and you had to be able to come up with $1200 to move in. So effect one is it made it almost impossible for someone on welfare who played by the rules to be able to move from a bad place. How are they ever going to come up with $1200? The second effect in it hurt the lower middle class. What decent place that was renting for $400 and a total move in cost of $800 would keep doing that when the dump down the street rents for $400 and could get a $1200 for someone to move in? So now the decent place raised their rent to $500 with $1500 to move in.
So the "compassion" of helping homeless families did help some homeless families. It also created an incentive for dishonest land lords and welfare tenants. It also hurt many other people by driving rent prices and deposits up.
College loans are the same deal. College costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation. Why? Because you can get a loan for college no matter what it is going to cost. You don't have to shop around. Everyone does it. Colleges know if they raise tuition and other costs, students will just take out a bigger load that has no effect on them while they are in college.
If colleges could only have classes for people who could afford to go. Then there would be a lot more part time students who work a job and take 1 or 2 classes a term at night.
Colleges are horrible. A classroom costs thousands of dollars to build. There are 24 hours in a day and that room is only used 4 to 8 hours a day. It is being "wasted" 50% to 80% of the time. The last time I took a class, my instructors gave lectures that were word for word from the book. Then I took tests from the book and they graded it. I was paying $150 for a "college text book" that was not as good as a "For Dummies Book" and $300 for someone to proctor me on the questions in the book that I already knew the answer to. Unless an instructor can provide something more than what I can get from a video on Youtube or purchasing a "For Dummies Book" I see some major changes coming to education and what it costs to attend college.
While on the subject. Text books are a rip off too. There have been new books on "Algebra" published every year. You could get books from 1850 to 2011. The book from 2011 is not any better than the one from 1850. The only thing the new book offers is the fact publishers can charge more for it.
On a 1024x768 display the dock takes up precious space. On a display that is 1280x768 or 1440x900, etc the 68 pixels used by a dock on the right hand side of the screen are hardly missed. In my case my network status, download and upload speeds, the status of several servers, my volume control and mp3 player all sit in the dock. Once quick glance to my right and I know the status of everything that is important for me to keep an eye on. Actually most of the time I can just ignore it. If an indicator goes from green to red I notice it within 15 to 30 seconds most of the time.
However, 99% of the computing world are living fine with a dock/wharf free experience. To each his own.
No I mean on a 22 inch monitor it is easier to get around and get work done with only a mouse. The way the Unity and Gnome Shell interfaces work, they seem better suited for smaller touch screen devices. So the way users who don't want to constantly jockey a mouse from one edge of the screen to the other edge of the screen deal with it is by using shortcut keys.
I would say a major selling point of KDE and Gnome was that you did not have to use short cut keys to be able to be productive with their desktop. When someone complains about the amount of mouse swiping they have to do, proponents of Gnome 3 and Unity start touting shortcut keys.
Which I find ironic, if I started talking about how great life is in AfterStep or enlightenment because of my shortcut keys, Gnome 2 users would say that Gnome 2 is so good you don't need to use all of those short cut keys if you don't want to. Now those same users are saying Gnome 3 is great and anyone that mentions it's shortcomings compared to Gnome 2, are reminded they can get around those shortcomings by using hot keys.
What I am saying is that both Gnome 1-2 and KDE 1-2-3-4 were designed so that non-power users could do almost everything the needed to do easily with just a mouse and a few clicks. Of course both KDE and Gnome offered keyboard shortcuts.
The contrast is that Fluxbox/Afterstep, etc do not always provide an interface that is optimized for the user that wants to rely on only the mouse. Proponents of those desktops would say they are more productive because of the use of shortcut keys. On the other side of this was GNOME and KDE which offered an environment where a user could be very productive without ever learning a shortcut key.
Now both Unity and Gnome Shell 3 have given up some of that ease of use that Gnome 2 offered mouse-heavy users. How do they recommend those users cope with this? By using short cut keys.
The same thing those of us who use WM over DE's have said, we dont' miss those feautres that DE's offer over WMs because we make up for it with shortcut keys.
In general my hands leave the keyboard much less now as well - alt-tab switching with that drop down selector is very intuitive and the search/launch is much nicer and more idiot proof than alt-f2 or continually opening terminals.
The irony of all of this is back in the day, many linux folks who were users of Fluxbox, Openbox, Blackbox, Afterstep, E16, etc said that they were more productive with their desktops because of all of their custom short-cut keys. Users of KDE and Gnome scoffed at this and said that icons, menus and mice were the way to go. 10 years later and the users of Unity and the Gnome 3 Shell tell us how productive their environments are. Both of these environments are optimized for "touch" and small display size. With larger screen monitors they fall far short of the "mouse friendliness" that Gnome 2 possesses. How do they make up for this? By boosting their productivity with shortcut keys.
Yes, that would be the very same type of shortcut keys we were told were not needed and users would not adapt to using. Welcome back to 1999 computing 2011 style. A keyboard driven interface that needs 2 gigs of ram and an i5 processor with a 256mb nvidia graphcis card.
Of course as I say that I go back to work on my Fluxbox driven workstation. Using the same short-cut keys I defined 10 years ago and continue to take with me by moving my .keys file to every new computer I get. Maybe they will discover dock apps next.
We had a store manger who saved several years worth of email in his Outlook "Trash" folder. He took the day off and a manger from another location was covering for him and emptied the trash in Outlook. The next day when he got back to work he was VERY freaked out.
I was able to "damage" the first 8 bytes of the pst file and run fixpst to get all the mail back. At which point he was lectured on creating a folder not named "Trash" to keep email in.
I have slax set up with partimage. Here are the steps I take .desktop file like C:\slax\rootcopy\root\Desktop\recovery.desktop
1. Create a 5 gig partition for the backup image
2. Create a folder on the hard drive named slax and copy all the files from the slax CD into this folder.
3. Create a recovery script that goes in C:\slax\rootcopy\usr\bin
4. Create a link to it using a
5. Rename C:\NTLDR to C:\NTLDRXP
6. Rename the GRUB4DOS bootlader to C:\NTLDR
7. Have C:\Menu.lst have 2 options. 1 to boot the default os after 5 seconds and another option to load slax.
8. Boot to slax. If you like zero out the pagefile get get better compression dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hda1/pagefile.sys bs=1M count=1524 then umount hda1 and use partimage to create a backup on hda2.
This way slax is loaded off the hard drive and into RAM and automatically mounts both /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2. The recovery script unmounts hda1 and uses the image on hd2 to restore hda1.
Since an XP install easily will fit on a 4GB DVD you can instead make a recovery DVD with slax where the recovery image is on the DVD instead of the hard drive.
Or you can make a recovery CD that just boots a copy of slax and expects to have a recovery image file on hda2.
In my case I work at a company with 7 locations and a server at each location. I have the slax setup on each XP workstation and the latest recovery image stored on the server. We don't use roaming profiles due to Outlook with Exchange. But if someone is having a problem with a system I convert their profile to a romaning profile, it backs up to the server, I then reboot the computer to slax (by modifying menu.lst) mount the networkshare, reimage the hard drive, reboot, rejoin the domain and log in with the roaming profile. At that point I convert the profile back to nonromaing. And set up the local printer.
I would be more than willing to provide in depth details, scripts and instructions on how to remaster slax ans necessary.
Virtual desktops?
Shoot, I would be happy if I could use the scroll wheel on the volume control in the tray. Since I have been using that in Linux for the last 10 years. I have been hoping that Microsoft would notice this feature and pick it up.
You can always switch to the classic menu.
My wife was a huge KDE 3.5 fan. She now uses KDE 4.6 and is liking it very much. That is an accomplishment. Here requirements were 1) A translucent kicker, 2) A classic menu 3) A classic desktop 4) A wallpaper rotator. KDE 4.2 and onward deliver.
That is the genius of KDE. Here is a gross over generalization. The plasma engine runs in the background, Then there are a few "containers". Each container has rules about how plasmoids can be arranged and provide a few menu/configuration options. Then everything else is a plasmoid. For all intent and purposes consider each plasmoid a resizeable canvas using SGV and truetype fonts.
So a menu, it is plasmoid. Tasklist, it is a plasmoid. Clock, yup, it is a plasmoid as well. Throw them into any container and away you go. Consider the desktop a container, consider the taskbar a container called a panel. Now take these parts and the dozens (if not hundreds) of plasmoids and design the desktop you want.
The cool thing here is that the "laptop" or "netbook" or "tablet" or "phone" interface uses the exact same plasmoids, and even uses many of the containers. All it takes to customize to some new device type is for someone to write a new "container" that encapsulates the behavior they want, and any new plasmoids they think will be useful. As an added bonus, those plasmoids will work on all other KDE4 systems.
The majority of KDE marches ahead doing what they have always done, working on a great desktop. Very little time or energy is wasted in working on these other environments. A small team of 2 or 3 programmers could come up with their own "container" and create a new metaphor for their device environment. All without stealing away people, mind share or resources from the main KDE project.
It depends on the union, but the problem now is it is not sustainable. When I city has to pay a lifetime pension to a firefighter who only works for 20 years. So they guy works for 20 years max, maybe from 24 to 44. Then they pay the pension from the time to are 44 till the pass away at 80 or 90. There are places where for every working firefighter there are 3 drawing a pension. Yes. A city with a force of 20 fire fighters are paying for 80 fire fighters (60 of them retired).
That is not sustainable. There is a point where taxpayers can't pay any more. There is a point where a business is bleeding money because of these things. All of these workers have been promised things (via their contract) that both the company and the union knew were not sustainable. But it was a problem someone else would have to deal with in 40 years. Then a new contract was negotiated and it was a problem that would need to be dealt with in 30 years. Now it is a problem where the people who are currently negotiating are having to say "Hey, this is not sustainable, and it will FAIL on my watch."
I am sure there are business and industries so awash in money, or that currently pay their workers so poorly, that they should pay more, more pay, more benefits and more retirement. For the must part must business and government entities that have unionized employees are looking at major shortfalls in the funding of pensions and benefits for retired workers.
If it is like anything else, the problem is not employees who are working. After all, it is easy enough to know if you can cover their pay and healthcare. It is retired workers that are the issue. Companies and Governments for the last 50 or 60 years have agreed to terms that both they and those in charge at the Unions knew would lead to a situation where for every working employee, there are 3 former employees being paid a retirement for 20, 30 or 40 years and benefits. That is not sustainable.
One of three things have to happen a) those organizations go out of business and default, leaving those retirees with nothing, b) the government will allow these organizations to default on these obligations or c) those currently working will have to pay a large burden AND be promised a lot less themselves for retirement.
No we are all evil. We are evil because we want our books, magazines, music, toasters, cars, etc at the best price possible. You know that companies like the one you work at are put out of business by Wal-Mart, yet to maximize your paycheck, you shop at Wal-Mart, not caring that it puts someone else someplace out of work. All you care about is that you are getting $240 worth of groceries for $198.
Someone always contradicts you on Slashdot. I would love to hear from the guy who only buys American, does not shop at Wal-Mart, does not order stuff online. This means you only shop at local high-priced grocery stores, prefer the local shoe store over Sears, Target or Wal-Mart. You only buy new cars, and always pay top dollar at the local car dealership. This also means you spend about 60% more than I do to live the same quality of lifestyle the rest of us are living.
I know I "should" support my local bookstore, but the prices are better at Amazon. The local book store also does not offer any titles for my ebook reader.
Self interest is an evil we all participate in.
Obviously I can't say how productive Number6.2 is,
I would say twice as productive as Number3.1 is.
People keep using the term "manged code" in a manner I do not understand. Per WikiPedia Managed Code = Code managed by the CLR, thus by extension, code that runs on a VM. So if I write C++ that compiles to a normal binary, it is unmanaged code. If I write C++ that compiles to bytecode that runs on the CLR, then it is managed code. Managed Code certainly sounds better than Unmanaged Code. Wtih unmanaged having so many negative connotations who would want the old broken down badness, instead of the new hotness?
If "the value of managed code" means it byte code and runs on a VM that only runs on the win32/win64 platform then that sucks. If what people mean is garbage collection, and a rapid development gui/debugger then that is another thing. However at that point, I don't think the term "managed code" is appropriate. Unless you are also saying that Java is managed code. Since it is bytecode that runs on a VM that provides a garbage collector.
I have to agree. There is even the possibility that with only 1 hard drive manufacturer left in the game with a limited R & D budget that gains in storage capacity on hard drives will slow down. Not to mention limited production runs will increase the cost of the media.
Whereas SSD's will become more commonplace, the cost of production will fall and capacities will rise. As long as some form of optical media does not come along and make SSD's obsolete. SSD's have a bright future in front of them.