I downloaded Kubuntu and tried it on a desktop that uses 100% linux-happy hardware.
Kubuntu sucks. Try KDE on a distro that actually puts does KDE properly instead of as an afterthought: Mandriva or SuSe for mainstream ditros, some people like Mepis, Arch is more geeky but has KDE mod as well as standard KDE.
If Gnome had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing Gnome as Mandrake/Mandriva has spent on polishing KDE, we would not have this discussion.... Mandriva (i.e. Gmandriva) would already rule the desktop.
Mandriva has always been "desktop-neutral" and have put as much effort into polishing Gnome as KDE. That the KDE version looks more polished tells you something about KDE.
I agree with you about letting users be happy with their choices, but it makes it impossible to know what it is best to recommend to a new user.
The whole question is incomplete and flawed. What chat network/protocol does he want to use? What is wrong with Kopete? Why does he rule out aMSN, SKype etc. Has he tried Qute (what used to be Wengophone). Ekiga? GYachi?
Some of these (Ekiga at least), use open protocols that allow interoperation with people using different clients on other platforms, some are cross-platform themselves (Ekiga, Skype), some use propreitray protocols to allow inter-operation (aMSN, GYachi).
If you ask a question, state what the actual problem is!
Except there is someone left who likes the look of TK.
The look of Tk has improved drastically in its successor, tile. It can use Windows, MacOS, Gtk and Qt native themes, although the Gtk is still in an early version and I do not knpw if it is usable yet.
1: If Google needs your permission to display the content, they can say "You grant Google permission to display or present the content on your behalf, within the scope of the service you are being provided."
RTFA, that is roughly what they do. The agreement goes on to day:
"This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services."
Illiteracy rate is high, many countries don't have stable and enough electricity let alone the number of PCs to use the inet effectively.
I live in a third world country, well within the area this will cover. Most people are literate, most households have electricity, you can buy a second hand PC in any town for a few tens of dollars (and about a quarter of the population have bought mobile phones, which start at similar prices). Even as it is, broadband is available in cities and is perfectly commercially viable.
Yes there are a lot of people who cannot benefit from this, but there are also a lot who can.
Take a look at the number of cars on the road in the third world. Anyone who can afford a car, can easily afford a cheap computer and internet connection. Anyone who can afford a motorbike can probably afford it!
You seem to think that people either live at first world standards, or on the edge of starvation. Most of the world's population is somewhere in between.
Re:Isn't that bad for electronics?
on
The Google Navy
·
· Score: 1
It's not like the US Navy, every cruise line, and countless shipbuilders haven't ever put a computer on a seagoing vessel before.
Not to mention every other navy in the world! true, and I am sure it is technically possible. However, doing whatever they do to protect electronics for sea water might be too expensive do to for a whole data centre for it to be economically feasible.
Net neutrality would mean that there should be no prioritising of traffic by content provider: i.e. you should not slow down some websites, to speed others up.
The idea is to prevent anti-competitive, anti-consumer choice agreements between telcos and other big companies that squeeze everyone else out.
I see no problem with providing different service levels to different end users. It already happens, and I have never heard of anyone finding it objectionable.
I doubt many people have a problem with charging per gigabyte either.
Long hours computing causes me to forget food... and sleep... and water... and stretching... but interestingly, not sex!
So at least you get some exercise
Are your long hours computing surfing for porn?
Re:Isn't that bad for electronics?
on
The Google Navy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Computers can go in a matter of months in a location really close to the sea.
On the other hand, I know people, in the town I have just moved to, who live only tens of meters from the sea who have had no problems - but they have a massive rampart between them and the sea that (I think) blocks the spray.
Ships are going to be tricky but designs meant to keep salt spray out may be workable.
I agree, except for the ad-free bit (which is unenforceable anyway). Ads often appear on useful text rich sites (OK, I am biased, but my pages are definitely usually better than their equivalents on various ad-free sites). What we need is a simple text heavy browser and a heavy web app plugin. They have existed for a long time: HTML for the first, and Java, Flash, Active X, etc. for the second.
There lies the problem. There was no consensus on what the latter should be with lots of choices, all proprietary. The result has been that HTML + Javascript as been extended to do both.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I hate the memory usage (and having to kill it 3 times a day).
I have no problem, and I do not need to.
I hate the developer's attitude. (We're removing feature X or changing feature Y because it's the way of the future and to those who complain tough).
What do you want them to do? Never change anything?
Coolbar is an abomination and an annoyance all in one change
I think it is the most useful addition to browsers since Opera added tabs a decade ago. Chrome has something similar, but with the addition of Google Suggest.
Chrome actually seems to have lot of features that people complained as causing bloat about when Firefox added them: spell checking for example.
I do not particularly want a browser that is primarily designed to run web apps. I want something that allows me to find, read, sort and store information on the web as easily as possible. The best so far is Firefox. What I really want is a cross between Forefox and Konqueror.
I do like some Chrome features (process per tab, for example), but I want my FF extensions too.
Rational faith is not blind. It is based on experience or reason.
Furthermore faith is not synonymous with belief. You could believe in God's existence without having faith in him (although vice-versa would obviously not make sense).
Manufacturers policies vary in different countries - I think because MS's do. I had no difficulty buying a Lenovo without OS, Dells were also available OS free, so was just about everything else.
Blame web masters who put the Google Analytics javascript in the header, instead of the bottom of the page.
Yes, Google did recommend the former years ago, but it was a bad idea and they changed their recommendation years ago.
"Women should abandon their careers to beome housewives" gets modded +5? WTF is wrong with this website?
Actually he says, "such as". it is one of a range of alternative solutions. I would certainly advocate both parents spending more time with children, and it is just as good for fathers to stay at home to look after children as for mothers to do so.
1. The vast majority of women in the US have little interest in permanently abandoning their careers.
It would be better for the children if parents worked less and spent more time with them
2. Even if they wanted to, a lot of households NEED two incomes to make ends meet.
Even though, in the vast majority of cases, each parent by themselves earns a lot more in real terms than households with a single earner typically did, say, fifty years ago? It would be more accurate to say they need to incomes to keep up with the lifestyle of other people with two incomes.
3. On-site daycare is a good way to attract employees, because it provides a benefit (having your kids in the same building) that is worth a lot more to the employees than it costs to the company.
True, it is attractive to employees, cut it can be very expensive to provide- as it was in this case. You might be better off just paying people more.
4. If you lure those employees in with this benefit, thus potentially drawing them away from another job with a better salary, and then ditch the benefit, you're screwing them. I dunno if it's "age discrimination," but it's at least somewhat a dick move.
Of course it is not age discrimination. Google's mistake was subsidising it too much, or providing too high a level of childcare, and landing themselves with an unsustainable cost.
Many major distros have closed source drivers in their repos. Mandriva does for example (they also offer a completely free version of the distro). So there is nothing Ubuntu specific about this.
You mean like the Debian OpenSSL patches, the community audited wide open security hole for mor than 1 1/2 years?
Better != perfect
Communities where maintainers know each other by nothing else than email can easily be infiltrated by "hostile" talent. They offer high quality contributions, seem to spend very much time discussion patches with much professionalism and politeness. In the end it might be just the made up personality Jon Doe of some organization X waiting to place just this one unsuspicious line within the code.
How many examples of that happening are there? For the same cost (of the time spent contributing) could the malicious party not bribe a programmer working on proprietary software, or or infiltrate a corporation in some other way.
When using commercial code, organization X needs much more than a diligent virtual personality but direct access to the corporate infrastructure.
I assume by commerical you mean proprietary. Any new hire has direct access to the corporate infrastructure because they need it to work. I have known someone to bring down a mission critical client system by-passing QC for a patch though negligence. How much more could someone malicious do?
both ATi and Intel have got a 2 year head start on supporting Ubuntu out of the box. You can say Ubuntu isn't linux, but it's what all those Dell buyers are going to see.
I was not aware that there are specific "Ubuntu" drivers. Can you confirm that is what you mean - otherwise that last sentence does not make sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I downloaded Kubuntu and tried it on a desktop that uses 100% linux-happy hardware.
Kubuntu sucks. Try KDE on a distro that actually puts does KDE properly instead of as an afterthought: Mandriva or SuSe for mainstream ditros, some people like Mepis, Arch is more geeky but has KDE mod as well as standard KDE.
If Gnome had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing Gnome as Mandrake/Mandriva has spent on polishing KDE, we would not have this discussion.... Mandriva (i.e. Gmandriva) would already rule the desktop.
Mandriva has always been "desktop-neutral" and have put as much effort into polishing Gnome as KDE. That the KDE version looks more polished tells you something about KDE.
I agree with you about letting users be happy with their choices, but it makes it impossible to know what it is best to recommend to a new user.
Some of these (Ekiga at least), use open protocols that allow interoperation with people using different clients on other platforms, some are cross-platform themselves (Ekiga, Skype), some use propreitray protocols to allow inter-operation (aMSN, GYachi).
If you ask a question, state what the actual problem is!
Except there is someone left who likes the look of TK.
The look of Tk has improved drastically in its successor, tile. It can use Windows, MacOS, Gtk and Qt native themes, although the Gtk is still in an early version and I do not knpw if it is usable yet.
I want KDE 4, but I am not upgrading until it is the default for my distro because it is not worth the hassle that results if something goes wrong.
I call BS on that one.
1: If Google needs your permission to display the content, they can say "You grant Google permission to display or present the content on your behalf, within the scope of the service you are being provided."
RTFA, that is roughly what they do. The agreement goes on to day:
"This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services."
Illiteracy rate is high, many countries don't have stable and enough electricity let alone the number of PCs to use the inet effectively.
I live in a third world country, well within the area this will cover. Most people are literate, most households have electricity, you can buy a second hand PC in any town for a few tens of dollars (and about a quarter of the population have bought mobile phones, which start at similar prices). Even as it is, broadband is available in cities and is perfectly commercially viable.
Yes there are a lot of people who cannot benefit from this, but there are also a lot who can.
Take a look at the number of cars on the road in the third world. Anyone who can afford a car, can easily afford a cheap computer and internet connection. Anyone who can afford a motorbike can probably afford it!
You seem to think that people either live at first world standards, or on the edge of starvation. Most of the world's population is somewhere in between.
It's not like the US Navy, every cruise line, and countless shipbuilders haven't ever put a computer on a seagoing vessel before.
Not to mention every other navy in the world! true, and I am sure it is technically possible. However, doing whatever they do to protect electronics for sea water might be too expensive do to for a whole data centre for it to be economically feasible.
Net neutrality would mean that there should be no prioritising of traffic by content provider: i.e. you should not slow down some websites, to speed others up.
The idea is to prevent anti-competitive, anti-consumer choice agreements between telcos and other big companies that squeeze everyone else out.
I see no problem with providing different service levels to different end users. It already happens, and I have never heard of anyone finding it objectionable.
I doubt many people have a problem with charging per gigabyte either.
Long hours computing causes me to forget food... and sleep... and water... and stretching... but interestingly, not sex!
On the other hand, I know people, in the town I have just moved to, who live only tens of meters from the sea who have had no problems - but they have a massive rampart between them and the sea that (I think) blocks the spray.
Ships are going to be tricky but designs meant to keep salt spray out may be workable.
What you mean is that it is not clear what fraction would be below the mean (the arithmetic mean to be exact).
You might (but probably not) be referring to the mode or the geometric mean.
If you want more explanation try the site linked to in my sig.
The codec is proprietary, so Helix player cannot actually be used to play the content.
The current Linux version does not work with Pulseaudio, which many distros are moving to and which seems to be the future of Linux audio.
There lies the problem. There was no consensus on what the latter should be with lots of choices, all proprietary. The result has been that HTML + Javascript as been extended to do both.
I hate the memory usage (and having to kill it 3 times a day).
I have no problem, and I do not need to.
I hate the developer's attitude. (We're removing feature X or changing feature Y because it's the way of the future and to those who complain tough).
What do you want them to do? Never change anything?
Coolbar is an abomination and an annoyance all in one change
I think it is the most useful addition to browsers since Opera added tabs a decade ago. Chrome has something similar, but with the addition of Google Suggest.
Chrome actually seems to have lot of features that people complained as causing bloat about when Firefox added them: spell checking for example.
I do not particularly want a browser that is primarily designed to run web apps. I want something that allows me to find, read, sort and store information on the web as easily as possible. The best so far is Firefox. What I really want is a cross between Forefox and Konqueror.
I do like some Chrome features (process per tab, for example), but I want my FF extensions too.
an act of blind faith.
Rational faith is not blind. It is based on experience or reason.
Furthermore faith is not synonymous with belief. You could believe in God's existence without having faith in him (although vice-versa would obviously not make sense).
Manufacturers policies vary in different countries - I think because MS's do. I had no difficulty buying a Lenovo without OS, Dells were also available OS free, so was just about everything else.
Blame web masters who put the Google Analytics javascript in the header, instead of the bottom of the page. Yes, Google did recommend the former years ago, but it was a bad idea and they changed their recommendation years ago.
I think we need stronger laws to prevent the pirating of particle colliders.
"Women should abandon their careers to beome housewives" gets modded +5? WTF is wrong with this website?
Actually he says, "such as". it is one of a range of alternative solutions. I would certainly advocate both parents spending more time with children, and it is just as good for fathers to stay at home to look after children as for mothers to do so.
1. The vast majority of women in the US have little interest in permanently abandoning their careers.
It would be better for the children if parents worked less and spent more time with them
2. Even if they wanted to, a lot of households NEED two incomes to make ends meet.
Even though, in the vast majority of cases, each parent by themselves earns a lot more in real terms than households with a single earner typically did, say, fifty years ago? It would be more accurate to say they need to incomes to keep up with the lifestyle of other people with two incomes.
3. On-site daycare is a good way to attract employees, because it provides a benefit (having your kids in the same building) that is worth a lot more to the employees than it costs to the company.
True, it is attractive to employees, cut it can be very expensive to provide- as it was in this case. You might be better off just paying people more.
4. If you lure those employees in with this benefit, thus potentially drawing them away from another job with a better salary, and then ditch the benefit, you're screwing them. I dunno if it's "age discrimination," but it's at least somewhat a dick move.
Of course it is not age discrimination. Google's mistake was subsidising it too much, or providing too high a level of childcare, and landing themselves with an unsustainable cost.
I have a problem with people getting all self-righteous and pulling a New Speak (or would that be "GNU-Speak"?) and abusing the word "free".
I take it you have never heard of "free speech"?
Also, let's not call GPL software "free." It's legally encumbered, just like everything else.
It has the legal encumberances necessary to preserve freedom - a bit like a functionning. democracy
Many major distros have closed source drivers in their repos. Mandriva does for example (they also offer a completely free version of the distro). So there is nothing Ubuntu specific about this.
You mean like the Debian OpenSSL patches, the community audited wide open security hole for mor than 1 1/2 years?
Better != perfect
Communities where maintainers know each other by nothing else than email can easily be infiltrated by "hostile" talent. They offer high quality contributions, seem to spend very much time discussion patches with much professionalism and politeness. In the end it might be just the made up personality Jon Doe of some organization X waiting to place just this one unsuspicious line within the code.
How many examples of that happening are there? For the same cost (of the time spent contributing) could the malicious party not bribe a programmer working on proprietary software, or or infiltrate a corporation in some other way.
When using commercial code, organization X needs much more than a diligent virtual personality but direct access to the corporate infrastructure.
I assume by commerical you mean proprietary. Any new hire has direct access to the corporate infrastructure because they need it to work. I have known someone to bring down a mission critical client system by-passing QC for a patch though negligence. How much more could someone malicious do?
It is very difficult to buy some hardware (laptops for example), that are completely supported Linux, let alone free drivers.
both ATi and Intel have got a 2 year head start on supporting Ubuntu out of the box. You can say Ubuntu isn't linux, but it's what all those Dell buyers are going to see.
I was not aware that there are specific "Ubuntu" drivers. Can you confirm that is what you mean - otherwise that last sentence does not make sense to me.