You would be equally correct in assuming that the notion of a virtual reality world created and maintained by a computer-based intelligence reflects actual work done by artificial intelligence researchers. Which is to say, you wouldn't be correct at all.
While I agree that whatever philosophy is in the Matrix is basically of the "PHIL 101: Introduction to Philosophy" sort, I don't really see how you can say it doesn't derive much of its material from existing philosophical sources. Plato's Allegory of the Cave isn't an existing philosophical source?
But you say, ho, did you notice Gilette's Sensor and Mach III razors where the razor is virtually free and the blades are expensive? This is indeed a perfect example. There are aftermarket Sensor-compatible blades (I don't know why there are not Mach III ones).
I think that it's patent-related, though I could well be wrong. Aftermarket blades don't come out for a given razor until it's been out for several years, and the Mach IIIs haven't been out for long enough. The only thing that makes me think it's not patent related is that it seems like that time lag is a lot shorter than a patent lifetime.
The monospace font is excellent. Until now I haven't seen a decent TTF monospace font that was properly hinted to keep it from looking horrible at 9pt, but still nice and smooth at large sizes.
Andale Mono (the font formerly known as Monotype.com) is quite good. However, at least in the gratis version, it isn't a complete font family; it doesn't have bold and italic. Because of this, it's not perfectly suited for things like terminals or text editors.
Bitstream Vera Sans is great for these purposes. The betas had some problems (it had a kind of awkward, semi-serifed appearance, and it was hard to distinguish O from 0 and l from 1), but these have been fixed for the release.
Taken out of context and put into cooked up examples meant to show off the new syntax, it looks bad... really bad. But once you actually start programming in it, you'll find that most of what you want and need to do will actually come quite simply.
Probably so...though a lot of this is because individual Perl programmers will each learn their preferred subset of Perl6, and will use it. Woe, woe unto the maintenance programmer who has learned a different dialect of Perl6! Woe unto the maintenance programmer when you have redefined the language syntax for your own convenience!
And "the rest of us" will just have an incredibly powerful language that is actually easier to program.
Easier to write, harder to read once written. Languages with a lot of syntax are the Dark Side of the Force.
Galeon used to have this feature, though I'm not sure if it still does -- it's been an option in some version, missing in others, and a hidden option in yet others. It seems to be the default (and only) behaviour in Ephiphany, however.
Both Galeon and Epiphany (gecko-based web browsers for GNOME) already support this. However, I think it's still worth getting the order in which tabs open right to begin with. It's an inconvenience to have to move tabs in order to get them where they should be. Not as inconvenient as having them in the wrong place and not being able to move them, but inconvenient nonetheless.
I think GNOME needs something like Sawfish -- something with useful features rather than just a Microsoft clone. If the GNOME people have gone off Sawfish, that's a shame, because there's nothing else like it.
I'm a long-time sawfish user, and have written several themes and small lisp modules for it. In my opinion, it's a very good thing to have a window manager that is extensible in a high-level language like lisp (rather than C or C++). However, in my opinion, it's also probably reasonable for this not to be the default WM.
In my experience Sawfish versions 1.2 and 2.0 are not even ready for beta testing. They crash readily and badly. Don't try them unless you're interested in development.
Stay away from anything labeled Sawfish-2.0 -- it's a prerelease of Sawfish 1.2 that RedHat made the mistake of releasing with RH8. I find Sawfish 1.2 quite usable, though it seems to have some problems with session-management. However,it seems to be in a bit of a transitional phase, as various features are moved out of the arena of graphically-configurable settings (in keeping with the Gnome 2 model of not including useless options) and purely into the realm of expert-user hack-the-sawfishrc-lisp-program-to-customize features. The documentation is trailing this development by quite a bit, unfortunately.
Metacity is good for Windows users. It's a better default than Sawfish was with that ugly Crux theme and the settings it came with in the old gnome defaults. But it's a shame that there's no longer a modern, sophisticated and efficient window manager in the project.
I used to hate Metacity with a passion, but lately, it's overcome its biggest flaws. Most Metacity themes adjust to fit the user's GTK theme flawlessly now, and you can also re-order the titlebar buttons in a way that is independent of the theme you're using. The only real flaw is that the MSW button order is still the default, so you have to change the button order using gconf-editor in order to get something sane (this is what HP has elsewhere derided as a 'fix-my-broken-app' preference). I'm even using Metacity right now, with RedHat's Bluecurve theme, just because my Sawfish setup needs some work before I can go back to it full-time. Mostly I don't even notice it except for some minor nits, and as far as I can tell, that's all Metacity is aiming for.
What I'm actually looking forward to with a bit of anticipation is Openbox 3. It's a total rewrite of OpenBox, and is/will be a fast, lightweight, ICCCM and EWMH compliant window manager with embedded Python scripting. Python is a good language for this kind of thing, and it's widespread in the GNOME development community in a way that lisp isn't. If it turns out as nicely as it promises to, Openbox 3 might make an excellent replacement for sawfish as the advanced, programmable WM for GNOME.
One and two are already done in Gnome2, and done well. IMO, a pure Gnome2 desktop with all apps conforming to the Gnome HIG looks and feels better than OSX. Even trivial-seeming things like button order in dialogs are well-thought-out and consistent.
Three and four are problems. I see even GTK2 apps coming out that don't follow the HIG for even simple things like dialog button order and instant-apply. There really needs to be a push for educating developers here, but I think it's doable. Four is worse, because of the demand for features, and, especially for options. A case in point is Galeon. Galeon2 (1.3.1, formally) is sweet. Clean, minimalistic interface, great integration with Gnome, lots of unobtrusive helpful features. Unfortunately, there's tremendous pressure from users (and some developers) to bloat it up with thousands of options and dozens of top-level menus. One of the top developers left the project recently because of this.
On the plus side, the thing you say that has to happen (one company strongly evangelizing the HIG) seems to be happening. RedHat has adopted Gnome2, and all their in-house apps (configuration tools, mostly) seem to follow the HIG strictly. They've also pushed their release of KDE to be more similar to Gnome2, though there are still serious problems (lack of auto-apply, crowded file selectors, bad dialog button order, and an out-of-control control center). Sun is also adopting Gnome2 as their main UI, and their UI research is a big part of what's behind the Gnome HIG, if I understand correctly.
But those printers are in-use on hardware which does have parallel ports, and if you assume computers generally outlive printers (true, IME) then there's no problem manufacturing motherboads without the legacy ports.
In my experience, this isn't true. My printer at home is the workhorse of the printer world, an HP Laserjet III. I've probably gone through four computers (or at least, four mainboards) in the lifetime of that printer. IMO the only printers which are regularly outlived by computers are consumer-grade inkjet printers, which are rightly regarded as disposable.
You know a skiffy franchise has gone on too long when its fanboys start arguing about what is and isn't "canon". Enough. Go out and read some Iain M. Banks, some Vernor Vinge, some Octavia Butler, or some Joan Slonczewski, and stop mistaking mass-produced pulp space opera for something worth caring about.
It ought to be moderated "funny", though it's also sort of insightful. National Petroleum Radio is a good nickname for today's NPR. Since the Gingrich
congress managed to remove most of NPR's federal funding, NPR has received most of its funding from large corporate donors, and its news/editorial positions have reflected this. NPR may have a liberal reputation, but if you look at their reporting (especially on globalization issues), you'll see that that reputation is no longer accurate; it reflects the time when NPR was largely publicly funded.
Maybe it's because I'm using subpixel rendering on my LCD screen right now, but the 'after' images look much worse than the regular XFT rendering to me.
Perhaps we need a new word or phrase to describe it. Much like we say Marxist Communism as opposed to Soviet Communism, we have Microsoft Capitalism as opposed to Competitive Capitalism.
I think you meant that magic numbers and #! replaces the metadata, and I agree with that. It would help a lot if Windows and KDE and Gnome would go back to using magic numbers rather than registries of file name extensions.
I don't know about KDE, but Gnome does primarily use magic numbers for identifying filetypes. File extensions are used as a fallback. For instance, with a remote file, you don't want to have to read the file to see the magic numbers, so Gnome will assume a type based on the extension.
The Dark Winter scenario apparently was based on some screwy statistics regarding rates of infection. Steven Milloy of Junkscience fame wrote an editorial on the subject.
That may or may not be the case, but I certainly wouldn't take Steven Milloy's word for it. Milloy is a conservative ideologue who doesn't seem to actually give a damn about good or bad methodology. If it leads to policy suggestions he doesn't like, then it's Junk Science (TM). There's a good debunking of this hypocrite at
The Skeptic's Dictionary.
More and more these days, linux projects are rejecting the canons of classic unix design - keep it small, keep it simple, sensibly limit the tasks solved by the code, integrate well with other utilities using simple interfaces.
Actually, I think Evolution, Nautilus, and other newer Gnome apps really represent a revitalization of the Unix philosophy. If you take a look at Evolution, you'll see that all of its different functions are bonobo components. The same with the various views in Nautilus. They can be re-used by other applications.
I've been really impressed by what's been done in Gnome with bonobo lately. For example, Galeon can use GTM as a download handler, getting all sorts of nice features (pause and resume downloads, e.g.) for free. Also, Galeon itself has been componentized, and Nautilus can now use Galeon for handling text/html documents. All this componentization means that each component can focus on one task and do it well, and applications can consist primarily of code to glue together components. This should sound familiar to anyone used to using shell scripts on Unix.
Some of the changes appear to allow KDE users the option to run Nautilus. My question is why? Why would a KDE user use Nautilus instead of Konqueror?
I'm not sure why a KDE user would use Nautilus instead of Konqueror (though perhaps they might just like it)? But my guess is that these changes in Nautilus weren't so much because they really thought a bunch of KDE users would want to run it, but for standards compliance. KDE and GNOME are supposed to meet certain standards for compatability; most of the KDE-related changes in Nautilus seem to be in order to meet these, especially the extended window manager hints spec.
Personally, there's only one X widget set that I really consider to be "ugly". You guessed it, Athena. =) As long as it's "pseudo-3D" and not black and white only, it's all fine with me.
De gustibus non disputandum, o lupine technomancer, but IMO Athena is too minimalist to really truly be ugly (though xaw3d certainly is pretty bad). To me the nadir of ugly widgets would be either QT 1.x (like Windows 95, but with a certain Lovecraftian disproportion and wrongness about its angles), or the thousand hideous white or red text on black/dark blue/dark green GTK themes out there.
I've wanted an Athena theme for GTK (to go with my twm theme for sawfish), but to make sense it would have to be an engine theme, and I just don't have the deep GDK knowledge needed to do that. For a minimalist feel, the Flat theme for GTK is quite good; except in the scrollbars it's much like the early Mac.
I saw a patch for AA text in GTK1.2 a few months ago that worked in most apps but crashed XMMS and a few others.
It looks like this is pretty much the same patch,
but instead of directly applying it to GTK,
it's built into a separate shared library that
you load with LD_PRELOAD. This should let you
enable and disable antialiasing on an app-by-app
basis (using a little tiny bit of scripting
in the background). I'd enable it globally,
and then wrap scripts around problem apps to
keep them from crashing.
Slashdot Mirror
Mu.
While I agree that whatever philosophy is in the Matrix is basically of the "PHIL 101: Introduction to Philosophy" sort, I don't really see how you can say it doesn't derive much of its material from existing philosophical sources. Plato's Allegory of the Cave isn't an existing philosophical source?
Heh. Another thing we can deduce from this scene is that 10.0.0.0/8 is now the official Hollywood equivalent of the 555-nnnn phone exchange.
I think that it's patent-related, though I could well be wrong. Aftermarket blades don't come out for a given razor until it's been out for several years, and the Mach IIIs haven't been out for long enough. The only thing that makes me think it's not patent related is that it seems like that time lag is a lot shorter than a patent lifetime.
Does anyone know the real answer here?
Andale Mono (the font formerly known as Monotype.com) is quite good. However, at least in the gratis version, it isn't a complete font family; it doesn't have bold and italic. Because of this, it's not perfectly suited for things like terminals or text editors.
Bitstream Vera Sans is great for these purposes. The betas had some problems (it had a kind of awkward, semi-serifed appearance, and it was hard to distinguish O from 0 and l from 1), but these have been fixed for the release.
If you're a RHCE, the release schedule of RHAS is probably more relevant to you than the release schedule of RedHat's regular Linux distro...
RedHat's "Phoebe" (8.0.94) has kernel 2.4.20, so I'd say it's safe to assume that RedHat 8.1/9.0 will, too.
Probably so...though a lot of this is because individual Perl programmers will each learn their preferred subset of Perl6, and will use it. Woe, woe unto the maintenance programmer who has learned a different dialect of Perl6! Woe unto the maintenance programmer when you have redefined the language syntax for your own convenience!
Easier to write, harder to read once written. Languages with a lot of syntax are the Dark Side of the Force.
Galeon used to have this feature, though I'm not sure if it still does -- it's been an option in some version, missing in others, and a hidden option in yet others. It seems to be the default (and only) behaviour in Ephiphany, however.
Both Galeon and Epiphany (gecko-based web browsers for GNOME) already support this. However, I think it's still worth getting the order in which tabs open right to begin with. It's an inconvenience to have to move tabs in order to get them where they should be. Not as inconvenient as having them in the wrong place and not being able to move them, but inconvenient nonetheless.
I'm a long-time sawfish user, and have written several themes and small lisp modules for it. In my opinion, it's a very good thing to have a window manager that is extensible in a high-level language like lisp (rather than C or C++). However, in my opinion, it's also probably reasonable for this not to be the default WM.
Stay away from anything labeled Sawfish-2.0 -- it's a prerelease of Sawfish 1.2 that RedHat made the mistake of releasing with RH8. I find Sawfish 1.2 quite usable, though it seems to have some problems with session-management. However,it seems to be in a bit of a transitional phase, as various features are moved out of the arena of graphically-configurable settings (in keeping with the Gnome 2 model of not including useless options) and purely into the realm of expert-user hack-the-sawfishrc-lisp-program-to-customize features. The documentation is trailing this development by quite a bit, unfortunately.
I used to hate Metacity with a passion, but lately, it's overcome its biggest flaws. Most Metacity themes adjust to fit the user's GTK theme flawlessly now, and you can also re-order the titlebar buttons in a way that is independent of the theme you're using. The only real flaw is that the MSW button order is still the default, so you have to change the button order using gconf-editor in order to get something sane (this is what HP has elsewhere derided as a 'fix-my-broken-app' preference). I'm even using Metacity right now, with RedHat's Bluecurve theme, just because my Sawfish setup needs some work before I can go back to it full-time. Mostly I don't even notice it except for some minor nits, and as far as I can tell, that's all Metacity is aiming for.
What I'm actually looking forward to with a bit of anticipation is Openbox 3. It's a total rewrite of OpenBox, and is/will be a fast, lightweight, ICCCM and EWMH compliant window manager with embedded Python scripting. Python is a good language for this kind of thing, and it's widespread in the GNOME development community in a way that lisp isn't. If it turns out as nicely as it promises to, Openbox 3 might make an excellent replacement for sawfish as the advanced, programmable WM for GNOME.
One and two are already done in Gnome2, and done well. IMO, a pure Gnome2 desktop with all apps conforming to the Gnome HIG looks and feels better than OSX. Even trivial-seeming things like button order in dialogs are well-thought-out and consistent.
Three and four are problems. I see even GTK2 apps coming out that don't follow the HIG for even simple things like dialog button order and instant-apply. There really needs to be a push for educating developers here, but I think it's doable. Four is worse, because of the demand for features, and, especially for options. A case in point is Galeon. Galeon2 (1.3.1, formally) is sweet. Clean, minimalistic interface, great integration with Gnome, lots of unobtrusive helpful features. Unfortunately, there's tremendous pressure from users (and some developers) to bloat it up with thousands of options and dozens of top-level menus. One of the top developers left the project recently because of this.
On the plus side, the thing you say that has to happen (one company strongly evangelizing the HIG) seems to be happening. RedHat has adopted Gnome2, and all their in-house apps (configuration tools, mostly) seem to follow the HIG strictly. They've also pushed their release of KDE to be more similar to Gnome2, though there are still serious problems (lack of auto-apply, crowded file selectors, bad dialog button order, and an out-of-control control center). Sun is also adopting Gnome2 as their main UI, and their UI research is a big part of what's behind the Gnome HIG, if I understand correctly.
In my experience, this isn't true. My printer at home is the workhorse of the printer world, an HP Laserjet III. I've probably gone through four computers (or at least, four mainboards) in the lifetime of that printer. IMO the only printers which are regularly outlived by computers are consumer-grade inkjet printers, which are rightly regarded as disposable.
You know a skiffy franchise has gone on too long when its fanboys start arguing about what is and isn't "canon". Enough. Go out and read some Iain M. Banks, some Vernor Vinge, some Octavia Butler, or some Joan Slonczewski, and stop mistaking mass-produced pulp space opera for something worth caring about.
It ought to be moderated "funny", though it's also sort of insightful. National Petroleum Radio is a good nickname for today's NPR. Since the Gingrich congress managed to remove most of NPR's federal funding, NPR has received most of its funding from large corporate donors, and its news/editorial positions have reflected this. NPR may have a liberal reputation, but if you look at their reporting (especially on globalization issues), you'll see that that reputation is no longer accurate; it reflects the time when NPR was largely publicly funded.
Ah, so Slashdot has finally caught up with Kuro5hin, then.
Maybe it's because I'm using subpixel rendering
on my LCD screen right now, but the 'after' images
look much worse than the regular XFT rendering to
me.
The Nation suggests the term "Enron Capitalism."
The O(1) scheduler and preempt patches for 2.4.18-pre-bignum apply cleanly to 2.4.18-final. Have fnu.
I don't know about KDE, but Gnome does primarily use magic numbers for identifying filetypes. File extensions are used as a fallback. For instance, with a remote file, you don't want to have to read the file to see the magic numbers, so Gnome will assume a type based on the extension.
That may or may not be the case, but I certainly wouldn't take Steven Milloy's word for it. Milloy is a conservative ideologue who doesn't seem to actually give a damn about good or bad methodology. If it leads to policy suggestions he doesn't like, then it's Junk Science (TM). There's a good debunking of this hypocrite at The Skeptic's Dictionary.
Actually, I think Evolution, Nautilus, and other newer Gnome apps really represent a revitalization of the Unix philosophy. If you take a look at Evolution, you'll see that all of its different functions are bonobo components. The same with the various views in Nautilus. They can be re-used by other applications.
I've been really impressed by what's been done in Gnome with bonobo lately. For example, Galeon can use GTM as a download handler, getting all sorts of nice features (pause and resume downloads, e.g.) for free. Also, Galeon itself has been componentized, and Nautilus can now use Galeon for handling text/html documents. All this componentization means that each component can focus on one task and do it well, and applications can consist primarily of code to glue together components. This should sound familiar to anyone used to using shell scripts on Unix.
I'm not sure why a KDE user would use Nautilus instead of Konqueror (though perhaps they might just like it)? But my guess is that these changes in Nautilus weren't so much because they really thought a bunch of KDE users would want to run it, but for standards compliance. KDE and GNOME are supposed to meet certain standards for compatability; most of the KDE-related changes in Nautilus seem to be in order to meet these, especially the extended window manager hints spec.
De gustibus non disputandum, o lupine technomancer, but IMO Athena is too minimalist to really truly be ugly (though xaw3d certainly is pretty bad). To me the nadir of ugly widgets would be either QT 1.x (like Windows 95, but with a certain Lovecraftian disproportion and wrongness about its angles), or the thousand hideous white or red text on black/dark blue/dark green GTK themes out there.
I've wanted an Athena theme for GTK (to go with my twm theme for sawfish), but to make sense it would have to be an engine theme, and I just don't have the deep GDK knowledge needed to do that. For a minimalist feel, the Flat theme for GTK is quite good; except in the scrollbars it's much like the early Mac.
It looks like this is pretty much the same patch, but instead of directly applying it to GTK, it's built into a separate shared library that you load with LD_PRELOAD. This should let you enable and disable antialiasing on an app-by-app basis (using a little tiny bit of scripting in the background). I'd enable it globally, and then wrap scripts around problem apps to keep them from crashing.