> What's not easy about right-clicking on a folder > and setting a few permissions in the sharing tab?
CIFS filesharing is one thing on a LAN, and something else again if you're transferring via an untrusted network, such as the internet. That's what scp is for.
The other user's main beef, near as I can tell, is that getting scp to work on Windows is an exercise in hunting down third-party software. Which is true.
But that's not really unique to scp. *Anything* you want to do on Windows is generally going to require having additional software installed that's not included with the OS. Even FreeBSD comes with more functionality "out of the box" than Windows, and I'm not talking about ports. Windows is basically just an OS (and a basic desktop environment), not a whole software distro. That's kind of the point: Microsoft supplies the OS, and you get the other software separately, usually from third parties (although Microsoft has some complementary products too, e.g., Word).
That's the way it's *supposed* to be on Windows; it's *designed* to be that way. With Windows, your computer is supposed to only have the software you've gone out of your way to install, so there's not a bunch of other stuff cluttering up your All Programs list. Windows is made for people who pretty much use the computer for the same few tasks all the time, so they only want the software they want and not a bunch of other (to them irrelevant) stuff. If that bothers him and isn't the way he likes things, if he wants a whole distro with software for a wide variety of purposes installed out of the box, why is he using Windows in the first place?
You're using the word "fact" in a way that would not hold up in court, in either the US or Australia, or probably any other common-law country.
If you look at the Australian court ruling, we're talking about dry non-creative stuff like a list of all the phone numbers in a given area code and the names associated with each. Such things are not copyrightable in the US either, because absolutely no creativity is involved in creating them.
> I'm probably just using "mapped as drives" as a > shorthand for "shows up as an icon in Explorer."
Oh. In the Explorer sidebar thingy on the left, you mean? No wonder I didn't understand. That's not the same thing at all. Explorer (if you haven't turned on Classic Folders) shows icons for several different kinds of things that are not mapped as drives. For example, any CIFS fileshare that you've visited recently may (or may not; I've not been able to figure out the exact criteria used to decide) show up as an icon on the left side of Explorer, but that doesn't mean it's been mapped as a drive. If you right-click it and choose "map as drive" and complete the wizard to do that, it'll be assigned a drive letter.
However, I've never seen an ftp site show up in Explorer like that. (Perhaps to show up like that the ftp service has to be listed in Active Directory or something? I'm just guessing here. Windows networking isn't really my strong suit.)
> > You're saying GTK doesn't support the Fisher Price theme in XP... > Yes, actually. If the user sets their color scheme to > blue and green, who are you to tell them it's wrong?
Umm, GTK on Windows has supported the user's system colors for a fair while now. It was a little shaky at first (like, back in the GTK 1.x days the installer looked at the system colors and built a GTK theme to match, and then if you changed your system colors you had to reinstall GTK or something to get it updated), but that was years ago. It's been quite solid for a while now.
> Again: it does not matter whether you like the Windows > feature or not. DOES. NOT. MATTER. The point here is > that if you're going to be compatible with Windows, > you have to be compatible with Windows.
You seem to be under the impression that I am personally responsible for what GTK does and does not support. I'm just a user, like you, and a system administrator. And as a user, and *especially* as system administrator, my experiences with GTK have been considerably better than my experiences with Windows.
But you're not interested in another user's perspective, apparently. You just want to hold me personally responsible for everything you don't like.
> Wow, either you're using Windows 98 or you're blind.
I'll admit that Windows 98 SE is probably the single version of Windows with which I have the most experience. But I've seen pretty much every major version of Windows you can name, with the notable exception of NT3. Just because I don't use it on *my* workstation doesn't mean I don't know anything about it.
> Classic appearance in 2000 and Vista uses gradients > in the title bar and a completely difference shade > of grey, GTK+ does neither.
Waitasec. I was pretty sure GTK did gradients in the titlebar just like everything else. Let's see...
Yeah. Screenshot (via Google images): http://www.gimpusers.com/images/tutorials/146/1.png
Is that the kind of "neither" you were talking about?
Were you using ancient versions of GTK, or just making stuff up?
Actually, I would consider Norilsk to be a worse place to go than Kolyma. The latter is remote and cold, yes, and formerly a Gulag site, but it has other things going for it. It is (provided you stay out of Magadan) straightforwardly rural, unlike Norilsk, which has all the disadvantages of a big city without most of the usual advantages. Additionally, Kolyma isn't almost completely defoliated as a result of heavy-metals polution. Kolyma has a variety of economic activities available, such as fishing and farming, in addition to mining. In Norilsk there's pretty much nothing to do but work in the Nickel-smelting plant.
Personally, the parts about being remote and cold wouldn't bother me that much. I rather like winter, and I like solitude. I might actually enjoy visiting Kolyma, or Yakutsk. But I wouldn't want to go to Norilsk.
> > Well, there's also Farmville. >...but you repeat yourself.
Farmville is drivel, but it's not malware. Malware isn't just pointless and stupid and unnecessary. (By that standard, almost *all* games would qualify, including some of my own guilty pleasures, such as Iagno.) Malware is worse than that. Malware actively does harm, and I don't mean just by using CPU cycles when the user is deliberately running it, or allowing the user to goof off (again, all games do that, and so does Slashdot for that matter).
No, "malware" isn't the right word for Farmville. The right word for Farmville is "prolefeed". The only purpose it serves is to keep bored stupid people occupied. Incidentally, most television programming also fits in this category.
Actually, part of what he said was right. We did indeed win the cold war by forcing the USSR to spend, in order to keep up with us militarily, more than they could possibly afford. Our economy could handle it. Theirs couldn't. Reagan spent Russia under the table.
It wasn't just SDI, of course. There were other factors as well. The nuclear-sub-based ballistic missile and nuclear warhead arsenal, for instance, was also a major factor: it wasn't enough to be able to hit our stationary missile silos and major cities, they had to be able to wipe us out completely. But SDI was also significant. The reasoning went like this: "Enough warheads to blow up the whole world might NOT be enough, if they can shoot most of them down. If they can do that, they can attack us with impunity. We have to have EVEN MORE warheads, so that they can't hope to shoot them ALL down." And it didn't matter that we never got SDI to actually work during the cold war. As long as the threat was credible, as long as there was the potential that we MIGHT get it to work, they had to be ready for us.
But yeah, SDI didn't bankrupt the US economy. It was a lot of money, yes, but stacked up against our GDP in the eighties, it was... well, not exactly pocket change, but it was something we could clearly afford.
He's also wrong in that we didn't just "sort of recover" from the expenditure. We had that debt all but paid at one point (during the Clinton administration IIRC), to the point where the Federal Reserve was mildly worried that the federal debt might disappear entirely, which would have had a negative impact on their ability to enact monetary policy (because, as I understand it, the interest rate on said debt is among the tools they use to influence the size of the money supply).
Of course, that situation did not last very long. Soon enough the federal government was once again deeper in hock than ever before. But we can't blame that on Reagan. Reagan's debt was paid off (albeit, not during his administration), so the current debt is not his fault. Congress got the ball rolling by overreacting when they got wind of the Fed's concern, during the Clinton administration IIRC, and then Bush had a hand in the matter subsequently, and the current congress and administration... let's just say they haven't exactly improved the situation. Sooner or later somebody's going to have to pay the piper.
But the other poster is basically right about the impact of SDI on the outcome of the Cold War, and the fact that the US could afford it when the USSR could not. That part's true.
> YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO VIEW 'REAL GENIUS' WITHIN 30 DAYS
Meh. I have a four-line Perl script I wrote that views such driv^H^H^H^Hcontent on my behalf (significantly faster than realtime, I might add) and provides me with terse plot summaries and sarcastic commentary. With the right command-line option, it would also look up your slashdot ID, get your email address, and send the sarcastic commentary to you, except that you don't have your email address public, so it would probably respond with a snide error message if I asked it to do that.
> OR YOU MUST FORFEIT YOUR GEEK CARD AT THE NEAREST > FRY'S ELECTRONICS, COMPUSA, OR RADIO SHACK.
CompUSA? Do they even sell anything a geek would buy?
Sometimes there is noise when a drive is failing. Sometimes there isn't any particular noise (beyond the sound a drive always makes whenever it's operating, which you may or may not be able to hear depending on ambient noise levels, including the computer's own fans).
> Another thing is to keep an eye on the > power on hours count. I have no idea > how many hours is too many.
Neither does anybody else. The mean (i.e., average) can be calculated for all hard drives, sure, but the standard deviation is so high, the mean is not a particularly useful predictor for any given drive. And the mean for your particular *model* of hard drive won't be known until you're already well past it. No help there.
Also, sometimes there are SMART errors before an all-out drive failure, and sometimes there aren't.
Don't wait for indicators. Make backups now.
> When it comes to papers written for school...
It depends. If you only spent thirty minutes writing it, one copy on your hard drive and a print copy to hand in is probably enough for now, and then when you do your next incremental backup of all your data it will of course be included.
But if you've spent a lot of time on the thing, you should always have multiple electronic copies in separate physical locations. Don't try to guess whether your hard drive might fail. It could fail at any time. Today is the day of salvation. Make your backups now.
> PhD "dissertation"? Normally one writes a thesis for a PhD
Two ways of saying the same thing. The word "thesis" in this context is short for "thesis paper", i.e., a dissertation written in support of a thesis statement.
> I don't know about you, but that's way > more than I can type in a night.
I'm guessing the story is a few years old.
Someone who is accustomed to retyping material from extant manuscripts (not very common these days but still a widespread practice in the eighties) and thus is well-practiced at typing quickly and has a halfway decent keyboard to type on (also not real common anymore, but the Model M was very popular at one time) can generally do at least 60wpm, and a lot of people can do more. *Good* typists can do 120+. If we split the difference for the sake of estimation, 90wpm, with only short breaks, comes to about four and a half thousand words an hour, so a fifty-thousand word dissertation might take about twelve hours to type. You could only do this if you were *accustomed* to spending several hours typing every day, of course, and by the time you finished your hands would be cramping up and your arms would feel like they were going to fall off and you wouldn't want to SEE a keyboard again for a week. It would be the kind of feat you would never want to have to repeat, EVER again in your life.
And there would be typos, and you wouldn't catch all of them, so you'd be turning in an imperfect copy.
A typical doctoral dissertation is less than a hundred pages double-spaced, so it'll fit on a 360K floppy even if you do it in XML. If you've got a high-density floppy, you could use RTF.
Yeah, but I don't have XCOPY on my PC-DOS 3.3 system, so I had to write a BAT file to do my backups. It's got PAUSE commands each time I need to insert another blank floppy disk.
> We cannot get everyone at the First World Level.
Of course not. What constitutes a "First World" level is a moving target. If we get to the point where everyone in rural sub-saharan Africa has a cellphone, then obviously having more than one phone per capita will no longer be an indicator of economic prosperity.
(Not that cellphones are really what the third world needs. Heck, if they could just figure out how to *feed* all their people, that would be a meaningful starting point.)
> Our oil, copper, lithium and tantalum will not > suffice for that.
The oil problem isn't as big a deal as people want to make out. If the price of gas goes much over six or eight bucks a gallon, alcohol-based fuels will be cost-competitive. That leaves plastics, but we're getting better all the time at making synthetics out of an ever-widening variety of source materials. Long-term, I don't think oil scarcity will even matter. Heck, we're probably not far off from being able to make oil synthetically if we need it, out of water, carbon dioxide, and energy. (Energy, of course, we get from the sun. If solar panels ever get good enough, we can do it that way; if not, we can raise fast-growth vegetation and burn that for fuel, possibly after fermenting it into alcohols. It may sound crude, but it WILL work.) Or we could use vegetable oils. Or tallow.
Rare elements, however, are another thing.
I don't know that copper will necessarily be a big problem, because other metals would work for a lot of the stuff we use it for (including the things we use a LOT of it for), and so other metals would be used more if copper were more expensive. We've been using trainloads of copper for water pipe, but we can make that out of almost anything. And we've also used quite a bit of it for plain old household electrical wiring, but there are other conductors. In a pinch, aluminum can be used for both of these purposes, and the earth's crust is absolutely loaded with aluminum. Currently we use copper for these things because we can, because it's a base metal and relatively affordable.
But yeah, there are some other elements could be more of a problem. Some of the rarer metals (e.g., platinum) could prove to be problematic, obviously. The lighter noble gasses come to mind as well. Those are basically irreplaceable. We fill balloons with helium because we get it cheap as a side-benefit of mining natural gas, but when the natural gas is used up... we can replace the natural gas with alcohol-based fuels, but replacements for the helium and argon may be a little hard to come by.
> What, if a low birthrate is the CAUSE of a > high standard of living, not the EFFECT?
If that were the case, you'd expect artificially-imposed low birthrates (think: One Child Policy) to be effective at raising the standard of living. But the standard of living in China is obviously highest in the parts of the country where significant amounts of free-market capitalism have been introduced, even though those parts of China have the highest percentages of "extra child" exceptions. The rural areas, where the one-child policy is most strictly enforced and the male-to-female ratio is highest? Those parts of China are dirt poor.
> Shall we expend all resources, funds, efforts towards > bringing the rest of the world to the same economical standard?
That would be ineffective and even counterproductive. Socialism consistently does not improve the overall economic situation of most of the people. It's not as bad as some other economic things that have been tried (e.g., populism), but it doesn't deliver on its promises either.
> No resource is truly unlimited, neither air nor oxygen nor hydrogen is.
Technically, that's true.
But in practice, air to breathe is not going to be scarce, because something else (food perhaps) will run out first. There's more than enough air to support the maximum possible population the planet can possibly handle. (Pollution is a separate issue. When you have pollution problems, even really big pollution problems, you still have plenty of air; it's just dirty.)
Never is probably right if by "intelligence" you mean the ability to figure out and understand the significance of entirely new things.
But most people use the word "intelligence" to mean a good memory and the ability to perform arithmetic, in which case the answer would be closer to "sixty years ago".
> But the more I think about it, the more it 'just' > seems like a kde4 bug(Or rather misfeature
Misfeature seems more likely. Are we only talking about the default setting, or is the behavior not configurable? (It's been a while since I used KDE on a regular basis. Like, since before Konqueror existed. I don't think their current window manager had been written yet then, either. Heck, Gnome's been through four different default window managers in that time.)
> What is the definition/description of a "utility window" in X. > I tried to look it up in google, but could not find anything.
You know, I wasn't not really sure myself until I looked it up just now. (Not being an application developer, I've not really studied the inner workings of X much.)
Tip: when searching for things that have to do with X, call it X11.
Anyway, I found this: http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY indicates a small persistent utility window, such as a palette or toolbox. It is distinct from type TOOLBAR because it does not correspond to a toolbar torn off from the main application. It's distinct from type DIALOG because it isn't a transient dialog, the user will probably keep it open while they're working. Windows of this type may set the WM_TRANSIENT_FOR hint indicating the main application window.
In other words, the Gimp tool palette and Layers dialog are perfect examples of exactly the kind of thing the "utility window" hint is meant to cover. Personally, I prefer for such windows to automatically raise when other windows in the same application are raised. But I don't want them to always be on *top* of those other windows; that would be annoying. Also, I do prefer for them to be listed in my task list.
> (Who would ever want all the utilities to be below > the window the utilities should be used on. I can't > come up with a use case for that,
Oh, I can. Sometimes in Gimp I work on an image that's just a little larger than the available screen real estate really has room for. (My monitor's only a nineteen-inch model, because I have finite funds.) I'd like to be able to see the whole image I'm working on, even if that means it has to be in front of other stuff, including the tool palette. (The Gimp tool palette is really redundant anyway. Context menus will get you everything you need.) So yeah, I definitely want to be able to put the main (image) window in front of the utility window.
But that's really a matter of personal preference. Like I said, try out half a dozen different window managers for a few days each and see the wide variety of different behaviors and options. It's enlightening.
The excuses were all about why I was not personally aware of all of the issues you pointed out. Bear in mind, I'm neither a Windows user nor a GTK developer.
> the fact that shortcuts have been around for decades and > they're still not supported does not bode well for GTK+.
It's not just GTK. Nothing else in the open-source world supports them either, except Emacs. Heck, there's a lot of proprietary Windows-only software that doesn't support them.
> > The last time I had access to an OS X system, getting GTK > > software to run on it could ONLY be done via the X server, > Still true, as of 10.4.
Interesting. I would have guessed something would have happened there in the intervening years. (At least running the X server rootless is a breeze now. Apple fixed that about three versions ago, IIRC.)
> You can't say "oh we support Windows, except for > the features that 'sound cumbersome'."
Like I said, I was totally unaware that using open/save dialog boxes as a file manager was even possible.
> But making folders!?
The GTK open/save dialog *has* that, if I'm not mistaken. There's a "new folder" button right there in the save dialog, to the far right of the directory hierarchy breadcrumb thingies. Above the preview area. (I'm on Debian at the moment, but I'm fairly sure this feature is available on Windows as well.)
As for copying files, I'm not sure how that would even work. It apparently isn't a very discoverable UI, since I was totally unaware that the Windows native common dialogs did that. (Unless by "copying" you mean Open and then Save As, for each file, one at a time. I've known people who copy files in that fashion, but they were not the sort of people who read slashdot.)
> FTP sites by default don't get drive letters,
In the other post you were talking about ones that were "mapped as drives". To me that means they have drive letters. What else would the phrase "mapped as drives" mean, in the context of MS Windows?
> Look, you're dodging the real issue: the real issue is, > why the hell did GTK+ write their own Open/Save dialogs > instead of using the ones built-in to the OS?
Now, that's an interesting question. OpenOffice did the same thing (write their own open/save dialogs), so presumably there's some kind of reason for doing so, but I'm not really sure what it would be. Using the native ones (where they exist) would make sense to me.
Do the GTK and OpenOffice open/save dialogs provide something that the native Windows ones lack? I can't really think of anything, but I don't have a Windows system handy to look at for comparison right now.
> GUI styles change. You can't have rectangular grey > buttons with a simple diagonal bevel anymore, not in 2010.
Oh, I think I understand now. You're saying GTK doesn't support the Fisher Price theme in XP or the Aero Glass stuff in Vista. Have I got that about right?
I didn't know. By the time I install any third-party software on a Windows system, the theme has always already been changed back to Classic (it's nearly the first thing I do). GTK looks right at home.
But yeah, for users who actually use the new-style UI themes, I can see where an app that didn't support them would look a bit out of place. How did you put it originally? "Like a total alien." That comment makes sense now.
> How can this possibly be anything but an infrastructure > for massive spying on its own citizens?
Actually, I suspect that the primary motivation is political. It's a symbolic gesture.
Not that they won't also use it to spy on their citizens. They will, obviously. But I suspect that's probably more of an "added benefit" than the main reason.
I'm speculating, though. It's an educated guess. I don't have any inside information or anything. I'm just reasoning based on standard well-known public information about how middle-easterners tend to think. They're very big on symbolic gestures. Stuff that doesn't even register for most people in the west is an extremely big deal over there.
Similarly, most Americans think the 9/11 attack was aimed at killing thousands of people. But in fact that was just a side-effect. The main goal was to bring down the World Trade Center, because that was the primary symbol of America's wealth and influence. Symbolically, an attack on the WTC was an attack on America's power and influence. Most Americans would say the Statue of Liberty is the main symbol of our power. But that's because we're Westerners and place a great deal of value on liberty. There's a major paradigmatic difference.
When you're interpreting the actions of a foreign government, you need to be aware of their culture and interpret in that light. Otherwise you end up like Japan in 1941, having exactly the opposite effect from what you intended. (They expected the Pearl Harbor attack to *prevent* the US from entering the war. Really. But you tell an American that, and they go, "They expected it to WHAT?" Because Americans think like Westerners. If the Japanese government at the time had done their cultural homework, they would have known this.)
> While I believe that almost every politician > is motivated by dollar signs, I don't believe > everyone in Congress is evil.
Oh, I do. Actually, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that all *people* are evil, at some level. Dishonest, selfish, careless, faithless, arrogant,... there are a lot of ways to be evil, and most people are guilty of several of them.
But some people are much MORE evil than others, and I'm sure that's true of politicians as well.
> Where do *YOU* propose proxy server operators find the money to operate?
Not my problem. I don't need the proxies. If you want free proxies, YOU figure out how to fund them.
I fail to see why the whole world should put up with pop-ups every time we browse the web just so a few people can have free access to proxies that *arguably* *might* be harder to fund otherwise. Either there's enough demand for the proxies that someone can find a way to fund them, or not. I don't think we should destroy the web in a misguided and probably futile attempt to influence the outcome of that.
Slashdot Mirror
> What's not easy about right-clicking on a folder
> and setting a few permissions in the sharing tab?
CIFS filesharing is one thing on a LAN, and something else again if you're transferring via an untrusted network, such as the internet. That's what scp is for.
The other user's main beef, near as I can tell, is that getting scp to work on Windows is an exercise in hunting down third-party software. Which is true.
But that's not really unique to scp. *Anything* you want to do on Windows is generally going to require having additional software installed that's not included with the OS. Even FreeBSD comes with more functionality "out of the box" than Windows, and I'm not talking about ports. Windows is basically just an OS (and a basic desktop environment), not a whole software distro. That's kind of the point: Microsoft supplies the OS, and you get the other software separately, usually from third parties (although Microsoft has some complementary products too, e.g., Word).
That's the way it's *supposed* to be on Windows; it's *designed* to be that way. With Windows, your computer is supposed to only have the software you've gone out of your way to install, so there's not a bunch of other stuff cluttering up your All Programs list. Windows is made for people who pretty much use the computer for the same few tasks all the time, so they only want the software they want and not a bunch of other (to them irrelevant) stuff. If that bothers him and isn't the way he likes things, if he wants a whole distro with software for a wide variety of purposes installed out of the box, why is he using Windows in the first place?
You're using the word "fact" in a way that would not hold up in court, in either the US or Australia, or probably any other common-law country.
If you look at the Australian court ruling, we're talking about dry non-creative stuff like a list of all the phone numbers in a given area code and the names associated with each. Such things are not copyrightable in the US either, because absolutely no creativity is involved in creating them.
That would be redundant. Our "insane Disney-sponsored" copyright law in the US has already been in full agreement with this ruling for years.
Maybe Australian courts will confirm Bridgeman next.
Masaka is waking!
> Dude, time to step out of Mom's basement!
What, you mean, like, get my *own* basement?
> China has an extra child exception for all
> farmers whose firstborn is a girl
Interesting. I did not know that.
You're right, that screws up a good chunk of my argument.
> I'm probably just using "mapped as drives" as a
> shorthand for "shows up as an icon in Explorer."
Oh. In the Explorer sidebar thingy on the left, you mean? No wonder I didn't understand. That's not the same thing at all. Explorer (if you haven't turned on Classic Folders) shows icons for several different kinds of things that are not mapped as drives. For example, any CIFS fileshare that you've visited recently may (or may not; I've not been able to figure out the exact criteria used to decide) show up as an icon on the left side of Explorer, but that doesn't mean it's been mapped as a drive. If you right-click it and choose "map as drive" and complete the wizard to do that, it'll be assigned a drive letter.
However, I've never seen an ftp site show up in Explorer like that. (Perhaps to show up like that the ftp service has to be listed in Active Directory or something? I'm just guessing here. Windows networking isn't really my strong suit.)
> > You're saying GTK doesn't support the Fisher Price theme in XP...
> Yes, actually. If the user sets their color scheme to
> blue and green, who are you to tell them it's wrong?
Umm, GTK on Windows has supported the user's system colors for a fair while now. It was a little shaky at first (like, back in the GTK 1.x days the installer looked at the system colors and built a GTK theme to match, and then if you changed your system colors you had to reinstall GTK or something to get it updated), but that was years ago. It's been quite solid for a while now.
> Again: it does not matter whether you like the Windows
> feature or not. DOES. NOT. MATTER. The point here is
> that if you're going to be compatible with Windows,
> you have to be compatible with Windows.
You seem to be under the impression that I am personally responsible for what GTK does and does not support. I'm just a user, like you, and a system administrator. And as a user, and *especially* as system administrator, my experiences with GTK have been considerably better than my experiences with Windows.
But you're not interested in another user's perspective, apparently. You just want to hold me personally responsible for everything you don't like.
> Wow, either you're using Windows 98 or you're blind.
I'll admit that Windows 98 SE is probably the single version of Windows with which I have the most experience. But I've seen pretty much every major version of Windows you can name, with the notable exception of NT3. Just because I don't use it on *my* workstation doesn't mean I don't know anything about it.
> Classic appearance in 2000 and Vista uses gradients
> in the title bar and a completely difference shade
> of grey, GTK+ does neither.
Waitasec. I was pretty sure GTK did gradients in the titlebar just like everything else. Let's see...
Yeah. Screenshot (via Google images):
http://www.gimpusers.com/images/tutorials/146/1.png
Is that the kind of "neither" you were talking about?
Were you using ancient versions of GTK, or just making stuff up?
Actually, I would consider Norilsk to be a worse place to go than Kolyma. The latter is remote and cold, yes, and formerly a Gulag site, but it has other things going for it. It is (provided you stay out of Magadan) straightforwardly rural, unlike Norilsk, which has all the disadvantages of a big city without most of the usual advantages. Additionally, Kolyma isn't almost completely defoliated as a result of heavy-metals polution. Kolyma has a variety of economic activities available, such as fishing and farming, in addition to mining. In Norilsk there's pretty much nothing to do but work in the Nickel-smelting plant.
Personally, the parts about being remote and cold wouldn't bother me that much. I rather like winter, and I like solitude. I might actually enjoy visiting Kolyma, or Yakutsk. But I wouldn't want to go to Norilsk.
> > Well, there's also Farmville. ...but you repeat yourself.
>
Farmville is drivel, but it's not malware. Malware isn't just pointless and stupid and unnecessary. (By that standard, almost *all* games would qualify, including some of my own guilty pleasures, such as Iagno.) Malware is worse than that. Malware actively does harm, and I don't mean just by using CPU cycles when the user is deliberately running it, or allowing the user to goof off (again, all games do that, and so does Slashdot for that matter).
No, "malware" isn't the right word for Farmville. The right word for Farmville is "prolefeed". The only purpose it serves is to keep bored stupid people occupied. Incidentally, most television programming also fits in this category.
Actually, part of what he said was right. We did indeed win the cold war by forcing the USSR to spend, in order to keep up with us militarily, more than they could possibly afford. Our economy could handle it. Theirs couldn't. Reagan spent Russia under the table.
It wasn't just SDI, of course. There were other factors as well. The nuclear-sub-based ballistic missile and nuclear warhead arsenal, for instance, was also a major factor: it wasn't enough to be able to hit our stationary missile silos and major cities, they had to be able to wipe us out completely. But SDI was also significant. The reasoning went like this: "Enough warheads to blow up the whole world might NOT be enough, if they can shoot most of them down. If they can do that, they can attack us with impunity. We have to have EVEN MORE warheads, so that they can't hope to shoot them ALL down." And it didn't matter that we never got SDI to actually work during the cold war. As long as the threat was credible, as long as there was the potential that we MIGHT get it to work, they had to be ready for us.
But yeah, SDI didn't bankrupt the US economy. It was a lot of money, yes, but stacked up against our GDP in the eighties, it was... well, not exactly pocket change, but it was something we could clearly afford.
He's also wrong in that we didn't just "sort of recover" from the expenditure. We had that debt all but paid at one point (during the Clinton administration IIRC), to the point where the Federal Reserve was mildly worried that the federal debt might disappear entirely, which would have had a negative impact on their ability to enact monetary policy (because, as I understand it, the interest rate on said debt is among the tools they use to influence the size of the money supply).
Of course, that situation did not last very long. Soon enough the federal government was once again deeper in hock than ever before. But we can't blame that on Reagan. Reagan's debt was paid off (albeit, not during his administration), so the current debt is not his fault. Congress got the ball rolling by overreacting when they got wind of the Fed's concern, during the Clinton administration IIRC, and then Bush had a hand in the matter subsequently, and the current congress and administration... let's just say they haven't exactly improved the situation. Sooner or later somebody's going to have to pay the piper.
But the other poster is basically right about the impact of SDI on the outcome of the Cold War, and the fact that the US could afford it when the USSR could not. That part's true.
> YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO VIEW 'REAL GENIUS' WITHIN 30 DAYS
Meh. I have a four-line Perl script I wrote that views such driv^H^H^H^Hcontent on my behalf (significantly faster than realtime, I might add) and provides me with terse plot summaries and sarcastic commentary. With the right command-line option, it would also look up your slashdot ID, get your email address, and send the sarcastic commentary to you, except that you don't have your email address public, so it would probably respond with a snide error message if I asked it to do that.
> OR YOU MUST FORFEIT YOUR GEEK CARD AT THE NEAREST
> FRY'S ELECTRONICS, COMPUSA, OR RADIO SHACK.
CompUSA? Do they even sell anything a geek would buy?
> Hard drives do fail. Noise is a big indicator
Sometimes there is noise when a drive is failing. Sometimes there isn't any particular noise (beyond the sound a drive always makes whenever it's operating, which you may or may not be able to hear depending on ambient noise levels, including the computer's own fans).
> Another thing is to keep an eye on the
> power on hours count. I have no idea
> how many hours is too many.
Neither does anybody else. The mean (i.e., average) can be calculated for all hard drives, sure, but the standard deviation is so high, the mean is not a particularly useful predictor for any given drive. And the mean for your particular *model* of hard drive won't be known until you're already well past it. No help there.
Also, sometimes there are SMART errors before an all-out drive failure, and sometimes there aren't.
Don't wait for indicators. Make backups now.
> When it comes to papers written for school...
It depends. If you only spent thirty minutes writing it, one copy on your hard drive and a print copy to hand in is probably enough for now, and then when you do your next incremental backup of all your data it will of course be included.
But if you've spent a lot of time on the thing, you should always have multiple electronic copies in separate physical locations. Don't try to guess whether your hard drive might fail. It could fail at any time. Today is the day of salvation. Make your backups now.
> PhD "dissertation"? Normally one writes a thesis for a PhD
Two ways of saying the same thing. The word "thesis" in this context is short for "thesis paper", i.e., a dissertation written in support of a thesis statement.
> I don't know about you, but that's way
> more than I can type in a night.
I'm guessing the story is a few years old.
Someone who is accustomed to retyping material from extant manuscripts (not very common these days but still a widespread practice in the eighties) and thus is well-practiced at typing quickly and has a halfway decent keyboard to type on (also not real common anymore, but the Model M was very popular at one time) can generally do at least 60wpm, and a lot of people can do more. *Good* typists can do 120+. If we split the difference for the sake of estimation, 90wpm, with only short breaks, comes to about four and a half thousand words an hour, so a fifty-thousand word dissertation might take about twelve hours to type. You could only do this if you were *accustomed* to spending several hours typing every day, of course, and by the time you finished your hands would be cramping up and your arms would feel like they were going to fall off and you wouldn't want to SEE a keyboard again for a week. It would be the kind of feat you would never want to have to repeat, EVER again in your life.
And there would be typos, and you wouldn't catch all of them, so you'd be turning in an imperfect copy.
But it's theoretically doable.
> Ph.D. on a floppy?
Sure, no problem.
A typical doctoral dissertation is less than a hundred pages double-spaced, so it'll fit on a 360K floppy even if you do it in XML. If you've got a high-density floppy, you could use RTF.
Yeah, but I don't have XCOPY on my PC-DOS 3.3 system, so I had to write a BAT file to do my backups. It's got PAUSE commands each time I need to insert another blank floppy disk.
Yeah, I was thinking that too.
"Don't verb nouns. Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Alternately:
"Fibre THIS: Hee-Yah!" -- Miss Piggy
> We cannot get everyone at the First World Level.
Of course not. What constitutes a "First World" level is a moving target. If we get to the point where everyone in rural sub-saharan Africa has a cellphone, then obviously having more than one phone per capita will no longer be an indicator of economic prosperity.
(Not that cellphones are really what the third world needs. Heck, if they could just figure out how to *feed* all their people, that would be a meaningful starting point.)
> Our oil, copper, lithium and tantalum will not
> suffice for that.
The oil problem isn't as big a deal as people want to make out. If the price of gas goes much over six or eight bucks a gallon, alcohol-based fuels will be cost-competitive. That leaves plastics, but we're getting better all the time at making synthetics out of an ever-widening variety of source materials. Long-term, I don't think oil scarcity will even matter. Heck, we're probably not far off from being able to make oil synthetically if we need it, out of water, carbon dioxide, and energy. (Energy, of course, we get from the sun. If solar panels ever get good enough, we can do it that way; if not, we can raise fast-growth vegetation and burn that for fuel, possibly after fermenting it into alcohols. It may sound crude, but it WILL work.) Or we could use vegetable oils. Or tallow.
Rare elements, however, are another thing.
I don't know that copper will necessarily be a big problem, because other metals would work for a lot of the stuff we use it for (including the things we use a LOT of it for), and so other metals would be used more if copper were more expensive. We've been using trainloads of copper for water pipe, but we can make that out of almost anything. And we've also used quite a bit of it for plain old household electrical wiring, but there are other conductors. In a pinch, aluminum can be used for both of these purposes, and the earth's crust is absolutely loaded with aluminum. Currently we use copper for these things because we can, because it's a base metal and relatively affordable.
But yeah, there are some other elements could be more of a problem. Some of the rarer metals (e.g., platinum) could prove to be problematic, obviously. The lighter noble gasses come to mind as well. Those are basically irreplaceable. We fill balloons with helium because we get it cheap as a side-benefit of mining natural gas, but when the natural gas is used up... we can replace the natural gas with alcohol-based fuels, but replacements for the helium and argon may be a little hard to come by.
> What, if a low birthrate is the CAUSE of a
> high standard of living, not the EFFECT?
If that were the case, you'd expect artificially-imposed low birthrates (think: One Child Policy) to be effective at raising the standard of living. But the standard of living in China is obviously highest in the parts of the country where significant amounts of free-market capitalism have been introduced, even though those parts of China have the highest percentages of "extra child" exceptions. The rural areas, where the one-child policy is most strictly enforced and the male-to-female ratio is highest? Those parts of China are dirt poor.
> Shall we expend all resources, funds, efforts towards
> bringing the rest of the world to the same economical standard?
That would be ineffective and even counterproductive. Socialism consistently does not improve the overall economic situation of most of the people. It's not as bad as some other economic things that have been tried (e.g., populism), but it doesn't deliver on its promises either.
> No resource is truly unlimited, neither air nor oxygen nor hydrogen is.
Technically, that's true.
But in practice, air to breathe is not going to be scarce, because something else (food perhaps) will run out first. There's more than enough air to support the maximum possible population the planet can possibly handle. (Pollution is a separate issue. When you have pollution problems, even really big pollution problems, you still have plenty of air; it's just dirty.)
Never is probably right if by "intelligence" you mean the ability to figure out and understand the significance of entirely new things.
But most people use the word "intelligence" to mean a good memory and the ability to perform arithmetic, in which case the answer would be closer to "sixty years ago".
> But the more I think about it, the more it 'just'
> seems like a kde4 bug(Or rather misfeature
Misfeature seems more likely. Are we only talking about the default setting, or is the behavior not configurable? (It's been a while since I used KDE on a regular basis. Like, since before Konqueror existed. I don't think their current window manager had been written yet then, either. Heck, Gnome's been through four different default window managers in that time.)
> What is the definition/description of a "utility window" in X.
> I tried to look it up in google, but could not find anything.
You know, I wasn't not really sure myself until I looked it up just now. (Not being an application developer, I've not really studied the inner workings of X much.)
Tip: when searching for things that have to do with X, call it X11.
Anyway, I found this:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY indicates a small persistent utility window, such as a palette or toolbox. It is distinct from type TOOLBAR because it does not correspond to a toolbar torn off from the main application. It's distinct from type DIALOG because it isn't a transient dialog, the user will probably keep it open while they're working. Windows of this type may set the WM_TRANSIENT_FOR hint indicating the main application window.
In other words, the Gimp tool palette and Layers dialog are perfect examples of exactly the kind of thing the "utility window" hint is meant to cover. Personally, I prefer for such windows to automatically raise when other windows in the same application are raised. But I don't want them to always be on *top* of those other windows; that would be annoying. Also, I do prefer for them to be listed in my task list.
> (Who would ever want all the utilities to be below
> the window the utilities should be used on. I can't
> come up with a use case for that,
Oh, I can. Sometimes in Gimp I work on an image that's just a little larger than the available screen real estate really has room for. (My monitor's only a nineteen-inch model, because I have finite funds.) I'd like to be able to see the whole image I'm working on, even if that means it has to be in front of other stuff, including the tool palette. (The Gimp tool palette is really redundant anyway. Context menus will get you everything you need.) So yeah, I definitely want to be able to put the main (image) window in front of the utility window.
But that's really a matter of personal preference. Like I said, try out half a dozen different window managers for a few days each and see the wide variety of different behaviors and options. It's enlightening.
> I don't care about excuses.
The excuses were all about why I was not personally aware of all of the issues you pointed out. Bear in mind, I'm neither a Windows user nor a GTK developer.
> the fact that shortcuts have been around for decades and
> they're still not supported does not bode well for GTK+.
It's not just GTK. Nothing else in the open-source world supports them either, except Emacs. Heck, there's a lot of proprietary Windows-only software that doesn't support them.
> > The last time I had access to an OS X system, getting GTK
> > software to run on it could ONLY be done via the X server,
> Still true, as of 10.4.
Interesting. I would have guessed something would have happened there in the intervening years. (At least running the X server rootless is a breeze now. Apple fixed that about three versions ago, IIRC.)
> You can't say "oh we support Windows, except for
> the features that 'sound cumbersome'."
Like I said, I was totally unaware that using open/save dialog boxes as a file manager was even possible.
> But making folders!?
The GTK open/save dialog *has* that, if I'm not mistaken. There's a "new folder" button right there in the save dialog, to the far right of the directory hierarchy breadcrumb thingies. Above the preview area. (I'm on Debian at the moment, but I'm fairly sure this feature is available on Windows as well.)
As for copying files, I'm not sure how that would even work. It apparently isn't a very discoverable UI, since I was totally unaware that the Windows native common dialogs did that. (Unless by "copying" you mean Open and then Save As, for each file, one at a time. I've known people who copy files in that fashion, but they were not the sort of people who read slashdot.)
> FTP sites by default don't get drive letters,
In the other post you were talking about ones that were "mapped as drives". To me that means they have drive letters. What else would the phrase "mapped as drives" mean, in the context of MS Windows?
> Look, you're dodging the real issue: the real issue is,
> why the hell did GTK+ write their own Open/Save dialogs
> instead of using the ones built-in to the OS?
Now, that's an interesting question. OpenOffice did the same thing (write their own open/save dialogs), so presumably there's some kind of reason for doing so, but I'm not really sure what it would be. Using the native ones (where they exist) would make sense to me.
Do the GTK and OpenOffice open/save dialogs provide something that the native Windows ones lack? I can't really think of anything, but I don't have a Windows system handy to look at for comparison right now.
> GUI styles change. You can't have rectangular grey
> buttons with a simple diagonal bevel anymore, not in 2010.
Oh, I think I understand now. You're saying GTK doesn't support the Fisher Price theme in XP or the Aero Glass stuff in Vista. Have I got that about right?
I didn't know. By the time I install any third-party software on a Windows system, the theme has always already been changed back to Classic (it's nearly the first thing I do). GTK looks right at home.
But yeah, for users who actually use the new-style UI themes, I can see where an app that didn't support them would look a bit out of place. How did you put it originally? "Like a total alien." That comment makes sense now.
> How can this possibly be anything but an infrastructure
> for massive spying on its own citizens?
Actually, I suspect that the primary motivation is political. It's a symbolic gesture.
Not that they won't also use it to spy on their citizens. They will, obviously. But I suspect that's probably more of an "added benefit" than the main reason.
I'm speculating, though. It's an educated guess. I don't have any inside information or anything. I'm just reasoning based on standard well-known public information about how middle-easterners tend to think. They're very big on symbolic gestures. Stuff that doesn't even register for most people in the west is an extremely big deal over there.
Similarly, most Americans think the 9/11 attack was aimed at killing thousands of people. But in fact that was just a side-effect. The main goal was to bring down the World Trade Center, because that was the primary symbol of America's wealth and influence. Symbolically, an attack on the WTC was an attack on America's power and influence. Most Americans would say the Statue of Liberty is the main symbol of our power. But that's because we're Westerners and place a great deal of value on liberty. There's a major paradigmatic difference.
When you're interpreting the actions of a foreign government, you need to be aware of their culture and interpret in that light. Otherwise you end up like Japan in 1941, having exactly the opposite effect from what you intended. (They expected the Pearl Harbor attack to *prevent* the US from entering the war. Really. But you tell an American that, and they go, "They expected it to WHAT?" Because Americans think like Westerners. If the Japanese government at the time had done their cultural homework, they would have known this.)
> While I believe that almost every politician
... there are a lot of ways to be evil, and most people are guilty of several of them.
> is motivated by dollar signs, I don't believe
> everyone in Congress is evil.
Oh, I do. Actually, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that all *people* are evil, at some level. Dishonest, selfish, careless, faithless, arrogant,
But some people are much MORE evil than others, and I'm sure that's true of politicians as well.
> So basically, you're a shameless freeloader.
Non sequitur.
> Where do *YOU* propose proxy server operators find the money to operate?
Not my problem. I don't need the proxies. If you want free proxies, YOU figure out how to fund them.
I fail to see why the whole world should put up with pop-ups every time we browse the web just so a few people can have free access to proxies that *arguably* *might* be harder to fund otherwise. Either there's enough demand for the proxies that someone can find a way to fund them, or not. I don't think we should destroy the web in a misguided and probably futile attempt to influence the outcome of that.
> the only thing that's not too complicated
> for most of the public is malware?
Well, there's also Farmville.