1) USC is not a public university. 2) If we put effort into training foreign students then we should do everything we can to sucker them into becoming productive and working members of *our* society.
Yes, because we all know wanting to use a platform you're more familiar with and can work faster on or allow you to post to mailing lists you need to work with are just religious concerns.
You'd strike out if you responded like that to a candidate that cares about having the best tools for their job available. You may not agree with the person's choice of tools, but not agreeing that a person should be able to use the tools that they're most effective with is exactly the type of failure the OP's question is supposed to illuminate.
I think Palm's complaint to the USB IF isn't intended to get Apple to stop. I think Palm knows that the USB IF has no teeth. However, at the same time, they also want to put on record why they're breaking the guidelines by using Apple's USB vendor ID.
That way they put Apple in a position where it's harder for them to take the high ground because Palm's complaint is their way of going on record that Apple is violating the purpose and spirit of the USB spec.
The Amazon, Yangtze and Yellow rivers would like a word with you.
I just stared at a list of the longest rivers in the world and was thoroughly unable to find a significant correlation that would indicate most rivers flow north/south. You can cite the Nile which happens to flow north/south and has some benefits from that all you want, that doesn't really have anything to do with what most rivers do.
> and this is the reason that the nice parts of > town are more likely to be found north of the > city, and the airports and industry are likely to > be on the south.
Because all rivers flow north/south? Are you kidding me?
The only trend I've seen is more affluent people live *closer* to a coast which means they're further down the major rivers.
> That said, I personally think it's long overdue > that we started treating these botnets and > hacking rings as criminal organizations.
I agree. However this policy treats them as foreign military which is much different.
Very few hacking incidents these days (not that we have terribly good data on this) are military operations. Criminal ones are likely to be far more common. It is important to preserve the distinction and hopefully there will be some effort to do so.
In the UC system the UC police are actually part of the state police. Which is a bit odd because California doesn't actually have a general state police force outside of the highway patrol and the UC Police.
So they're actually one of the more powerful police systems in the state and their jurisdiction *trumps* that of the regular police.
Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux.
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
Don't give up. Please, we really do need more good UI critics. (Good ones mind you, not just random users who think that because they use a piece of software they know how to design a UI for it.)
I hope you keep offering your criticism. If you want a more receptive audience you might consider getting involved with http://www.openusability.org/ which is a recent attempt at matching people with UI skills to projects that are looking for UI criticism.
Not all projects are receptive to UI criticism, but quite a few are. Sometimes this also changes depending on the project's priorities, for instance, if they're currently working on a massive change to pieces of the core, usability issues aren't high priority, as sad as that is. Often it's a timing issue not just an issue of willingness.
The other thing you might want to consider doing is not mentioning the way other products do things as a reason to switch. I think most open-source developers are very averse to someone who says "I'm more familiar with this way because product X does it this way and I think it's better." You may be right, but do you know how often they hear the same thing from people who are dead wrong and just lack familiarity with the project? All the time.
So if you can, in the future, you may want to try and frame your request as "I'd like it behave like this because it's better than how it currently behaves because of reasons A, B, C." If someone notices that you've asked for the behavior in a different product, well, that's fine, but you've given the reasons for the new behavior. It isn't completely unfair to ask people to justify UI changes using concrete reasons instead of "I know what I'm doing and this is better" or "This other product uses it and it's better." Please understand that until you've actually built up credibility as someone who knows what they're talking about on a project, people will go ahead and argue with you. (And sometimes they will even if you have) This arguing is often a good thing and is how a lot of good development in the open-source community works. Often the resulting design ends up being something neither side envisioned and the improvement is quite good. People argue about things until someone convinces them.
Right, I was just saying that there is a need for this type of technology because without it and with just standard DNSSEC the root needs to be signed.
Er... sorry, that should read "webkit" not "webkit's code"
LGPL or GPL rendering engines can use webkit's code, but closed-source projects have to use the whole engine or publicly provide the alterations they make.
That's the source code to webkit, the rendering engine behind Safari. It's licensed under the LGPL.
The reason, in case you were wondering, is because it was started from an open-source rendering engine called KHTML, which was written by the KDE project. The LGPL made sure that when Apple started improving it their improvements would stay in the open.
And so you *can* in fact see all the nice things Apple has done with Safari and all the speed tricks they're working on.
It *is* the small configuration options that matter in a DE. At least to some of us. They may seem trivial to you, but some of us rely on little things like this for our workflow. For me, it's KDE's active borders feature.
> Well worth the $150 million, right? It's not > like we have an ailing economy that could have > made better use of it.
What, it has to be labeled as a stimulus package with a big bow around it or otherwise it doesn't help the economy?
Government spending *does* help the ailing economy and a large part of the stimulus package being put together is spending on all kinds of random projects.
Re:I'm not a copyright lawyer
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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· Score: 0
The only thing the LGPL'ing maintains is allowing licenses outside that list and since most of the open-source ones are on that list (including the BSD-style licenses) this generally is just applicable for proprietary programs.
I think that's for people who want to maintain a private fork of Qt specially modified for their project. Qt has always given source code with their libraries and the commercial edition allowed modified versions of that library to be distributed. The LGPL does not change this restriction and those commercial users who have altered Qt and do not want to make those changes available still can buy a commercial license to allow for this.
It's apparently more robust and there are some actual advantages in places, but the actual interface was terrible and the system was utterly unusable until the KDE guys ported their toolset to it and gave it the same interface DCOP had.
> In the article, Shuttleworth says they're working with KDE.
Unfortunately their track record of actually doing this is very bad.
So I expect them to do what they always do, which is notice a problem that exists in GNOME that KDE has had a sensible solution to for quite some time and then propose a GNOME-centric standard like libnotify (which is what they're doing) and encourage it's use everywhere. What's more annoying is that the solution they end up implementing often ends up being worse than what existed in KDE. Sometimes KDE then ends up adopting the now dominant cross-platform standard and has to do various tools to work around the braindamage that's been caused.
(For instance, see how qdbus is the only thing that makes using dbus actually bearable because it basically provides a dcop like interface to dbus.)
No, the size of the block is determined by the torrent, not by an individual client. You need to map individual blocks to series of UDP datagrams and determine which one it is you're getting. It's certainly doable and not terribly bad and you save a lot of overhead from TCP, but the only thing you get is consistent sorting with that scheme. You have to generally build at least a couple features of TCP on top of UDP whenever you use it.
Slashdot Mirror
1) USC is not a public university.
2) If we put effort into training foreign students then we should do everything we can to sucker them into becoming productive and working members of *our* society.
Yes, because we all know wanting to use a platform you're more familiar with and can work faster on or allow you to post to mailing lists you need to work with are just religious concerns.
You'd strike out if you responded like that to a candidate that cares about having the best tools for their job available. You may not agree with the person's choice of tools, but not agreeing that a person should be able to use the tools that they're most effective with is exactly the type of failure the OP's question is supposed to illuminate.
I think Palm's complaint to the USB IF isn't intended to get Apple to stop. I think Palm knows that the USB IF has no teeth. However, at the same time, they also want to put on record why they're breaking the guidelines by using Apple's USB vendor ID.
That way they put Apple in a position where it's harder for them to take the high ground because Palm's complaint is their way of going on record that Apple is violating the purpose and spirit of the USB spec.
The Amazon, Yangtze and Yellow rivers would like a word with you.
I just stared at a list of the longest rivers in the world and was thoroughly unable to find a significant correlation that would indicate most rivers flow north/south. You can cite the Nile which happens to flow north/south and has some benefits from that all you want, that doesn't really have anything to do with what most rivers do.
If you were to claim wind patterns were biased in a certain direction though, that would be a claim one could support with evidence: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Earth_Global_Circulation.jpg
Happen to have any concrete reason to say that rivers tend to go north/south?
> and this is the reason that the nice parts of
> town are more likely to be found north of the
> city, and the airports and industry are likely to
> be on the south.
Because all rivers flow north/south? Are you kidding me?
The only trend I've seen is more affluent people live *closer* to a coast which means they're further down the major rivers.
> That said, I personally think it's long overdue
> that we started treating these botnets and
> hacking rings as criminal organizations.
I agree. However this policy treats them as foreign military which is much different.
Very few hacking incidents these days (not that we have terribly good data on this) are military operations. Criminal ones are likely to be far more common. It is important to preserve the distinction and hopefully there will be some effort to do so.
In the UC system the UC police are actually part of the state police. Which is a bit odd because California doesn't actually have a general state police force outside of the highway patrol and the UC Police.
So they're actually one of the more powerful police systems in the state and their jurisdiction *trumps* that of the regular police.
Don't give up. Please, we really do need more good UI critics. (Good ones mind you, not just random users who think that because they use a piece of software they know how to design a UI for it.)
I hope you keep offering your criticism. If you want a more receptive audience you might consider getting involved with http://www.openusability.org/ which is a recent attempt at matching people with UI skills to projects that are looking for UI criticism.
Not all projects are receptive to UI criticism, but quite a few are. Sometimes this also changes depending on the project's priorities, for instance, if they're currently working on a massive change to pieces of the core, usability issues aren't high priority, as sad as that is. Often it's a timing issue not just an issue of willingness.
The other thing you might want to consider doing is not mentioning the way other products do things as a reason to switch. I think most open-source developers are very averse to someone who says "I'm more familiar with this way because product X does it this way and I think it's better." You may be right, but do you know how often they hear the same thing from people who are dead wrong and just lack familiarity with the project? All the time.
So if you can, in the future, you may want to try and frame your request as "I'd like it behave like this because it's better than how it currently behaves because of reasons A, B, C." If someone notices that you've asked for the behavior in a different product, well, that's fine, but you've given the reasons for the new behavior. It isn't completely unfair to ask people to justify UI changes using concrete reasons instead of "I know what I'm doing and this is better" or "This other product uses it and it's better." Please understand that until you've actually built up credibility as someone who knows what they're talking about on a project, people will go ahead and argue with you. (And sometimes they will even if you have) This arguing is often a good thing and is how a lot of good development in the open-source community works. Often the resulting design ends up being something neither side envisioned and the improvement is quite good. People argue about things until someone convinces them.
Anyways, I hope you keep at it.
Right, I was just saying that there is a need for this type of technology because without it and with just standard DNSSEC the root needs to be signed.
Er... sorry, that should read "webkit" not "webkit's code"
LGPL or GPL rendering engines can use webkit's code, but closed-source projects have to use the whole engine or publicly provide the alterations they make.
BSD + LGPL actually. Which means *anyone* can use webkit's code in their browser, even a closed-source project. (And many do!)
> how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
Man they'd have to like, use the Internet or something: http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk
That's the source code to webkit, the rendering engine behind Safari. It's licensed under the LGPL.
The reason, in case you were wondering, is because it was started from an open-source rendering engine called KHTML, which was written by the KDE project. The LGPL made sure that when Apple started improving it their improvements would stay in the open.
And so you *can* in fact see all the nice things Apple has done with Safari and all the speed tricks they're working on.
The TLDs can be signed all they want but if the root isn't signed it doesn't matter without technology like the article discusses.
The root is the invisible dot at the end, not the TLD. It's *above* gov in the hierarchy.
Wow. If that is your favorite thing to complain about, I guess Gnome must be pretty good...
Whether or not the cursor blinks is a non-trivial issue: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/102406.html
It *is* the small configuration options that matter in a DE. At least to some of us. They may seem trivial to you, but some of us rely on little things like this for our workflow. For me, it's KDE's active borders feature.
> Well worth the $150 million, right? It's not
> like we have an ailing economy that could have
> made better use of it.
What, it has to be labeled as a stimulus package with a big bow around it or otherwise it doesn't help the economy?
Government spending *does* help the ailing economy and a large part of the stimulus package being put together is spending on all kinds of random projects.
In the case of Qt however there are many many special license exceptions which make this not true at all: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/license-gpl-exceptions.html
The only thing the LGPL'ing maintains is allowing licenses outside that list and since most of the open-source ones are on that list (including the BSD-style licenses) this generally is just applicable for proprietary programs.
I think that's for people who want to maintain a private fork of Qt specially modified for their project. Qt has always given source code with their libraries and the commercial edition allowed modified versions of that library to be distributed. The LGPL does not change this restriction and those commercial users who have altered Qt and do not want to make those changes available still can buy a commercial license to allow for this.
The spec and the creator says you're wrong.
Do you have sources or do you just like telling people they're wrong without any data to back it up?
Here's another source if you trust wikipedia more than random webpages that can't be edited by half the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gif#Pronunciation
You're definitely wrong about the pronunciation of gif: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/
I know everyone says that no one on slashdot reads the articles. But the big secret is that's supposed to be a joke, not a rule.
What about Google Chrome? I know it's currently only Windows only, but it's a very good browser and Open Source.
You mean the one that's the second item on the list in the article? That Google Chrome?
It's apparently more robust and there are some actual advantages in places, but the actual interface was terrible and the system was utterly unusable until the KDE guys ported their toolset to it and gave it the same interface DCOP had.
> Where by "GNOME-centric" you presumably mean "written in C".
Yeah that's actually not what I mean at all.
> In the article, Shuttleworth says they're working with KDE.
Unfortunately their track record of actually doing this is very bad.
So I expect them to do what they always do, which is notice a problem that exists in GNOME that KDE has had a sensible solution to for quite some time and then propose a GNOME-centric standard like libnotify (which is what they're doing) and encourage it's use everywhere. What's more annoying is that the solution they end up implementing often ends up being worse than what existed in KDE. Sometimes KDE then ends up adopting the now dominant cross-platform standard and has to do various tools to work around the braindamage that's been caused.
(For instance, see how qdbus is the only thing that makes using dbus actually bearable because it basically provides a dcop like interface to dbus.)
It is, to say the least, frustrating.
No, the size of the block is determined by the torrent, not by an individual client. You need to map individual blocks to series of UDP datagrams and determine which one it is you're getting. It's certainly doable and not terribly bad and you save a lot of overhead from TCP, but the only thing you get is consistent sorting with that scheme. You have to generally build at least a couple features of TCP on top of UDP whenever you use it.