If you think about the situation, it becomes easy to identify the root cause. Certain companies with a stake in Gnome are interested in it one day being used on the coprate desktop. (BigCompanies = +CashFlow) If they create a product that has too many configuration options their target audience is left confused. Not only that, but configuration options are a nightmare for people who maintain the desktop environments used by enterprises. They want to do everything they can to make certain you "can't configure xyz", in fact each time a configuation change is brought up there is likely a discussion on how to make sure you can totally disable it. Take a look at the "Run Programs" menu item vanishing, it is part of a logical strategy. You don't want enterprise user x to just run something not in the menu. They could potentially circumvent other restrictions you placed on the machine and start doing file sharing, playing games on Cedega, or something worse. So the short answer is not that Gnome doesn't care, or wants a clean look. It is simply that the "hacker", is no longer the target audience, because they can't generate enough revenue stream to support a company. The target audience is "large company x"'s low level HR employee (and their corperate purchasing manager who is calculating the ROIT).
Re:Fitts Law and the Dual Layer Task Bar
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Fitt's "Laws" (*grumble*) have seemed to cause more in the way of a lack of innovation and customability than any notifiable improvements from my end. For me personally, this really struck a cord with the Amiga-style "spatial file management" and other "improvements" that have happened in Gnome. I hope KDE stays as far away from Fitt as possible and comes up with something new and unique.
It's not debugging on the PS3 that will be the big problem, it is developing an game in the first place that can make use of a new technology like Cell. There simply isn't the pile of tools and "know-how" that already exist for the PowerPC architecture. It's easy to find the most efficient way to perform a complicated routine on the 360, because other developers have been working against the same basic architecture it uses for at least a decade. The Cell, on the other hand, is designed in a way that makes it vastly different from what people have been used to developing for. That doesn't mean the Cell is in anyway "worse" than the PowerPC architecture of the XBOX360; it's simply that it has a bigger bridge to cross for the people who create the games.
Loop-AES has been around on Linux for years and provides a fairly nice transparent encrypted FS. I really can't imagine anyone cracking a HD seeded with garbage, an FS offset from the traditional drive start, and using loop-aes in _years_, much less days. Who knows, maybe MI5 has the black box from the movie Sneakers... the UK did produce Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking after all.
One idea is to stop simply challenging (or promoting) ID's merits, and try to determine an argument that would make it testable and falsifiable ("scientific"). For instance, if the universe is a completely ordered system, then it should be devoid of any real entropy. No ordered system has yet been created mathematically that imposes anything which is beyond pseudo-randomness. Though similar to the "first cause" paradox of Aristotle, it is one example to get you thinking of something we can actually "test". As technology progresses we are bound to find new methods of testing old ideas. I am certain that there are those here that could think up much better examples to share.
To be clear, by firing a number of these employees they will manage to stay operational and maybe even profitable. Layoffs are no sign that a company is about to go "South", many times layoffs prove just the opposite by alowing additional revenue to go back into R&D, marketing, etc.
Bill certainly must be psychic! Listen to these other amazing predictions:
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system of all time."
"The Internet will never be more than a toy for hackers and gamers." -1993
No worries though, when his predictions don't exactally turn out right, he revises his statements or the entire book, like he did with "The Road Ahead".
There is the former UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, who according to the Justice Department, "assisted or participated" in Nazi deportations and the executions of Jews and soldiers in the Balkans during World War II. The organization has a history of corruption and incompotence.
The "social egoism" you mentioned has been a long running debate in philosophy. Are people as a group naturally too incompetent to run a perfect democracy? Plato, in The Republic, argued that democracy is a "ship of fools". In his eloquent allusion, he compared democracy to a ship hijacked by it's crew, who then locked the navigator in the hold. After they proceeded to travel around in endless circles based on their whims and refused to listen to those who were better equiped to handle navigation because their ideas were unpopular.
The problem, however, lies in the alternatives. You mentioned above a situation in which the government should go against the populance to favor the "minority". That is, unfortunately, the path of tyranny and oppression. Take a close look at non-democratic countries who have practiced similar policies and what became of their ideas -- Apartide, the Holocost, Stalinism.
Perhaps the real solution is to find better representatives in democratic governments. Currently, the qualifications in most of the world are set very low. The ability to speak (or read a teleprompter) and loads of money. If there were some type of test or analysis to judge good leaders, or a wider selection of choices, then perhaps the representative system (American system) would be run with more direction and less of an overt populist stance.
Finally, I am from Ohio, USA and as you can see the "farmers" here are not "stupid";) The education of the average citizen today has far exceeded anything the American constitutional framer's had ever envisioned. I can only expect, that as information becomes more easily available to a majority of people, better decisions will be made by citizens. However, as I pointed out above, without better leaders to choose from this won't make much of a difference.
Hmmm... do you get the 72 virgins for martyring yourself to stop a robot?;) Also it is much easier to "sell" a war to a populance that has little to no fear of human causualties. It's not as if Bender from Futurama is going to appear on 60 Minuites and read the list of fallen robots! Primarily military strategy is based on cowing enemies into surrender; enemies are much less willing to put their life on the line to fight the "demonic machines from BABALON." This will be espically true if they take the idea _all the way_ and develop an expert system to learn from online military shooters. I can't imagine fighting against something that maintained hundreds of kills per hour and never missed. Sounds like some interesting work!
Mono will always be on the fringes of acceptance like WINE... Never quite compatible and necessitating that you keep returning to Windows at least semi-frequently for that last bit of missing compatability.
How is this insightful?! These claims are flamebait and based on absolutely no evidence. The fact is.NET/C# is ANSI and public. It is not an "emulator", but rather an implimentation. There is no semi-frequently returning to Windows about it.
This change is going to be a "bad thing" *period*. This whole issue makes all of Microsoft's old "Hallloween" FUD, look like a frightening prophesy. The community should pressure them to stop this whole mess before it is too late. Without stirring up too much bitterness, lets remember how we _really_ got into having the two major Linux desktops today: RMS + GPL vs KDE. It played right into Microsoft's hands; divide and conquer. The lack of truly great apps is now punctuated by the number of redundancies in the offered software -- all because of that one crucial moment. Now, here we are again. There will be a split and it will hurt us. There will be factions who chose not to go over to the "other side" and become true software communists. There will be forks. Businesses will choose not to use Linux. Steve Ballmer will not throw his chair.
Actually, that is one of the things Microsoft is really good at! Outside of managed service businesses (IBM, HP, EDS), Microsoft is certainly a top teir player at providing support to large customers. There are some here who will flame or contend this, however I've happily worked directly with excellent Microsoft resources when architecting and implimenting solutions for large customers. Microsoft, like some big UNIX vendors, will even provide an on-site for enterprise customers with the weight and money. There are a lot of things to knock them for, but enterprise class service isn't one of them.;)
No, the software cost is usually a function of the number of users. So obviously when you have 120,000 users the license cost gets very high. Plus, you get to pay for the enterprise services!;)
That 10x price increase is there for a reason, if you support any enterprise you _will_ need to offer 24x7 support 365 days a week, probably install everything yourself by flying out to them, and maybe even hand hold them through every upgrade and security patch. It takes a good deal of work to support an enterprise customer and not all businesses are up to task.
Re:Better than post-it notes
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Oddly enough, I have been doing something very similar. This should generate a key for you:
Unlike Ulrich, I _actually took part in the LSB_ in the lonely dark days of 1996. Far from "making things compatible with RedHat", we were trying to stop the major issues which fragmented the UNIX market in the previous years. It's not so easy to compile your fancy "portable" app on both Solaris and your HP/UX workstation. The LSB head off this very problem in the Linux community by creating an infrastructure that had some base compatability. Before you think this guy is anyone to talk, take a look around for his work in the community... There are some of us with much more experience (*cough* *cough*) who can't ever get modded above 0;)
Seriously, don't make fun of the 14 year old mods on Slashdot!! They are weilding 6.8 Ghz laptops with 2T or ram and driving monster trucks powered by dead cats (which also _of course_ are generating hydrogen).
Slashdot Mirror
How many of these Linux/UNIX vulnerabilities allowed remote execution of arbitrairy code as a superuser...
Also, note that PER-vendor Microsoft far outwieghed the competition.
If you think about the situation, it becomes easy to identify the root cause. Certain companies with a stake in Gnome are interested in it one day being used on the coprate desktop. (BigCompanies = +CashFlow) If they create a product that has too many configuration options their target audience is left confused. Not only that, but configuration options are a nightmare for people who maintain the desktop environments used by enterprises. They want to do everything they can to make certain you "can't configure xyz", in fact each time a configuation change is brought up there is likely a discussion on how to make sure you can totally disable it. Take a look at the "Run Programs" menu item vanishing, it is part of a logical strategy. You don't want enterprise user x to just run something not in the menu. They could potentially circumvent other restrictions you placed on the machine and start doing file sharing, playing games on Cedega, or something worse. So the short answer is not that Gnome doesn't care, or wants a clean look. It is simply that the "hacker", is no longer the target audience, because they can't generate enough revenue stream to support a company. The target audience is "large company x"'s low level HR employee (and their corperate purchasing manager who is calculating the ROIT).
Fitt's "Laws" (*grumble*) have seemed to cause more in the way of a lack of innovation and customability than any notifiable improvements from my end. For me personally, this really struck a cord with the Amiga-style "spatial file management" and other "improvements" that have happened in Gnome. I hope KDE stays as far away from Fitt as possible and comes up with something new and unique.
It's not debugging on the PS3 that will be the big problem, it is developing an game in the first place that can make use of a new technology like Cell. There simply isn't the pile of tools and "know-how" that already exist for the PowerPC architecture. It's easy to find the most efficient way to perform a complicated routine on the 360, because other developers have been working against the same basic architecture it uses for at least a decade. The Cell, on the other hand, is designed in a way that makes it vastly different from what people have been used to developing for. That doesn't mean the Cell is in anyway "worse" than the PowerPC architecture of the XBOX360; it's simply that it has a bigger bridge to cross for the people who create the games.
Loop-AES has been around on Linux for years and provides a fairly nice transparent encrypted FS. I really can't imagine anyone cracking a HD seeded with garbage, an FS offset from the traditional drive start, and using loop-aes in _years_, much less days. Who knows, maybe MI5 has the black box from the movie Sneakers... the UK did produce Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking after all.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/loop-aes/
One idea is to stop simply challenging (or promoting) ID's merits, and try to determine an argument that would make it testable and falsifiable ("scientific"). For instance, if the universe is a completely ordered system, then it should be devoid of any real entropy. No ordered system has yet been created mathematically that imposes anything which is beyond pseudo-randomness. Though similar to the "first cause" paradox of Aristotle, it is one example to get you thinking of something we can actually "test". As technology progresses we are bound to find new methods of testing old ideas. I am certain that there are those here that could think up much better examples to share.
To be clear, by firing a number of these employees they will manage to stay operational and maybe even profitable. Layoffs are no sign that a company is about to go "South", many times layoffs prove just the opposite by alowing additional revenue to go back into R&D, marketing, etc.
This is a flamebaiting troll, please mod parent appropriately. Completely off topic
Bill certainly must be psychic! Listen to these other amazing predictions:
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system of all time."
"The Internet will never be more than a toy for hackers and gamers." -1993
No worries though, when his predictions don't exactally turn out right, he revises his statements or the entire book, like he did with "The Road Ahead".
Is there any evidence, besides the obvious, that Ballmer is a major cocaine addict...
Certainly would explain some things!
There is the former UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, who according to the Justice Department, "assisted or participated" in Nazi deportations and the executions of Jews and soldiers in the Balkans during World War II. The organization has a history of corruption and incompotence.
The "social egoism" you mentioned has been a long running debate in philosophy. Are people as a group naturally too incompetent to run a perfect democracy? Plato, in The Republic, argued that democracy is a "ship of fools". In his eloquent allusion, he compared democracy to a ship hijacked by it's crew, who then locked the navigator in the hold. After they proceeded to travel around in endless circles based on their whims and refused to listen to those who were better equiped to handle navigation because their ideas were unpopular.
;) The education of the average citizen today has far exceeded anything the American constitutional framer's had ever envisioned. I can only expect, that as information becomes more easily available to a majority of people, better decisions will be made by citizens. However, as I pointed out above, without better leaders to choose from this won't make much of a difference.
The problem, however, lies in the alternatives. You mentioned above a situation in which the government should go against the populance to favor the "minority". That is, unfortunately, the path of tyranny and oppression. Take a close look at non-democratic countries who have practiced similar policies and what became of their ideas -- Apartide, the Holocost, Stalinism.
Perhaps the real solution is to find better representatives in democratic governments. Currently, the qualifications in most of the world are set very low. The ability to speak (or read a teleprompter) and loads of money. If there were some type of test or analysis to judge good leaders, or a wider selection of choices, then perhaps the representative system (American system) would be run with more direction and less of an overt populist stance.
Finally, I am from Ohio, USA and as you can see the "farmers" here are not "stupid"
Progressive, yes -- well, Except for that one time they produced an improved Hollerith punch card system for the Nazis...
Hmmm... do you get the 72 virgins for martyring yourself to stop a robot? ;) Also it is much easier to "sell" a war to a populance that has little to no fear of human causualties. It's not as if Bender from Futurama is going to appear on 60 Minuites and read the list of fallen robots! Primarily military strategy is based on cowing enemies into surrender; enemies are much less willing to put their life on the line to fight the "demonic machines from BABALON." This will be espically true if they take the idea _all the way_ and develop an expert system to learn from online military shooters. I can't imagine fighting against something that maintained hundreds of kills per hour and never missed. Sounds like some interesting work!
Mono will always be on the fringes of acceptance like WINE... Never quite compatible and necessitating that you keep returning to Windows at least semi-frequently for that last bit of missing compatability. How is this insightful?! These claims are flamebait and based on absolutely no evidence. The fact is .NET/C# is ANSI and public. It is not an "emulator", but rather an implimentation. There is no semi-frequently returning to Windows about it.
This change is going to be a "bad thing" *period*. This whole issue makes all of Microsoft's old "Hallloween" FUD, look like a frightening prophesy. The community should pressure them to stop this whole mess before it is too late. Without stirring up too much bitterness, lets remember how we _really_ got into having the two major Linux desktops today: RMS + GPL vs KDE. It played right into Microsoft's hands; divide and conquer. The lack of truly great apps is now punctuated by the number of redundancies in the offered software -- all because of that one crucial moment. Now, here we are again. There will be a split and it will hurt us. There will be factions who chose not to go over to the "other side" and become true software communists. There will be forks. Businesses will choose not to use Linux. Steve Ballmer will not throw his chair.
Actually, that is one of the things Microsoft is really good at! Outside of managed service businesses (IBM, HP, EDS), Microsoft is certainly a top teir player at providing support to large customers. There are some here who will flame or contend this, however I've happily worked directly with excellent Microsoft resources when architecting and implimenting solutions for large customers. Microsoft, like some big UNIX vendors, will even provide an on-site for enterprise customers with the weight and money. There are a lot of things to knock them for, but enterprise class service isn't one of them. ;)
No, the software cost is usually a function of the number of users. So obviously when you have 120,000 users the license cost gets very high. Plus, you get to pay for the enterprise services! ;)
That 10x price increase is there for a reason, if you support any enterprise you _will_ need to offer 24x7 support 365 days a week, probably install everything yourself by flying out to them, and maybe even hand hold them through every upgrade and security patch. It takes a good deal of work to support an enterprise customer and not all businesses are up to task.
Oddly enough, I have been doing something very similar. This should generate a key for you:
perl -e 'foreach $x(A..Z) { print "$x: ".chr(int(rand 94)+33).chr(int(rand 94)+33)."\n"}'
They were neet before that "one guy" coined the term Blog(tm) *gag*. Now they are the new tag.
Can you at least use a different title than the OSNews articles from three days ago...
Unlike Ulrich, I _actually took part in the LSB_ in the lonely dark days of 1996. Far from "making things compatible with RedHat", we were trying to stop the major issues which fragmented the UNIX market in the previous years. It's not so easy to compile your fancy "portable" app on both Solaris and your HP/UX workstation. The LSB head off this very problem in the Linux community by creating an infrastructure that had some base compatability. Before you think this guy is anyone to talk, take a look around for his work in the community... There are some of us with much more experience (*cough* *cough*) who can't ever get modded above 0 ;)
Seriously, don't make fun of the 14 year old mods on Slashdot!! They are weilding 6.8 Ghz laptops with 2T or ram and driving monster trucks powered by dead cats (which also _of course_ are generating hydrogen).
Ewe h@v3 b33n w@rN3d!!
2. Trademark the term "Peerguardian". This costs about ~$400.
Where?! Not the USA! My patent lawyer told me I better have about $20,000 to go through the PTO process.