"Losing?" For Linux, there's really no concept of losing. The only way for Linux to "lose" is if, by some "miracle," all developers stop contributing to it. Maybe Linus goes the way of Reiser, gets thrown in jail and all interest built upon Linux goes by the wayside in shame for Linus's bad deeds. I don't see that happening, though.
Linux does have a few things going against it in terms of applications and stuff that may bring it closer to the forefront of people's minds. Of course, these disadvantages comes from probably the biggest advantage Linux has: it's free and open. But when developers only
Applications are typically only a "developers toy" for the most part, unless it gains particular popularity. I mention this because many developers don't have a clue on how to create a usable and pleasing UI. I'm one of those developers. Oh, and Documentation
Little support from commercial vendors in terms of drivers, games, etc. This has little to do with Linux itself and everything to do with the fact it's not windows.
WINE has been a blessing and a curse. I remember reading even fairly recently of companies saying "we support our game in linux via wine." It may be awesome for companies who haven't ported x game from windows, but it also gives people an excuse not to make a native port
Duplication of effort. Think of how many Window managers there are, how many desktop environments (and how big of an undertaking DEs are), how many media players there are, how many file managers, how many shells there are, how many terminal emulators for X there are.. the list goes on.
Some applications could take a hint from Apple about their "just working" philosophy. While I do enjoy the customizability Linux and everything associated with it gives me.. 15 windows worth of options for an instant messenger is kinda silly.
I still honestly believe that what keeps Linux below many people's radar is the fact that it's not Windows. While installing Linux has gotten laughably easy (Wubi is sex), when people can't even install software without having a slight mental breakdown, how do you expect them to potentially repartition their hard drive and installing an operating system without any help? Yeah, it's not happening.
Why should we really care about Linux becoming the de-facto OS/kernel for everyone though? It's like me being an atheist and caring that the majority of the world are silly christians. But really, you say things "aren't moving quickly" enough on the linux front.. what do you mean? It's made leaps and bounds in the last few years from the desktop usability standpoint. In all areas, really.
And as far as Visual Studio goes, I wouldn't be surprised if most developers are happy with simple syntax highlighting text editors such as SciTE and Kate.;p
A restocking fee is exactly what should sound like it's for.
It's not compensation for keeping the movie late. If that were the case, it would make a lot more sense if we just forgot about the confusing "sell and refund" system we have now and continued on with our "Extended Viewing Fees" system.
A movie rental (DVD) is $3.99 plus tax. A Game rental can range anywhere from $4.99 to $6.99 plus tax. BBI is losing anywhere from $2 to $5 on each rental period a customer keeps a rental out. If a customer keeps a two day rental out for three weeks, long enough for it to auto-sell but short enough for the refund to take place.. we have already lost out on 10 potential rental cycles which is over $40.00 lost on ONE rental item.
A restocking fee actually represents more than simply the manpower it takes to put a movie back on the shelf as well.
Firstly, there's cost incurred by transferring a rental product as PRP. This is done to make inventory correct -- it's technically no longer available for rent, so temporarily transferring it as a Previously Rented Product and then selling that PRP game or movie to the account is the only real way to sell a movie or game to an account whilst keeping inventory accurate.
Secondly, when the movie is returned, it price of the movie or game is refunded to the account, and then the movie or game is transferred from PRP back to rental.
I guess this makes little sense to most people, but there is cost incurred from the transferring process. No, it's not about manpower. I guess it has to do with the store's shrink. More shrink = bad.
Another part of the restocking fee is the fact that various methods are used in order to get into contact with a customer to make them aware that they still have rentals out and that they are late. Think about it.. it costs what? 37 cents to mail something out via USPS. A customer should receive (or, atleast we send them out) two automated phone calls and two post-card notices in the mail before their rentals are auto-sold to their account. Just taking the postage in consideration, THAT is over half of the cost incurred by making sure the customer is properly informed that that have late rentals on their account.
Or, atleast, that's what we were told in our meeting
From how I understand it, WinFS will actually be a layer of abstraction above whatever underlying filesystem (FAT32/NTFS) the system is running on. It won't be a new filesystem at all. It holds metadata about each file and makes it easier and faster to find things. Much like the aforementioned Beagle project.
And ext3's journalling is quite different from what WinFS attempts to accomplish. Journalling basically makes it so, like you say, files aren't lost and you don't have to do a time-consuming fsck whenever the partition is not unmounted cleanly like with ext2.
>But if you bring the movie back after 7 days but >before 37 days, they charge you $1.25.
Semantics aside (BBV has actually not had "late fees" for a long time -- ever since that lawsuit a few years ago they're supposed to be "Extended Viewing Fees":P), what would you rather have happen?
Say you rent a copy of Shall We Dance, which is currently a two day rental. You keep it a week past its due day. On the old system, a late fee of $3.99 plus tax (let's say $4.23 for the sake of argument) would be accrued every two days, so if you return it 8 days later, meaning that it's around six days late, you would have to pay a $16.92 EVF balance.
Under the new deal, if it was six days late, it probably wouldn't charge you anything at all! But if it's one more day late, yes -- the price of the movie is charged to your account (the price of the movie less the rental fee) which is about $18.00 for a new movie like Shall We Dance. If you've a credit card on your account, it's charged to that. If you don't, it's just slapped on your account.
When you return it, the $18.00 is refunded to the account minus the $1.25 restocking fee. So if you had that credit card, you'd show a negative balance of around $16.75, or if you had no credit card, you'd have a "late fee" of $1.25.
If you have that negative balance, you can have the MOD refund it to the credit card on your account or you can use it as money within BBV and not have to worry about paying for stuff for the next few weeks. Choice is yours.
I don't know about most people, but if it's a choice between having to pay $12.69 for keeping a 2 day rental a few extra days or having a net loss of $1.25, I'll choose the latter.
Also, even on the old system, if you kept the movie long enough (around 15 days), the movie should be sold to the customers account plus the EVF charges accrued until that point. So even if they charge the PRP price of the movie (probably $12.99 or $13.77 after tax), you have to pay the EVFs that have accrued to that point as well. Keeping a two day rental out for two weeks will give the account a balance of about $25.38 (the price of about six movie rentals). So if you "got stuck" with a movie, you would end up paying almost $40 for it, rather than the $18.00 you pay under the new policy.
But heck, misleading commercials aside, if you prefer to pay $3.99+ for only having a movie a few hours late, that's your perogative. If I wasn't a BBV employee (;)), I definitely would prefer the new plan. Of course, TEOL has other drawbacks, including the fact that NOBODY brings ANYTHING back on time anymore, so many "righteous" customers who think they're entitled to see the latest Hillary Duff movie right now get all pissy at us because their fellow customers want to keep it a "few extra days."
I think the real issue here is that GNOME has slowly evolved into a creature that resists customization. It's not just Nautilus---it's apps such as gnome-terminal too
gnome-terminal lacks options? How? What is it missing?
.. it is self-destructive for GNOME to snub them so openly.
Did you actually read the article? Did you notice what it said at the bottom? Radoslaw Sokol is a network administrator in Poland. I would think that it would have been a bit more relevant to say that he was somehow affiliated with the GNOME developers. So it's probably safe to assume that he is merely just a user of the GNOME DE that feels strongly about his opinions.
In other words, this article has nothing to do with "GNOME" snubbing anyone. It's about a user of GNOME snubbing GNOME bashers.
Overall, though, I have to agree with the AC. There is no such thing as a desktop for everyone. If you want to tinker to your hearts content so your configuration is just right, GNOME is not for you. If gconf-editor scares you but you want absolute control over how your apps work, GNOME is not for you.
First, they did not "remove" the browser mode. True, the option to disable spatial mode by default is "hidden" within the "GNOME Registry" (-_-), but the option is still there. And I'm sure if you weren't just looking for a reason to bash GNOME and really WANT to use GNOME, you would have heard of gTweakUI already. Or know that they've already "announced" that they will include an option in the GUI for later releases.
Second, why are the GNOME devs "arrogant" because they wanted to try something different? I think it's quite the opposite of arrogance that they didn't totally rip out browser Nautilus, even though browser and spatial are almost at opposite ends of the spectrum.
And what does Microsoft have to do anything? If you don't want browser mode, tough nuts. Atleast I've never run across anything that resembles spatial mode in 2k/XP.
Heh, and much like Win95, you would never see spatial mode if you got rid of the "Home"/"My Documents" folder.
I never even realized there was a spatialesque file view in Win95 until people starting flaming about spatial Nautilus. Why? Because I never used "My *" and the default is probably more properly the browser mode, since that's what I remember coming up when I ran simply "explorer.exe."
Since I don't like stuff on my desktop, and because I prefer spatial Nautilus over browser, one of the first things I do is make shortcuts to a few of my more important directories so I can have easy access to them, in spatial mode, since there's no "View in Spatial Mode" in browser mode, afterall.;)
Ew, that's bad. echo "x11-base/xorg-x11" >>/etc/portage/package.keywords (you'll have to do the same thing for things like utempter and xterm as well, since those are ~x86) emerge -C xfree (xfree blocks xorg, so you have to uninstall first) emerge xorg-x11
And as should be implied, if you already have an installation of xfree, the config file works with it out of the box. In fact, the config file generated from xorgconfig (which, incidentally, looks exactly like the XF86Config util) is pretty much the same as the one generated from the XF86Config util, save for a different header most likely ("This config file was generated" by blah).
But there's really no difference between the current X.org release and Xfree4.3.0 save for some patches that they have may have backported from 4.4. But I've been running X.org's implementation for quite a few months now and while I haven't noticed any significant difference between xfree and X.org at the moment.. that's not to say that will be the same as time goes on.
I think this "release" was mostly just to get the thing out of the door and get its name out there. The REAL cool stuff will be coming during the next releases. They're already trying to get the damage and composite extensions ported to the X.org tree. Those who've played around with KeithP's kdrive/Xserver have seen both of those extensions in action. Just imagining the composite extention in cooperation with something like cairo and glitz just makes me drool.
Re:they need updated docs for todays ram amounts
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 0
I have 512Mb of ram in both of my systems (Linux running a Duron, and Used-to-be-running Windows (in the middle of installing gentoo on it now;)) on a Athlon XP), Windows is the only system that has complained that my virtual memory is too low.
And believe me, I tax my Linux box WAAAY more than I tax my Windows machine. It works both as a small server as well as my primary desktop.
Oh yeah, and while I had the defaults on for virtual memory/swap for Windows, I have no swap file/partition in Linux.
Theres no Akira Toriyama (the original character designer) working on it.
It might be my utter distaste for anything semi-related to DBZ, but there are many reasons I can think of that made me enjoy Chrono Trigger (fun battle system, no random battles, enjoyable characters/story, overall good gfx for its time) but character designs ain't one of 'em.
Hell, if anything, it was more of a detraction for me to look at Chrno and think "it's Goku with red hair" or the fact that both Meryl (Lunch) and Lucca (Bulma) looked like body doubles from DBZ.
Although you may have a point -- the enhanced detail may prove some interesting directional challenges for the crew making this remake. Are they going to be static models? Nothing more than souped up versions of their originals, complete with rudimentary animations to help express the emotion behind their lines? That may have been sufficient during the 16bit era, but it's not anymore.
Or will we see the characters themselve cringe, laugh and cry as the story goes on? Will they make the characters seem like they're over-acting, or will they be so understated it's almost not worth it?
And I just cringe at the thought of a dub of this game. Hopefully they'll err on the side of saving time/money and just go with a voiceless game.
Overall, I can't wait until this is released. Of the RPGs released since the dawn of polygons and the PSX, Xenosaga is really the only RPG that comes close to dethroning CT as my favorite RPG.
Of course, I'm not really an RPG Gamer, so I play RPGs for the story moreso than anything else, so I probably would have been fine with CT as long as its gameplay wasn't annoying and it kept its good story. Xenosaga was the same way -- the story was great but the gameplay just made it that much more enjoyable.
True enough that IRC was made back in the day when character encoding wasn't a real issue. It is today, however, but I guess I've been using IRC long enough that I just don't think of being able to communicate in Japanese or other such non-roman language.
Two of your latter points are fairly invalid these days on IRC though. Takeovers are effectively impossible through the use of channel services like Dalnet's Chanserv and Undernet's X/W.
Server desynch should also not be an issue if the network you're on is running any halfway recent (read: within the last few years) release of a properly coded IRC server that has timestamping. There may be a better way to deal with it, but timestamping will basically take the older "copy" of a user list that a server has and will use that instead of a potentially "newer" copy that could be used to hijack ops.
IRC would be a lot more nifty if it standardized on the use of UTF-8 however, although with the annoyance of people who love to talk in high-ascii, I just cringe at the thought of some kiddy having an almost limitless choice of annoying characters to use using a UTF-8 nickname.
And as far as netsplits go.. I'm not really sure how a better written protocol can really defend against DoS attacks and overloading.
Expecting users to get used to using an alternate button just for their app...
How's that any different from learning the commands on vi? or the keystrokes of emacs? or the middle button opening a new tab that was pretty much only in Mozilla (and maybe Opera) back in the day?
I've effectively "taught" myself to middle click on links in only a few days when I started liking the tabbed browsing of Mozilla. Of course, when I go in IE every once in a while I'll vainly attempt to middle click on a link thinking I'm still using Epiphany or another tabbed-able browser.
Besides, as has been said multiple times whenever there's a slashdot article, there's a gconf key that let's the user default to the old browser-type view. That makes the "having to learn an alternate button just for their app" point moot.
And it's a double middle click, not a double right click. Right click brings up a context menu like it would in any other program.
You mean enabling "Use compact layout" and "Text beside icons" doesn't suffice it for you? I can see ~15 items in the default-sized spatial window at 100% (or ~35 at 50%), which is quite a bit, IMO.
gnome-vfs is essentially gnome's answer to KDE's IOSlaves, I believe. And while I don't believe gnome-vfs has quite the breadth of fs modules that KDE has, it does has some of the more "important" ones like smb and ftp that I can think of offhand. It also supports a "sftp://" protocol (which, obviously, lets you access the ftp subsystem of ssh), as well as a "ssh://" protocol of which I'm not sure how it's supposed to work.
Of course, for simple SMB on LAN use I still think smbfs coupled with automount is still the best solution. gnome-vfs seems to create quite a bit of overhead*, not to mention that the smb:// URIs will only work in gnome-vfs powered programs, which makes me wonder if I would even be able to open a document in gedit for example via Nautilus and save it without any weirdness happening since GTK+ doesn't have support for gnome-vfs.
And just to see what happened, I did just that -- the "Save as" dialogue brought me back to my home directory and obviously wouldn't let me CTRL+L to my smb:// mount.
ignoring the fact that there's always a market for
good games.
Yeah, just look at Beyond Good & Evil; as great and unique as the game was, it probably set a record for dropping down to bargain bin prices. And I doubt UbiSoft selling bundles of Splinter Cell with Prince of Persia happened because they wanted boost SC's sales.
Some games don't make it farther than the "niche" market, and I can't think of a recent point and click adventure game (as much as I miss them) that has really gotten the recognition comparable to the recognition games like King's Quest or the like probably got back in the day. There is definitely a market for anything, it just matters whether the company believes it's cost effective to cater to that market or not. Sadly, LucasArts felt it wasn't cost-effective, and I probably would have to agree with them.
Of course, the game was already cancelled by the time I had even heard about it, but I guess that's the only reason I can look at what happened fairly objectively. However, the original Sam & Max was a great game and I would have loved to play the sequal, rather than the three hundredth iteration of Star Wars (all right, I don't actually play any Star Wars games so I guess it doesn't matter much;/).
As of GNOME 2.6beta1 (and probably before) there are about three ways to get the non-spatial Nautilus
1) as another poster said, right click->Browse Folder 2) The only filemanager button in the Application menu is "Browse Filesystem," which opens it in the browser interface 3) To make it default to the browser mode, open gconf-editor and go to apps->nautilus->preferences->always_use_browser
It would be nice, I guess, if they, eventually, made a visible preference in a dialog box for defaulting to the browser mode, but once you get used to the new interface, it's A LOT more useful than browser mode for actual file *management,* IMO.
There are ways to limit the clutter traversing through directories though -- like ctrl+L for inputting a path name directory or double middle clicking to close the parent window when the child directory is opened.
Finally, the one thing that we most need that a standardized distro can provide, is a standardized directory layout. None of this/usr/bin or/bin or/var/usr/bin confusion.
Odd, I could have sworn there already was Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It's up to the distroes to actually follow the standard, but most of them follow them for the most part.
Of course, I assume when you say "standard," you really mean "userfriendly" or "human readable," much like C:\program files\ or something to that effect. I don't know how much difference the filesystem will make when all Joe Schmoe wants is to be able to run his e-mail from his foot/KDE menu and watch the videos his downloaded to his Documents dir, honestly.
When you've used gentoo for a while, you'll realize why date-based LiveCDs make more sense than ambiguous versions that imply that "1.2" is inherently different from 1.4, which, where gentoo is concerned, is *definitely* not the case. I suppose that "2005.1" will also imply to most people that it's inherently better than 2004.0, but.. it shouldn't.
Sure, the stages you initially get are obviously going to be more out of date from 1.2 compared to 1.4 -- most noteably 1.4 was the point where gentoo moved to a default gcc3 profile, so 1.2 was still gcc2.9 based. But beyond that, you can essentially have the same system when all is said and done if you update all your system to the latest available in portage.
Upgrading GCC is a little more in depth and, from my experience, you might as well just reinstall the system all together -- but it's definitely doable, although it *IS* a matter of changing your profile and recompiling everything.
Heck, unless I'm VERY mistaken, you would be able to take a 1.2 LiveCD and grab the stages from a 1.4 installation and they'd work fine, since it's just a simple tarball.
Er, Nintendo most DEFINITELY does not hold the copyright on the word "tanuki" by itself -- tanuki is Japanese for "racoon dog" and is basically a create that can morph into different things, if I remember correctly.
But then, I think the guy has a lot more to worry about if he released "Tanooki Linux" if the only difference between Gentoo and "his" distribution was the name. -_-
As of 2.6.0-test5 or 6, devfs is considered obsolete/deprecated, and AFAIK, will be totally gone from the 2.7 kernel.
The replacement for devfs will be a userspace implementation called udev.
There's an actual paper going around by the guy who came up with an implementation of udev, but I can't think of the URL for it offhand, so here's a little article/discussion on it.
Actually, found the paper. Here's a link to it, in PDF format.
I'm running mplayer 0.91 and it sounds fine right out of the box. Using libfaad2 1.1.
Of course, I'm using OSS with a stereo speaker system with sound that only comes out of the right channel, so I may not be able to accurately judge whether or not something sounds nice.:P But no real problems on my end.
I'm having more problems on the video end myself.. first time in a LONG time that I've gotten one of those "Your system is too SLOW to play this!!" messages.
Slashdot Mirror
"Losing?" For Linux, there's really no concept of losing. The only way for Linux to "lose" is if, by some "miracle," all developers stop contributing to it. Maybe Linus goes the way of Reiser, gets thrown in jail and all interest built upon Linux goes by the wayside in shame for Linus's bad deeds. I don't see that happening, though.
Linux does have a few things going against it in terms of applications and stuff that may bring it closer to the forefront of people's minds. Of course, these disadvantages comes from probably the biggest advantage Linux has: it's free and open. But when developers only
I still honestly believe that what keeps Linux below many people's radar is the fact that it's not Windows. While installing Linux has gotten laughably easy (Wubi is sex), when people can't even install software without having a slight mental breakdown, how do you expect them to potentially repartition their hard drive and installing an operating system without any help? Yeah, it's not happening.
Why should we really care about Linux becoming the de-facto OS/kernel for everyone though? It's like me being an atheist and caring that the majority of the world are silly christians. But really, you say things "aren't moving quickly" enough on the linux front.. what do you mean? It's made leaps and bounds in the last few years from the desktop usability standpoint. In all areas, really.
And as far as Visual Studio goes, I wouldn't be surprised if most developers are happy with simple syntax highlighting text editors such as SciTE and Kate. ;p
A restocking fee is exactly what should sound like it's for.
.. it costs what? 37 cents to mail something out via USPS. A customer should receive (or, atleast we send them out) two automated phone calls and two post-card notices in the mail before their rentals are auto-sold to their account. Just taking the postage in consideration, THAT is over half of the cost incurred by making sure the customer is properly informed that that have late rentals on their account.
It's not compensation for keeping the movie late. If that were the case, it would make a lot more sense if we just forgot about the confusing "sell and refund" system we have now and continued on with our "Extended Viewing Fees" system.
A movie rental (DVD) is $3.99 plus tax. A Game rental can range anywhere from $4.99 to $6.99 plus tax. BBI is losing anywhere from $2 to $5 on each rental period a customer keeps a rental out. If a customer keeps a two day rental out for three weeks, long enough for it to auto-sell but short enough for the refund to take place.. we have already lost out on 10 potential rental cycles which is over $40.00 lost on ONE rental item.
A restocking fee actually represents more than simply the manpower it takes to put a movie back on the shelf as well.
Firstly, there's cost incurred by transferring a rental product as PRP. This is done to make inventory correct -- it's technically no longer available for rent, so temporarily transferring it as a Previously Rented Product and then selling that PRP game or movie to the account is the only real way to sell a movie or game to an account whilst keeping inventory accurate.
Secondly, when the movie is returned, it price of the movie or game is refunded to the account, and then the movie or game is transferred from PRP back to rental.
I guess this makes little sense to most people, but there is cost incurred from the transferring process. No, it's not about manpower. I guess it has to do with the store's shrink. More shrink = bad.
Another part of the restocking fee is the fact that various methods are used in order to get into contact with a customer to make them aware that they still have rentals out and that they are late. Think about it
Or, atleast, that's what we were told in our meeting
Actually, no.
From how I understand it, WinFS will actually be a layer of abstraction above whatever underlying filesystem (FAT32/NTFS) the system is running on. It won't be a new filesystem at all. It holds metadata about each file and makes it easier and faster to find things. Much like the aforementioned Beagle project.
And ext3's journalling is quite different from what WinFS attempts to accomplish. Journalling basically makes it so, like you say, files aren't lost and you don't have to do a time-consuming fsck whenever the partition is not unmounted cleanly like with ext2.
>But if you bring the movie back after 7 days but
:P), what would you rather have happen?
>before 37 days, they charge you $1.25.
Semantics aside (BBV has actually not had "late fees" for a long time -- ever since that lawsuit a few years ago they're supposed to be "Extended Viewing Fees"
Say you rent a copy of Shall We Dance, which is currently a two day rental. You keep it a week past its due day. On the old system, a late fee of $3.99 plus tax (let's say $4.23 for the sake of argument) would be accrued every two days, so if you return it 8 days later, meaning that it's around six days late, you would have to pay a $16.92 EVF balance.
Under the new deal, if it was six days late, it probably wouldn't charge you anything at all! But if it's one more day late, yes -- the price of the movie is charged to your account (the price of the movie less the rental fee) which is about $18.00 for a new movie like Shall We Dance. If you've a credit card on your account, it's charged to that. If you don't, it's just slapped on your account.
When you return it, the $18.00 is refunded to the account minus the $1.25 restocking fee. So if you had that credit card, you'd show a negative balance of around $16.75, or if you had no credit card, you'd have a "late fee" of $1.25.
If you have that negative balance, you can have the MOD refund it to the credit card on your account or you can use it as money within BBV and not have to worry about paying for stuff for the next few weeks. Choice is yours.
I don't know about most people, but if it's a choice between having to pay $12.69 for keeping a 2 day rental a few extra days or having a net loss of $1.25, I'll choose the latter.
Also, even on the old system, if you kept the movie long enough (around 15 days), the movie should be sold to the customers account plus the EVF charges accrued until that point. So even if they charge the PRP price of the movie (probably $12.99 or $13.77 after tax), you have to pay the EVFs that have accrued to that point as well. Keeping a two day rental out for two weeks will give the account a balance of about $25.38 (the price of about six movie rentals). So if you "got stuck" with a movie, you would end up paying almost $40 for it, rather than the $18.00 you pay under the new policy.
But heck, misleading commercials aside, if you prefer to pay $3.99+ for only having a movie a few hours late, that's your perogative. If I wasn't a BBV employee (;)), I definitely would prefer the new plan. Of course, TEOL has other drawbacks, including the fact that NOBODY brings ANYTHING back on time anymore, so many "righteous" customers who think they're entitled to see the latest Hillary Duff movie right now get all pissy at us because their fellow customers want to keep it a "few extra days."
As should be common knowledge by now, 2.8 will have an option in its GUI to switch between spatial and navigational modes.
Heck, it's in the 2.7 dialogue now but I didn't even notice it until this second.
It's probably unlikely to be backported to 2.6, though.
gnome-terminal lacks options? How? What is it missing?
Did you actually read the article? Did you notice what it said at the bottom?
Radoslaw Sokol is a network administrator in Poland.
I would think that it would have been a bit more relevant to say that he was somehow affiliated with the GNOME developers. So it's probably safe to assume that he is merely just a user of the GNOME DE that feels strongly about his opinions.
In other words, this article has nothing to do with "GNOME" snubbing anyone. It's about a user of GNOME snubbing GNOME bashers.
Overall, though, I have to agree with the AC. There is no such thing as a desktop for everyone. If you want to tinker to your hearts content so your configuration is just right, GNOME is not for you. If gconf-editor scares you but you want absolute control over how your apps work, GNOME is not for you.
First, they did not "remove" the browser mode. True, the option to disable spatial mode by default is "hidden" within the "GNOME Registry" (-_-), but the option is still there. And I'm sure if you weren't just looking for a reason to bash GNOME and really WANT to use GNOME, you would have heard of gTweakUI already. Or know that they've already "announced" that they will include an option in the GUI for later releases.
Second, why are the GNOME devs "arrogant" because they wanted to try something different? I think it's quite the opposite of arrogance that they didn't totally rip out browser Nautilus, even though browser and spatial are almost at opposite ends of the spectrum.
And what does Microsoft have to do anything? If you don't want browser mode, tough nuts. Atleast I've never run across anything that resembles spatial mode in 2k/XP.
Heh, and much like Win95, you would never see spatial mode if you got rid of the "Home"/"My Documents" folder.
;)
I never even realized there was a spatialesque file view in Win95 until people starting flaming about spatial Nautilus. Why? Because I never used "My *" and the default is probably more properly the browser mode, since that's what I remember coming up when I ran simply "explorer.exe."
Since I don't like stuff on my desktop, and because I prefer spatial Nautilus over browser, one of the first things I do is make shortcuts to a few of my more important directories so I can have easy access to them, in spatial mode, since there's no "View in Spatial Mode" in browser mode, afterall.
Ew, that's bad.
echo "x11-base/xorg-x11" >>/etc/portage/package.keywords
(you'll have to do the same thing for things like utempter and xterm as well, since those are ~x86)
emerge -C xfree (xfree blocks xorg, so you have to uninstall first)
emerge xorg-x11
And as should be implied, if you already have an installation of xfree, the config file works with it out of the box. In fact, the config file generated from xorgconfig (which, incidentally, looks exactly like the XF86Config util) is pretty much the same as the one generated from the XF86Config util, save for a different header most likely ("This config file was generated" by blah).
But there's really no difference between the current X.org release and Xfree4.3.0 save for some patches that they have may have backported from 4.4. But I've been running X.org's implementation for quite a few months now and while I haven't noticed any significant difference between xfree and X.org at the moment.. that's not to say that will be the same as time goes on.
I think this "release" was mostly just to get the thing out of the door and get its name out there. The REAL cool stuff will be coming during the next releases. They're already trying to get the damage and composite extensions ported to the X.org tree. Those who've played around with KeithP's kdrive/Xserver have seen both of those extensions in action. Just imagining the composite extention in cooperation with something like cairo and glitz just makes me drool.
I have 512Mb of ram in both of my systems (Linux running a Duron, and Used-to-be-running Windows (in the middle of installing gentoo on it now ;)) on a Athlon XP), Windows is the only system that has complained that my virtual memory is too low.
And believe me, I tax my Linux box WAAAY more than I tax my Windows machine. It works both as a small server as well as my primary desktop.
Oh yeah, and while I had the defaults on for virtual memory/swap for Windows, I have no swap file/partition in Linux.
It might be my utter distaste for anything semi-related to DBZ, but there are many reasons I can think of that made me enjoy Chrono Trigger (fun battle system, no random battles, enjoyable characters/story, overall good gfx for its time) but character designs ain't one of 'em.
Hell, if anything, it was more of a detraction for me to look at Chrno and think "it's Goku with red hair" or the fact that both Meryl (Lunch) and Lucca (Bulma) looked like body doubles from DBZ.
Although you may have a point -- the enhanced detail may prove some interesting directional challenges for the crew making this remake. Are they going to be static models? Nothing more than souped up versions of their originals, complete with rudimentary animations to help express the emotion behind their lines? That may have been sufficient during the 16bit era, but it's not anymore.
Or will we see the characters themselve cringe, laugh and cry as the story goes on? Will they make the characters seem like they're over-acting, or will they be so understated it's almost not worth it?
And I just cringe at the thought of a dub of this game. Hopefully they'll err on the side of saving time/money and just go with a voiceless game.
Overall, I can't wait until this is released. Of the RPGs released since the dawn of polygons and the PSX, Xenosaga is really the only RPG that comes close to dethroning CT as my favorite RPG.
Of course, I'm not really an RPG Gamer, so I play RPGs for the story moreso than anything else, so I probably would have been fine with CT as long as its gameplay wasn't annoying and it kept its good story. Xenosaga was the same way -- the story was great but the gameplay just made it that much more enjoyable.
True enough that IRC was made back in the day when character encoding wasn't a real issue. It is today, however, but I guess I've been using IRC long enough that I just don't think of being able to communicate in Japanese or other such non-roman language.
Two of your latter points are fairly invalid these days on IRC though. Takeovers are effectively impossible through the use of channel services like Dalnet's Chanserv and Undernet's X/W.
Server desynch should also not be an issue if the network you're on is running any halfway recent (read: within the last few years) release of a properly coded IRC server that has timestamping. There may be a better way to deal with it, but timestamping will basically take the older "copy" of a user list that a server has and will use that instead of a potentially "newer" copy that could be used to hijack ops.
IRC would be a lot more nifty if it standardized on the use of UTF-8 however, although with the annoyance of people who love to talk in high-ascii, I just cringe at the thought of some kiddy having an almost limitless choice of annoying characters to use using a UTF-8 nickname.
And as far as netsplits go.. I'm not really sure how a better written protocol can really defend against DoS attacks and overloading.
I've effectively "taught" myself to middle click on links in only a few days when I started liking the tabbed browsing of Mozilla. Of course, when I go in IE every once in a while I'll vainly attempt to middle click on a link thinking I'm still using Epiphany or another tabbed-able browser.
Besides, as has been said multiple times whenever there's a slashdot article, there's a gconf key that let's the user default to the old browser-type view. That makes the "having to learn an alternate button just for their app" point moot.
And it's a double middle click, not a double right click. Right click brings up a context menu like it would in any other program.
You mean enabling "Use compact layout" and "Text beside icons" doesn't suffice it for you? I can see ~15 items in the default-sized spatial window at 100% (or ~35 at 50%), which is quite a bit, IMO.
gnome-vfs is essentially gnome's answer to KDE's IOSlaves, I believe.
And while I don't believe gnome-vfs has quite the breadth of fs modules that KDE has, it does has some of the more "important" ones like smb and ftp that I can think of offhand. It also supports a "sftp://" protocol (which, obviously, lets you access the ftp subsystem of ssh), as well as a "ssh://" protocol of which I'm not sure how it's supposed to work.
Of course, for simple SMB on LAN use I still think smbfs coupled with automount is still the best solution. gnome-vfs seems to create quite a bit of overhead*, not to mention that the smb:// URIs will only work in gnome-vfs powered programs, which makes me wonder if I would even be able to open a document in gedit for example via Nautilus and save it without any weirdness happening since GTK+ doesn't have support for gnome-vfs.
And just to see what happened, I did just that -- the "Save as" dialogue brought me back to my home directory and obviously wouldn't let me CTRL+L to my smb:// mount.
Some games don't make it farther than the "niche" market, and I can't think of a recent point and click adventure game (as much as I miss them) that has really gotten the recognition comparable to the recognition games like King's Quest or the like probably got back in the day. There is definitely a market for anything, it just matters whether the company believes it's cost effective to cater to that market or not. Sadly, LucasArts felt it wasn't cost-effective, and I probably would have to agree with them.
Of course, the game was already cancelled by the time I had even heard about it, but I guess that's the only reason I can look at what happened fairly objectively. However, the original Sam & Max was a great game and I would have loved to play the sequal, rather than the three hundredth iteration of Star Wars (all right, I don't actually play any Star Wars games so I guess it doesn't matter much
As of GNOME 2.6beta1 (and probably before) there are about three ways to get the non-spatial Nautilus
1) as another poster said, right click->Browse Folder
2) The only filemanager button in the Application menu is "Browse Filesystem," which opens it in the browser interface
3) To make it default to the browser mode, open gconf-editor and go to apps->nautilus->preferences->always_use_browser
It would be nice, I guess, if they, eventually, made a visible preference in a dialog box for defaulting to the browser mode, but once you get used to the new interface, it's A LOT more useful than browser mode for actual file *management,* IMO.
There are ways to limit the clutter traversing through directories though -- like ctrl+L for inputting a path name directory or double middle clicking to close the parent window when the child directory is opened.
Odd, I could have sworn there already was Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It's up to the distroes to actually follow the standard, but most of them follow them for the most part.
Of course, I assume when you say "standard," you really mean "userfriendly" or "human readable," much like C:\program files\ or something to that effect. I don't know how much difference the filesystem will make when all Joe Schmoe wants is to be able to run his e-mail from his foot/KDE menu and watch the videos his downloaded to his Documents dir, honestly.
When you've used gentoo for a while, you'll realize why date-based LiveCDs make more sense than ambiguous versions that imply that "1.2" is inherently different from 1.4, which, where gentoo is concerned, is *definitely* not the case. I suppose that "2005.1" will also imply to most people that it's inherently better than 2004.0, but .. it shouldn't.
Sure, the stages you initially get are obviously going to be more out of date from 1.2 compared to 1.4 -- most noteably 1.4 was the point where gentoo moved to a default gcc3 profile, so 1.2 was still gcc2.9 based. But beyond that, you can essentially have the same system when all is said and done if you update all your system to the latest available in portage.
Upgrading GCC is a little more in depth and, from my experience, you might as well just reinstall the system all together -- but it's definitely doable, although it *IS* a matter of changing your profile and recompiling everything.
Heck, unless I'm VERY mistaken, you would be able to take a 1.2 LiveCD and grab the stages from a 1.4 installation and they'd work fine, since it's just a simple tarball.
Yep, because of the way gentoo works the only real difference between 2004.0 and 1.4 is possibly how much you have to upgrade afterwards.
;)
So you are correct in thinking that the only thing you have to do in order to "upgrade" to 2004.0 is "emerge sync && emerge -pDu world".
As far as devfs goes, it gets the job done while udev is still VERY much in development. udev is fun to play with if nothing else, though.
Er, Nintendo most DEFINITELY does not hold the copyright on the word "tanuki" by itself -- tanuki is Japanese for "racoon dog" and is basically a create that can morph into different things, if I remember correctly.
But then, I think the guy has a lot more to worry about if he released "Tanooki Linux" if the only difference between Gentoo and "his" distribution was the name. -_-
Try using the 'xv' video driver ($ mplayer -vo xv). mplayer, by default, uses the 'x11' video driver and won't scale on the fly.
the 'xv' driver will, however.
This one will probably return more relevant results.
As of 2.6.0-test5 or 6, devfs is considered obsolete/deprecated, and AFAIK, will be totally gone from the 2.7 kernel.
The replacement for devfs will be a userspace implementation called udev.
There's an actual paper going around by the guy who came up with an implementation of udev, but I can't think of the URL for it offhand, so here's a little article/discussion on it.
Actually, found the paper. Here's a link to it, in PDF format.
"Nicely?" How is it "not nice" for you?
:P But no real problems on my end.
I'm running mplayer 0.91 and it sounds fine right out of the box. Using libfaad2 1.1.
Of course, I'm using OSS with a stereo speaker system with sound that only comes out of the right channel, so I may not be able to accurately judge whether or not something sounds nice.
I'm having more problems on the video end myself.. first time in a LONG time that I've gotten one of those "Your system is too SLOW to play this!!" messages.