The idea of releasing the isos two weeks early to the club members was to give some kind of a benefit to those who've actually bothered to support the development of the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution.
They could've gone the other way like SuSe and many others (Lindows, Xandros and so on) - make a small insignificant bit of their distribution non-free and let no-one download the isos, but they wanted to try something that would keep the whole distribution free, right according to the GNU philosophy.
They decided to trust that their club members would hold off distributing the isos just for the short time of two weeks. In my mind that would've been the decent thing to do. Limit the leeching a bit for a very limited time period and create a little incentive for actually giving something to the company that has done all the work.
I'm not a native english speaker and games were what got me started learning english when I was less than en years old. I would play games such as Monkey island and really want to understand what was happening so I had a dictionary I looked up words from.
In a way, parser-based older adventure games were even better because you had to be able to type in the objects' names and also make no spelling mistakes. Maybe I should grab a non-english adventure game and try learning a new language.:)
These days most games are so basic story-wise that I imagine they couldn't work as language learning tools as well. Fortunately it seems we do still have RPGs and even some adventure games altough most are playing Counter Strike.
One more way that I've learned with games is by getting so interested about the subject that I would read the manual and even go to a library to borrow some books on the subject. This happened with Red Baron for example. It had a very informational manual and as a result, I know quite a bit about WW1 aviation now. Nowadays games are packed in DVD-style cases mostly and there is simply no room for all the stuff that always used to be a big plus in buying instead of copying.
Actually the code in question most likely was statically linked (as someone reported and as one could imagine that a 3D-game's physics system must be) and the LGPL only permits dynamic linking. So that would not save them.
But the trail leads to the Crystal Space engine as previously reported here.
The code in question seems to be contributed to Crystal Space by someone working at Havok who then of course has all the rights to also license it for use in a proprietary product (Havok). This is an assumption based on the fact that the person (Alexander Michael Ewert) has a @havok.com email address.
I only wish he would have removed the licensing information from the source code file as the code that is included inside HL2 clearly isn't under the LGPL, only the version that was formerly in Crystal Space is.
Anyway, as far as I can see there is no LGPL violation here. Just a misplaced copyright notice. But it had to be asked and I'm glad we could find out what the situation was.
I think GNU/Linux and other free software is a great example of how well the internet can work as a learning tool. We have the Linux Documentation Project, man pages and of course the actual source code. You can easily learn very advanced stuff without buying a single book or attending a single lecture. Why couldn't this be true for other areas as well? The information just needs to be there. I understand Stallman very well when he says that documentation should be free too (FDL).
Trying to play the file I downloaded resulted in mplayer segfaulting. BT also complained about a block failing a hash check at one point during the download.
Jabber's doing great. The Jabber software foundation recently issued a press release stating that Jabber has now passed ICQ in popularity.
Also, they're on their way to becoming an actual internet standard.
The last obstacles are file transfer (should be addressed soon) and actually getting people to migrate. When all your friends are on Yahoo for example, it's not that easy to switch. The gateways are supposed to help the problem, but of course right now the Jabber Yahoo gateway is not functioning either.
Richard Stallman sees this philosophy as a natural extension of the conventional western moral values. This makes the question of making a living off it completely irrelevant to him. (even if he does address that one too)
Philosophical and ethical issues should not be mixed with practical issues because the philosophy and the ethically right thing to do always has to take precedence over the practical thing, no matter what the consequenses. It is only after the choice of what you think is right that you need to ask yourself how it will work.
Your assumption seems to be that the only way anyone can make a living writing software is making "a product" out of it and you seem to think there's no way that product can be free at the same time, but in case you missed it, Red Hat, a company that has made a product out of free software and support services for that software just announced their best quarter so far.
Providing support services is just one way of feeding those hungry free software programmers. Another possibility is that when company wants a piece of software, they hire some people to write it program. Or, you can sell the software with the hardware preinstalled.There's also the possibility of donations (Matthew Toseland has been developing freenet full-time, getting paid from donations and MandrakeClub has almost 20000 members supporting their distribution) - people can pay if they want to see the program develop. There are advertisements (which is Mandrake's latest experiment). And then there's community development (Debian) . Finally, to quote you: "In life nobody is entitled to anything, period." - So why exactly should someone be entitled to making a living off of programming? Stallman himself has said it - you've always have the option of doing something else.
The issue of making a profit should not even come to consideration when deciding what is right, but there are many possible ways to make money off free software and I've probably missed a few.
You've obviously not familiar with the Free Software Foundation's and the GNU project's philosophy if you need to ask that question. I recommend you read at least Why software should not have owners and more of the essays on the GNU/FSF website according to your interest.
GNU/Linux is my preferred operating system. If I want to play games, they will have to be for this operating system. If I just use Windows for games I will keep using it forever because there will never be any Linux games if there is no demand for them. I won't boot my system just to play a little game either. That way I'd just end up using Windows all the time because it'd be more convenient for me to just launch the game instead of waiting forever for a boot, then launching it and afterwards booting back to Linux.
I don't want to pay for something I don't really want to use and I don't want to unnecessarily waste my hard drive space. There may be somewhat less choice for a pure Linux gamer but no-one really needs every possible game on the market and the selection for GNU/Linux is enough for most of us unless you *really* need to get all the latest games scoring over 90% in the latest PC Gamer.
If no-one's willing to make a sacrifice of a few cool games, there will never be a significant market for Linux games. It's the classic problem, the first adopters need to accept some inconveniences but it will never go big no-one wants to.
Very recently, Richard Stallman commented that the only distribution he can really recommend is Extremadura's Linex on the grounds that they only provide free software and also mentioned that companies such as Red Hat and Mandrake haven't been very strict and have often let non-free software slip past. I've also personally found this to be true for at least Mandrake 8.1, 8.2 and Red Hat 7.3. I'm still waiting on a report for Mandrake 9.1.
I don't want to be too hard on Mandrake, though. They actually use GNU/Linux in some places, all their software is under the GPL and all their documentation under the FDL. They also are seeking for a viable way for them to keep it that way like this move again demonstrates. They should just be a little more careful. They're definitely one of the best of the GNU/Linux companies when it comes to free software.
Mandrake is also available for Macs (LinuxPPC), isn't it?;)
You see, there's still an Apple connection! They probably should've mentioned in the story to avoid confusion though, but you know how the Slashdot editors are.
Now just hold your breath to see if the next one is also a Mac story.
Re:Pay for what you use
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Mandrake develops many GUI administration tools under the DrakXtools. I personally haven't seen anything that matches them in any other distribution except SuSe, but Yast2 isn't free software like all the tools Mandrake has developed (they are under the GNU GPL).
All their documentation is also under the GNU FDL.
And lastly, distributions often contribute directly to projects so when you're paying to Mandrake, you're also paying the salaries of some developers working on the various major free software projects. I don't think Mandrake has any "big" names like Red Hat (Alan Cox) or Conectiva (Marcelo Tosati) for example but they do some important work just like all the other popular distributions.
But unfortunately, if free-as-in-RMS doesn't come up with the goods, I see no reason to agree with him. <br><br> Then you see no reason to agree with him at all. You don't truly agree if you're only compelled by the practical benefits. You should look at their arguments and ask yourself whether or not you think that non-free software is truly unethical. If not, you're in the open source camp.
The FSF doesn't restrict it's definition of "free software" to the GPL. Their definition also includes the kind of software you refer to with "free software". So they actually demand less freedoms from the license than you. You can view their 4 basic required freedoms here.
The GPL is a device that ensures the code that is licensed under it will always be free (by their definition) for it's users. It prevents anyone from removing the four basic freedoms from other users. Is the ability to control others really a freedom?
Copylefted software and software licensed under the GPL are just a type of free software, no more, no less. The GPL was originally devised, because Stallman felt it would have been discouraging for the free software developers if all the non-free software companies had always been able to incorporate all the work into their products and build upon them.
If there was no copyright protection for software, the GPL would not be needed. Binary-only distribution would not be viable in such a system.
Civilization was also originally completely turn-based but they changed it into semi-realtime with CivNet. M.A.X. is another strategy game that used this approach.
In those games the players play their turns simultaneously and there is a timelimit for turns so you don't need to wait forever if someone can't decide or isn't at the computer.
Maybe this could work for roguelikes somehow as well?
I happen to think that the complete graphical user interface and pretty much every Apple-developed tool within it is no small part of an OS to have proprietary. It's a component that is absolutely needed for an modern OS. And I don't think it stops there. In any case, the graphical user interface is plenty to justify calling OS X non-free.
You say that you understand Apple's decision to keep Quartz non-free. Care to elaborate? They build on a lots of important software components that are free software and have been available for them to just take and incorporate into the OS. To me, it would seem only fair to give as much back.
Your straight comparison to Red Hat is flawed because the product Apple sells is completely different to the one Red Hat has. A large part of what Apple sells is the hardware. OS X won't even run on anything but their computers. Red Hat is just a software company, sharing the entire PC market with a giant that has a near-monopoly.
Even if Apple was just a software company, why would they need to have the same number of developers? It's only natural that with free software time isn't spent on reinventing the wheel and there's some less work for programmers to do. You don't determine the viability of a business model with the number of employees needed, do you?
I rarely troll and if I do, I appreciate someone clearly and unquestionably pointing out the flaws in my thinking instead of calling me a troll at first sight, thank you.
OS X doesn't just have a proprietary UI. Even if it did, having a non-free UI won't just affect UI designers. There's a lot that a hacker could want to play with in there. How much of XFree86 is UI design? - all the important stuff is done in KDE/GNOME and you're not saying those are just UI design are you? You're seriously confusing things here.
That said, while the classic hacker is a coder, there can just as well be UI hackers. Hacker isn't necessarily a word only restricted to coding.
Maybe you haven't heard of some commercial software companies such as Red Hat. Apple would actually even have an advantage here because it's not only a software company, the hardware is a very significant part of the whole package. (Writing this on an Apple iBook running GNU/Linux, btw) Saying that Apple is a commercial software/hardware company doesn't really reveal anything that should force us reconsider our expectations from Apple.
I don't know who expects them to give their users freedom. I haven't really expected. Hoped, for about five seconds when the announcements of Apple "going open source" first came in.
But I've noticed several that do continuously tout how Mac OS X is everything GNU/Linux was ever supposed to. That may well be, I've not used it enough to say (and am skeptical) but there is one major thing that GNU/Linux is and it obviously is not: *free*, in any meaning of the word.
Now at least the small parts of it that they've chosen to release under an "open source license" are actually free software. The vast majority of it still isn't and no-one should think of MacOS X as anything even close to a free operating system.
Could it be if Apple wanted to let it be? Sure, this is the company that tells us to "Think different" and sells much more than just your average PCs and a Windows-workalike to go with them. I don't see why anyone would use OS X on anything else than Apple hardware anyway.
1. You can go for intuitivity and ease of use for everyone. All the widely used operating system GUIs and mainstream applications follow this design philosophy. Examples would be KDE, GNOME, the Windows UI, Microsoft Office, Openoffice.org etc.
2. You can try to make all the functions easily accessible for the experienced user so that a user that knows how to use the program can work his way around as fast as possible. Examples of this design are Blender, Emacs and many other programs that target professionals.
Intuitive GUIs are nice for the beginner or casual user and lower the learning curve for an application, but when the time spent actually using the program will greatly exceed the time spent learning it, designing the UI to be fast (less motions, less time spent pointing with the mouse or tapping key sequences) may be a better option.
That's why not all window managers don't try to be the next GNOME and why some of us like to use the command line.
Right, it is indeed x86-only according to a post on LinuxGames by one of the developers IIRC. Don't know if you could've played it with DRI drivers anyway. PPC Linux users really get to notice why non-free software is bad. They don't get the 3D, Realplayer, Flash plugin etc.
Gotta love these guys even without the PPC port, the programmer responsible for the GNU/Linux port posting on the LG comment threads for Savage and very much feeling like he's "with us". And this one really seems like an original game.
Couldn't the select-clipboard be disabled altogether for the location bar somehow?
Still, I don't want a button for that on my browser even if it's not possible to disable, seems clumsy. I usually just ctrl-l there and hit backspace to clear. That way the clipboard doesn't get replaced.
I've been using Galeon as part of XD2 and while I do like Firebird more, I don't think they've done a bad job. The integration (filetypes, default browser) to the GNOME desktop is the major selling point. I wonder why Mozilla/Firebird can't do that?
My opinion is that the fact that large-scale charity exists in any society is an indication that the government isn't doing it's job properly.
The government is created by humans and hopefully (in most modern societies) for the people in it. It is not a inhuman structure serving some higher purpose than the people itself.
It is supposed to guarantee the safety and well-being of it's citizens and all the critical infrastructure. It can be argued what various things these include and different countries in the world have different systems.
I don't know much about the social security system in place in the US (except that I've heard it is pretty limited), but in european countries social security also usually includes things such as health care (if you get sick most of the treatment costs are covered by the government) and a guaranteed minimal income from the government if you happen to lose your job.
We don't have many people living in the streets, those that do wouldn't be forced to if they didn't have other problems (drugs, alcohol). People shouldn't have problems with getting medical treatment because they mostly don't need to pay for it.
Without the social security system your society will resemble a dog eat dog jungle. Sure, those that are able to work, are healthy and are not unlucky will be getting larger paychecks, but there will be more poverty and suffering. I don't think anyone deserves to live in the street, endure an illness any more than anyone actually deserves to earn a billion dollars a second. Taking care of those that are weak and cannot manage by themselves instead of taking advantage of them is really one of the key defining things of being a human.
Would you mind also telling us what exactly makes GNOME/KDE feel like "a fucking Edsel"? And why exactly was whatever was on that IRIX (maybe CDE?) so much better?
For me it's the exact opposite. WinXP seems like an utter mess that is coated with "eyecandy" that I can't imagine anyone enjoying or tolerating longer than a week willingly. Mac OS X with aqua looks nice for a while but no thanks, I just want a nice and clean desktop. I think GNOME does a very good job at this and KDE ain't bad either.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of releasing the isos two weeks early to the club members was to give some kind of a benefit to those who've actually bothered to support the development of the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution.
They could've gone the other way like SuSe and many others (Lindows, Xandros and so on) - make a small insignificant bit of their distribution non-free and let no-one download the isos, but they wanted to try something that would keep the whole distribution free, right according to the GNU philosophy.
They decided to trust that their club members would hold off distributing the isos just for the short time of two weeks. In my mind that would've been the decent thing to do. Limit the leeching a bit for a very limited time period and create a little incentive for actually giving something to the company that has done all the work.
Moderators, could you not mod this down?
I'm not a native english speaker and games were what got me started learning english when I was less than en years old. I would play games such as Monkey island and really want to understand what was happening so I had a dictionary I looked up words from.
:)
In a way, parser-based older adventure games were even better because you had to be able to type in the objects' names and also make no spelling mistakes. Maybe I should grab a non-english adventure game and try learning a new language.
These days most games are so basic story-wise that I imagine they couldn't work as language learning tools as well. Fortunately it seems we do still have RPGs and even some adventure games altough most are playing Counter Strike.
One more way that I've learned with games is by getting so interested about the subject that I would read the manual and even go to a library to borrow some books on the subject. This happened with Red Baron for example. It had a very informational manual and as a result, I know quite a bit about WW1 aviation now. Nowadays games are packed in DVD-style cases mostly and there is simply no room for all the stuff that always used to be a big plus in buying instead of copying.
Actually the code in question most likely was statically linked (as someone reported and as one could imagine that a 3D-game's physics system must be) and the LGPL only permits dynamic linking. So that would not save them.
But the trail leads to the Crystal Space engine as previously reported here.
The code in question seems to be contributed to Crystal Space by someone working at Havok who then of course has all the rights to also license it for use in a proprietary product (Havok). This is an assumption based on the fact that the person (Alexander Michael Ewert) has a @havok.com email address.
I only wish he would have removed the licensing information from the source code file as the code that is included inside HL2 clearly isn't under the LGPL, only the version that was formerly in Crystal Space is.
Anyway, as far as I can see there is no LGPL violation here. Just a misplaced copyright notice. But it had to be asked and I'm glad we could find out what the situation was.
I think GNU/Linux and other free software is a great example of how well the internet can work as a learning tool. We have the Linux Documentation Project, man pages and of course the actual source code. You can easily learn very advanced stuff without buying a single book or attending a single lecture. Why couldn't this be true for other areas as well? The information just needs to be there. I understand Stallman very well when he says that documentation should be free too (FDL).
The torrent link gives a 404 not found for me too, even with that one extra space removed. Anything I'm missing?
Trying to play the file I downloaded resulted in mplayer segfaulting. BT also complained about a block failing a hash check at one point during the download.
Jabber's doing great. The Jabber software foundation recently issued a press release stating that Jabber has now passed ICQ in popularity.
Also, they're on their way to becoming an actual internet standard.
The last obstacles are file transfer (should be addressed soon) and actually getting people to migrate. When all your friends are on Yahoo for example, it's not that easy to switch. The gateways are supposed to help the problem, but of course right now the Jabber Yahoo gateway is not functioning either.
Richard Stallman sees this philosophy as a natural extension of the conventional western moral values. This makes the question of making a living off it completely irrelevant to him. (even if he does address that one too)
Philosophical and ethical issues should not be mixed with practical issues because the philosophy and the ethically right thing to do always has to take precedence over the practical thing, no matter what the consequenses. It is only after the choice of what you think is right that you need to ask yourself how it will work.
Your assumption seems to be that the only way anyone can make a living writing software is making "a product" out of it and you seem to think there's no way that product can be free at the same time, but in case you missed it, Red Hat, a company that has made a product out of free software and support services for that software just announced their best quarter so far.
Providing support services is just one way of feeding those hungry free software programmers. Another possibility is that when company wants a piece of software, they hire some people to write it program. Or, you can sell the software with the hardware preinstalled.There's also the possibility of donations (Matthew Toseland has been developing freenet full-time, getting paid from donations and MandrakeClub has almost 20000 members supporting their distribution) - people can pay if they want to see the program develop. There are advertisements (which is Mandrake's latest experiment). And then there's community development (Debian) . Finally, to quote you: "In life nobody is entitled to anything, period." - So why exactly should someone be entitled to making a living off of programming? Stallman himself has said it - you've always have the option of doing something else.
The issue of making a profit should not even come to consideration when deciding what is right, but there are many possible ways to make money off free software and I've probably missed a few.
You've obviously not familiar with the Free Software Foundation's and the GNU project's philosophy if you need to ask that question. I recommend you read at least Why software should not have owners and more of the essays on the GNU/FSF website according to your interest.
GNU/Linux is my preferred operating system. If I want to play games, they will have to be for this operating system. If I just use Windows for games I will keep using it forever because there will never be any Linux games if there is no demand for them. I won't boot my system just to play a little game either. That way I'd just end up using Windows all the time because it'd be more convenient for me to just launch the game instead of waiting forever for a boot, then launching it and afterwards booting back to Linux.
I don't want to pay for something I don't really want to use and I don't want to unnecessarily waste my hard drive space. There may be somewhat less choice for a pure Linux gamer but no-one really needs every possible game on the market and the selection for GNU/Linux is enough for most of us unless you *really* need to get all the latest games scoring over 90% in the latest PC Gamer.
If no-one's willing to make a sacrifice of a few cool games, there will never be a significant market for Linux games. It's the classic problem, the first adopters need to accept some inconveniences but it will never go big no-one wants to.
Got any proof to back this up with?
Very recently, Richard Stallman commented that the only distribution he can really recommend is Extremadura's Linex on the grounds that they only provide free software and also mentioned that companies such as Red Hat and Mandrake haven't been very strict and have often let non-free software slip past. I've also personally found this to be true for at least Mandrake 8.1, 8.2 and Red Hat 7.3. I'm still waiting on a report for Mandrake 9.1.
I don't want to be too hard on Mandrake, though. They actually use GNU/Linux in some places, all their software is under the GPL and all their documentation under the FDL. They also are seeking for a viable way for them to keep it that way like this move again demonstrates. They should just be a little more careful. They're definitely one of the best of the GNU/Linux companies when it comes to free software.
Mandrake is also available for Macs (LinuxPPC), isn't it? ;)
You see, there's still an Apple connection! They probably should've mentioned in the story to avoid confusion though, but you know how the Slashdot editors are.
Now just hold your breath to see if the next one is also a Mac story.
Mandrake develops many GUI administration tools under the DrakXtools. I personally haven't seen anything that matches them in any other distribution except SuSe, but Yast2 isn't free software like all the tools Mandrake has developed (they are under the GNU GPL).
All their documentation is also under the GNU FDL.
And lastly, distributions often contribute directly to projects so when you're paying to Mandrake, you're also paying the salaries of some developers working on the various major free software projects. I don't think Mandrake has any "big" names like Red Hat (Alan Cox) or Conectiva (Marcelo Tosati) for example but they do some important work just like all the other popular distributions.
But unfortunately, if free-as-in-RMS doesn't come up with the goods, I see no reason to agree with him.
<br><br>
Then you see no reason to agree with him at all. You don't truly agree if you're only compelled by the practical benefits. You should look at their arguments and ask yourself whether or not you think that non-free software is truly unethical. If not, you're in the open source camp.
The FSF doesn't restrict it's definition of "free software" to the GPL. Their definition also includes the kind of software you refer to with "free software". So they actually demand less freedoms from the license than you. You can view their 4 basic required freedoms here.
The GPL is a device that ensures the code that is licensed under it will always be free (by their definition) for it's users. It prevents anyone from removing the four basic freedoms from other users. Is the ability to control others really a freedom?
Copylefted software and software licensed under the GPL are just a type of free software, no more, no less. The GPL was originally devised, because Stallman felt it would have been discouraging for the free software developers if all the non-free software companies had always been able to incorporate all the work into their products and build upon them.
If there was no copyright protection for software, the GPL would not be needed. Binary-only distribution would not be viable in such a system.
Civilization was also originally completely turn-based but they changed it into semi-realtime with CivNet. M.A.X. is another strategy game that used this approach.
In those games the players play their turns simultaneously and there is a timelimit for turns so you don't need to wait forever if someone can't decide or isn't at the computer.
Maybe this could work for roguelikes somehow as well?
I happen to think that the complete graphical user interface and pretty much every Apple-developed tool within it is no small part of an OS to have proprietary. It's a component that is absolutely needed for an modern OS. And I don't think it stops there. In any case, the graphical user interface is plenty to justify calling OS X non-free.
You say that you understand Apple's decision to keep Quartz non-free. Care to elaborate? They build on a lots of important software components that are free software and have been available for them to just take and incorporate into the OS. To me, it would seem only fair to give as much back.
Your straight comparison to Red Hat is flawed because the product Apple sells is completely different to the one Red Hat has. A large part of what Apple sells is the hardware. OS X won't even run on anything but their computers. Red Hat is just a software company, sharing the entire PC market with a giant that has a near-monopoly.
Even if Apple was just a software company, why would they need to have the same number of developers? It's only natural that with free software time isn't spent on reinventing the wheel and there's some less work for programmers to do. You don't determine the viability of a business model with the number of employees needed, do you?
I rarely troll and if I do, I appreciate someone clearly and unquestionably pointing out the flaws in my thinking instead of calling me a troll at first sight, thank you.
OS X doesn't just have a proprietary UI. Even if it did, having a non-free UI won't just affect UI designers. There's a lot that a hacker could want to play with in there. How much of XFree86 is UI design? - all the important stuff is done in KDE/GNOME and you're not saying those are just UI design are you? You're seriously confusing things here.
That said, while the classic hacker is a coder, there can just as well be UI hackers. Hacker isn't necessarily a word only restricted to coding.
Maybe you haven't heard of some commercial software companies such as Red Hat. Apple would actually even have an advantage here because it's not only a software company, the hardware is a very significant part of the whole package. (Writing this on an Apple iBook running GNU/Linux, btw) Saying that Apple is a commercial software/hardware company doesn't really reveal anything that should force us reconsider our expectations from Apple.
I don't know who expects them to give their users freedom. I haven't really expected. Hoped, for about five seconds when the announcements of Apple "going open source" first came in.
But I've noticed several that do continuously tout how Mac OS X is everything GNU/Linux was ever supposed to. That may well be, I've not used it enough to say (and am skeptical) but there is one major thing that GNU/Linux is and it obviously is not: *free*, in any meaning of the word.
Now at least the small parts of it that they've chosen to release under an "open source license" are actually free software. The vast majority of it still isn't and no-one should think of MacOS X as anything even close to a free operating system.
Could it be if Apple wanted to let it be? Sure, this is the company that tells us to "Think different" and sells much more than just your average PCs and a Windows-workalike to go with them. I don't see why anyone would use OS X on anything else than Apple hardware anyway.
There are basically two ways to design an UI.
1. You can go for intuitivity and ease of use for everyone. All the widely used operating system GUIs and mainstream applications follow this design philosophy. Examples would be KDE, GNOME, the Windows UI, Microsoft Office, Openoffice.org etc.
2. You can try to make all the functions easily accessible for the experienced user so that a user that knows how to use the program can work his way around as fast as possible. Examples of this design are Blender, Emacs and many other programs that target professionals.
Intuitive GUIs are nice for the beginner or casual user and lower the learning curve for an application, but when the time spent actually using the program will greatly exceed the time spent learning it, designing the UI to be fast (less motions, less time spent pointing with the mouse or tapping key sequences) may be a better option.
That's why not all window managers don't try to be the next GNOME and why some of us like to use the command line.
Right, it is indeed x86-only according to a post on LinuxGames by one of the developers IIRC. Don't know if you could've played it with DRI drivers anyway. PPC Linux users really get to notice why non-free software is bad. They don't get the 3D, Realplayer, Flash plugin etc.
Gotta love these guys even without the PPC port, the programmer responsible for the GNU/Linux port posting on the LG comment threads for Savage and very much feeling like he's "with us". And this one really seems like an original game.
Couldn't the select-clipboard be disabled altogether for the location bar somehow?
Still, I don't want a button for that on my browser even if it's not possible to disable, seems clumsy. I usually just ctrl-l there and hit backspace to clear. That way the clipboard doesn't get replaced.
I've been using Galeon as part of XD2 and while I do like Firebird more, I don't think they've done a bad job. The integration (filetypes, default browser) to the GNOME desktop is the major selling point. I wonder why Mozilla/Firebird can't do that?
My opinion is that the fact that large-scale charity exists in any society is an indication that the government isn't doing it's job properly.
The government is created by humans and hopefully (in most modern societies) for the people in it. It is not a inhuman structure serving some higher purpose than the people itself.
It is supposed to guarantee the safety and well-being of it's citizens and all the critical infrastructure. It can be argued what various things these include and different countries in the world have different systems.
I don't know much about the social security system in place in the US (except that I've heard it is pretty limited), but in european countries social security also usually includes things such as health care (if you get sick most of the treatment costs are covered by the government) and a guaranteed minimal income from the government if you happen to lose your job.
We don't have many people living in the streets, those that do wouldn't be forced to if they didn't have other problems (drugs, alcohol). People shouldn't have problems with getting medical treatment because they mostly don't need to pay for it.
Without the social security system your society will resemble a dog eat dog jungle. Sure, those that are able to work, are healthy and are not unlucky will be getting larger paychecks, but there will be more poverty and suffering. I don't think anyone deserves to live in the street, endure an illness any more than anyone actually deserves to earn a billion dollars a second. Taking care of those that are weak and cannot manage by themselves instead of taking advantage of them is really one of the key defining things of being a human.
Would you mind also telling us what exactly makes GNOME/KDE feel like "a fucking Edsel"? And why exactly was whatever was on that IRIX (maybe CDE?) so much better?
For me it's the exact opposite. WinXP seems like an utter mess that is coated with "eyecandy" that I can't imagine anyone enjoying or tolerating longer than a week willingly. Mac OS X with aqua looks nice for a while but no thanks, I just want a nice and clean desktop. I think GNOME does a very good job at this and KDE ain't bad either.
Seems to me like you're just trolling.