I fail to see where Google has a problem. Gnome is the default DE of the three main distros, Ubuntu, Suse and RH/Fedora, so - and that's what they did - it's quite logical to do the port on Gnome.
Now Chrome is open source, so if anybody want to port Chrome to QT/KDE, well, they can.
As to why Google wants to port Chrome to Linux, well, they need to show goodwill to the open source community to beef up the Android Market.
And finally, I think we'll see the Gnome/KDE duality for a long, long time, simply because some people prefer C and others C++ and we're talking about free software.
And wasn't it Gygax himself who once said that the use for dice was to make noise behind the DM's screen?:)
but more importantly, games - whatever their type - are basically abount human interaction. And the best way to interact with people is face to face. Any kind of mediation removes something from that interaction.
The thing is the CRT is a much, much more mature technology than LCD or DLP (for video projectors).
Final control for (real) broadcast-quality post-production is done on murderously expensive (think $8-10,000) CRT monitors, but when you've seen an SD picture on those, HD on a consumer plasma is an eye-sore.
High-quality DLPs - the kind that's found on high-end 3-DLP projectors from Christie, Barco and Digital Projection - approach the color fidelity of good CRTs, but LCD is definetely out.
R&D for LCD monitor panels focuses on reducing costs and increasing production volumes to tackle the consumer market for CRT TV & computer monitor replacement. Quality improvements are just a by-product.
Even the projector LCD panel manufacturers - Epson and Sony - who do invest in quality R&D for the mid-range projectors have not managed to equal the quality of DLP.
CRTs will eventually disappear but not anytime soon. It'll take years before any flat-panel technology reaches the maturity level needed to displace CRT for quality-critical applications.
I don't change my passwords that often but they seem pretty secure to me.
Typically, they'll be 10-20 characters long, refer to extremely personnal events, include digits that relate to the event and a few character replacements that make sense to me but not necessarily to other people.
For instance, I've used the pillow name I gave an ex with the last 2 digits of her birthdate and adding in a couple typing errors I commonly make.
That kind of password is easy to remember, can't be found in a dictionary and can take years to crack on large system.
Another scheme I'm thinking about is semi-randomly mixing character codings in the same password, like ANSI and Unicode.
However, it's quite logical that you can't buy IE or WMP without buying Windows, since you can only run them on top of Windows, and you can't use Windows if you don't have a license. That is, legally:)
It's the reverse that's illegal, although since IE for Mac is free, MS can reasonnably argue that IE/Win is indeed free, and the same would be true if they released WMP for Mac.
The real problem is they can leverage their dominant position on the PC OS market to impose their file formats to lock their customers and their customers' third party suppliers, which is what they've already done with word processing and spreadsheets.
About the definition of "shooter" - according to Grossman: It's somebody who attempts to hit ennemies. People who "shoot high" don't count.
You may be right about the Romans, but as far as the gunpowder era is concerned the problem was recognized as far back as the 1860's by Ardant du Picq - and I wouldn't be surprised if it were mentionned by Guibert...
The "not seeing much of the ennemy" bit actually started with WWI.
Most US soldiers in Viet Nam were conscripts, not professionals.
That said, I'll readily agree that video games exist in a different universe from boot camp. Still, I find Grossman's argument that some of those games act as conditionning to increase psychological distance rather convincing. Not in the sense that they turn people into psychos, but rather that they lower the threshold.
There's a powerful argument at the end of Grossman's On Killing that it's not the violence itself that's a problem, but how it is presented.
The games that are actually dangerous are those in which are realistic enough that there is no doubt that it's human beings that you maim or kill, but at the same time depict those human beings as not really human, thereby introducing a conditionned psychological distance between the player and potential victims.
95% of people have an ingrained resistance to killing other people. You have to artificially condition them to get them to shoot at people. Until this was acknowledged after WWII, only about 10% of soldiers actually shot their guns at the ennemy. Modern military (infantry) training is intended to counter that ingrained resistance, and is pretty successful at it - in VietNam, the "shooting rate" was over 90%.
That's why Western-trained troops regularly trash opponents with similar equipment but different training: a Western-trained 30-man platoon will typically have 27 shooters, while its opponent will most likely have only 3 or 4, giving the Westerners an actual 9:1 fire superiority every other thing being equal.
Some games (eg, Doom and its offsprings) operate in a similar fashion to military training/indoctrination, but without the control features inherent to military training, and are thereby dangerous.
Yeah, it's perfectly clear now. The FSF is a secret society filled with mutant commies!
Send in the clones!
The Computer is your friend!
Re:Is it as good as Windows' GUI?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 1
Let's put it that way:
Each time I select/middle click in Windows and nothing happens, or move the pointer over a window and roll the wheel and another window scrolls, or when I middle-click on a link in IE and Bad Things happen, I curse Bill Gates. I much, much prefer X-based GUIs.
But that's me.
I guess you must be so much used to Windows' idiosyncraties that you don't notice them anymore.
I used GEM and the Workbench before I used Windows, and I never got used to it. To me, Gnome and KDE feel much more like what a GUI should be, but again, that's me and you've got a right to differ.
As good as Windows? I'd say they're better. But mostly, they're different.
It's just what somebody said earlier, it's not the language itself that's difficult to learn, it's the APIs.
20 years ago hp calculators used ASM as their programming language - though it wasn't called asm by hp. I didn't realize it until I started learning Z80 asm and noticed it was almost the same as my hp-15C's language.
Except for the hp-16C, those calculators weren't targetted at programmers, so I guess there must be lots of people out there who know asm without realizing they do...
I haven't much used windows these past couple years so when friends ask a windows question I usually refer them to someone more knowledgeable.
Or offer to install Linux on their computer - though I haven't had much success with that yet I must confess. I have switched many people to Mozilla, though, and even running on top of windows it's a big help against virii.
I do not doubt that Apple's market share is very limited in Israel - like everywhere else. What is important here is the symbol, not the number of affected pepople.
Besides, I don't see the government having any trouble with the monopolies you mentionned because they're state monopolies in Israel. Microsoft is an entirely different animal.
Before the internet boom, people used personal computers in the workplace mostly for word processing and spreadsheets, and also for accessing ERPs.
It's much easier to train people to use a point-and-click interface to perform those tasks than a purely text-based interface, and once you're into point-and-click it's logical to go the whole way to a true GUI.
Back in 1990 there were 4 widely available platforms that supported such a full-featured GUI: the Amiga (Workbench), the ST (GEM), the Mac and the PC (Windows 3.0 and OS/2).
The Amiga and ST were out mostly because Commodore and Atari never actively marketed them towards professional users and therefore lacked both the dealer network and essential apps such as accounting suites.
That left only Mac and PC. Although the Mac was more user-friendly, PCs were cheaper, could do the job, and in large organisations your mainframe supplier also doubled up as a PC supplier so you could easily use your PCs as mainframe terminals.
That clinched it. Now the fight could only be between OS/2 and Windows, but OS/2 was marketed by a hardware manufacturer while Windows wasn't, so it was unlikely that Compaq, for instance, would push OS/2 over Windows.
So if you weren't an IBM customer, from a purchasing manager's point of view the only real option was Wintel. The end user never had much to say about that.
Apple survived mostly because its GUI was far superior and let it acquire a loyal following in graphics-oriented businesses where nice-looking litterally means money, but everywhere else, where the extra expenditure couldn't be justified there was just Wintel.
The Israeli decision probably stems from Microsoft's faux pas last year when they announced that Office XP for MAc would not be localized in Hebrew.
See _Microsoft's Mac Hebrew snub prompts Israeli AntiTrust complaint_ from the register: www.theregister.com/content/archive/296 92.html
Even if they apparently subsequently reversed their decision the damage was done.
An important factor here is Israel has a buoyant IT industry and Microsoft's initial decision highlighted the danger of relying too heavily on one single software supplier.
Yes, knoppix is a great idea, but Mandrake is way simpler to install on your HD.
Starting from a Windows box with a defragged HD, you can pretty much boot on the Mandrake CD, then press enter until you're asked for your username and you'll have it up and working.
The Knoppix install UI is far from being as friendly as that. And it doesn't have DiskDrake, which lets you repartition your disk(s) in a very intuitive way.
I helped a friend who got her XP box infected with blaster get rid of a few months ago.
Having noticed how her user account had admin privileges, I launched into a quick lesson on why this was a Bad Idea and talked her into letting me set up a separate admin account and revert hers to regular user privileges.
It appeared that many programs she uses all the time expect you to run your computer as admin and require those rights to function properly.
So the experiment in proper account policy was extremely short-lived.
I have 38% as the thermal efficiency of a fuel plant and 94% efficiency for the power network, for a combined efficiency of slightly under 36%.
On the other hand, I assumed the train used its full power most of the time.
A lightened (250t) but otherwise pretty much standard TGV reached 515 kph in 1990.
Assuming power requirements are a linear function of weight but a square function of speed, a full-load (424t) TGV running at 300kph would use only 57% of its max power.
Let's say 70% to stay safe. We can assume that for the lower speed part of the trip it uses only 50%.
So the energy expenditure would be closer to 9.8Mwh, giving using your revised efficiency about 170mpg per passenger.
Even if it's lower than my flawed estimate, it's still quite higher than a car or plane.
And yes, in France the electricity would likely be supplied by a nuclear power plant, but the thermal efficiency is similar anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see where Google has a problem.
Gnome is the default DE of the three main distros, Ubuntu, Suse and RH/Fedora, so - and that's what they did - it's quite logical to do the port on Gnome.
Now Chrome is open source, so if anybody want to port Chrome to QT/KDE, well, they can.
As to why Google wants to port Chrome to Linux, well, they need to show goodwill to the open source community to beef up the Android Market.
And finally, I think we'll see the Gnome/KDE duality for a long, long time, simply because some people prefer C and others C++ and we're talking about free software.
And wasn't it Gygax himself who once said that the use for dice was to make noise behind the DM's screen? :)
but more importantly, games - whatever their type - are basically abount human interaction. And the best way to interact with people is face to face. Any kind of mediation removes something from that interaction.
The thing is the CRT is a much, much more mature technology than LCD or DLP (for video projectors).
Final control for (real) broadcast-quality post-production is done on murderously expensive (think $8-10,000) CRT monitors, but when you've seen an SD picture on those, HD on a consumer plasma is an eye-sore.
High-quality DLPs - the kind that's found on high-end 3-DLP projectors from Christie, Barco and Digital Projection - approach the color fidelity of good CRTs, but LCD is definetely out.
R&D for LCD monitor panels focuses on reducing costs and increasing production volumes to tackle the consumer market for CRT TV & computer monitor replacement. Quality improvements are just a by-product.
Even the projector LCD panel manufacturers - Epson and Sony - who do invest in quality R&D for the mid-range projectors have not managed to equal the quality of DLP.
CRTs will eventually disappear but not anytime soon. It'll take years before any flat-panel technology reaches the maturity level needed to displace CRT for quality-critical applications.
I don't change my passwords that often but they seem pretty secure to me.
Typically, they'll be 10-20 characters long, refer to extremely personnal events, include digits that relate to the event and a few character replacements that make sense to me but not necessarily to other people.
For instance, I've used the pillow name I gave an ex with the last 2 digits of her birthdate and adding in a couple typing errors I commonly make.
That kind of password is easy to remember, can't be found in a dictionary and can take years to crack on large system.
Another scheme I'm thinking about is semi-randomly mixing character codings in the same password, like ANSI and Unicode.
bundling is illegal in France.
:)
However, it's quite logical that you can't buy IE or WMP without buying Windows, since you can only run them on top of Windows, and you can't use Windows if you don't have a license. That is, legally
It's the reverse that's illegal, although since IE for Mac is free, MS can reasonnably argue that IE/Win is indeed free, and the same would be true if they released WMP for Mac.
The real problem is they can leverage their dominant position on the PC OS market to impose their file formats to lock their customers and their customers' third party suppliers, which is what they've already done with word processing and spreadsheets.
About the definition of "shooter" - according to Grossman:
It's somebody who attempts to hit ennemies. People who "shoot high" don't count.
You may be right about the Romans, but as far as the gunpowder era is concerned the problem was recognized as far back as the 1860's by Ardant du Picq - and I wouldn't be surprised if it were mentionned by Guibert...
The "not seeing much of the ennemy" bit actually started with WWI.
Most US soldiers in Viet Nam were conscripts, not professionals.
That said, I'll readily agree that video games exist in a different universe from boot camp. Still, I find Grossman's argument that some of those games act as conditionning to increase psychological distance rather convincing. Not in the sense that they turn people into psychos, but rather that they lower the threshold.
There's a powerful argument at the end of Grossman's On Killing that it's not the violence itself that's a problem, but how it is presented.
The games that are actually dangerous are those in which are realistic enough that there is no doubt that it's human beings that you maim or kill, but at the same time depict those human beings as not really human, thereby introducing a conditionned psychological distance between the player and potential victims.
95% of people have an ingrained resistance to killing other people. You have to artificially condition them to get them to shoot at people. Until this was acknowledged after WWII, only about 10% of soldiers actually shot their guns at the ennemy. Modern military (infantry) training is intended to counter that ingrained resistance, and is pretty successful at it - in VietNam, the "shooting rate" was over 90%.
That's why Western-trained troops regularly trash opponents with similar equipment but different training: a Western-trained 30-man platoon will typically have 27 shooters, while its opponent will most likely have only 3 or 4, giving the Westerners an actual 9:1 fire superiority every other thing being equal.
Some games (eg, Doom and its offsprings) operate in a similar fashion to military training/indoctrination, but without the control features inherent to military training, and are thereby dangerous.
See www.killology.com
Yeah, it's perfectly clear now. The FSF is a secret society filled with mutant commies!
Send in the clones!
The Computer is your friend!
Let's put it that way:
Each time I select/middle click in Windows and nothing happens, or move the pointer over a window and roll the wheel and another window scrolls, or when I middle-click on a link in IE and Bad Things happen, I curse Bill Gates. I much, much prefer X-based GUIs.
But that's me.
I guess you must be so much used to Windows' idiosyncraties that you don't notice them anymore.
I used GEM and the Workbench before I used Windows, and I never got used to it. To me, Gnome and KDE feel much more like what a GUI should be, but again, that's me and you've got a right to differ.
As good as Windows? I'd say they're better. But mostly, they're different.
I like the idea of paying to send email.
Make it, say, 1c per mail, flat, up front.
For normal private use, odds are you won't even notice the cost.
For business use, it's still dirt cheap.
But for a spammer who sends millions of mails each day, the cost would be prohibitive.
If you can manage to make a profit on that money you can use it to pay developpers for community software like Apache, Bind, Sendmail, PHP, etc..
It's just what somebody said earlier, it's not the language itself that's difficult to learn, it's the APIs.
20 years ago hp calculators used ASM as their programming language - though it wasn't called asm by hp. I didn't realize it until I started learning Z80 asm and noticed it was almost the same as my hp-15C's language.
Except for the hp-16C, those calculators weren't targetted at programmers, so I guess there must be lots of people out there who know asm without realizing they do...
Hmmmm
Let's see:
Hackers wear hats, as is well known.
Witches also wear hats, therefore hackers are obviously witches.
But since silicon wafers float on water, they are also obviously witches.
Therefore, hackers really are silicon wafers turned by witchfraft into human form.
QED
I haven't much used windows these past couple years so when friends ask a windows question I usually refer them to someone more knowledgeable.
Or offer to install Linux on their computer - though I haven't had much success with that yet I must confess. I have switched many people to Mozilla, though, and even running on top of windows it's a big help against virii.
he probably got it from there:
r ve y.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_su
(though that's about server software, not OS, but not many non-MS servers run on top of Windows)
The point isn't wether EMACS or Wordperfect or MS Word or GizmoWrite is the Ultimate and Perfect Word Processor, just that it's nice to have a choice.
Different programs behave differently, and one person might prefer to work with one and another person with a different one, that's all.
I do not doubt that Apple's market share is very limited in Israel - like everywhere else. What is important here is the symbol, not the number of affected pepople.
Besides, I don't see the government having any trouble with the monopolies you mentionned because they're state monopolies in Israel. Microsoft is an entirely different animal.
Millions of people did not choose to use Windows.
Before the internet boom, people used personal computers in the workplace mostly for word processing and spreadsheets, and also for accessing ERPs.
It's much easier to train people to use a point-and-click interface to perform those tasks than a purely text-based interface, and once you're into point-and-click it's logical to go the whole way to a true GUI.
Back in 1990 there were 4 widely available platforms that supported such a full-featured GUI: the Amiga (Workbench), the ST (GEM), the Mac and the PC (Windows 3.0 and OS/2).
The Amiga and ST were out mostly because Commodore and Atari never actively marketed them towards professional users and therefore lacked both the dealer network and essential apps such as accounting suites.
That left only Mac and PC. Although the Mac was more user-friendly, PCs were cheaper, could do the job, and in large organisations your mainframe supplier also doubled up as a PC supplier so you could easily use your PCs as mainframe terminals.
That clinched it. Now the fight could only be between OS/2 and Windows, but OS/2 was marketed by a hardware manufacturer while Windows wasn't, so it was unlikely that Compaq, for instance, would push OS/2 over Windows.
So if you weren't an IBM customer, from a purchasing manager's point of view the only real option was Wintel. The end user never had much to say about that.
Apple survived mostly because its GUI was far superior and let it acquire a loyal following in graphics-oriented businesses where nice-looking litterally means money, but everywhere else, where the extra expenditure couldn't be justified there was just Wintel.
The Israeli decision probably stems from Microsoft's faux pas last year when they announced that Office XP for MAc would not be localized in Hebrew.
6 92.html
See _Microsoft's Mac Hebrew snub prompts Israeli AntiTrust complaint_ from the register:
www.theregister.com/content/archive/29
Even if they apparently subsequently reversed their decision the damage was done.
An important factor here is Israel has a buoyant IT industry and Microsoft's initial decision highlighted the danger of relying too heavily on one single software supplier.
I remember reading a novelist praising EMACS because it is the closest thing to a text-mode Wordperfect one can get today.
Yes, knoppix is a great idea, but Mandrake is way simpler to install on your HD.
Starting from a Windows box with a defragged HD, you can pretty much boot on the Mandrake CD, then press enter until you're asked for your username and you'll have it up and working.
The Knoppix install UI is far from being as friendly as that. And it doesn't have DiskDrake, which lets you repartition your disk(s) in a very intuitive way.
I helped a friend who got her XP box infected with blaster get rid of a few months ago.
Having noticed how her user account had admin privileges, I launched into a quick lesson on why this was a Bad Idea and talked her into letting me set up a separate admin account and revert hers to regular user privileges.
It appeared that many programs she uses all the time expect you to run your computer as admin and require those rights to function properly.
So the experiment in proper account policy was extremely short-lived.
Do you mean that lawyers don't have the capacity to understand differential equations?
:D
I'd think it should naturally spring from their ability to master complex problems?
Of course you're right!
I have 38% as the thermal efficiency of a fuel plant and 94% efficiency for the power network, for a combined efficiency of slightly under 36%.
On the other hand, I assumed the train used its full power most of the time.
A lightened (250t) but otherwise pretty much standard TGV reached 515 kph in 1990.
Assuming power requirements are a linear function of weight but a square function of speed, a full-load (424t) TGV running at 300kph would use only 57% of its max power.
Let's say 70% to stay safe. We can assume that for the lower speed part of the trip it uses only 50%.
So the energy expenditure would be closer to 9.8Mwh, giving using your revised efficiency about 170mpg per passenger.
Even if it's lower than my flawed estimate, it's still quite higher than a car or plane.
And yes, in France the electricity would likely be supplied by a nuclear power plant, but the thermal efficiency is similar anyway.
Not to mention the LGPL allows linking proprietary softaware to LGPL'd libraries.
Mandrake's financial troubles actually have little to do with their current business model.
See their explanation here:
www.mandrakelinux.com/en/future.php3
Briefly, after a profitable first year in 1999 as a small distro maker, they let venture capitalists into the capital.
Those investors brought in a new management team which multiplied the workforce by ten almost overnight and steered the company towards e-learning.
The results of this strategy were catastrophic - Mandrake's burn rate reached 1.5M USD/month.
In April 2001, the founders resumed control of the company, refocused on Linux and started repairing the damage.
Filing for chapter 11 was a sound decision in this context, as it gave Mandrake some breathing space to get back on its feet.