If it's using all the nice GNOME Bonobo stuff, then I'm sure there's a lot of nice stuff under there. However, looking at the Nautilus web page, it tells me next to nothing about what Nautilus can do. Care to enlighten me? I couldn't find anything that really made me sit back and think "wow".
As for being a hacker or not... I'm not a hardcore hacker, but I do program & administrate Unix boxes for a living. I'm not about to peruse 4MB of source code to find out what this sparsely documented file manager can actually do, though.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on it. Maybe I'm just having a bad day. Finding that I required Mozilla to get a web browser that has no proxy support probably coloured my opinion of it. I'll probably try it out again in the near future, but I'm just a bit underwhelmed at the moment.
Save the sarcasm please, and there's no need to shout. Of course I know what a bloody preview is. I use nightly builds of Mozilla, I'm fully aware of its preview status, but unlike Nautilus, Mozilla is actually something new (i.e. a full-featured HTML renderer for Unix).
Problem is, unless they rewrite Nautilus from the ground up, it's still going to be nothing new or innovative. It's eye-candy, form over functionality, and even if it were 5 times as fast (which it may well be in v1.0), it's still nothing special.
It's pretty, but that's about it. Definitely a case of form over function.
The "preview your files while you're browsing them" sounds like a cool idea, but when you actually get to use it, it really doesn't do anything except slow the whole experience right down. And on this 300MHz laptop, it's SLOW.
I assume it has a built-in web browser, since it requires Mozilla (which is not in itself a bad idea), but since it doesn't appear to support proxies yet, I can't use that. Ho hum. Hey, Eazel: if you want to impress people, get your software working well, THEN work on the eye candy.
Throw multiuser and files access permissions out of the system. have the user automatically login and work as 'root' just as in windows 95/98/me and in macos
Bad idea. Even on a simple dialup PC, your chances of getting hacked while online are non-zero. Besides, what if more than one family member uses this box? How do you protect your own files from accidental, never mind malicious, damage?
Simplify the file system structure.
Why? Why not just make the interface smart enough that the user doesn't need to know about the filesystem structure? This is slowly but surely happening anyway.
Throw out X11 - since no desktop user needs its network functionality
I'm a desktop user, and I need its functionality.
Create lightweight desktop applications not with configurability, but simplicity in mind. Avoid redundant functionality (i.e. button bars doubling menu entries).
Configurability is a good thing, as long as it doesn't get in the way of simplicity. I like highly configurable applications, as long as the defaults are sane. Redundant functionality is a good thing: different users have different preferences about how they want to do things.
Reduce inter-application interfaces to classic Unix pipes, sockets and libraries. Avoid bloat and slowdown through Corba and similar interfaces.
Thus crippling any kind of useful component object model that Unix desktops are just truly beginning to take advantage of.
Adapt and simplify LinuxConf to act as the system configurator
Having a useful system configuration manager is a desirable goal. I pray that LinuxConf is never adopted as a standard though - throwing it out it what's really needed. Maybe that's me, but I truly loathe LinuxConf.
Standardize on one scripting language in your "distribution" (for example, Python).
Argh. Please no. Allow developers and users their choice of what scripting language they want to use. Sure, Python's a good language, but why Python? Why not Perl or Tcl or Scheme?
To be honest (and I don't mean to flame you), it sounds like you'd be happier using something like BeOS or MacOS. Why go to the trouble of using a complex, powerful Unix-like kernel if you're immediately going to rip out half of its functionality?
When my network card failed the other day, Windows decided that it had detected a new network card, pushing me through that ridiculous new hardware wizard (the one that doesn't find the right drivers no matter where you tell it to look and needs you to have a Windows 98 CD on hand just to update your network drivers).
Red Hat on the same machine, on the other hand, correctly spotted that I had no longer had a 3c59x network card in the system.
When I replaced the card, I needed to reboot Windows 3 times (as well as use Linux to download some new drivers from 3Com's site) before it worked again.
When I rebooted Linux, it just worked.
So please don't try to tell me the Windows is user friendly.
Fortunately, it looks like that is indeed the default now - in the Helix GNOME I'm running on this box, Unix domain sockets are enabled by default and IPv4/IPv6 sockets are not.
(Last GNOME update I did was about 2 weeks ago, so it's been there since then at least)
Given that there's a sphere upwards of 60 light years in radius of radio emissions from the earth, any race within that radius capable of intercepting a radio signal probably already knows about us.
In that context, a probe moving at a mere 100km/sec is somewhat insignificant. It won't even reach Alpha Centauri for thousands of years.
In a MUD like EQ, most of the fun of being a high level character or owning that special item is the (team)work you've put in to obtain that special item in the first place. And a lot of the higher level quests/items do require a large team of players with a lot of strategy/planning and high degree of co-operation.
What's the fun in playing a MUD when the people with the special items are those who a) can afford to buy them, and b) actually want to buy them instead of playing the game for fun?
Sony (actually Verant) did not scan anyone's hard drive. They were planning on scanning the Windows running task list, which I don't agree with, but they backed down on that as well.
Verant are far from perfect, but this sort of hysterical exaggeration doesn't help matters at all.
Gtk apps are X apps, and they work with X's network transparency just as well as any other X app.
What Gtk doesn't support is the Xt resource database and command-line parsing functionality, which I personally loathe (yes I have programmed Xt/Motif for a living in the past).
Instead off my-app -display remote:0, you say my-app --display remote:0, or even DISPLAY=remote:0 my-app
Using the environment works with all X apps, regardless of toolkit.
People still talk about a pint of milk, although it is almost always a 1/2 litre. There are some bizarre mixtures: fabric comes in 45 or 60 inch widths, but is now often priced by the meter lengthways.
Talking of bizarre: in Ireland these days, road distance signs are now in kilometres, but speed limits are in miles. Now that's confusing.
Namely: KDE. Under my Red Hat system, KDE usually goes in/opt/kde, and the RPM's I get from www.kde.org go in/opt/kde.
On Red Hat 6.0 though, the KDE packages are all dumped under/usr by default. I don't particularly like it, but it hasn't annoyed me enough to change it.
Iff the Mandrake RPM's are relocatable (one would hope so), it may be possible to install them all under/opt/kde with something like rpm --prefix=/opt/kde -ivh *.rpm. Although you'll probably then have to change some init scripts if you're running kdm. Disclaimer: I haven't tried this, so no warranty:-)
That depends on how you define functionality. KDE runs on Unix, so it's already way more functional than Windows can ever hope to be, as far as I'm concerned.
Windows might have a reasonable interface (and KDE is right to incorporate what it can), but it's deeply rotten at the core.
Why, when a game crashes on Win98, does the OS claim I have no memory to start anything else? Even when nothing's running, and the machine has 192MB of RAM! Heh, DOS is still alive and well at the heart of it all, I can see.
Why did Windows fail to update my CD-ROM drive letter when I added a new hard drive?
Why does Windows ask me to insert a floppy when installing new drivers, and then claim that the drivers can't be found in C:\windows\system? That's just shoddy.
Why, when I upgraded a soundcard driver, did Windows lose my Glide DLLs, forcing another driver reinstall and another two reboots?
And why, when I had to replace a network card due to hardware failure, did Windows force me to reboot no less than 8 TIMES? Guess how many times I had to reboot Linux on the same machine? That's right, once.
So you can keep your bloody brain-damaged functionality. I'll keep an OS that works. Now, if only Everquest ran on Linux...
I believe it was about 97% coverage here, and we were lucky enough to have clear skies.
It was a fairly strange and worthwhile sight. Even though it remained light throughout, the daylight did have a bizarre washed-out quality, sort of like twilight, but still with sharp shadows and the sun high in the sky.
Well, it was a fine excuse for the entire office to stand outside with their homemade pin-hole cameras for 20 minutes... it's amazing what you can do with a 17" monitor box, a pin and sheet of white paper:-)
First, retool the chain from application to server. Instead of ALWAYS using sockets, write a new path on the libX11.so library so that commands are fifo'd using shared memory to the X server. Get rid of the X protocol over local connections(which require quite a bit of time decoding and encoding... think PPP), and use something more like System.map. Build the protocol over a shared memory fifo buffer. This _MUST_ be backwards compatable. Same library. Just a new life for old apps.
This is a pretty good idea. In fact, it's already been done by someone else - IBM. The AIX X server uses a shared memory transport for all X requests if client & server are on the same machine. This confused me for a while - where's the XShm extension on AIX, I wondered? Ah, it doesn't need, since everything's shared anyway.
I don't understand what you mean by getting rid of the X protocol though - you mean giving clients direct access to the hardware? Sun did something like this with their SUN_DGA extension (which is not the same as the XFree86 extension).
Build enlightenment/wmaker/fvwm/etc.. as a library. Allow the wm to be linked into the X server(I know, but but it's a good thing). This would lower the context switches a good bit. because you'd get rid of the X/WM/CLIENT clusterfsck that can often happen when you have an app running and you MOVE THE MOUSE (Ohh My God). Besides, if you want to switch WM's - we use the libdl.so to kill the hooks, blow out the old wm lib, and relink the new lib
I can sort of see what you're getting at here, but (a) it would be a truly monumental task, and (b) I don't think it would buy you much.
Another interresting notion, would be to allow X to load toolkits (server side) like KDE/GNOME/Motif/Xt into the X server...
What you're describing is pretty much what the Berlin people want to do. Take a look at their website - there's some very interesting and thoughtful design there.
You have some good ideas, but IMHO, you should look at contributing to Berlin, rather than reworking X. Especially since a lot of your ideas are already there:-)
As someone else pointed out, if the X server has a lower priority than other processes on the system, interactive performance will feel worse. So, on Windows, for example, you'll get nice smooth mouse movement, but you're pulling more CPU cycles from apps that might really need the processing power.
Anyway, this is not a problem of X per se, more of an issue with specific X server design. Accelerated X has a technology called Velvet Mouse, which addresses precisely the problem you describe - I quote from their web page:
"Velvet Mouse" Accelerated-X Display Server features smooth mouse operation, even when the system is heavily loaded. Other X servers have a tendency to ignore mouse movements and other inputs for so long that when it does get around to servicing them, the movements are large, resulting in a "jerky" cursor. Tacky.
Yeah, Accel X is a commercial product, but it demonstrates that it's an implementation issue, not a fundamental design flaw.
(Despite Europa's distance from the sun, Jupiter emits significant heat at close range which is leftover primordial heat from the solar system formation).
Not to mention Jupiter's significant tidal effects on its satellites, which contributes energy to them.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's using all the nice GNOME Bonobo stuff, then I'm sure there's a lot of nice stuff under there. However, looking at the Nautilus web page, it tells me next to nothing about what Nautilus can do. Care to enlighten me? I couldn't find anything that really made me sit back and think "wow".
As for being a hacker or not... I'm not a hardcore hacker, but I do program & administrate Unix boxes for a living. I'm not about to peruse 4MB of source code to find out what this sparsely documented file manager can actually do, though.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on it. Maybe I'm just having a bad day. Finding that I required Mozilla to get a web browser that has no proxy support probably coloured my opinion of it. I'll probably try it out again in the near future, but I'm just a bit underwhelmed at the moment.
Save the sarcasm please, and there's no need to shout. Of course I know what a bloody preview is. I use nightly builds of Mozilla, I'm fully aware of its preview status, but unlike Nautilus, Mozilla is actually something new (i.e. a full-featured HTML renderer for Unix).
Problem is, unless they rewrite Nautilus from the ground up, it's still going to be nothing new or innovative. It's eye-candy, form over functionality, and even if it were 5 times as fast (which it may well be in v1.0), it's still nothing special.
It's pretty, but that's about it. Definitely a case of form over function.
The "preview your files while you're browsing them" sounds like a cool idea, but when you actually get to use it, it really doesn't do anything except slow the whole experience right down. And on this 300MHz laptop, it's SLOW.
I assume it has a built-in web browser, since it requires Mozilla (which is not in itself a bad idea), but since it doesn't appear to support proxies yet, I can't use that. Ho hum. Hey, Eazel: if you want to impress people, get your software working well, THEN work on the eye candy.
Tried it out, deleted it 10 minutes later.
Bad idea. Even on a simple dialup PC, your chances of getting hacked while online are non-zero. Besides, what if more than one family member uses this box? How do you protect your own files from accidental, never mind malicious, damage?
Simplify the file system structure.
Why? Why not just make the interface smart enough that the user doesn't need to know about the filesystem structure? This is slowly but surely happening anyway.
Throw out X11 - since no desktop user needs its network functionality
I'm a desktop user, and I need its functionality.
Create lightweight desktop applications not with configurability, but simplicity in mind. Avoid redundant functionality (i.e. button bars doubling menu entries).
Configurability is a good thing, as long as it doesn't get in the way of simplicity. I like highly configurable applications, as long as the defaults are sane. Redundant functionality is a good thing: different users have different preferences about how they want to do things.
Reduce inter-application interfaces to classic Unix pipes, sockets and libraries. Avoid bloat and slowdown through Corba and similar interfaces.
Thus crippling any kind of useful component object model that Unix desktops are just truly beginning to take advantage of.
Adapt and simplify LinuxConf to act as the system configurator
Having a useful system configuration manager is a desirable goal. I pray that LinuxConf is never adopted as a standard though - throwing it out it what's really needed. Maybe that's me, but I truly loathe LinuxConf.
Standardize on one scripting language in your "distribution" (for example, Python).
Argh. Please no. Allow developers and users their choice of what scripting language they want to use. Sure, Python's a good language, but why Python? Why not Perl or Tcl or Scheme?
To be honest (and I don't mean to flame you), it sounds like you'd be happier using something like BeOS or MacOS. Why go to the trouble of using a complex, powerful Unix-like kernel if you're immediately going to rip out half of its functionality?
Sometimes.
When my network card failed the other day, Windows decided that it had detected a new network card, pushing me through that ridiculous new hardware wizard (the one that doesn't find the right drivers no matter where you tell it to look and needs you to have a Windows 98 CD on hand just to update your network drivers).
Red Hat on the same machine, on the other hand, correctly spotted that I had no longer had a 3c59x network card in the system.
When I replaced the card, I needed to reboot Windows 3 times (as well as use Linux to download some new drivers from 3Com's site) before it worked again.
When I rebooted Linux, it just worked.
So please don't try to tell me the Windows is user friendly.
Yep, that's the right way to do it.
Fortunately, it looks like that is indeed the default now - in the Helix GNOME I'm running on this box, Unix domain sockets are enabled by default and IPv4/IPv6 sockets are not.
(Last GNOME update I did was about 2 weeks ago, so it's been there since then at least)
Given that there's a sphere upwards of 60 light years in radius of radio emissions from the earth, any race within that radius capable of intercepting a radio signal probably already knows about us.
In that context, a probe moving at a mere 100km/sec is somewhat insignificant. It won't even reach Alpha Centauri for thousands of years.
In a MUD like EQ, most of the fun of being a high level character or owning that special item is the (team)work you've put in to obtain that special item in the first place. And a lot of the higher level quests/items do require a large team of players with a lot of strategy/planning and high degree of co-operation.
What's the fun in playing a MUD when the people with the special items are those who a) can afford to buy them, and b) actually want to buy them instead of playing the game for fun?
Verant are far from perfect, but this sort of hysterical exaggeration doesn't help matters at all.
That experiment lead to the discovery of a new subatomic particle, the scratchon.
It exerts a powerful attractive force between the experimentor and the subject.
What Gtk doesn't support is the Xt resource database and command-line parsing functionality, which I personally loathe (yes I have programmed Xt/Motif for a living in the past).
Instead off my-app -display remote:0, you say my-app --display remote:0, or even DISPLAY=remote:0 my-app
Using the environment works with all X apps, regardless of toolkit.
The term you wanted was ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL. Of course, it was also locally known as Oh! Oh! COBOL! and I Object to COBOL.
Disclaimer: I'm not a COBOL programmer. Life's too short.
Take a look at www.stand.org.uk for more information on why this bill is so braindead.
There's no way that's true.
Talking of bizarre: in Ireland these days, road distance signs are now in kilometres, but speed limits are in miles. Now that's confusing.
every geek remembers grep means get regular expression
Actually, it's Global Regular Expression Print. From the ed command g/re/p.
On Red Hat 6.0 though, the KDE packages are all dumped under /usr by default. I don't particularly like it, but it hasn't annoyed me enough to change it.
Iff the Mandrake RPM's are relocatable (one would hope so), it may be possible to install them all under /opt/kde with something like rpm --prefix=/opt/kde -ivh *.rpm. Although you'll probably then have to change some init scripts if you're running kdm. Disclaimer: I haven't tried this, so no warranty :-)
That depends on how you define functionality. KDE runs on Unix, so it's already way more functional than Windows can ever hope to be, as far as I'm concerned.
Windows might have a reasonable interface (and KDE is right to incorporate what it can), but it's deeply rotten at the core.
Why, when a game crashes on Win98, does the OS claim I have no memory to start anything else? Even when nothing's running, and the machine has 192MB of RAM! Heh, DOS is still alive and well at the heart of it all, I can see.
Why did Windows fail to update my CD-ROM drive letter when I added a new hard drive?
Why does Windows ask me to insert a floppy when installing new drivers, and then claim that the drivers can't be found in C:\windows\system? That's just shoddy.
Why, when I upgraded a soundcard driver, did Windows lose my Glide DLLs, forcing another driver reinstall and another two reboots?
And why, when I had to replace a network card due to hardware failure, did Windows force me to reboot no less than 8 TIMES? Guess how many times I had to reboot Linux on the same machine? That's right, once.
So you can keep your bloody brain-damaged functionality. I'll keep an OS that works. Now, if only Everquest ran on Linux...
I believe it was about 97% coverage here, and we were lucky enough to have clear skies.
:-)
It was a fairly strange and worthwhile sight. Even though it remained light throughout, the daylight did have a bizarre washed-out quality, sort of like twilight, but still with sharp shadows and the sun high in the sky.
Well, it was a fine excuse for the entire office to stand outside with their homemade pin-hole cameras for 20 minutes... it's amazing what you can do with a 17" monitor box, a pin and sheet of white paper
This is a pretty good idea. In fact, it's already been done by someone else - IBM. The AIX X server uses a shared memory transport for all X requests if client & server are on the same machine. This confused me for a while - where's the XShm extension on AIX, I wondered? Ah, it doesn't need, since everything's shared anyway.
I don't understand what you mean by getting rid of the X protocol though - you mean giving clients direct access to the hardware? Sun did something like this with their SUN_DGA extension (which is not the same as the XFree86 extension).
Build enlightenment/wmaker/fvwm/etc.. as a library. Allow the wm to be linked into the X server(I know, but but it's a good thing). This would lower the context switches a good bit. because you'd get rid of the X/WM/CLIENT clusterfsck that can often happen when you have an app running and you MOVE THE MOUSE (Ohh My God). Besides, if you want to switch WM's - we use the libdl.so to kill the hooks, blow out the old wm lib, and relink the new lib
I can sort of see what you're getting at here, but (a) it would be a truly monumental task, and (b) I don't think it would buy you much.
Another interresting notion, would be to allow X to load toolkits (server side) like KDE/GNOME/Motif/Xt into the X server...
What you're describing is pretty much what the Berlin people want to do. Take a look at their website - there's some very interesting and thoughtful design there.
You have some good ideas, but IMHO, you should look at contributing to Berlin, rather than reworking X. Especially since a lot of your ideas are already there :-)
Anyway, this is not a problem of X per se, more of an issue with specific X server design. Accelerated X has a technology called Velvet Mouse, which addresses precisely the problem you describe - I quote from their web page:
"Velvet Mouse" Accelerated-X Display Server features smooth mouse operation, even when the system is heavily loaded. Other X servers have a tendency to ignore mouse movements and other inputs for so long that when it does get around to servicing them, the movements are large, resulting in a "jerky" cursor. Tacky.
Yeah, Accel X is a commercial product, but it demonstrates that it's an implementation issue, not a fundamental design flaw.
Or it would be if I was talking about Titan and not Europa.
Oh, someone moderate me down, please. I'm having a bad day here.
Did I say Jupiter? (backpedals furiously)
Umm, Saturn. Yeah, that's the one.
Not to mention Jupiter's significant tidal effects on its satellites, which contributes energy to them.
Maybe you're thinking about a different game.
Heretic II is a fairly recent title (well, less than a year old), and uses the Quake II engine.
Are you thinking of Heretic, part one?