Only if you believe that Religion is just a book of story.
Religion is a tool for peace of mind. It has different meanings for different people. This is one of the reasons why I hate those stupid "missionaries" who give me "some fun about Jesus" and "Bible and global warming" pamphlets.
I read some replies you got and none of them were actually provide an answer - classic slashdot phenomena of beating the dead horse, which is nearest to your hand. (I should get a BadAnalogyGuy.v2:) )
Anyway, you are confusing goal with path.
The tests are designed not to see which browsers are better at handling, but to provide higher bar of competition to all browsers. It is designed to provoke fanboyism among fans, and a sense of challenge among developers, but its aim is to promote compatibility by providing a common ground. For example, if all the browsers start getting 90%, you will know that they are compatible for at least 90% of all the tests (may be more, if they all fail on same tests, but at least 90%!).
As you see, while the immediate response of a participant browser is to be a winner, the test is designed for the improvement of the loser. Which is IE in this case.
And judging by Microsoft's response to Acid2, I am at least hopeful:)
I bet you haven't tried the latest one. Adobe Reader 8 is a breeze - it is damn fast! Right now I have "alias xpdf=acroread" in my bashrc. Earlier I used to use KPDF.
Although, I admit, I haven't tried okular, but I don't think it can be better than reader.
I was known as the guy who "knows a lot of computer" in my school:)
Once I turned off a monitor and told everyone that I have written a virus and no one will be able to start the computer again. My teacher tried his best before calling my parents. Man it was NOT funny!
I have understood one fact after spending so much time on Slashdot - "Religion is bad". Everything that goes on in any religion based article can be best summarized as follows: 1) All Religions are bad. 2) Islam is a big problem. 3) Killing is good, I don't know why people are against it.
Cue ad-hominem replies.
It is a karma-fest, don't dare posting anything critical of group thinking!!!
Actually I see no doubt. To me, morality is not absolute. It comes from ideology. A thousand years ago we had different ideologies, and thus different moral issues. Child marriage or having an extravagant king who should always be respected may sound idiotic today, it was the most respectable thing to do then. Morality, is different for every one.
There is no doubt that different societies around the world have different moral norms etc. While stoning a woman in premarital affair is acceptable in middle east, in India premarital sex goes on behind the curtain and is acceptable until it becomes public. In Europe it is not even a question that a boyfriend should be asking.
The problem arises because of Globalization. We need each other now and we cannot live without cooperation. Business! So we have to look over somethings to do so. To me, two options appear: 1) We CAN live without each other, like we have been since thousands of year. 2) We accept the difference and shed the superiority complex aka nationalism. |____ If you move to another country,
a) The people in host country accept your way of living.
b) You accept their way of living.
And you see, that is exactly what happens. People chose the second option.
So where is the problem? The fine print here is that when you move to another country, there is an interaction beside business. You get to see and talk to people. This factor is missing when people are talking about nations which do not even touch each others border (here, USA and China). There is only one connection between these two lands: business.
And that is why economic sanction and war are not similar tools with different levels of acceptance etc., they are two totally different approaches. War means a direct action in a foreign land, while economic sanction is just stopping the ties which are already present. They could have been similar IF China and USA were neighbors, or had a history of wars, but currently the only possible way is to severe the already present economical ties.
This is the same difference that is a fight between you are your neighbor and you and some random guy on street.
This is where Iraq war is wrong. USA went ahead and started to wage a war, and made it obvious that they are there only for oil (a physical need, beside economical one).
Thanks for reading and replying. These days Slashdot has just become a karma whore center where people post something sensational (and blatantly incorrect), get karma and stop.
A part of me wants to point out that your reply seems to be directed to those who are criticizing the Chinese and yet supporting their actions by buying their stuff.
You got me.
But the question still remains: why would anyone be so concerned about Chinese? And the answer is simple: because of an ideology. Because I believe in something and I do not want to promote my opposition which I think is wrong. I am against Chinese form of Goverment and I am trying hard that my side of generation doesn't develop into something which has anything to do with current China.
It really should not be difficult to understand, since everything starts from an ideology. Chinese government, or for that matter, the notion of a nation or a country. When you listen to the news about how someone died in your neighborhood, or how at the other end of your country came up with some ingenious idea, what you feel is not humanitarian, but ideological commonness. And like everyone, I want to promote and preserve mine.
And so, not doing business and helping my opposition, people who at the end will call me incorrect if they succeed, is the most logical and correct step.
It is this step that is missing from West, because common people, at the end, don't care about ideologies... they care about the price of consumer products. And when such people turn around and say that others should be ashamed, THAT is hypocrisy.
Regarding my position, I am (probably) anarchist. If I were king, everyone would be my slave:)
If that is true, then who would get embarrassed over anything, why? (Except until you believe that Democracy is somehow inherently superior to everything and so...aw)02n0'!)&RO"... embarrassment!!! )
Who is talking about anyone dictating anyone? The only dictatorship I see here is Chinese. And anyone who subscribes to the notion of "nation" will by definition not like any foreigner meddling in national affairs. But that is not what I am saying.
All I am asking is to stop the lip-service and start being self-consistent.
No one needs to go on a war with China, no one needs to do anything, except stop trading with China. If you think someone is being bullied, stop supporting the bully. Regardless of whether the bullied person wants you to do something or not. It is not his job to tell you what to do, as it is not your job to tell him what to do. Just. Be. Consistent. Taking all chances where you can get ultra cheap labor and a nice place to dump all the waste, all I see is hypocrisy.
And that is the problem. This is the point where people turn to me and say, "you are being too ideologist, you have no knowledge of practical world". If you also think like that, here is my answer: Practical world is created by you and me. Follow the ideology and it will become practical.
It will be when their Western colleagues start to care about such stuff.
Welcome to reality. China is not a dictatorship from a year or so, and this is not their first act of censorship. Rather, it is one with least human rights violation. If the West cared about democracy, censorship etc. at all, we would have done something in China.
China is world's manufacturer, just like Saudi Arabia being world's gas station.
I have korean project partners who are angry with me because I won't install Office 2007 and make them save it in some older format. They are even playing games, claiming that they are using some essential parts (read Microsoft Equation Editor) which they cannot convert to old format.
I have given up on explaining the morality behind not using pirated copies... I have given up the rational that Office 2007 adds no new mission crucial functionality. I simply say that I don't have a computer and I work in my office. I don't even tell them that in my office I use OpenOffice, on Linux.
People are not masters in this area. There is a very simple thinking behind all this: 1) Expensive is good, more expensive is better, even when it is pirated. 2) I use bla/I _like_ bla, can you do it? (Until we can do it by clicking here and there, we are argument-less in their eyes.
Their naming convention for version numbers is know, and has been discussed to death on Slashdot everytime someone says KDE 4.0
I am no fan of KDE 4.0 myself. I have been hearing the hype about it since what, end of 2004? That is 3 years ago. They had something on kde-look.org where users will be posting mockups of what they want and other users would look and say, wow, KDE 4 is going to be so great. They promised Kopete which will have proxy support (WTH is it not a priority for Thiego is something I could never understand. Long time ago he said he has already written a report. One time he scolded another user to write the code himself...). Oxygen was something so "secret" than looking at it would destroy your experience!!!!111!!
But the thing is, they are still following their release cycle, much the same way enlightenment is following its own. They did this when they released 3.0. Until they changed the process for 4.0 specifically, you cannot blame them.
But I kind of agree to you. They are hell bent on marketing for some reason, and getting the bugs fixed for core libraries is just a PITA even now.
Oh come on! Open early, open often is the mantra of open source, remember? All the problems with KDE 4 being "unprofessional", "incomplete" etc. are only coming from people who expected that KDE 4 will be awesome and revolutionary. Although it has a lot to do with marketing (the same kind of marketing that is being discussed in TFA), but also the fact that KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.
Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead? "Until everything is finished" - tada! They even have different release cycles for libraries and applications. And they have yet to release 0.17. I mean, at this rate, even Duke Nukem Forever will get released before they reach 1.00
I am not that old. It was back in home, in India. We used to live in a small house, and it all looked so big back then.
My father was a lecturer in a University, and when we would get sick we would go to University Health Center. I remember that whenever we would get sick, my father would take us in the morning with him to his department. Then he would leave us into computer room ("Oh this room is for staff members, how lucky are we!") and start a game of Space Commanders (and sometimes Gorilla on QBASIC). It must have been 1992 or 1991, I don't remember clearly. I still do remember though, that whenever we would get sick, we would be so happy for the next day:)
Later he a got an IBM PC and he bought it back. On a hindsight, I think my father himself was a geek. On a 5-1/4 floppy we would have DIGGER and SPACE COMMANDER and PC-MAN! Man it was so fun! And it was incredibly hard to beat my father:)
Then one day he bought us KEEN4E.EXE, and PRINCE.EXE. I don't think any game molded my imagination more than Prince of Persia. It. Was. Awesome. I would later draw the prince and Jaffar and the scene of princess room on Corel 5.
When I reached my bachelors, for the first time I saw internet. And my third semester's grade sheet is proof that I played a LOT of Pacman. And only a month ago I finished Commander Keen. My father still bodes that he even completed Pyramid of the Forbidden. This time when I meet him I have something to tell him:)
I miss my childhood.
On topic: best line from the article - "Back then it seemed to all make sense - the flying around, trying to catch the popsicles and root beer mugs..."
Ohhh.... I know this keyboard! One of my friend in university owned it. Man was he always pissed... I remember one of the keys was "Delete" which was not a normal delete (it had a red-cross marked on it) - pressing it would delete the selected file without pressing shift!
That was the only button he used to use though, since he had a tendency to "clean" everything:D. No destop icons, everymail deleted from inbox and so on...
You misunderstand. People are not made because US doesn't sign treaties it cannot keep up, they are mad because US makes other countries sign those treaties threatening about economic sanctions.
Well it is not KDE, and that is why I didn't wanted to use ksnapshot.
And yes, I know how to take screenshot using import (ImageMagick), but I wanted to use xwd. Turns out it stores the image in xwd format, and to convert it to PNG I would have still needed convert (ImageMagick), so all this exercise has led to only one thing: groß embarrassment:(
Actually, right now I am testing Acid Test 2 with Firefox Beta 2 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b2) Gecko/2007121016 Firefox/3.0b2) and it DOES NOT pass the test.
Slashdot Mirror
Some one summaries the controversial lines please, so that we can continue hot Sceintology bashing...
Ugh... I hate PDF... it makes me look like someone interested in actually reading TFA...
Ha!Ha!Ha! That is funny :)
Religion is a tool for peace of mind. It has different meanings for different people. This is one of the reasons why I hate those stupid "missionaries" who give me "some fun about Jesus" and "Bible and global warming" pamphlets.
I read some replies you got and none of them were actually provide an answer - classic slashdot phenomena of beating the dead horse, which is nearest to your hand. (I should get a BadAnalogyGuy.v2 :) )
:)
Anyway, you are confusing goal with path.
The tests are designed not to see which browsers are better at handling, but to provide higher bar of competition to all browsers. It is designed to provoke fanboyism among fans, and a sense of challenge among developers, but its aim is to promote compatibility by providing a common ground. For example, if all the browsers start getting 90%, you will know that they are compatible for at least 90% of all the tests (may be more, if they all fail on same tests, but at least 90%!).
As you see, while the immediate response of a participant browser is to be a winner, the test is designed for the improvement of the loser. Which is IE in this case.
And judging by Microsoft's response to Acid2, I am at least hopeful
Oh... GNOME :)
I bet you haven't tried the latest one. Adobe Reader 8 is a breeze - it is damn fast! Right now I have "alias xpdf=acroread" in my bashrc. Earlier I used to use KPDF.
Although, I admit, I haven't tried okular, but I don't think it can be better than reader.
I was known as the guy who "knows a lot of computer" in my school :)
Once I turned off a monitor and told everyone that I have written a virus and no one will be able to start the computer again. My teacher tried his best before calling my parents. Man it was NOT funny!
I have understood one fact after spending so much time on Slashdot - "Religion is bad". Everything that goes on in any religion based article can be best summarized as follows:
1) All Religions are bad.
2) Islam is a big problem.
3) Killing is good, I don't know why people are against it.
Cue ad-hominem replies.
It is a karma-fest, don't dare posting anything critical of group thinking!!!
Actually I see no doubt. To me, morality is not absolute. It comes from ideology. A thousand years ago we had different ideologies, and thus different moral issues. Child marriage or having an extravagant king who should always be respected may sound idiotic today, it was the most respectable thing to do then. Morality, is different for every one.
There is no doubt that different societies around the world have different moral norms etc. While stoning a woman in premarital affair is acceptable in middle east, in India premarital sex goes on behind the curtain and is acceptable until it becomes public. In Europe it is not even a question that a boyfriend should be asking.
The problem arises because of Globalization. We need each other now and we cannot live without cooperation. Business! So we have to look over somethings to do so. To me, two options appear:
1) We CAN live without each other, like we have been since thousands of year.
2) We accept the difference and shed the superiority complex aka nationalism.
|____ If you move to another country,
a) The people in host country accept your way of living.
b) You accept their way of living.
And you see, that is exactly what happens. People chose the second option.
So where is the problem? The fine print here is that when you move to another country, there is an interaction beside business. You get to see and talk to people. This factor is missing when people are talking about nations which do not even touch each others border (here, USA and China). There is only one connection between these two lands: business.
And that is why economic sanction and war are not similar tools with different levels of acceptance etc., they are two totally different approaches. War means a direct action in a foreign land, while economic sanction is just stopping the ties which are already present. They could have been similar IF China and USA were neighbors, or had a history of wars, but currently the only possible way is to severe the already present economical ties.
This is the same difference that is a fight between you are your neighbor and you and some random guy on street.
This is where Iraq war is wrong. USA went ahead and started to wage a war, and made it obvious that they are there only for oil (a physical need, beside economical one).
You got me.
But the question still remains: why would anyone be so concerned about Chinese?
And the answer is simple: because of an ideology. Because I believe in something and I do not want to promote my opposition which I think is wrong. I am against Chinese form of Goverment and I am trying hard that my side of generation doesn't develop into something which has anything to do with current China.
It really should not be difficult to understand, since everything starts from an ideology. Chinese government, or for that matter, the notion of a nation or a country. When you listen to the news about how someone died in your neighborhood, or how at the other end of your country came up with some ingenious idea, what you feel is not humanitarian, but ideological commonness. And like everyone, I want to promote and preserve mine.
And so, not doing business and helping my opposition, people who at the end will call me incorrect if they succeed, is the most logical and correct step.
It is this step that is missing from West, because common people, at the end, don't care about ideologies... they care about the price of consumer products. And when such people turn around and say that others should be ashamed, THAT is hypocrisy.
Regarding my position, I am (probably) anarchist. If I were king, everyone would be my slave
If that is true, then who would get embarrassed over anything, why? (Except until you believe that Democracy is somehow inherently superior to everything and so ...aw)02n0'!)&RO"... embarrassment!!! )
Who is talking about anyone dictating anyone? The only dictatorship I see here is Chinese. And anyone who subscribes to the notion of "nation" will by definition not like any foreigner meddling in national affairs. But that is not what I am saying.
All I am asking is to stop the lip-service and start being self-consistent.
No one needs to go on a war with China, no one needs to do anything, except stop trading with China. If you think someone is being bullied, stop supporting the bully. Regardless of whether the bullied person wants you to do something or not. It is not his job to tell you what to do, as it is not your job to tell him what to do. Just. Be. Consistent. Taking all chances where you can get ultra cheap labor and a nice place to dump all the waste, all I see is hypocrisy.
And that is the problem. This is the point where people turn to me and say, "you are being too ideologist, you have no knowledge of practical world". If you also think like that, here is my answer: Practical world is created by you and me. Follow the ideology and it will become practical.
It will be when their Western colleagues start to care about such stuff.
Welcome to reality. China is not a dictatorship from a year or so, and this is not their first act of censorship. Rather, it is one with least human rights violation. If the West cared about democracy, censorship etc. at all, we would have done something in China.
China is world's manufacturer, just like Saudi Arabia being world's gas station.
It should be the Westerners' embarrassment.
They are korean students running Office 2007 on Vista. No way in hell am I going to believe that any one of them have bought.
Don't get me wrong, I am myself from India. Asia is a place where piracy is OK until you work for the company.
Thanks for saying this.
I have korean project partners who are angry with me because I won't install Office 2007 and make them save it in some older format. They are even playing games, claiming that they are using some essential parts (read Microsoft Equation Editor) which they cannot convert to old format.
I have given up on explaining the morality behind not using pirated copies... I have given up the rational that Office 2007 adds no new mission crucial functionality. I simply say that I don't have a computer and I work in my office. I don't even tell them that in my office I use OpenOffice, on Linux.
People are not masters in this area. There is a very simple thinking behind all this:
1) Expensive is good, more expensive is better, even when it is pirated.
2) I use bla/I _like_ bla, can you do it? (Until we can do it by clicking here and there, we are argument-less in their eyes.
Their naming convention for version numbers is know, and has been discussed to death on Slashdot everytime someone says KDE 4.0
I am no fan of KDE 4.0 myself. I have been hearing the hype about it since what, end of 2004? That is 3 years ago. They had something on kde-look.org where users will be posting mockups of what they want and other users would look and say, wow, KDE 4 is going to be so great. They promised Kopete which will have proxy support (WTH is it not a priority for Thiego is something I could never understand. Long time ago he said he has already written a report. One time he scolded another user to write the code himself...). Oxygen was something so "secret" than looking at it would destroy your experience!!!!111!!
But the thing is, they are still following their release cycle, much the same way enlightenment is following its own. They did this when they released 3.0. Until they changed the process for 4.0 specifically, you cannot blame them.
But I kind of agree to you. They are hell bent on marketing for some reason, and getting the bugs fixed for core libraries is just a PITA even now.
I personally haven't tried Gnome much. Everytime I wanted to use it, I felt like my productivity is being hindered.
All my friends have used KDE exclusively. Those who know, install kde as first thing when they get Ubuntu. Those who know more, install kubuntu.
Ofcourse there are people using Gnome, and rise in Ubuntu means a lot for Gnome users, but look at these results from linuxquestions.org:
1) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2006-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-76/desktop-environment-of-the-year-514945/
2) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2005-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-69/desktop-environment-of-the-year-409028/
3) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2004-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-62/desktop-environment-of-the-year-272100/
4) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/lq-suggestions-and-feedback-7/2003-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-133391/
5) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/2001-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-winners-15903/?highlight=LinuxQuestions.org+Members+Choice+Awards
KDE all the way.
Oh come on! Open early, open often is the mantra of open source, remember? All the problems with KDE 4 being "unprofessional", "incomplete" etc. are only coming from people who expected that KDE 4 will be awesome and revolutionary. Although it has a lot to do with marketing (the same kind of marketing that is being discussed in TFA), but also the fact that KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.
Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead? "Until everything is finished" - tada! They even have different release cycles for libraries and applications. And they have yet to release 0.17. I mean, at this rate, even Duke Nukem Forever will get released before they reach 1.00
I am not that old. It was back in home, in India. We used to live in a small house, and it all looked so big back then.
:)
:)
:)
My father was a lecturer in a University, and when we would get sick we would go to University Health Center. I remember that whenever we would get sick, my father would take us in the morning with him to his department. Then he would leave us into computer room ("Oh this room is for staff members, how lucky are we!") and start a game of Space Commanders (and sometimes Gorilla on QBASIC). It must have been 1992 or 1991, I don't remember clearly. I still do remember though, that whenever we would get sick, we would be so happy for the next day
Later he a got an IBM PC and he bought it back. On a hindsight, I think my father himself was a geek. On a 5-1/4 floppy we would have DIGGER and SPACE COMMANDER and PC-MAN! Man it was so fun! And it was incredibly hard to beat my father
Then one day he bought us KEEN4E.EXE, and PRINCE.EXE. I don't think any game molded my imagination more than Prince of Persia. It. Was. Awesome. I would later draw the prince and Jaffar and the scene of princess room on Corel 5.
When I reached my bachelors, for the first time I saw internet. And my third semester's grade sheet is proof that I played a LOT of Pacman. And only a month ago I finished Commander Keen. My father still bodes that he even completed Pyramid of the Forbidden. This time when I meet him I have something to tell him
I miss my childhood.
On topic: best line from the article - "Back then it seemed to all make sense - the flying around, trying to catch the popsicles and root beer mugs..."
Ohhh.... I know this keyboard! One of my friend in university owned it. Man was he always pissed... I remember one of the keys was "Delete" which was not a normal delete (it had a red-cross marked on it) - pressing it would delete the selected file without pressing shift!
:D. No destop icons, everymail deleted from inbox and so on...
That was the only button he used to use though, since he had a tendency to "clean" everything
You misunderstand. People are not made because US doesn't sign treaties it cannot keep up, they are mad because US makes other countries sign those treaties threatening about economic sanctions.
This story begs to be true. A true Slashdotter will never know when a women is interested in him.
Well it is not KDE, and that is why I didn't wanted to use ksnapshot.
:(
And yes, I know how to take screenshot using import (ImageMagick), but I wanted to use xwd. Turns out it stores the image in xwd format, and to convert it to PNG I would have still needed convert (ImageMagick), so all this exercise has led to only one thing: groß embarrassment
Well you caught me :)
On a serious note, I didn't wanted to open ksnapshot.
Actually, right now I am testing Acid Test 2 with Firefox Beta 2 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b2) Gecko/2007121016 Firefox/3.0b2) and it DOES NOT pass the test.
Here is a screenshot: acid2