> Why does GNOME need a third part window manager?
The intent was to not have GNOME dictate the look and feel of the desktop--your basic "freedom of choice" thing. As you well noted, this didn't quite work out as planned.
Sawmill, though, is becoming the unofficial official WM of GNOME, to the point that Helix Code bundles it with its GNOME setup. Sawmill dovetails pretty nicely into GNOME--it really doesn't have any overlapping functionality with GNOME.
AFAIK, they do a line-by-line security audit of the OS code and all their packages. They basically specialize in putting the system under tight scrutiny.
From bits and pieces I've picked up, it seems that FreeBSD is more conservative, more old-school UNIX style. Bear in mind that I say this as a Linux user, so I wouldn't say my opinion is all that authoritative.
In terms of stability, the two are pretty much neck and neck, AFAIK.
It would be nice if the KDE folks could issue a statement on whether GPL'd stuff could be linked to Qt2, maybe even contact the FSF's lawyers and get their opinions. There may be some legit issues here, or at least legit questions, and it would be nice to clear the air.
And I had hoped the Qt licensing troubles would be gone with the QPL. Sigh . . .
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it. Apparently Debian finds that the QPL conflicts with the GPL because the requirement in the QPL that modifications be distributed "in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches" supposedly stomps on the GPL's requirement that no additional restrictions other than the ones the GPL imposes may be applied to GPL'd software--or something like that. You can find out the full scoop in the archives of the debian-legal mailing list. It looks like KDE's not *quite* out of the woods yet.
"As far as I'm concerned anything that has anything to do with Amazon is tainted. This is a clear cut money versus morality scenario."
You don't know Jeff Bezos. Neither do I. It's easy for us to see him as some faceless bad guy, a Snidely Whiplash laughing maniacly about how he put one (two, now) over the U.S. Patent Office. O'Reilly, on the other hand, apparently knows Bezos, or at least knows Bezos' business, and heretofore has had a lot of respect for him. Bezos, to him, is an actual human being. It's a lot harder to have pure animosity towards someone that you actually regard as a person.
From what I've seen, Bezos is acting in desperation. Amazon is in the red, and as big as it is, it is vulnerable. Bezos sees himself as trying to protect his company from competitors pushing on him. Does this make him any less wrong? No. However, now that Bezos' motivations and fears are known, they can be more directly addressed. What O'Reilly has done is open the door to a possible reconciliation, offering a chance for Amazon to back down without losing face. While this may be less romantic and exciting than a David-and-Goliath hackers versus giant-Amazon standoff, it may be more helpful.
Actually, it would seem to me that offline stores are quicker--you don't have to wait for the book to come in the mail; you can buy it and take it home immediately. You can also browse through a book before you buy it in a regular old store. The main advantage of online stores is that they are more likely to have a wider selection of somewhat less popular books, like technical books, and that one can order from them without leaving the house. As usual, it's a tradeoff. I don't think that brick-and-mortar bookstores are going to go away entirely; they still definately have something to offer.
"Look, is it my fault if the UNIX guys can't get their act together?"
AFAIK, the "Unix guys" did get their act together, sort of. It's called Motif and CDE. Unfortunately, said Unix guys also made Motif and CDE proprietary, so they only became standard on proprietary Unices.
Actually, if Motif weren't proprietary, the GTK probably wouldn't exist, since (AFAIK) it was created to remove the GIMP's dependance on Motif. (The really early versions of the Gimp were Motif-based.) GNOME probably wouldn't have existed, either, certainly not in its current form.
"no they don't have to use linux, or an inferior OS, just suggest Be to them, and all is good."
AFAIK, Be doesn't have very many apps, and that may be a downer to regular Joes. Bear in mind that I say this as one who's been occasionally curious about the BeOS, but never gotten around to using it, mainly because of the worry I've described, so someone who actually uses the OS part or most of the time might correct me here.
"Perl seems to be based on accomplishing as much as possible using as few keystrokes as possible."
Actually, Perl was more-or-less a more powerful replacement for the sed, awk & shell combo. The Perl syntax borrows a lot from shell scripting languages, which is probably why you see stuff like "$_" in Perl, which is reminiscent of built-in shell variables like $? and $#. That probably explains why Perl looks as it does.
"If indeed Jesus did rise from the grave. Did not certain christian mainstream-repressed gnostic texts that were discovered (dead sea scrolls) contain references that it was not Jesus who was crucified but his twin, while the real Jesus sat up in a scene laughing and watching the scene?"
I'm probably feeding the troll here, but . . .
The Dead Sea scrolls were made by Hebrews, not Gnostics. Many were texts of the Essenes, a Jewish sect, along with translations and commentaries of some Old Testament books. So, to answer your question: No.
"But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system."
Sounds like you haven't met your kind of Christians, yet, actually. Not all Christians react with "hostility or silence" when their beliefs are questioned. There are way too many that do, to be sure, but not all.
Besides, the truth of Christianity can't be proved or disproved by the behavior of those who claim to subscribe to it. If Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave, then he died and rose from the grave, whether or not the people who say they believe in that fact act like idiots or not. I suggest that if you are seriously interested in verifying Christianity that you nose around for yourself. "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell is probably a good start. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Mandrake has never pretended that it wasn't Red Hat-based. Credit was given where credit was due. Further, Mandrake wasn't just a rebranding, but it attempted to add touches that made it easier to use--like KDE.
> When I install the drivers make install10 I get > the error/lib/.../au8810.o: init module: Device > or Resource busy
Hmm. As sort of a rough, lousy guess, I'd see if something sound-card-related was installed already. Maybe when you installed Linux, some stub sound module or something was installed. My suggestions:
First off, make sure that au8810.o didn't actually get installed. I know that the error message implies that it wasn't installed, but I'd run "find / -name 'au8810.o'" anyway, just out of paranoia, to double-check.
Second, reboot and check the messages that you see on startup, like "Checking for sound module . . . [ OK ]." My guess is that if you see "OK," there's a problem and *some* sound module is installed, even if it's not working. You probably should want to see "Checking for sound module . . . [FAILED]," or something like that.
I'm not sure whether this will seriously help or not. I'm just going by hunches and little observations I made when I installed OSS a few months ago. (I've since installed Aureal's drivers today, and except for some MIDI-related stuff, it seems to work fine.)
"- copyright exists to ensure musicians get paid."
"This is a very common misconception, perhaps born of IP-industry disinformation and propoganda. But copyright -IP as a whole, actually- exists not for the benefit of the artist/inventor, but for the *benefit of society*."
Actually, the statements that copyright exists to ensure that artists get paid and that copyright exists to benefit society are *both* true. By allowing artists to make a living from their music, artists have an incentive and opportunity to make more music, and the music is supposed to benefit society. It would be fairly accurate to say that the intended end of copyright is to benefit society, and the means to that end is providing a way for artists to get paid.
"- Most newbies do not read documentation. If they do, they seem to only skim through it and choose not to "swallow" any of it."
You are implicitly, even subconsciously, assuming that the newbie knows where to look and what to look for. If I don't know where to find the documentation, I certainly can't read it. Even if I know roughly where the documentation is, I may not know where within the documentation to go to, which means I'm going to skim through it until I find what seems appropriate--and if I'm a newbie who isn't too sure if I've found what I'm looking for, I may never find something that appears "appropriate," so I'll end up skimming through the whole thing.
"- They are often rude. Most newbies who have access to my phone number seem to have a lack of respect for my own time. Believe it or not, people have accosted me verbally for choosing to no longer help them. I just hate when they get offended when you choose not to help!"
If you give someone your phone number, you have implicitly given them permission to call you and ask of your time. If you don't want them to call during certain hours, say so. You may wish to give them an e-mail address rather than a phone number, since that way you can respond more or less at your leisure instead of being pressured immediately. (This assumes, of course, that they have an Internet connection in place, which may not be the case.) Bear in mind that if you tell someone to go away after you appear to have promised to offer some assistance, they may consider you to be rude, and respond rudely in kind.
"- They ask far too general questions. "How do I get on the net with Linux?". Of course, if you decide to help with this question, they'll get irritated when you start getting into the details of how things work. You see, newbies want to gloss over everything without having at least some fundamental knowledge of how things work. There are currently other great (and not so great) operating systems for people who do not want to get into these issues."
"How do I get on the net with Linux?" isn't horribly general, just goal-oriented. That's asking how to get from point A to point B. Newbies getting mad about you getting into details? If I ask you how to get from Picadilly Drugstore to Hal's Hardware, and you talk about how car engines work, you are 1) getting too detailed and 2) not answering my question. I obviously want a roadmap or directions. That's probably what you are inadvertently doing to the newbies who are asking you questions. The best way to handle it, IMHO, is to give them step-by-step directions, with occasional explanations of why each step works. Don't get too technical too early. What seems a mild current to you may be a riptide to them. The time for technical details is *after* they've got stuff working, and they are not in such a panic.
The problem is that the things that are old hat and second nature to you now are likely to be utterly foreign concepts to newbies. It is all to easy to forget that, and I think that that is exactly what you have done.
AFAIK, "Trekkie" was originally just a name for a fan of the series, but devolved into a name for those who treated Trek almost like a religion. "Trekker" was supposedly supposed to mean what "Trekkie" originally meant. Or something like that. I agree, "Trekker" sounds awfully pretentious, though.
"Voluntary censorship ala PICS seems to be more dangerous in some ways than end user censorship since it allows national governments to filter content at the backbone level leaving no choice at all for net users. . . .
"For example, I run a church web site and I'm seriously considering the idea of using PICS to rate it as major gay porn. What do you think?"
Why would you want the church site rated as gay porn?
If you want people looking for gay porn to visit your site, then I think you are being dishonest.
If you are trying to deliberately throw PICS off in an act of protest, I'd still watch it. There are probably better ways of protesting PICS.
8) Can I find out the list of blocked sites, and alter this list if need be?
I took a look at peacefire.org, and in CYBERsitter's case, the answer was not only a resounding "NO," but they took pains to keep the list of blocked sites secret, even adding peacefire.org to their list when Peacefire took issue with this. Sites like NOW's site were on CYBERsitter's bad site list, which I find highly disturbing.
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> Why does GNOME need a third part window manager?
The intent was to not have GNOME dictate the look and feel of the desktop--your basic "freedom of choice" thing. As you well noted, this didn't quite work out as planned.
Sawmill, though, is becoming the unofficial official WM of GNOME, to the point that Helix Code bundles it with its GNOME setup. Sawmill dovetails pretty nicely into GNOME--it really doesn't have any overlapping functionality with GNOME.
"I mean, shouldn't they at least be viewable from within an administrative section of the program that requires passwords and what not to get into?"
:^)
Yes, they should.
"Or is it because the corporations don't want people seeing all their mistakes and what not in the list?"
I say that's the reason right there.
AFAIK, they do a line-by-line security audit of the OS code and all their packages. They basically specialize in putting the system under tight scrutiny.
Isn't OpenBSD based in Canada because of screwy U.S. crypto laws? That might complicate a merge of it with the rest of the *BSDs.
From bits and pieces I've picked up, it seems that FreeBSD is more conservative, more old-school UNIX style. Bear in mind that I say this as a Linux user, so I wouldn't say my opinion is all that authoritative.
In terms of stability, the two are pretty much neck and neck, AFAIK.
It would be nice if the KDE folks could issue a statement on whether GPL'd stuff could be linked to Qt2, maybe even contact the FSF's lawyers and get their opinions. There may be some legit issues here, or at least legit questions, and it would be nice to clear the air.
And I had hoped the Qt licensing troubles would be gone with the QPL. Sigh . . .
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it. Apparently Debian finds that the QPL conflicts with the GPL because the requirement in the QPL that modifications be distributed "in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches" supposedly stomps on the GPL's requirement that no additional restrictions other than the ones the GPL imposes may be applied to GPL'd software--or something like that. You can find out the full scoop in the archives of the debian-legal mailing list. It looks like KDE's not *quite* out of the woods yet.
"As far as I'm concerned anything that has anything to do with Amazon is tainted. This is a clear cut money versus morality scenario."
You don't know Jeff Bezos. Neither do I. It's easy for us to see him as some faceless bad guy, a Snidely Whiplash laughing maniacly about how he put one (two, now) over the U.S. Patent Office. O'Reilly, on the other hand, apparently knows Bezos, or at least knows Bezos' business, and heretofore has had a lot of respect for him. Bezos, to him, is an actual human being. It's a lot harder to have pure animosity towards someone that you actually regard as a person.
From what I've seen, Bezos is acting in desperation. Amazon is in the red, and as big as it is, it is vulnerable. Bezos sees himself as trying to protect his company from competitors pushing on him. Does this make him any less wrong? No. However, now that Bezos' motivations and fears are known, they can be more directly addressed. What O'Reilly has done is open the door to a possible reconciliation, offering a chance for Amazon to back down without losing face. While this may be less romantic and exciting than a David-and-Goliath hackers versus giant-Amazon standoff, it may be more helpful.
Actually, it would seem to me that offline stores are quicker--you don't have to wait for the book to come in the mail; you can buy it and take it home immediately. You can also browse through a book before you buy it in a regular old store. The main advantage of online stores is that they are more likely to have a wider selection of somewhat less popular books, like technical books, and that one can order from them without leaving the house. As usual, it's a tradeoff. I don't think that brick-and-mortar bookstores are going to go away entirely; they still definately have something to offer.
"Look, is it my fault if the UNIX guys can't get their act together?"
AFAIK, the "Unix guys" did get their act together, sort of. It's called Motif and CDE. Unfortunately, said Unix guys also made Motif and CDE proprietary, so they only became standard on proprietary Unices.
Actually, if Motif weren't proprietary, the GTK probably wouldn't exist, since (AFAIK) it was created to remove the GIMP's dependance on Motif. (The really early versions of the Gimp were Motif-based.) GNOME probably wouldn't have existed, either, certainly not in its current form.
In X, you middle-click to paste highlighted text, or if you have a two-button mouse, press the right and left buttons at the same time.
"no they don't have to use linux, or an inferior
OS, just suggest Be to them, and all is good."
AFAIK, Be doesn't have very many apps, and that may be a downer to regular Joes. Bear in mind that I say this as one who's been occasionally curious about the BeOS, but never gotten around to using it, mainly because of the worry I've described, so someone who actually uses the OS part or most of the time might correct me here.
"Perl seems to be based on accomplishing as much
as possible using as few keystrokes as possible."
Actually, Perl was more-or-less a more powerful replacement for the sed, awk & shell combo. The Perl syntax borrows a lot from shell scripting languages, which is probably why you see stuff like "$_" in Perl, which is reminiscent of built-in shell variables like $? and $#. That probably explains why Perl looks as it does.
"If indeed Jesus did rise from the grave. Did not certain christian mainstream-repressed gnostic texts that were discovered (dead sea scrolls) contain references that it was not Jesus who was crucified but his twin, while the real Jesus sat up in a scene laughing and watching the scene?"
I'm probably feeding the troll here, but . . .
The Dead Sea scrolls were made by Hebrews, not Gnostics. Many were texts of the Essenes, a Jewish sect, along with translations and commentaries of some Old Testament books. So, to answer your question: No.
"But if everything is True by Decree and questions are met with hostility or silence, then this I believe speaks volumes about the convictions of the religious followers own belief in his system."
Sounds like you haven't met your kind of Christians, yet, actually. Not all Christians react with "hostility or silence" when their beliefs are questioned. There are way too many that do, to be sure, but not all.
Besides, the truth of Christianity can't be proved or disproved by the behavior of those who claim to subscribe to it. If Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave, then he died and rose from the grave, whether or not the people who say they believe in that fact act like idiots or not. I suggest that if you are seriously interested in verifying Christianity that you nose around for yourself. "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell is probably a good start. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Mandrake has never pretended that it wasn't Red Hat-based. Credit was given where credit was due. Further, Mandrake wasn't just a rebranding, but it attempted to add touches that made it easier to use--like KDE.
> When I install the drivers make install10 I get /lib/.../au8810.o: init module: Device
> the error
> or Resource busy
Hmm. As sort of a rough, lousy guess, I'd see if something sound-card-related was installed already. Maybe when you installed Linux, some stub sound module or something was installed. My suggestions:
First off, make sure that au8810.o didn't actually get installed. I know that the error message implies that it wasn't installed, but I'd run "find / -name 'au8810.o'" anyway, just out of paranoia, to double-check.
Second, reboot and check the messages that you see on startup, like "Checking for sound module . . . [ OK ]." My guess is that if you see "OK," there's a problem and *some* sound module is installed, even if it's not working. You probably should want to see "Checking for sound module . . . [FAILED]," or something like that.
I'm not sure whether this will seriously help or not. I'm just going by hunches and little observations I made when I installed OSS a few months ago. (I've since installed Aureal's drivers today, and except for some MIDI-related stuff, it seems to work fine.)
Unicode is something else all together.
"- copyright exists to ensure musicians get paid."
"This is a very common misconception, perhaps born of IP-industry disinformation and propoganda. But copyright -IP as a whole, actually- exists not for the benefit of the artist/inventor, but for the *benefit of society*."
Actually, the statements that copyright exists to ensure that artists get paid and that copyright exists to benefit society are *both* true. By allowing artists to make a living from their music, artists have an incentive and opportunity to make more music, and the music is supposed to benefit society. It would be fairly accurate to say that the intended end of copyright is to benefit society, and the means to that end is providing a way for artists to get paid.
I thought 4.2 was RELEASE or STABLE, not CURRENT.
"- Most newbies do not read documentation. If they do, they seem to only skim through it and choose not to "swallow" any of it."
You are implicitly, even subconsciously, assuming that the newbie knows where to look and what to look for. If I don't know where to find the documentation, I certainly can't read it. Even if I know roughly where the documentation is, I may not know where within the documentation to go to, which means I'm going to skim through it until I find what seems appropriate--and if I'm a newbie who isn't too sure if I've found what I'm looking for, I may never find something that appears "appropriate," so I'll end up skimming through the whole thing.
"- They are often rude. Most newbies who have access to my phone number seem to have a lack of respect for my own time. Believe it or not, people have accosted me verbally for choosing to no longer help them. I just hate when they get offended when you choose not to help!"
If you give someone your phone number, you have implicitly given them permission to call you and ask of your time. If you don't want them to call during certain hours, say so. You may wish to give them an e-mail address rather than a phone number, since that way you can respond more or less at your leisure instead of being pressured immediately. (This assumes, of course, that they have an Internet connection in place, which may not be the case.) Bear in mind that if you tell someone to go away after you appear to have promised to offer some assistance, they may consider you to be rude, and respond rudely in kind.
"- They ask far too general questions. "How do I get on the net with Linux?". Of course, if you decide to help with this question, they'll get irritated when you start getting into the details of how things work. You see, newbies want to gloss over everything without having at least some fundamental knowledge of how things work. There are currently other great (and not so great) operating systems for people who do not want to get into these issues."
"How do I get on the net with Linux?" isn't horribly general, just goal-oriented. That's asking how to get from point A to point B. Newbies getting mad about you getting into details? If I ask you how to get from Picadilly Drugstore to Hal's Hardware, and you talk about how car engines work, you are 1) getting too detailed and 2) not answering my question. I obviously want a roadmap or directions. That's probably what you are inadvertently doing to the newbies who are asking you questions. The best way to handle it, IMHO, is to give them step-by-step directions, with occasional explanations of why each step works. Don't get too technical too early. What seems a mild current to you may be a riptide to them. The time for technical details is *after* they've got stuff working, and they are not in such a panic.
The problem is that the things that are old hat and second nature to you now are likely to be utterly foreign concepts to newbies. It is all to easy to forget that, and I think that that is exactly what you have done.
AFAIK, "Trekkie" was originally just a name for a fan of the series, but devolved into a name for those who treated Trek almost like a religion. "Trekker" was supposedly supposed to mean what "Trekkie" originally meant. Or something like that. I agree, "Trekker" sounds awfully pretentious, though.
Interestingly enough, it's from kde.org's "Food for Thought" section. Go here.
"Voluntary censorship ala PICS seems to be more dangerous in some ways than end user censorship since it allows national governments to filter content at the backbone level leaving no choice at all for net users. . . .
"For example, I run a church web site and I'm seriously considering the idea of using PICS to rate it as major gay porn. What do you think?"
Why would you want the church site rated as gay porn?
If you want people looking for gay porn to visit your site, then I think you are being dishonest.
If you are trying to deliberately throw PICS off in an act of protest, I'd still watch it. There are probably better ways of protesting PICS.
8) Can I find out the list of blocked sites, and alter this list if need be?
I took a look at peacefire.org, and in CYBERsitter's case, the answer was not only a resounding "NO," but they took pains to keep the list of blocked sites secret, even adding peacefire.org to their list when Peacefire took issue with this. Sites like NOW's site were on CYBERsitter's bad site list, which I find highly disturbing.