I honestly believe our lawyers are being cautious until they can draft very specific procedures for our engineers to follow. The message itself came from managers, not lawyers, and was sent to engineers.
I actually work on our company's patent committee, and in my interactions with our lawyers, I've found them to be a competent and cautious bunch. The punchline of the email was basically "If it says GPL v3, don't do anything just yet without asking one of our lawyers." That does seem prudent.
I just hope they get some new policies and procedures published and tone down the FUD-sounding email coming from management.:-)
I hope my company sends a few members of its legal team to find out more. We use Linux a lot, and many key Linux system pieces (such as GCC) are moving to GPL v3. An email broadcast went out at work, telling us specifically:
Please do not bring software into [company] under the GNU Public License version 3.0 (GPL v. 3.0) without review by the [company] attorney who supports your business unit.
GPL v. 3.0 has been finalized by the Free Software Foundation. It contains some provisions that are at odds with generally accepted practices among high tech companies, and [company] in particular.
It goes on to enumerate those fears. One of the more alarmist-sounding points brought up in the email is: "Ambiguous language that could grant patent rights to other companies, even if [company] only uses the software internally."
I really hope the FSF clarifies the points our lawyers have raised. (I hope and imagine our lawyers have taken it up w/ the FSF.) I can totally see our company not releasing software under GPL v3, nor incorporating GPL v3 software into our products. But banning the use of GPL v3 software entirely? Hopefully these sorts of kinks work their way out. In the meantime, I won't be updating my compiler right away. *sigh*
As for the modifier thing, I'm not hung up on that. It turns out I was complaining about behavior that was fixed as far back as 2.0, but I kept bumping into because I still ran 1.2 on some machines.
You know what... a huge mea culpa from me and a giant helping of crow. Mmmmmm, tasty, tasty crow.:-)
I use a mix of Gimp versions, and I didn't realize that that's been fixed, and has been for years. Once upon a time, you had to select between images with a drop down in the Layers menu if you didn't have "activate focused images." That drop-down is gone, and has been since 2.0. Sadly, I was still using 1.2 up until recently on one machine. (Yes, I was using Gimp 1.2, 2.0 and 2.2 depending on which machine I sat at.)
I feel like a dumbass. Thank you for your (and everyone else's) patience. I'm now on the path to significantly less frustration.:-D
Thank you for the suggestion. I've opened it up in a new tab, and I'll probably get to it tomorrow when I'm a little more coherent.
The 5 peeves I listed above are just the tip of the "peeve-berg" as it were. (Don't get me started on the font selector...;-) Who thinks seeing "Aa" is enough to distinguish amongst most typefaces?)
I love GIMP. I love it enough to be critical of it in a constructive manner, so it grows up to be the best possible GIMP it can be.;-)
At first I thought you were talking about a different GUI front end for GIMP (hence my seeming non-sequitur regarding GTK). I do recall looking at WinImages before, now that my memory's kicked in, aided by my lagging reading comprehension skills.;-) (I had seen it in your sig, actually, well over a year ago.)
And yes, I'm a layer junkie. I think in terms of composition, and layers in GIMP are a mechanism (albeit somewhat hamfisted) for stating a set of operations for composing an image. Layers are the closest i can get. Seriously, if you can describe the steps required to create an image out of pieces, then many uses for "undo" evaporate, and many decisions can be deferred until the final "flatten to bitmap." This is especially true if various "layers" represent filters, transformations and the like.
If GIMP ever bites onto GEGL, or if some other tool adopts GEGL and exposes its mechanisms in an easy to use fashion, I'm there dude. (Not a big fan of measuring out coordinates and manually instantiating XML, except as part of demoing the infrastructure.)
As far as WinImages and Wine... Well, I'm at a loss there too. I run 64-bit Linux. Wine doesn't play there last I heard, though I'd happily accept corrections on that front. On the Mac side of things--you might finally give me a reason to upgrade my aging G3.;-)
Well, as I mentioned in peeve #1, both modes—focus selects and manual select—lose for different reasons. I want a third mode, "interaction selects." This is approximately what "focus selects" does when your window manager is set to "click-to-focus," but still works for "focus follows mouse" and its variants.
As for peeve #4, "move active layer" is certainly more consistent, but is significantly less useful than "pick a layer," since for many-layer images, it requires many trips to the layer dialog solely for the purpose of changing the active layer. Even with its fussy Z-ordering issues, I find "pick a layer" much more useful than "move active layer." Growing the opaque regions (for purposes of this tool) to give them slightly larger handles (I'm thinking by a mere 2px to 4px), though, would fix my primary complaint with "pick a layer," and retain the functionality. The biggest offender in this space? Text or text-like layers.
Do you have "focus follows mouse" set? I do... Just glancing a window with another image is enough to activate it in the Layers dialog. I'm using 2.2 also.
If you have click-to-focus or some other setting, it may have a higher threshold of interaction.
Well, my point is in #1 that there two modes selectable, and I want a third. The preferences allow either selecting manually in a drop-down (meaning it doesn't follow focus), or selecting based on what had focus last. Both options lose, for somewhat different reasons. I want "Select based on whichever had a meaningful interaction most recently" which is somewhat close to "whichever had focus," but requires an additional quanta of interaction.
#4 is similar. I actually like that I can grab a layer without first going and selecting it in the layers dialog. (The misbehavior in #1 makes that doubly true.) I just want a fuzzy zone to bias clicks towards layers with higher Z-ordering, perhaps hard-clipped to the layer's actual dimensions.
It'd be interesting to pose the "activate on button down" vs. "activate on button up" thing as a config option. My personal hunch is that for tool selection, people would gravitate towards the former, since it matches many other select mechanisms. This isn't the same as dismissing a dialog OR selecting a menu item. It's selecting a mode.
Someone pointed to a GIMP brainstorming forum. I think I'll try to collect my thoughts there. I appreciate the reasoned dialog.
I guess the semantic I want is "This window will become focused the moment I do something more than hover my mouse over it." Already I find myself frustrated by behaviors where the window under my mouse doesn't get my keystroke. The flipside is that the window ought to have received some other interaction besides having my mouse hover over it to be considered "important."
As for #5, there are plenty of things where button-down initiates the action, not button-up. I think I've been sensitized to this due to having written a button-mashing video game, and had to handle both semantics based on context in order to get the most natural feel.
Certain types of inputs feel most natural registering on key-down, others on key-up. Mode selects feel most natural triggering on key-down. For example, suppose you press [ALT]-[Fn] or whatever to switch virtual desktops (Linux, or Windows w/ VirtuaWin)... Does it switch on key-down or key-up? When you click the [Start] menu, does it open on button-down or button-up? When you press [M] in GIMP, does it engage the Move tool on key down or key up? Should there be a different semantic for mouse click vs. keypress in this case?
Unfortunately, I use Linux as my primary setup, though I do use both. Is there a particular reason WinImages is Windows-centric? Does it ditch GTK and use Windows-native widgets or something?
I used to use that setting, but having it pick layer-under-cursor is more effective. Feathering out the opaque areas just a little would make it near perfect.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I can tell you some things that drive me nuts in GIMP 2.2. (I haven't tried 2.4 yet.)
Pet Peeve #1: Image selection in the layers dialog
The Layers dialog has two modes for deciding which image's layers it'll tell you about: Either you have to explicitly select it from a drop-down, or have it auto-switch to the last image which had focus. Either way, more often than not, it seems to have the wrong image selected for me. Why?
If I'm hopping back and forth between images, say, cutting things from one and pasting them in the other, the drop-down selection will be wrong almost 100% of the time, simply because I'm hopping back and forth between images. So even though I've raised the imagine I'm interested in, and perhaps pasted something into it (which I now need to go anchor to a layer), the layers dialog points at the image I cut from, not the image I'm pasting into. So what about automatic mode?
That one sucks too. I have my window manager set to "focus follows mouse." I have only so much screen real estate. In all likelihood, the image I cut from or yet some other image lies on the path between the image I pasted in, and the layers dialog. In some cases, it can be next to impossible to move from the image I'm working with and the layers dialog without brushing past another image--thereby causing the layers dialog to select the wrong image. Again, it loses.
What I really want is the layers dialog to pick up the image I most recently interacted with. Gaining focus does not count as interaction. I should have to click something (even dead-air) or press a key to send an event into a given image's window before the layers dialog switches over to that image.
Pet peeve #2: Layer naming in the layers dialog
If you want to rename a layer in Gimp, you can double click its name in the layers dialog and start typing. So far, so good. BUT, if you don't hit [Enter], but instead just move along and click elsewhere, it'll revert your edit. This makes editing a large number of names really tedious and error prone.
(I've got a few other pet peeves with the layers dialog, such as lacking a way to select a layer AND make it the only visible layer in one go, or locking subgroups of layers together for motion rather than only having a global "lock together", or selecting groups of layers to act on simultaneously with a filter, or raising/lowering layers as a group, but I'll stop there.)
Pet peeve #3: Editing at image boundaries.
If your image is smaller than the image window, you can over-stroke an image, which is great. You can even do point-to-point strokes with both endpoints outside the image. This is fairly handy. You can't do this, though, if the image is greater than or equal to the visible area. There's no overstroke zone around the image. You either have to zoom out, or make an oversized canvas to center your image in.
Ok, suppose I go the oversized canvas route... oversized by how much? It really depends on how zoomed in or out you are. In reality, the amount of overstroke zone you need remains fairly fixed regardless of zoom level, so this isn't really an ideal solution.
Pet Peeve #4: Getting the wrong layer when trying to move things
If a given layer has a lot of "thin" structures in a sea of transparency, the move tool often grabs the layer behind rather than the layer intended, even if the intended layer is the currently active layer. GIMP should "fuzz" the opaque areas out a little bit to make them more grabbable, because chances are that's what the user wishes to move. I don't remember a time when I accidentally grabbed a layer that was too high on the Z-ordering. I curse endlessly when I grab the layer below the one I wanted though, and that happens regularly.
Pet Peeve #5: Not actually selecting the tool I just clicked.
If I click on a tool and move away too quickly, the tool gets a highlight box around it, but doesn't actually get se
Worth noting, sure, but I think the intent here is to have a "boss button" and little more. Like how the old Tetris for DOS would display a phony Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet screen if you hit escape.
I guess if you wrap it up in a shell script that also does "rm -rf ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/session*" and tell Firefox not to remember your browsing history, you'll be in super shape. You could even bind that to a launcher, though that might draw attention.;-)
If killall firefox-bin (note the dash, not the period) or, failing that, killall -9 firefox-bin works, leave a reply and I might just take you up on that scotch when I'm in Chicagoland the week of Thanksgiving.;-)
I like me a nice single-malt, especially an Islay malt.
I was talking to my wife about this just the other day, as she cursed and dismissed another handful of needy dialogs from Windows. Basically, Windows is like a little 3 year old, running up and shoving in your face whatever doodle it just made. "See mommy? A sheep!" "That's very nice dear. Mommy's trying to work." Or, occasionally "Uhoh, I made a poopie." "Oh dear..."
Unfortunately, Linux has started to go in that direction. For instance, on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, when I run the update manager, all of its pop-ups steal my keyboard focus. WTF? I already told you to do the update—you don't need to pop up and steal my keyboard focus to let me know you've managed to connect to the repository, and again once you've started installing the packages, and yet again when you're complete so I can dismiss you. Just go away and do it, and alert me if something goes wrong. I don't need an "Everything is OK" alarm.
Does Gutsy fix this, or am I going to have to blow the dust off of olvwm and run apt from a cron job?
And before I get pounced on as a troll, I'm referring to my main system. It's only ever run Linux. I've built three systems in this particular case, and all three of them have been Linux and Linux only from the first boot, stretching back about 4 or 5 years for this box. The box before it came with Windows 95 (pre-OSR2), which I dual booted mainly to verify that Intellivision emulator Windows and DOS ports ran correctly. (I dropped the DOS port some time ago.)
Hence the debate. Who do you think carries most of the Internet backbone links? The phone company. Who came up with T1 (now DS1), T3 (now DS3), ATM and the like? The phone company. How did ISPs connect into NAPs? Over T1s, T3s, and so forth.... provided via the phone company. How did people connect? Via modems, over the telephone line, provided by, you guessed it, the phone company. This sets up a bit of a precedent.
Now, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 classifies "information providers" (including ISPs) as distinct from "telecommunication providers," and that has proved controversial. This distinction lies at the heart of the network neutrality debate. As recently as 2005, DSL connections had different rules (more along the rules applied to telecommunication providers as opposed to information providers) than cable Internet connections in the US. It's truly a mess.
ISPs have historically sought at least some protection under common carrier status, insofar as disclaiming liability for the legal infractions of their users. Clearly, all the regulatory undulation over the last 11 years or so has muddied the water.
There's an important concept in telecommunications: common carrier. When I buy bandwidth, I have a not-unreasonable expectation that I get complete and unbiased Internet access, not "kinda sorta Internet," unless it's specifically marketed to me that way. This is what the whole network neutrality debate is all about.
You missed the part where I said "You told me it picked up all the off-air stations." Comcast goes around screaming "we'll give you gobs of bandwidth!" misrepresenting what it is exactly they're selling.
If you go into an Apple store and ask "Will it play my Windows files?" and the sales droid say "Yes," you have a right to return it when you discover it doesn't.
Your analogy is broken. Suppose you rented me a TV and told me it picked up all the off-air stations just fine. Then, I discovered that it wouldn't pick up Channel 62, and I complained to you about this. Later, I discover that not only this TV, but all the TVs you rent refuse to pick up Channel 62. All of them pick up the local Channel 8 network affiliate though, which you just happen to be on very good terms with. After all, it turns out you're getting a share of ad revenue from Channel 8, because you're helping to increase overall viewership.
I'd say I got slighted. There was a duty of disclosure and a conflict of interest at play. It was your duty to disclose to me that the TV did not pick up Channel 62. Furthermore, your relationship to Channel 8 makes it likely that the inability to pick up Channel 62 is no mere oversight.
Had I known your televisions wouldn't pick up Channel 62, I would have gotten a TV elsewhere, or demanded a much lower price. Now that I'm locked into a 2 year service contract, though, I'm stuck holding the crap end of the stick.
Now replace "Channel 62" with "P2P software," "Channel 8" with MPAA and big cable networks, and TV with cable internet service, and "you" with "Comcast," and that's a bit closer to the situation.
--Joe
(And yes, Channel 62 / Channel 8 is a reference to UHF...
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly believe our lawyers are being cautious until they can draft very specific procedures for our engineers to follow. The message itself came from managers, not lawyers, and was sent to engineers.
I actually work on our company's patent committee, and in my interactions with our lawyers, I've found them to be a competent and cautious bunch. The punchline of the email was basically "If it says GPL v3, don't do anything just yet without asking one of our lawyers." That does seem prudent.
I just hope they get some new policies and procedures published and tone down the FUD-sounding email coming from management. :-)
--JoeI hope my company sends a few members of its legal team to find out more. We use Linux a lot, and many key Linux system pieces (such as GCC) are moving to GPL v3. An email broadcast went out at work, telling us specifically:
It goes on to enumerate those fears. One of the more alarmist-sounding points brought up in the email is: "Ambiguous language that could grant patent rights to other companies, even if [company] only uses the software internally."
I really hope the FSF clarifies the points our lawyers have raised. (I hope and imagine our lawyers have taken it up w/ the FSF.) I can totally see our company not releasing software under GPL v3, nor incorporating GPL v3 software into our products. But banning the use of GPL v3 software entirely? Hopefully these sorts of kinks work their way out. In the meantime, I won't be updating my compiler right away. *sigh*
--Joe
Interesting. Thanks!
Actually, it just turns out I'm a dumbass. Oops. :-)
As for the modifier thing, I'm not hung up on that. It turns out I was complaining about behavior that was fixed as far back as 2.0, but I kept bumping into because I still ran 1.2 on some machines.
--JoeYou know what... a huge mea culpa from me and a giant helping of crow. Mmmmmm, tasty, tasty crow. :-)
I use a mix of Gimp versions, and I didn't realize that that's been fixed, and has been for years. Once upon a time, you had to select between images with a drop down in the Layers menu if you didn't have "activate focused images." That drop-down is gone, and has been since 2.0. Sadly, I was still using 1.2 up until recently on one machine. (Yes, I was using Gimp 1.2, 2.0 and 2.2 depending on which machine I sat at.)
I feel like a dumbass. Thank you for your (and everyone else's) patience. I'm now on the path to significantly less frustration. :-D
--JoeThank you for the suggestion. I've opened it up in a new tab, and I'll probably get to it tomorrow when I'm a little more coherent.
The 5 peeves I listed above are just the tip of the "peeve-berg" as it were. (Don't get me started on the font selector... ;-) Who thinks seeing "Aa" is enough to distinguish amongst most typefaces?)
I love GIMP. I love it enough to be critical of it in a constructive manner, so it grows up to be the best possible GIMP it can be. ;-)
--JoeAt first I thought you were talking about a different GUI front end for GIMP (hence my seeming non-sequitur regarding GTK). I do recall looking at WinImages before, now that my memory's kicked in, aided by my lagging reading comprehension skills. ;-) (I had seen it in your sig, actually, well over a year ago.)
And yes, I'm a layer junkie. I think in terms of composition, and layers in GIMP are a mechanism (albeit somewhat hamfisted) for stating a set of operations for composing an image. Layers are the closest i can get. Seriously, if you can describe the steps required to create an image out of pieces, then many uses for "undo" evaporate, and many decisions can be deferred until the final "flatten to bitmap." This is especially true if various "layers" represent filters, transformations and the like.
If GIMP ever bites onto GEGL, or if some other tool adopts GEGL and exposes its mechanisms in an easy to use fashion, I'm there dude. (Not a big fan of measuring out coordinates and manually instantiating XML, except as part of demoing the infrastructure.)
As far as WinImages and Wine... Well, I'm at a loss there too. I run 64-bit Linux. Wine doesn't play there last I heard, though I'd happily accept corrections on that front. On the Mac side of things--you might finally give me a reason to upgrade my aging G3. ;-)
Well, as I mentioned in peeve #1, both modes—focus selects and manual select—lose for different reasons. I want a third mode, "interaction selects." This is approximately what "focus selects" does when your window manager is set to "click-to-focus," but still works for "focus follows mouse" and its variants.
As for peeve #4, "move active layer" is certainly more consistent, but is significantly less useful than "pick a layer," since for many-layer images, it requires many trips to the layer dialog solely for the purpose of changing the active layer. Even with its fussy Z-ordering issues, I find "pick a layer" much more useful than "move active layer." Growing the opaque regions (for purposes of this tool) to give them slightly larger handles (I'm thinking by a mere 2px to 4px), though, would fix my primary complaint with "pick a layer," and retain the functionality. The biggest offender in this space? Text or text-like layers.
--JoeDo you have "focus follows mouse" set? I do... Just glancing a window with another image is enough to activate it in the Layers dialog. I'm using 2.2 also.
If you have click-to-focus or some other setting, it may have a higher threshold of interaction.
Well, my point is in #1 that there two modes selectable, and I want a third. The preferences allow either selecting manually in a drop-down (meaning it doesn't follow focus), or selecting based on what had focus last. Both options lose, for somewhat different reasons. I want "Select based on whichever had a meaningful interaction most recently" which is somewhat close to "whichever had focus," but requires an additional quanta of interaction.
#4 is similar. I actually like that I can grab a layer without first going and selecting it in the layers dialog. (The misbehavior in #1 makes that doubly true.) I just want a fuzzy zone to bias clicks towards layers with higher Z-ordering, perhaps hard-clipped to the layer's actual dimensions.
It'd be interesting to pose the "activate on button down" vs. "activate on button up" thing as a config option. My personal hunch is that for tool selection, people would gravitate towards the former, since it matches many other select mechanisms. This isn't the same as dismissing a dialog OR selecting a menu item. It's selecting a mode.
Someone pointed to a GIMP brainstorming forum. I think I'll try to collect my thoughts there. I appreciate the reasoned dialog.
I guess the semantic I want is "This window will become focused the moment I do something more than hover my mouse over it." Already I find myself frustrated by behaviors where the window under my mouse doesn't get my keystroke. The flipside is that the window ought to have received some other interaction besides having my mouse hover over it to be considered "important."
As for #5, there are plenty of things where button-down initiates the action, not button-up. I think I've been sensitized to this due to having written a button-mashing video game, and had to handle both semantics based on context in order to get the most natural feel.
Certain types of inputs feel most natural registering on key-down, others on key-up. Mode selects feel most natural triggering on key-down. For example, suppose you press [ALT]-[Fn] or whatever to switch virtual desktops (Linux, or Windows w/ VirtuaWin)... Does it switch on key-down or key-up? When you click the [Start] menu, does it open on button-down or button-up? When you press [M] in GIMP, does it engage the Move tool on key down or key up? Should there be a different semantic for mouse click vs. keypress in this case?
Unfortunately, I use Linux as my primary setup, though I do use both. Is there a particular reason WinImages is Windows-centric? Does it ditch GTK and use Windows-native widgets or something?
I used to use that setting, but having it pick layer-under-cursor is more effective. Feathering out the opaque areas just a little would make it near perfect.
I can tell you some things that drive me nuts in GIMP 2.2. (I haven't tried 2.4 yet.)
The Layers dialog has two modes for deciding which image's layers it'll tell you about: Either you have to explicitly select it from a drop-down, or have it auto-switch to the last image which had focus. Either way, more often than not, it seems to have the wrong image selected for me. Why?
If I'm hopping back and forth between images, say, cutting things from one and pasting them in the other, the drop-down selection will be wrong almost 100% of the time, simply because I'm hopping back and forth between images. So even though I've raised the imagine I'm interested in, and perhaps pasted something into it (which I now need to go anchor to a layer), the layers dialog points at the image I cut from, not the image I'm pasting into. So what about automatic mode?
That one sucks too. I have my window manager set to "focus follows mouse." I have only so much screen real estate. In all likelihood, the image I cut from or yet some other image lies on the path between the image I pasted in, and the layers dialog. In some cases, it can be next to impossible to move from the image I'm working with and the layers dialog without brushing past another image--thereby causing the layers dialog to select the wrong image. Again, it loses.
What I really want is the layers dialog to pick up the image I most recently interacted with. Gaining focus does not count as interaction. I should have to click something (even dead-air) or press a key to send an event into a given image's window before the layers dialog switches over to that image.
If you want to rename a layer in Gimp, you can double click its name in the layers dialog and start typing. So far, so good. BUT, if you don't hit [Enter], but instead just move along and click elsewhere, it'll revert your edit. This makes editing a large number of names really tedious and error prone.
(I've got a few other pet peeves with the layers dialog, such as lacking a way to select a layer AND make it the only visible layer in one go, or locking subgroups of layers together for motion rather than only having a global "lock together", or selecting groups of layers to act on simultaneously with a filter, or raising/lowering layers as a group, but I'll stop there.)
If your image is smaller than the image window, you can over-stroke an image, which is great. You can even do point-to-point strokes with both endpoints outside the image. This is fairly handy. You can't do this, though, if the image is greater than or equal to the visible area. There's no overstroke zone around the image. You either have to zoom out, or make an oversized canvas to center your image in.
Ok, suppose I go the oversized canvas route... oversized by how much? It really depends on how zoomed in or out you are. In reality, the amount of overstroke zone you need remains fairly fixed regardless of zoom level, so this isn't really an ideal solution.
If a given layer has a lot of "thin" structures in a sea of transparency, the move tool often grabs the layer behind rather than the layer intended, even if the intended layer is the currently active layer. GIMP should "fuzz" the opaque areas out a little bit to make them more grabbable, because chances are that's what the user wishes to move. I don't remember a time when I accidentally grabbed a layer that was too high on the Z-ordering. I curse endlessly when I grab the layer below the one I wanted though, and that happens regularly.
If I click on a tool and move away too quickly, the tool gets a highlight box around it, but doesn't actually get se
Worth noting, sure, but I think the intent here is to have a "boss button" and little more. Like how the old Tetris for DOS would display a phony Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet screen if you hit escape.
I guess if you wrap it up in a shell script that also does "rm -rf ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/session*" and tell Firefox not to remember your browsing history, you'll be in super shape. You could even bind that to a launcher, though that might draw attention. ;-)
Hmmm... do underage kids now get a chance to watch someone their own age for a change when they sneak down some pr0n?
Ok, where do I pick up my ticket, and which handbasket is mine? ;-)
If killall firefox-bin (note the dash, not the period) or, failing that, killall -9 firefox-bin works, leave a reply and I might just take you up on that scotch when I'm in Chicagoland the week of Thanksgiving. ;-)
I like me a nice single-malt, especially an Islay malt.
That's 'cause it's killall firefox-bin . See, "firefox" is the wrapper shell script, "firefox-bin" is the program.
or Unrecoverable Application Eerror (Windows 3.0), or Unusable Amiga Emulator, or....
...that my Intellivision emulator...
*sigh* Mea culpa...
I was talking to my wife about this just the other day, as she cursed and dismissed another handful of needy dialogs from Windows. Basically, Windows is like a little 3 year old, running up and shoving in your face whatever doodle it just made. "See mommy? A sheep!" "That's very nice dear. Mommy's trying to work." Or, occasionally "Uhoh, I made a poopie." "Oh dear..."
Unfortunately, Linux has started to go in that direction. For instance, on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, when I run the update manager, all of its pop-ups steal my keyboard focus. WTF? I already told you to do the update—you don't need to pop up and steal my keyboard focus to let me know you've managed to connect to the repository, and again once you've started installing the packages, and yet again when you're complete so I can dismiss you. Just go away and do it, and alert me if something goes wrong. I don't need an "Everything is OK" alarm.
Does Gutsy fix this, or am I going to have to blow the dust off of olvwm and run apt from a cron job?
And before I get pounced on as a troll, I'm referring to my main system. It's only ever run Linux. I've built three systems in this particular case, and all three of them have been Linux and Linux only from the first boot, stretching back about 4 or 5 years for this box. The box before it came with Windows 95 (pre-OSR2), which I dual booted mainly to verify that Intellivision emulator Windows and DOS ports ran correctly. (I dropped the DOS port some time ago.)
--JoeHence the debate. Who do you think carries most of the Internet backbone links? The phone company. Who came up with T1 (now DS1), T3 (now DS3), ATM and the like? The phone company. How did ISPs connect into NAPs? Over T1s, T3s, and so forth.... provided via the phone company. How did people connect? Via modems, over the telephone line, provided by, you guessed it, the phone company. This sets up a bit of a precedent.
Now, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 classifies "information providers" (including ISPs) as distinct from "telecommunication providers," and that has proved controversial. This distinction lies at the heart of the network neutrality debate. As recently as 2005, DSL connections had different rules (more along the rules applied to telecommunication providers as opposed to information providers) than cable Internet connections in the US. It's truly a mess.
ISPs have historically sought at least some protection under common carrier status, insofar as disclaiming liability for the legal infractions of their users. Clearly, all the regulatory undulation over the last 11 years or so has muddied the water.
There's an important concept in telecommunications: common carrier. When I buy bandwidth, I have a not-unreasonable expectation that I get complete and unbiased Internet access, not "kinda sorta Internet," unless it's specifically marketed to me that way. This is what the whole network neutrality debate is all about.
You missed the part where I said "You told me it picked up all the off-air stations." Comcast goes around screaming "we'll give you gobs of bandwidth!" misrepresenting what it is exactly they're selling.
If you go into an Apple store and ask "Will it play my Windows files?" and the sales droid say "Yes," you have a right to return it when you discover it doesn't.
--JoeYour analogy is broken. Suppose you rented me a TV and told me it picked up all the off-air stations just fine. Then, I discovered that it wouldn't pick up Channel 62, and I complained to you about this. Later, I discover that not only this TV, but all the TVs you rent refuse to pick up Channel 62. All of them pick up the local Channel 8 network affiliate though, which you just happen to be on very good terms with. After all, it turns out you're getting a share of ad revenue from Channel 8, because you're helping to increase overall viewership.
I'd say I got slighted. There was a duty of disclosure and a conflict of interest at play. It was your duty to disclose to me that the TV did not pick up Channel 62. Furthermore, your relationship to Channel 8 makes it likely that the inability to pick up Channel 62 is no mere oversight.
Had I known your televisions wouldn't pick up Channel 62, I would have gotten a TV elsewhere, or demanded a much lower price. Now that I'm locked into a 2 year service contract, though, I'm stuck holding the crap end of the stick.
Now replace "Channel 62" with "P2P software," "Channel 8" with MPAA and big cable networks, and TV with cable internet service, and "you" with "Comcast," and that's a bit closer to the situation.
--Joe
(And yes, Channel 62 / Channel 8 is a reference to UHF...