It was 03:00. The moonless night engulfed three individuals in complete darkness. Three individuals who moved, with surprising grace, toward a single destination. Three individuals on a campaign; a mission. A campaign to rid Slashdot of lame trolls. A mission to ultimately destroy Slashdot forever.
A low candle flame, flickering slightly in the crisp Autumn night breeze, lit the storm sewer corridors and access tubes with a deep yellow pallor. Faint whisperings, little more than leaves brushing against ancient cement walls to the rest of the world, could be heard.
"Where is Alan? I thought I saw him approaching a moment ago," Trollaxor hissed. Standing a full 6 foot, with slicked-back black hair and a few day's worth of stubble, Trollaxor looked every bit the revolutionary in his black leather biking jacket. His green eyes pierced the dimly lit darkness, awaiting a response.
"I believe he tripped on his beard," Linus stated matter-of-factly, with just a hint of impatience. Linus Torvalds, Open Source hero and maintainer of Linux, stood taut as coiled snakes as he realized the gravity of the situation.
"Contact him. We have already overstayed our time in this place, even as we arrive." Trollaxor pushed.
"Fine," Linus Torvalds threw back the hood that concealed his Finnish visage, which was painted with tightly closed eyes and a look of grim concentration. He rubbed his temples lightly as sweat began to bead upon his high Finnish forehead.
Mumbling rapidly in Finnish, Linus turned to the East, now raising one hand above his head, palm extended to the direction of the sun's somnal abode.
"I can't seem-- to contact him--" Linus grunted in broken English. "I will try another method!"
Now a tributary of Old Swedish poured from the well of Linus's foreign maw. Trollaxor started, "Linus, if he is lost to us, there is nothing you can do, not even a fossil language can bring him to us now!"
Linus broke his linguistic trance and turned to Trollaxor. "In the name of all discontinued Japanese Transformers! The enemy must have captured him! Damn him and his filth-ridden beard! Now you know why I hate working with dirty GNU hippies!"
The enemy, as both Trollaxor and Linus knew too well, were the nefarious Slashdot Moderators, a group of numb-minded, brainwashed denizens of their strange, dark world that patrolled in hopes of "disabling" those who rebelled against their beloved Commander's will. "As dirty as he was, he was a valuable ally that you and I and the rest of the free world needed," Trollaxor dryly pointed out. "If the Mods got him, we must forego tonight's plans and rescue him immediately!"
Grunting again, this time out of frustration and anger, Linus whispered sharply thru clenched teeth in a heavy accent, thick with Finnish and Old Gutnish phonemic forms. "In the name of unmade Beast Wars toys, how are you and I to do a thing if the Mods patrol tonight?"
Trollaxor, ever the rebel to thrive against challenge, grew a vicious smile as he turned to Linus again. "The harder they patrol, the harder we troll, my friend." Linus remained nonplussed. As Trollaxor tightened the belts on his black leather biking jacket and made sure all miscelanaous zippers were sealed, his face brightened even more. "We've faced worse setbacks. Remember the Fallen Trolls. And remember moreso those Trolls who have gone over to the other side."
As Trollaxor's voice trailed off, Linus hung his head and exhaled slowly. Thoughts of the fallen whipped thru Linus's Finnish brain like TCP packets to Linux's bit bucket. "No, how can I not remember. Troll Mastah, Signal 11, travesty... They tried to break us!"
"Looks like they'll try again!" Trollaxor replied, smiling, completing a verse from "Wild Boys", the infamous Duran Duran track that Trollaxor and his camp had taken up as their anthem. "Now come on. We have some Mods that need bitchslapped tonight!"
Linus closed his eyes and bobbed his head three times
Gay Nigger Association of America -- January 16, 2004, 19:36PM GMT
The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) is a trolling organisation, tirelessly working in all areas of research and development to carry out assertive actions and produce new technologies. Our flagship production thus far has been FloodMT, software designed to crapflood Movable Type blogs. This is an important strategic anti-blogging weapon and as such we deemed it imperative that it be hosted reliably and in the public eye.
We chose to host our project on Sourceforge. Sourceforge is a site owned by OSDN which hosts open source projects of almost any nature. Having witnessed the registration of many useless projects on Sourceforge, we felt that their hosting of FloodMT would be acceptable. They deemed it so, approving our project within 24 hours of submission.
The GNAA finished uploading its materials and produced a complete website, all of which were kept up to date as development progressed rapidly. Then without warning, on January 15, all of the project's files were erased. The website, floodmt.sourceforge.net, was taken down and all of our CVS and file releases were lost. The same occurred for the Sourceforge project shitstorm, and all of the developers of FloodMT had their Sourceforge users deleted and access revoked.
This is considered by us an offensive action. As such, we declare a jihad on OSDN. At 8PM GMT this evening until further notice, all OSDN owned websites, subsidiaries, employees and administrators will be considered viable targets for attack by us. These targets include Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat though others may be assaulted.
Gay Nigger Association of America -- January 16, 2004, 19:36PM GMT
The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) is a trolling organisation, tirelessly working in all areas of research and development to carry out assertive actions and produce new technologies. Our flagship production thus far has been FloodMT, software designed to crapflood Movable Type blogs. This is an important strategic anti-blogging weapon and as such we deemed it imperative that it be hosted reliably and in the public eye.
We chose to host our project on Sourceforge. Sourceforge is a site owned by OSDN which hosts open source projects of almost any nature. Having witnessed the registration of many useless projects on Sourceforge, we felt that their hosting of FloodMT would be acceptable. They deemed it so, approving our project within 24 hours of submission.
The GNAA finished uploading its materials and produced a complete website, all of which were kept up to date as development progressed rapidly. Then without warning, on January 15, all of the project's files were erased. The website, floodmt.sourceforge.net, was taken down and all of our CVS and file releases were lost. The same occurred for the Sourceforge project shitstorm, and all of the developers of FloodMT had their Sourceforge users deleted and access revoked.
This is considered by us an offensive action. As such, we declare a jihad on OSDN. At 8PM GMT this evening until further notice, all OSDN owned websites, subsidiaries, employees and administrators will be considered viable targets for attack by us. These targets include Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat though others may be assaulted.
What they don't mention in the review is how easily these things break, I got the new Sony for christmas and it fell on the floor (from 1 meter), and almost broke in half. I mean wtf? I think I'll just be sticking with Apple powerbooks from now on as they make the most durable and stable laptops on the market. I just love their 17" G4, it's such a beast;-)
I would seriously suggest you try it out live before you buy it (but dropping it on the floor at the store might not be the best idea.) Or better yet, choose ppc, for superior architecture and design.
And we all know what happens when electronic voting goes bad.
I mean seriously, what will it take for these people to realize some things are just better done the old way, one of them being voting.
I can see it now, in the future major media conglomerates will consolidate and choose the president based on which is the most popular in *their* opinion. I guess that could be called a 'representative democracy' too
Representation of corporations *shudder*
I think each slashbot should think carefully about this and write to his congressman.
I can't find any papers from the said authors on the physics archive, so these two obviously aren't well known or respectable among the scientific community. A lack of peer review in a strata where peer review accounts of all fault-finding leads me to believe this articles credibility is the same as those of new-age magazines who which posting about the Bermuda triangle and the creation fabled self-professed scientists.
Until some well-known scientist confirms this, I think I'll just believe the 'official' story about black holes.
In 2001, me and my partner were hired by Microsoft to do a "third party test" over which OS scales better, FreeBSD or Microsoft. We had a bad feeling about it from the get go, but decided that we needed money. And believe me, Microsoft pays plenty of money.
That is, of course, if the results go the way they wish. They didn't, and we argued and argued, and then were shown the NDA which clearly stated that if they aren't happy with it, we can go shove it up our arses. We were told we could "re-run" the tests, see if things changed, they suggested we made a mistake and so on. I just stood up and walked right out of the office while an exec was explaining this. I couldn't believe it. So, a warning:
YOU GET ZERO MONEY UNLESS YOU DO THE TEST IN THEIR FAVOUR.
What kind of objectivity can you expect?
Here's a little NDA violation:
We found out FreeBSD scales 3 times better than windows 2000 advanced server.
reason: We're still seeing technological progress, at least in terms of tools. Some of us have DVD burners in our laptops, when not too long ago we couldn't imagine burning CDs. Content providers are freaking out about this because people are able to make their own product, or duplicate other people's product.
Sterling: I'm not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they're only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It's about manipulating factory processes, it's about mass customization, it's about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we'll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that's not really that big of a deal.
He is right to the point, it doesn't really matter what the RIAA, MPAA and their cronies do, they surely can't stop us, it might have worked in the past, but now we control the information paths and they can't do anything except scare those who haven't got access to the sources of information that we do.
I wish more people like him were in politics, that way maybe we'd be better off.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lac \Lac\, Lakh \Lakh\, n. [Hind. lak, l[=a]kh, l[=a]ksh, Skr.
laksha a mark, sign, lakh.]
One hundred thousand; also, a vaguely great number; as, a lac
of rupees. [Written also {lack}.] [East Indies]
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lakh \Lakh\, n.
Same as {Lac}, one hundred thousand.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
lakh
n : the cardinal number that is the fifth power of ten [syn: {hundred
thousand}, {100000}]
Well FWIW, I've used a number of window managers in my relatively long UNIX history. I still remember TWM and MOTIF, and I had a WM-less desktop when it was all the rage at MIT. I've used pretty much all versions of GNOME and KDE, though neither for very long. I have used blackbox and its derivates, openbox, pekwm, pwm, vtwm, metacity, an obscure scheme based wm whose name I don't remember, alloywm, aewm(++), kwin, window maker, afterstep, evilwm, and a host of others whose name escapes me because they weren't worth remembering.
I tell you, nothing compares to the power of FVWM.
It lets you define multiple workspaces, all of which can have several virtual desktops where you can freely scroll around. Workspaces and desktops are created dinamically as you request them and deleted when you no longer need them, it is completely configurable to a point where you can open a console and talk directly to the window manager, changing the settings and interacting with the WM on-the-fly. It allows any focus model you could possibly imagine, it lets you load modules likes pagers, launchbars, and so on.
And that is only the beginning.
So basically, there are window managers (like.. fluxbox, which is impossibly popular among the crowd who only tried the KDE WM and fluxbox and decided fluxbox is the best thing that ever existed), and there are Window Managers.
This is a review I wrote for amazon.com, I'll just repost it here hoping to bring a better understanding of the book to my fellow slashdotters;-)
David Grinspoon has written the book I wanted to write, and he's done it so very well that I'll be forever thankful I never got to it! David's style is so direct, so personal, and so punctuated with delightful humor that it's like sitting in his living room with him. At the same time he is dealing with cutting edge scientific knowledge in the revolutionary field of astrobiology and he speaks of it from understanding his science at depth.
David covers the subject from the Epicureans of ancient Greece to the SETI Institute while passing informatively through the Copernican revolution, up to the minute astrophysics, the origins of DNA, crop circles and alien abductions along the way. If you want to know what we know today, and how we got here, this book puts it all, not only into perspective, but into relationship.
What's particularly wonderful about David's approach in this book is that he is willing to look at and deal with things which other scientific writers are unwilling to touch. He makes quite clear when he's off into speculation or his own musings on the more controversial subjects, but he nevertheless digs into them. I found myself again and again nodding my affirmation (or more truthfully, interrupting my wife to read a paragraph to her) as he approached some of the more bizarre ideas that circulate in the public mind with sympathetic understanding while not compromising his scientific grounding.
David closes the book by diving into those things we all wonder about when we let our kid come out; are we alone, who else might be "out there", will we ever make contact, and how are we related? Are we part of the plan of the universe or some freak of circumstance? The latter seeming vanishingly improbable, the unavoidable question then becomes, where are "they"? Is there some rite of passage required by the Universe for us to qualify for cosmic citizenship? Great questions to grapple with and a terrific author to hold hands with in doing so.
I don't want to be the one dissin' RMS, but I think he needs a sanity check or just stop being a "spokesperson" for the Free software community. It is true that he has done a lot to further it's progress, but lets face it, this is the person who hates debian simply because they include THE OPTION (which, mind you, has to be enabled by editing a text config file) of downloading non-free software. This is the guy who refuses to follow the proper procedures laid out hundreds of years ago by the French revolutionaries (you all know what I mean), etc
He gives the Free software community a bad name, and with him on the forefront, Free software will never be part of corporate america (which is becoming more and more synonymous with America itself.)
Really, I mean, QT is nice and all, but what do we really need it for? GTK+ 2.x is far superior to the QT widget family as it provides antialiased fonts, superb localization and a better application framework in one package (all this can be gotten with QT, but not without downloading the source and patching it, which can be a pain to the new Linux user.)
Hopefully this is a step toward unification of the two widgets, I'm sure the QT team can find a way to contribute to the GNOME project, and with one desktop having twice the amount of applications as before, it should really be ready to blow m$ away.
Me, I still like TK the best;-)
Enthusiast sites helped to widen up the market for Asian suppliers, of which there are many, many more waiting in the wings to get into the lucrative North American and European markets. These supplies are hungry. They can feed hungry White Box vendors, but I grant that White Box vendors have to contend with the general ignorance of the people.
The people like Gateway, and the sound of those Intel chimes. They fear computers and the big Tier One OEMs feed on that fear.
We at the Terrato institute for social sciences actually confirmed this by studying the broken-computer rate sale on Ebay, it appears there has been a 40x increase in the sale of broken computer parts in the last 3 years (mind you, we accounted for the general rise of auctions.) The equipment was mostly network gear and motherboards, which we found particularly strange.
It all goes to China, where it's disassembled by teens in makeshift tents looking for a quick way to earn a buck (and perhaps die because of the dangerous toxins in CRT screens.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Troll War
Chapter 1
It was 03:00. The moonless night engulfed three individuals in complete darkness. Three individuals who moved, with surprising grace, toward a single destination. Three individuals on a campaign; a mission. A campaign to rid Slashdot of lame trolls. A mission to ultimately destroy Slashdot forever.
A low candle flame, flickering slightly in the crisp Autumn night breeze, lit the storm sewer corridors and access tubes with a deep yellow pallor. Faint whisperings, little more than leaves brushing against ancient cement walls to the rest of the world, could be heard.
"Where is Alan? I thought I saw him approaching a moment ago," Trollaxor hissed. Standing a full 6 foot, with slicked-back black hair and a few day's worth of stubble, Trollaxor looked every bit the revolutionary in his black leather biking jacket. His green eyes pierced the dimly lit darkness, awaiting a response.
"I believe he tripped on his beard," Linus stated matter-of-factly, with just a hint of impatience. Linus Torvalds, Open Source hero and maintainer of Linux, stood taut as coiled snakes as he realized the gravity of the situation.
"Contact him. We have already overstayed our time in this place, even as we arrive." Trollaxor pushed.
"Fine," Linus Torvalds threw back the hood that concealed his Finnish visage, which was painted with tightly closed eyes and a look of grim concentration. He rubbed his temples lightly as sweat began to bead upon his high Finnish forehead.
Mumbling rapidly in Finnish, Linus turned to the East, now raising one hand above his head, palm extended to the direction of the sun's somnal abode.
"I can't seem-- to contact him--" Linus grunted in broken English. "I will try another method!"
Now a tributary of Old Swedish poured from the well of Linus's foreign maw. Trollaxor started, "Linus, if he is lost to us, there is nothing you can do, not even a fossil language can bring him to us now!"
Linus broke his linguistic trance and turned to Trollaxor. "In the name of all discontinued Japanese Transformers! The enemy must have captured him! Damn him and his filth-ridden beard! Now you know why I hate working with dirty GNU hippies!"
The enemy, as both Trollaxor and Linus knew too well, were the nefarious Slashdot Moderators, a group of numb-minded, brainwashed denizens of their strange, dark world that patrolled in hopes of "disabling" those who rebelled against their beloved Commander's will. "As dirty as he was, he was a valuable ally that you and I and the rest of the free world needed," Trollaxor dryly pointed out. "If the Mods got him, we must forego tonight's plans and rescue him immediately!"
Grunting again, this time out of frustration and anger, Linus whispered sharply thru clenched teeth in a heavy accent, thick with Finnish and Old Gutnish phonemic forms. "In the name of unmade Beast Wars toys, how are you and I to do a thing if the Mods patrol tonight?"
Trollaxor, ever the rebel to thrive against challenge, grew a vicious smile as he turned to Linus again. "The harder they patrol, the harder we troll, my friend." Linus remained nonplussed. As Trollaxor tightened the belts on his black leather biking jacket and made sure all miscelanaous zippers were sealed, his face brightened even more. "We've faced worse setbacks. Remember the Fallen Trolls. And remember moreso those Trolls who have gone over to the other side."
As Trollaxor's voice trailed off, Linus hung his head and exhaled slowly. Thoughts of the fallen whipped thru Linus's Finnish brain like TCP packets to Linux's bit bucket. "No, how can I not remember. Troll Mastah, Signal 11, travesty... They tried to break us!"
"Looks like they'll try again!" Trollaxor replied, smiling, completing a verse from "Wild Boys", the infamous Duran Duran track that Trollaxor and his camp had taken up as their anthem. "Now come on. We have some Mods that need bitchslapped tonight!"
Linus closed his eyes and bobbed his head three times
Gay Nigger Association of America -- January 16, 2004, 19:36PM GMT
The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) is a trolling organisation, tirelessly working in all areas of research and development to carry out assertive actions and produce new technologies. Our flagship production thus far has been FloodMT, software designed to crapflood Movable Type blogs. This is an important strategic anti-blogging weapon and as such we deemed it imperative that it be hosted reliably and in the public eye.
We chose to host our project on Sourceforge. Sourceforge is a site owned by OSDN which hosts open source projects of almost any nature. Having witnessed the registration of many useless projects on Sourceforge, we felt that their hosting of FloodMT would be acceptable. They deemed it so, approving our project within 24 hours of submission.
The GNAA finished uploading its materials and produced a complete website, all of which were kept up to date as development progressed rapidly. Then without warning, on January 15, all of the project's files were erased. The website, floodmt.sourceforge.net, was taken down and all of our CVS and file releases were lost. The same occurred for the Sourceforge project shitstorm, and all of the developers of FloodMT had their Sourceforge users deleted and access revoked.
This is considered by us an offensive action. As such, we declare a jihad on OSDN. At 8PM GMT this evening until further notice, all OSDN owned websites, subsidiaries, employees and administrators will be considered viable targets for attack by us. These targets include Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat though others may be assaulted.
http://terrato.org/wiki.pl?OSDN_Press_Release
Gay Nigger Association of America -- January 16, 2004, 19:36PM GMT
The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) is a trolling organisation, tirelessly working in all areas of research and development to carry out assertive actions and produce new technologies. Our flagship production thus far has been FloodMT, software designed to crapflood Movable Type blogs. This is an important strategic anti-blogging weapon and as such we deemed it imperative that it be hosted reliably and in the public eye.
We chose to host our project on Sourceforge. Sourceforge is a site owned by OSDN which hosts open source projects of almost any nature. Having witnessed the registration of many useless projects on Sourceforge, we felt that their hosting of FloodMT would be acceptable. They deemed it so, approving our project within 24 hours of submission.
The GNAA finished uploading its materials and produced a complete website, all of which were kept up to date as development progressed rapidly. Then without warning, on January 15, all of the project's files were erased. The website, floodmt.sourceforge.net, was taken down and all of our CVS and file releases were lost. The same occurred for the Sourceforge project shitstorm, and all of the developers of FloodMT had their Sourceforge users deleted and access revoked.
This is considered by us an offensive action. As such, we declare a jihad on OSDN. At 8PM GMT this evening until further notice, all OSDN owned websites, subsidiaries, employees and administrators will be considered viable targets for attack by us. These targets include Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freshmeat though others may be assaulted.
http://terrato.org/wiki.pl?OSDN_Press_Release
here
right here
if you use imap you can see the size when you list and if it's too big you can delete it. problem solved
the speedpass specifications are available here.
The analysis part is quite interesting I must say.
too bad it still has perl 5.6 while almost every other operating system (including the other two BSDs) have switched to 5.8
What they don't mention in the review is how easily these things break, I got the new Sony for christmas and it fell on the floor (from 1 meter), and almost broke in half. I mean wtf? I think I'll just be sticking with Apple powerbooks from now on as they make the most durable and stable laptops on the market. I just love their 17" G4, it's such a beast ;-)
I would seriously suggest you try it out live before you buy it (but dropping it on the floor at the store might not be the best idea.) Or better yet, choose ppc,
for superior architecture and design.
And we all know what happens when electronic voting goes bad.
I mean seriously, what will it take for these people to realize some things are just better done the old way, one of them being voting.
I can see it now, in the future major media conglomerates will consolidate and choose the president based on which is the most popular in *their* opinion. I guess that could be called a 'representative democracy' too
Representation of corporations *shudder*
I think each slashbot should think carefully about this and write to his congressman.
Java isn't and never will be as fast as C/C++, people who say "but oh it's compiled it runs just as fast" haven't a clue what they're talking about.
I suggest reading some kernel documentation or tesitng real-world applications and then you'll notice what I'm saying is true.
the o'reilly network security articles are another great resource for the advanced system administrator.
plus, they're free..
rm -rf * in the wrong directory. god that sucked, i lost weeks of work. been keeping daily backups since then and aliased rm to 'rm -i'
I'm sorry but - there's no reason to run OS X - FreeBSD 4.x already offers everything it has for free, and FreeBSD -current far surpasses it.
Why pay for something I can get for free?
I can't find any papers from the said authors on the physics archive, so these two obviously aren't well known or respectable among the scientific community. A lack of peer review in a strata where peer review accounts of all fault-finding leads me to believe this articles credibility is the same as those of new-age magazines who which posting about the Bermuda triangle and the creation fabled
self-professed scientists.
Until some well-known scientist confirms this, I think I'll just believe the 'official' story about black holes.
Just my 2 dollars.
In 2001, me and my partner were hired by Microsoft to do a "third party test" over which OS scales better, FreeBSD or Microsoft. We had a bad feeling about it from the get go, but decided that we needed money. And believe me, Microsoft pays plenty of money.
That is, of course, if the results go the way they wish. They didn't, and we argued and argued, and then were shown the NDA which clearly stated that if they aren't happy with it, we can go shove it up our arses. We were told we could "re-run" the tests, see if things changed, they suggested we made a mistake and so on. I just stood up and walked right out of the office while an exec was explaining this. I couldn't believe it. So, a warning:
YOU GET ZERO MONEY UNLESS YOU DO THE TEST IN THEIR FAVOUR.
What kind of objectivity can you expect?
Here's a little NDA violation:
We found out FreeBSD scales 3 times better than windows 2000 advanced server.
Fuck you Micro$oft.
He is right to the point, it doesn't really matter what the RIAA, MPAA and their cronies do, they surely can't stop us, it might have worked in the past, but now we control the information paths and they can't do anything except scare those who haven't got access to the sources of information that we do.
I wish more people like him were in politics, that way maybe we'd be better off.
He's also one hell of a writer.
magic% dict lakh
3 definitions found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lac \Lac\, Lakh \Lakh\, n. [Hind. lak, l[=a]kh, l[=a]ksh, Skr.
laksha a mark, sign, lakh.]
One hundred thousand; also, a vaguely great number; as, a lac
of rupees. [Written also {lack}.] [East Indies]
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lakh \Lakh\, n.
Same as {Lac}, one hundred thousand.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
lakh
n : the cardinal number that is the fifth power of ten [syn: {hundred
thousand}, {100000}]
Well FWIW, I've used a number of window managers in my relatively long UNIX history. I still remember TWM and MOTIF, and I had a WM-less desktop when it was all the rage at MIT. I've used pretty much all versions of GNOME and KDE, though neither for very long. I have used blackbox and its derivates, openbox, pekwm, pwm, vtwm, metacity, an obscure scheme based wm whose name I don't remember, alloywm, aewm(++), kwin, window maker, afterstep, evilwm, and a host of others whose name escapes me because they weren't worth remembering.
I tell you, nothing compares to the power of FVWM.
It lets you define multiple workspaces, all of which can have several virtual desktops where you can freely scroll around. Workspaces and desktops are created dinamically as you request them and deleted when you no longer need them, it is completely configurable to a point where you can open a console and talk directly to the window manager, changing the settings and interacting with the WM on-the-fly. It allows any focus model you could possibly imagine, it lets you load modules likes pagers, launchbars, and so on.
And that is only the beginning.
So basically, there are window managers (like.. fluxbox, which is impossibly popular among the crowd who only tried the KDE WM and fluxbox and decided fluxbox is the best thing that ever existed), and there are Window Managers.
Moderators: this isn't meant as a flamebait.
I don't want to be the one dissin' RMS, but I think he needs a sanity check or just stop being a "spokesperson" for the Free software community. It is true that he has done a lot to further it's progress, but lets face it, this is the person who hates debian simply because they include THE OPTION (which, mind you, has to be enabled by editing a text config file) of downloading non-free software. This is the guy who refuses to follow the proper procedures laid out hundreds of years ago by the French revolutionaries (you
all know what I mean), etc
He gives the Free software community a bad name, and with him on the forefront, Free software will never be part of corporate america (which is becoming more and more synonymous with America itself.)
Thank you for reading this.
Really, I mean, QT is nice and all, but what do we really need it for? GTK+ 2.x is far superior to the QT widget family as it provides antialiased fonts, superb localization and a better application framework in one package (all this can be gotten with QT, but not without downloading the source and patching it, which can be a pain to the new Linux user.) Hopefully this is a step toward unification of the two widgets, I'm sure the QT team can find a way to contribute to the GNOME project, and with one desktop having twice the amount of applications as before, it should really be ready to blow m$ away. Me, I still like TK the best ;-)
Enthusiast sites helped to widen up the market for Asian suppliers, of which there are many, many more waiting in the wings to get into the lucrative North American and European markets. These supplies are hungry. They can feed hungry White Box vendors, but I grant that White Box vendors have to contend with the general ignorance of the people.
The people like Gateway, and the sound of those Intel chimes. They fear computers and the big Tier One OEMs feed on that fear.
We at the Terrato institute for social sciences actually confirmed this by studying the broken-computer rate sale on Ebay, it appears there has been a 40x increase in the sale of broken computer parts in the last 3 years (mind you, we accounted for the general rise of auctions.) The equipment was mostly network gear and motherboards, which we found particularly strange.
There is definately something strange going on.
It all goes to China, where it's disassembled by teens in makeshift tents looking for a quick way to earn a buck (and perhaps die because of the dangerous toxins in CRT screens.)
Life is just grand, isn't it?