It's not a punishment. Canada has no obligation to let people in the country. If they grant you entry, it's essentially a privilege.
Indeed. I don't think anybody is accusing Canada of punishing these people. However, if these people were unjustly added to a list of criminals by US authorities, and if US authorities knew that adding names to this list will prevent these people from being admitted to Canada (none of which, in my opinion, was actually proved), then the US authorities are effectively punishing these people, by restricting their movement and preventing them from leaving the country. This is a violation or their rights, and when communist governments did it, western governments were loudly protesting (for which I am grateful). Of course, communist governments used much more direct method, and simply confiscated protester's passports. Again, I have seen no proof that US government is actually using this list to prevent "difficult US citizens" from traveling to Canada, however, the possibility seems to be there, and there is a standing accusation, so, in my opinion, this list and its use need some closer scrutiny.
I'm sure there are dangerous criminals on that FBI list in addition to the annoying protesters though. I'm guessing Canadians don't want to start importing sex offenders and armed robbers so they may want to think twice before they oppose using that FBI list.
That actually happens fairly often. After the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by soviets, Canada, US and most of other western governments allowed number of Czechs and Slovaks into their countries with very little background checks. The simple reason was that the Czechoslovak government, which collaborated with the occupants, could not be trusted, and if they said that somebody was a dangerous criminal, they could simply be peaceful protesters, or they could have a criminal record for such things as publishing a newspaper critical of the government or something of that kind. Or they possibly had no actual criminal record at all, and the government was just making it up. As a result, some number of people guilty of violent crimes were actually admitted to US and Canada, in addition to much larger number of completely innocent immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime. In fact, there were cases where the Czechoslovak government released prisoners and allowed them to leave the country, sometimes in exchange for them becoming spies and informing on expatriate organizations in US and Canada.
The question here is whether the US government and US authorities can be trusted.
I do have "focus follow mouse", or, in fact, "sloppy focus", but that should not make any difference. When "activate focused images" is set, images whose window receives focus when mouse cursor enters them will get activated, which is annoying. But with "activate focused images" unset, the focused image will not get activated until it receives a keyboard or mouse click event.
If you have "activate focused images" unset and your active image still get change with the mouse cursor, something is wrong, because that's not how it's supposed to work, and that's not how it works for me. Which window manager do you use? Perhaps it is your window manager doing something weird when focusing windows?
Hmm, I still use 2.2, maybe it is different in newer versions, but when I deselect the "Activate focused image" in the Window management preferences, each image becomes active when I interact with it, like if I paint on it, or right-click on it to open a menu. I can also change the active image manually in the layer dialog drop-down. The only thing that may be somewhat unexpected is that the focussed image becomes active if it receives ANY keypress, including modifier keys, which I wouldn't consider "meaningful interaction". That means that the active image WILL change if you switch the focus using keyboard (Alt-Tab in many window managers). Other than that, it seems to me that it works exactly the way I would expect it.
This is finally someone who comes up with a list of specific issues, rather than completely useless rant about how "GIMP UI sucks" and how "GIMP should work more like PS" (when, in fact, it's GUI is pretty close to the one of Photoshop, most of the differences being in number of little but important details like the ones you described).
As other's pointed out, #1 and #4 can be configured in preferences, and I never ran into #5, and my computer is pretty old and slow. You are right, the tools selection is based on "button up", and it could easily be based on button down, except perhaps that most of other buttons in pretty much any GUI have the "button up" behavior, and I can see plenty of people complaining that GIMP is "inconsistent with other applications":)
And I agree with you on Photoshop. I haven't seriously used photoshop in years, and every time I have to use it for 10 minutes or so, I get frustrated about bunch of small things, partly because they seem to be done in some particularly annoying and braindead way, and partly because "it does not work like GIMP":).
Just from the top of my head, of course twm, then fvwm and compiz-fusion (with appropriate modules). These I am sure of. I seem to remember hearing about one of the other window managers, like fluxbox or windowmaker or one of those having a tabbing support, too.
I don't know. i always thought that since the market leader is Photoshop, they should make the GUI somewhat close to that of Photoshop. And I think they did that quite well. There are couple of quirks, but the overall feel is pretty close to Photoshop, as far as I can tell.
That's easy to do with GIMP. Simply use a tabbing window manager to make a tabbed window out of the two panels, configure your window manager so it will always stick this window at the same place of the screen, and so that it will never maximize a window to cover it.
Yes, but there are about infinitely many different "CMYK" coordinate systems that corresponds to the standard RGBA system. Which one should we convert to? That's the hard question, and that's what Adobe most likely has bunch of patents in. And these patents are not trivial.
Years ago, when I had a job that required a weekly 3 hours commute, I used to play a kind of pretend game in my mind to keep myself awake while driving, that was based on a situation opposite to what you suggest. Imagine you pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road, who actually turns out to be a particular well known scientist, inventor or engineer from 100 or 150 years ago, who got somehow magically transported in time. You have to explain him everything that's happening around you in terms he can understand. Bonus points for referring to the person's own work, results and inventions.
Ok, replying to myself, maybe it should be me who should re-read the thread. I didn't realize that it was you who started this discussion.
But I believe my argument still holds. Nobody is trying to somehow force MS to release their source code. If MS maintained a released the documentation for all their protocols and interfaces from the beginning, they would not have this problem. They neglected to do that, some say on purpose, but that does not matter. Now they need to catch up, and it is going to cost them.
Back in 80's, almost every piece of hardware, and a lot of software you bought, came with two pieces of documentation: a user manual, and a programmer manual. The programmer manual provided information about the protocols and interfaces implemented by the device, or the software. Since most people did not need the programmer manual, to save money companies started to put them on the internet, instead of packaging them with the product. Later these disappeared too, and companies started to refer to protocols and interfaces as their trade secrets, and refusing to provide any documentation on them. I believe that should be stopped. If you provide a component, be it hardware or software, that is designed to communicate with other components, you should provide means for programmers and hardware designers to find out easily the protocol and the interface you use.
Please read this whole discussion again. This thread started with somebody suggesting that open source developers should also be required to provide documentation for all protocols they implement. A counterargument was that they already do, as they provide the source code. So Microsoft could, if they wanted, do the same, and provide the source code. Obviously they do not want that, so they need to provide the documentation in a different form. I didn't see anybody in this discussion to try to "use poorly informed legal argument as a way to get more than they're entitled to".
of course there is a question whether source code is a sufficient documentation. In my experience, the source code is better than documentation most of the times. Sometimes the source code is so messy, or different parts of it are so badly entangled, that it is very hard to figure out what the code does, or where one should get started. In general, my experience with OSS developers is that in such a case the best thing to do is ask. Generally, if you tell a developer "I am trying to interoperate with your open source product, and I really can figure out what is the horrible mess between the lines 2345 and 4321 in foobar.c supposed to do, could you please explain it to me", they, at least in my experience, react pretty well, even if you are working on a competing product.
An alternative would be that anyone wanting to work on interoperability be entitled to have the OSS developers produce reasonably correct and comprehensive interface documentation for their use, even if such documentation is not used internally by the OSS folks themselves.
Yes, everybody is entitled to that. If you want an OSS developer to produce such documentation, become an OSS developer and produce such documentation.
How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.
Go to System->Administration->Update Manager
It will know about the upgrade, and have a button to upgrade. So it's 3 clicks rather than 1 click. I think that's good, because upgrading the whole distro is a major administrative task, you may want to make sure that applications you compiled yourself/installed from other sources will still work, they may need to be recompiled/reinstalled, if you have unusual hardware that gave you trouble with ubuntu before, you may want to back up your system fist, etc. Lot of people prefer to wait a while and keep the old distro until they are sure that nothing will go wrong, and they will find an upgrade message popping up every time they log on annoying. Besides, a one click upgrade path would be pretty much useless at this moment anyway, it seems that plenty of people manage to find the button in the Update manager already:)
As far the second part of your comment, i am not sure I really understand what you are asking about, but it seems to me that using debian unstable distribution would do what you want, if you are willing to live with a broken system every once a while. I don't know enough about ubuntu, but they may have something similar.
It might not have a lot of power under the hood...
Actually, LOGO has a lot of power under its hood, definitely more than BASIC. It seems that most people here don't realize that LOGO is a full featured dialect of LISP. Some things that are easily done in LOGO would be pretty hard in BASIC. I agree with the rest of your post, though.
I would argue replacing their content with IFPI, in this case, censoring. Mind, I'm being fairly liberal in my definition of censorship.
So if I rent a billboard on a side of a road, and the billboard still has the previous renter's sign on it, and I replace it with my own sign, you would accuse me of censorship?
There is no reason for Pirate Bay to maintain the content created by any previous owner of the domain.
They are taking away traffic intended to be for IFPI.
IFPI did not pay for the traffic. Imagine you rent a business property, then stop paying the rent. You get evicted, and somebody else moves in and opens a store there. Would you say they are taking away customers that were intended for you?
They are making it harded for IFPI to voice their opinion by unethical means. If you look at it from an unbiased view point (don't even look it to the purposes of either sites), you would probably agree that PirateBay are more wrong than right.
I don't see anything unethical here. One site let their domain registration expire, somebody else registered the domain, and gave it to Pirate Bay. It's probably not even like IFPI simply forgot to renew their registration. Typically, your web hosting provider will give you plenty of warning before they let the domain expire. I usually start getting emails on a domain I maintain for somebody that expires at the end of January sometimes in the mid December. Last year there was some confusion as to who should pay for the registration, and so I left it till the last day, and the week before the registration was to expire, I was receiving daily emails from them, reminding me to renew. I think IFPI had their own reason to keep the.org and let the.com go.
This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.
True, the task is well known and it hasn't changed much, but it has never been solved well. With every new release of every office suit in existence, I hear that their new version does things "the right way". I get my hopes up, give it a try, and so far I have been always completely disappointed. Now I am hearing that the new Office is supposed to be good, I didn't have chance to try it yet, but my experience tells me it is probably not going to be what they claim it to be.
From that moment on, I renounced all satanic rock music, discovered Christ and placed my life with the Lord, and now I run a successful business as a reseller of fine artist Thomas Kinkade's work. All thanks to the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Shit! The book really is evil! You changed my mind, I agree with the grandparent, the book must be wiped from the face of the planet!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a punishment. Canada has no obligation to let people in the country. If they grant you entry, it's essentially a privilege.
Indeed. I don't think anybody is accusing Canada of punishing these people. However, if these people were unjustly added to a list of criminals by US authorities, and if US authorities knew that adding names to this list will prevent these people from being admitted to Canada (none of which, in my opinion, was actually proved), then the US authorities are effectively punishing these people, by restricting their movement and preventing them from leaving the country. This is a violation or their rights, and when communist governments did it, western governments were loudly protesting (for which I am grateful). Of course, communist governments used much more direct method, and simply confiscated protester's passports. Again, I have seen no proof that US government is actually using this list to prevent "difficult US citizens" from traveling to Canada, however, the possibility seems to be there, and there is a standing accusation, so, in my opinion, this list and its use need some closer scrutiny.
I'm sure there are dangerous criminals on that FBI list in addition to the annoying protesters though. I'm guessing Canadians don't want to start importing sex offenders and armed robbers so they may want to think twice before they oppose using that FBI list.
That actually happens fairly often. After the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by soviets, Canada, US and most of other western governments allowed number of Czechs and Slovaks into their countries with very little background checks. The simple reason was that the Czechoslovak government, which collaborated with the occupants, could not be trusted, and if they said that somebody was a dangerous criminal, they could simply be peaceful protesters, or they could have a criminal record for such things as publishing a newspaper critical of the government or something of that kind. Or they possibly had no actual criminal record at all, and the government was just making it up. As a result, some number of people guilty of violent crimes were actually admitted to US and Canada, in addition to much larger number of completely innocent immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime. In fact, there were cases where the Czechoslovak government released prisoners and allowed them to leave the country, sometimes in exchange for them becoming spies and informing on expatriate organizations in US and Canada.
The question here is whether the US government and US authorities can be trusted.
I always found this truly geeky.
Perhaps is a similar way as "Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics"?
I do have "focus follow mouse", or, in fact, "sloppy focus", but that should not make any difference. When "activate focused images" is set, images whose window receives focus when mouse cursor enters them will get activated, which is annoying. But with "activate focused images" unset, the focused image will not get activated until it receives a keyboard or mouse click event.
If you have "activate focused images" unset and your active image still get change with the mouse cursor, something is wrong, because that's not how it's supposed to work, and that's not how it works for me. Which window manager do you use? Perhaps it is your window manager doing something weird when focusing windows?
Hmm, I still use 2.2, maybe it is different in newer versions, but when I deselect the "Activate focused image" in the Window management preferences, each image becomes active when I interact with it, like if I paint on it, or right-click on it to open a menu. I can also change the active image manually in the layer dialog drop-down. The only thing that may be somewhat unexpected is that the focussed image becomes active if it receives ANY keypress, including modifier keys, which I wouldn't consider "meaningful interaction". That means that the active image WILL change if you switch the focus using keyboard (Alt-Tab in many window managers). Other than that, it seems to me that it works exactly the way I would expect it.
This is finally someone who comes up with a list of specific issues, rather than completely useless rant about how "GIMP UI sucks" and how "GIMP should work more like PS" (when, in fact, it's GUI is pretty close to the one of Photoshop, most of the differences being in number of little but important details like the ones you described).
As other's pointed out, #1 and #4 can be configured in preferences, and I never ran into #5, and my computer is pretty old and slow. You are right, the tools selection is based on "button up", and it could easily be based on button down, except perhaps that most of other buttons in pretty much any GUI have the "button up" behavior, and I can see plenty of people complaining that GIMP is "inconsistent with other applications":)
And I agree with you on Photoshop. I haven't seriously used photoshop in years, and every time I have to use it for 10 minutes or so, I get frustrated about bunch of small things, partly because they seem to be done in some particularly annoying and braindead way, and partly because "it does not work like GIMP":).
Just from the top of my head, of course twm, then fvwm and compiz-fusion (with appropriate modules). These I am sure of. I seem to remember hearing about one of the other window managers, like fluxbox or windowmaker or one of those having a tabbing support, too.
I don't know, but wasn't it that way in Photoshop, like, always?
I don't know. i always thought that since the market leader is Photoshop, they should make the GUI somewhat close to that of Photoshop. And I think they did that quite well. There are couple of quirks, but the overall feel is pretty close to Photoshop, as far as I can tell.
That's easy to do with GIMP. Simply use a tabbing window manager to make a tabbed window out of the two panels, configure your window manager so it will always stick this window at the same place of the screen, and so that it will never maximize a window to cover it.
Yes, but there are about infinitely many different "CMYK" coordinate systems that corresponds to the standard RGBA system. Which one should we convert to? That's the hard question, and that's what Adobe most likely has bunch of patents in. And these patents are not trivial.
Years ago, when I had a job that required a weekly 3 hours commute, I used to play a kind of pretend game in my mind to keep myself awake while driving, that was based on a situation opposite to what you suggest. Imagine you pick up a hitchhiker on the side of the road, who actually turns out to be a particular well known scientist, inventor or engineer from 100 or 150 years ago, who got somehow magically transported in time. You have to explain him everything that's happening around you in terms he can understand. Bonus points for referring to the person's own work, results and inventions.
Ehm, how many "oldies" stations were there, even in the 80's, that played Stockhausen, Boulez, Varese, ...?
Define "hotness"! :)
Ok, replying to myself, maybe it should be me who should re-read the thread. I didn't realize that it was you who started this discussion.
But I believe my argument still holds. Nobody is trying to somehow force MS to release their source code. If MS maintained a released the documentation for all their protocols and interfaces from the beginning, they would not have this problem. They neglected to do that, some say on purpose, but that does not matter. Now they need to catch up, and it is going to cost them.
Back in 80's, almost every piece of hardware, and a lot of software you bought, came with two pieces of documentation: a user manual, and a programmer manual. The programmer manual provided information about the protocols and interfaces implemented by the device, or the software. Since most people did not need the programmer manual, to save money companies started to put them on the internet, instead of packaging them with the product. Later these disappeared too, and companies started to refer to protocols and interfaces as their trade secrets, and refusing to provide any documentation on them. I believe that should be stopped. If you provide a component, be it hardware or software, that is designed to communicate with other components, you should provide means for programmers and hardware designers to find out easily the protocol and the interface you use.
Please read this whole discussion again. This thread started with somebody suggesting that open source developers should also be required to provide documentation for all protocols they implement. A counterargument was that they already do, as they provide the source code. So Microsoft could, if they wanted, do the same, and provide the source code. Obviously they do not want that, so they need to provide the documentation in a different form. I didn't see anybody in this discussion to try to "use poorly informed legal argument as a way to get more than they're entitled to".
of course there is a question whether source code is a sufficient documentation. In my experience, the source code is better than documentation most of the times. Sometimes the source code is so messy, or different parts of it are so badly entangled, that it is very hard to figure out what the code does, or where one should get started. In general, my experience with OSS developers is that in such a case the best thing to do is ask. Generally, if you tell a developer "I am trying to interoperate with your open source product, and I really can figure out what is the horrible mess between the lines 2345 and 4321 in foobar.c supposed to do, could you please explain it to me", they, at least in my experience, react pretty well, even if you are working on a competing product.
An alternative would be that anyone wanting to work on interoperability be entitled to have the OSS developers produce reasonably correct and comprehensive interface documentation for their use, even if such documentation is not used internally by the OSS folks themselves.
Yes, everybody is entitled to that. If you want an OSS developer to produce such documentation, become an OSS developer and produce such documentation.
Congrats on getting this moded as insightful! Sharply pointed rocket indeed.
How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.
:)
Go to System->Administration->Update Manager
It will know about the upgrade, and have a button to upgrade. So it's 3 clicks rather than 1 click. I think that's good, because upgrading the whole distro is a major administrative task, you may want to make sure that applications you compiled yourself/installed from other sources will still work, they may need to be recompiled/reinstalled, if you have unusual hardware that gave you trouble with ubuntu before, you may want to back up your system fist, etc. Lot of people prefer to wait a while and keep the old distro until they are sure that nothing will go wrong, and they will find an upgrade message popping up every time they log on annoying. Besides, a one click upgrade path would be pretty much useless at this moment anyway, it seems that plenty of people manage to find the button in the Update manager already
As far the second part of your comment, i am not sure I really understand what you are asking about, but it seems to me that using debian unstable distribution would do what you want, if you are willing to live with a broken system every once a while. I don't know enough about ubuntu, but they may have something similar.
or used boots of levitation to get over water or out of a pit. Rock piercers and bolders also fall from the top.
:)
What about 4D games? "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all around."
It might not have a lot of power under the hood...
Actually, LOGO has a lot of power under its hood, definitely more than BASIC. It seems that most people here don't realize that LOGO is a full featured dialect of LISP. Some things that are easily done in LOGO would be pretty hard in BASIC. I agree with the rest of your post, though.
I would argue replacing their content with IFPI, in this case, censoring. Mind, I'm being fairly liberal in my definition of censorship.
.org and let the .com go.
So if I rent a billboard on a side of a road, and the billboard still has the previous renter's sign on it, and I replace it with my own sign, you would accuse me of censorship?
There is no reason for Pirate Bay to maintain the content created by any previous owner of the domain.
They are taking away traffic intended to be for IFPI.
IFPI did not pay for the traffic. Imagine you rent a business property, then stop paying the rent. You get evicted, and somebody else moves in and opens a store there. Would you say they are taking away customers that were intended for you?
They are making it harded for IFPI to voice their opinion by unethical means. If you look at it from an unbiased view point (don't even look it to the purposes of either sites), you would probably agree that PirateBay are more wrong than right.
I don't see anything unethical here. One site let their domain registration expire, somebody else registered the domain, and gave it to Pirate Bay. It's probably not even like IFPI simply forgot to renew their registration. Typically, your web hosting provider will give you plenty of warning before they let the domain expire. I usually start getting emails on a domain I maintain for somebody that expires at the end of January sometimes in the mid December. Last year there was some confusion as to who should pay for the registration, and so I left it till the last day, and the week before the registration was to expire, I was receiving daily emails from them, reminding me to renew. I think IFPI had their own reason to keep the
This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.
True, the task is well known and it hasn't changed much, but it has never been solved well. With every new release of every office suit in existence, I hear that their new version does things "the right way". I get my hopes up, give it a try, and so far I have been always completely disappointed. Now I am hearing that the new Office is supposed to be good, I didn't have chance to try it yet, but my experience tells me it is probably not going to be what they claim it to be.
From that moment on, I renounced all satanic rock music, discovered Christ and placed my life with the Lord, and now I run a successful business as a reseller of fine artist Thomas Kinkade's work. All thanks to the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Shit! The book really is evil! You changed my mind, I agree with the grandparent, the book must be wiped from the face of the planet!
In that case, make sure that you don't travel too much.