Yes, god forbid our tax dollars get used on something that would benefit all of us, like for example allowing some really bright kids get good education in this country.
What do you thing taxes are for? If I had the choice, I would opt for giving my tax money to those kids instead of all the other government funded bullshit that's going on all over the place.
Who in the world moded the parent as "insightful"? It has about as much insight as a bucket of excrement!
Who cares about KDE and openoffice? I want a liveCD that has a complete TeX distribution, Maxima, and other math and science packages. Who needs a desktop environment? Waste of space, if you ask me.
Actually, in a typical totalitarian regime, 99% of the people are not "beaten with rubber hoses" or anything like that. As long as you mind your own business, you are ok.
But some may argue that our strength and military technology are results of our freedom. It seems that in most cases in the past, well developed countries that bacame totatliarian experienced a fast economical downturn.
Actually, I think it puts ALL the launchers in the Debian Menu (which is just the standard debian menu in gnome format). Some of them are then selected for the main Gnome menu, mostly the ones that are part of the Gnome environment. I wish there was a way to replace the main Gnome menu with the standard debian one.
One major difference here is that the various operating systems called GNU/Linux doesn't have a unified file manager. An app would have to install menu shortcuts for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and possibly more, unlike Windows which has Explorer.exe on well over 95 percent of machines reading from the same Start Menu folder.
You just made an interesting point. You see, I hate Explorer.exe. I think it is one of the worst graphical environments in existence. In fact, I have tried several times to replace it by something else. There are so called "shell replacements" for windows, and many of them provide much better environment than Explorer.exe does. The reason I don't use one is I don't have time to set them up and configure them. Every major linux ditro has a wide choice of desktop environment, starting with very simple window managers to complete desktop systems like Gnome, KDE or xcfe. And on every linux system I have used in the last 4 years or so, all those come completely configured, with nearly all applications in menus, icon boxes or whatever. You just choose which desktop environment/window manager you want to use, and you are in business. Compare this with installing say litestep or blackbox on windows, and spending several hours searching for applications, creating menus, keyboard shortcuts etc.
During about 10 years of using linux, I have had to search for an application once, when several kde programs I compiled from source installed themselves in/usr/local/kde for come braindead reason. I didn't pay attention when configuring and installing the programs (because typically you don't have to), so it took me a while to find what was going on.
There is whole bunch of third party applications for windows that are distributed as zip files rather than executable installers. For those, you have to create the menus and icons yourself.
Finally, one big thing that always drives me nuts on windows is the lack of sensible hierarchy in the main menu. On linux, I have all editors in Applications->Editors, all graphics stuff in Applications->Graphics etc. On windows I have one giant main menu with everything on it, and if things are grouped into sub-menus, they are usually grouped and labeled by the name of the company that makes the software, which is completely useles.
Re:The myth is dead! Long live the myth!
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just because these guys were unable to do it, it doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact, there are large solar ovens capable to melt glass and aluminium. In the article you point at, they say thay could only reach 280 F. I don't know what they were doing, but I have just seen a middle school science project in which the kid got 280 F using about 100 small flat hand mirrors mounted on a square piece of plywood.
I lived in Indiana for several years (thank god;) I finally got out of there). Once I took my kids to a planetarium show in a local children science museum. The volunteer running the show talked for a while about stars, constellations etc. Towards the end of the show she asked "how did all the stars get there?" and she immediately provided the answer: "God put them there!"
Ignoring the obvious reading comprehension mistake (17 per cent \neq 17 cents), even small differences in prices are bad. Look at it from the point of wiew of somebody owning a competing restaurant in the same area. Your costs are roughly the same, and so are your prices. You may work hard to keep your prices 5 cents lower than your competition, and you honestly list correct prices on your website (paying somebody the whole time to keep it updated). Wouldn't you be pissed off?
Suppose you want to meet with some 15-20 people for dinner. You look at the website, see low prices, so you sent everybody e-mail "let's meet at such and such, I'll be there at 7". You know that some people cannot show up till 7:30, but you figure you can start ordering and having few drinks...
You come at 7, get in, take your coats off, look at the menu - ooops, the low prices you saw on the website are nowhere to be found. What are your options?
You can stay and pay the higher prices. You can get up, put on your coats and go somewhere else, leaving a message for your friends and hoping they will get it. You can get up, put on your coats and freeze your ass out on the pavement in front of the place for half an hour until everybody shows up.
Contact the company hosting the site and ask them to remove it? Plys buy a shot-gun to chase away all other of those "web master" con-men offering you to make a website for you?
I agree. While ago, I did a little bit of work on a system that was suposed to translate computer manuals from Czech to Russian. I remember it did fairly good job translating technical manuals, but even though it was designed to be quite general translating engine, when we tested it with non-technical texts, the results were often less than satisfactory. Vocabulary was definitely part of it.
Nope. Links does not have vi navigation and numbering of links and form fields, at least not as easy to use as lynx. I find lynx much easier to use. It also seems to be much more stable.
1) Remembering windows size/positions. This drives me nuts. I've read that the reasoning behind this is for the most efficient use of the desktop (e.g. you launch a 2nd term and it positions itself beside the 1st term instead of overlapping). Sounds good, but in practice it makes me a less efficient user. Back in my windows days, I liked that whenever I launched the file browser it was always in the same position where I left it. I could rely on this and be ready to click whereever I needed. Same with the file dialog, calculator or whereever. I EXPECTED them to be in a certain position and thus I could work faster/more efficiently. I think maybe a compromise on this would be the default should be that gnome remembers size/position for all apps unless the developer of an app explicitly coded an app not to follow this behaviour. So the wm is the default unless the app says otherwise. I can see the benefit of autopositioning maybe with terms, but for most other apps it just makes me slower and gets in the way. As it stands I feel like I never know where an app will be when it launches.
I am not sure I understand your suggestion. When Gnome remembers the positions of your windows, it means that they will always open at the same place, right? Isn't that what you want? (I must admit I don't use gnome, so I am not sure about this, but this is what I would expect when you say "remember position"). On the other hand, autopositioning will try to place windows at some smart location (e.g. to minimize overlap), so they pop-up at some unexpected place, but it is likely you won't have to move them around manually too much.
I think there isn't a best way. It depends on application, or even individual windows. I want a window that will be around for a long time to be placed somewhere where it does not interfere with other windows. OTOH, windows that I wil use briefly and then close them would be better in a known location, so I know where to expect them.
Luckilly, there are window managers that let me do exactly that. And regardless of a window manager, you can always specify geometry on the command line.
As far as your suggestion to allow developers to specify where to open a window, there are ways to do that. Luckily, almost nobody uses them, and decent window managers include an option to ignore such developers' suggestions. The problem with such settings is that the developer have no idea how my desktop is organized, so the window is almost certainly going to show up somewhere where it is totally in the way. This setting should not be used by developers, it should be a USER setting! An option where you can say "I want this application to always open right here at the same place". And as I said, there are ways to do that, even though it should be much easier than it is.
2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle.
And a good thing, too. Alt key is in a place where I often hit it by mistake. As Alt key is a modifier, it does not matter. But it it was a toggle, it would be a mess.
Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu.
If you change that, I'll scream! This is clearly a question of habit, but I am used to ESC to get out of places.
Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.
these people can explain everything to us. You see, here I am, spending sleepless nights worrying about what Linux "needs", and so on, and this guy has it all figured out! I just don't understand why people can't just listen to him! C'mon! Work together! Or you will be all half baked!
Are you telling me that if I tutor somebody in a public park and charge for it, I need to have the freaking city's permission? What about if I give my students an extra review session in a public park? I work for a public university, but the students do pay tuition. Is that a commercial operation? What if I go there and paint a picture which I subsequently sell? And what about somebody going to the park to work on a book they are going to publish? What's the difference between that and snapping pictures?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, god forbid our tax dollars get used on something that would benefit all of us, like for example allowing some really bright kids get good education in this country.
What do you thing taxes are for? If I had the choice, I would opt for giving my tax money to those kids instead of all the other government funded bullshit that's going on all over the place.
Who in the world moded the parent as "insightful"? It has about as much insight as a bucket of excrement!
Who cares about KDE and openoffice? I want a liveCD that has a complete TeX distribution, Maxima, and other math and science packages. Who needs a desktop environment? Waste of space, if you ask me.
Actually, in a typical totalitarian regime, 99% of the people are not "beaten with rubber hoses" or anything like that. As long as you mind your own business, you are ok.
But some may argue that our strength and military technology are results of our freedom. It seems that in most cases in the past, well developed countries that bacame totatliarian experienced a fast economical downturn.
Actually, I think it puts ALL the launchers in the Debian Menu (which is just the standard debian menu in gnome format). Some of them are then selected for the main Gnome menu, mostly the ones that are part of the Gnome environment. I wish there was a way to replace the main Gnome menu with the standard debian one.
One major difference here is that the various operating systems called GNU/Linux doesn't have a unified file manager. An app would have to install menu shortcuts for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and possibly more, unlike Windows which has Explorer.exe on well over 95 percent of machines reading from the same Start Menu folder.
/usr/local/kde for come braindead reason. I didn't pay attention when configuring and installing the programs (because typically you don't have to), so it took me a while to find what was going on.
You just made an interesting point. You see, I hate Explorer.exe. I think it is one of the worst graphical environments in existence. In fact, I have tried several times to replace it by something else. There are so called "shell replacements" for windows, and many of them provide much better environment than Explorer.exe does. The reason I don't use one is I don't have time to set them up and configure them. Every major linux ditro has a wide choice of desktop environment, starting with very simple window managers to complete desktop systems like Gnome, KDE or xcfe. And on every linux system I have used in the last 4 years or so, all those come completely configured, with nearly all applications in menus, icon boxes or whatever. You just choose which desktop environment/window manager you want to use, and you are in business. Compare this with installing say litestep or blackbox on windows, and spending several hours searching for applications, creating menus, keyboard shortcuts etc.
During about 10 years of using linux, I have had to search for an application once, when several kde programs I compiled from source installed themselves in
There is whole bunch of third party applications for windows that are distributed as zip files rather than executable installers. For those, you have to create the menus and icons yourself.
Finally, one big thing that always drives me nuts on windows is the lack of sensible hierarchy in the main menu. On linux, I have all editors in Applications->Editors, all graphics stuff in Applications->Graphics etc. On windows I have one giant main menu with everything on it, and if things are grouped into sub-menus, they are usually grouped and labeled by the name of the company that makes the software, which is completely useles.
Just because these guys were unable to do it, it doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact, there are large solar ovens capable to melt glass and aluminium. In the article you point at, they say thay could only reach 280 F. I don't know what they were doing, but I have just seen a middle school science project in which the kid got 280 F using about 100 small flat hand mirrors mounted on a square piece of plywood.
And how exactly do you propose to fix it?
It can get even more sad and frightening:
;) I finally got out of there). Once I took my kids to a planetarium show in a local children science museum. The volunteer running the show talked for a while about stars, constellations etc. Towards the end of the show she asked "how did all the stars get there?" and she immediately provided the answer: "God put them there!"
I lived in Indiana for several years (thank god
Ignoring the obvious reading comprehension mistake (17 per cent \neq 17 cents), even small differences in prices are bad. Look at it from the point of wiew of somebody owning a competing restaurant in the same area. Your costs are roughly the same, and so are your prices. You may work hard to keep your prices 5 cents lower than your competition, and you honestly list correct prices on your website (paying somebody the whole time to keep it updated). Wouldn't you be pissed off?
Suppose you want to meet with some 15-20 people for dinner. You look at the website, see low prices, so you sent everybody e-mail "let's meet at such and such, I'll be there at 7". You know that some people cannot show up till 7:30, but you figure you can start ordering and having few drinks...
You come at 7, get in, take your coats off, look at the menu - ooops, the low prices you saw on the website are nowhere to be found. What are your options?
You can stay and pay the higher prices.
You can get up, put on your coats and go somewhere else, leaving a message for your friends and hoping they will get it.
You can get up, put on your coats and freeze your ass out on the pavement in front of the place for half an hour until everybody shows up.
None of those sound very good to me.
Contact the company hosting the site and ask them to remove it? Plys buy a shot-gun to chase away all other of those "web master" con-men offering you to make a website for you?
Sweet! Do you know about WIMS?
That's too bad. I don't think I can use it until they fix that.
I agree. While ago, I did a little bit of work on a system that was suposed to translate computer manuals from Czech to Russian. I remember it did fairly good job translating technical manuals, but even though it was designed to be quite general translating engine, when we tested it with non-technical texts, the results were often less than satisfactory. Vocabulary was definitely part of it.
The sentence that is often missing in articles like this one is "Before proceeding further, make sure you have a back-up copy of your house".
Nope. Links does not have vi navigation and numbering of links and form fields, at least not as easy to use as lynx. I find lynx much easier to use. It also seems to be much more stable.
Your mailman is probably making a magnetic card reader right now.
Just couple of points:
You said:
1) Remembering windows size/positions. This drives me nuts. I've read that the reasoning behind this is for the most efficient use of the desktop (e.g. you launch a 2nd term and it positions itself beside the 1st term instead of overlapping). Sounds good, but in practice it makes me a less efficient user. Back in my windows days, I liked that whenever I launched the file browser it was always in the same position where I left it. I could rely on this and be ready to click whereever I needed. Same with the file dialog, calculator or whereever. I EXPECTED them to be in a certain position and thus I could work faster/more efficiently. I think maybe a compromise on this would be the default should be that gnome remembers size/position for all apps unless the developer of an app explicitly coded an app not to follow this behaviour. So the wm is the default unless the app says otherwise. I can see the benefit of autopositioning maybe with terms, but for most other apps it just makes me slower and gets in the way. As it stands I feel like I never know where an app will be when it launches.
I am not sure I understand your suggestion. When Gnome remembers the positions of your windows, it means that they will always open at the same place, right? Isn't that what you want? (I must admit I don't use gnome, so I am not sure about this, but this is what I would expect when you say "remember position"). On the other hand, autopositioning will try to place windows at some smart location (e.g. to minimize overlap), so they pop-up at some unexpected place, but it is likely you won't have to move them around manually too much.
I think there isn't a best way. It depends on application, or even individual windows. I want a window that will be around for a long time to be placed somewhere where it does not interfere with other windows. OTOH, windows that I wil use briefly and then close them would be better in a known location, so I know where to expect them.
Luckilly, there are window managers that let me do exactly that. And regardless of a window manager, you can always specify geometry on the command line.
As far as your suggestion to allow developers to specify where to open a window, there are ways to do that. Luckily, almost nobody uses them, and decent window managers include an option to ignore such developers' suggestions. The problem with such settings is that the developer have no idea how my desktop is organized, so the window is almost certainly going to show up somewhere where it is totally in the way. This setting should not be used by developers, it should be a USER setting! An option where you can say "I want this application to always open right here at the same place". And as I said, there are ways to do that, even though it should be much easier than it is.
2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle.
And a good thing, too. Alt key is in a place where I often hit it by mistake. As Alt key is a modifier, it does not matter. But it it was a toggle, it would be a mess.
Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu.
If you change that, I'll scream! This is clearly a question of habit, but I am used to ESC to get out of places.
Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.
I think I actually agree with you here. Being
these people can explain everything to us. You see, here I am, spending sleepless nights worrying about what Linux "needs", and so on, and this guy has it all figured out! I just don't understand why people can't just listen to him! C'mon! Work together! Or you will be all half baked!
Thank you!
how about talking mostly hairless bible-quoting humanoids? Maybe that would help. But then, I am not sure that could be really called evolution.
Holy shit! So that's what the guys in Redmond were trying to do the whole time! So I guess all the anti-trust trials were just - ehm - testing?
so that people can take pictures in the park again.
Try saying to the guards: "Would you guys please cover the bean for few minutes so I can take a picture of my family here?"
Are you telling me that if I tutor somebody in a public park and charge for it, I need to have the freaking city's permission? What about if I give my students an extra review session in a public park? I work for a public university, but the students do pay tuition. Is that a commercial operation? What if I go there and paint a picture which I subsequently sell? And what about somebody going to the park to work on a book they are going to publish? What's the difference between that and snapping pictures?