The best idea is to fool the users. Keep the E icon for Internet Explorer, but have it point to the Firefox executable. That's idiot-proofing.
Clever idea, but it can backfire if they depend on a site that only works on IE. I tried something along those lines with one of my relatives, and his banking website wouldn't work. He was horribly freaked out because he thought I had "broken" his "bank account" and he thought he wouldn't be able to withdraw money while he was on a vacation he was leaving for in several days.
Well I explained what was wrong, but he didn't believe me so I spent about an hour on the phone trying first to explain how to open the site in IE, then trying to explain how to change the default browser to IE, then even trying to get him to simply delete Firefox. Unfortunately he was too stupid to figure it out, and I had to drive to his house and fix it for him.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm not going to install Firefox on people's machines anymore unless they know what I'm doing. If a luser is too thick skulled to figure out what a web browser is, then they deserve to be stuck with IE.
Wrong, Apple is ONLY making 4c per song on iTunes. It has been argued that iTunes was a loss leader to promote the iPod. if they open iTunes to other players, it may NOT be worth their intrests.
That's one reason they won't open up their Music Store to other portables, but there's another bigger reason for Apple not to open up their format that seems to go unnoticed for some reason.
If the iPod is the only player that can play the music you bought, you will be restricted to buying iPods forever unless you want to buy your music all over again in a new format.
Remember when the labels were trying to push for a a way to convert DRM'd AAC to DRM'd WMA? I wonder why it never happened...
Remember when Apple tried to shut down the PlayFair project? Everyone said "Oh, but Apple's not evil! The only reason they're doing that is because the record labels are going to shut down our precious store if the DRM is broken!"
Well apparently the labels had second thoughts, because the DRM is still broken and the iTMS is still up.
Long ago, I too was an Apple nut. I still buy stuff from them because I think the iPod is the best portable player out there and I think Mac OS X is the best desktop OS, but I've realized that they're not as benevolent as they seem on the surface.
The "Hydrogen Based Economy" is a pipe dream. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source as many people think. It's far more efficient to just use electricity to do stuff than to use electricity to create hydrogen and then use than hydrogen to do stuff, because the more steps and conversions you have the more energy is going to be lost.
Now at this point, somebody is going to point out that pure electric cars are more expensive or primitive or something. Let me point out that if there were a tenth the amount of research spent on electric cars as there are gas cars then battery capacity, mileage, time to recharge etc would be miles ahead of where they are now, and they would be much much cheaper than traditional gasoline engines. Gas engines today are incredibly complex, and the only reason they don't cost huge amounts of money is that they're in high demand and they're mass produced.
Maybe a few people will adopt this "other internet" because it's "more secure" or whatever, but I suspect very few people would run servers that don't accept connections from the real net. There'll always be people with older versions of Windows or people on other platforms who refuse to switch, and because of that I doubt anyone will give up support for the real net.
We've seen how hard it is to get the internet switched from IPv4 to IPv6. Imagine how hard things would be when you try and switch over the whole internet to something that's not even worth switching to! It just doesn't make sense. If the BIOS, OS, and network interface are "100% secure", why would you need a trusted internet?
Oh, and in regard to that comment about MS not supporting the real net, I highly doubt it. When you look at the kind of lengths they go to in order to ensure backwards compatability, it would seem very uncharateristic of them to go and drop support for the main reason many people currently use computers.
ANts is a really great concept, but it's never going to take off until it's usability is improved. Seriously, ANts has the worst gui of just about any application I've ever used. I've started learning GTK just so I can try to make something better.
For the time being, I think MUTE is a more pleasant program to use. MUTE's gui is a little weird too, but at least it's intuitive and it uses the native toolkit. ANts may have more features, but it's far too much of a pain for me to consider using it on a day to day basis. Besides the gui sucking, it's written in Java which means that I really can't do anything else with my machine while it's running. I hope that someday we'll see a file sharing app with all the features of ANts in a more convenient package...
The only problem I have with Xfce is that, no offense intended to the devs, its file manager is crude and poorly thought out.
I dislike xffm4 as well, but I've found you can replace it quite seamlessly with nautilus if you're willing to tweak some configuration files so that it starts up on login. It used to be a rather weighty file manager, but it's been getting some nice optimizations lately, and with spatial mode it compliments the unbloated philosophy of Xfce quite nicely.
It's not that I don't know how to edit menus, it's that the current process for doing so is not intuitive.
Sorry, when you mentioned "basic functionality" I assumed that you weren't aware you could edit the menu at all.
Shouldn't I be able to right-click the menu whose attributes I want to change instead?
Yeah, that's a good point, and something that's bothered me slightly in the past. I've gotten used to it, so I had forgotten that it had ever been confusing, but that's very true.
So I guess you're right, the menu system needs to be polished up a little, but I still don't agree it needs a menu editor app, it's just a little rough around the edges.
My suspicion is that a lot of the fault may actually be with gcc. From what I've gathered, the current version of gcc isn't very advanced in the optimization department. For example, there are threads sometimes on the blender message boards where people post unofficial builds created with Intel's compiler. They can generally render images at more than twice the speed of a gcc compiled version.
So if "things are just as bad as Windows XP", then the gnome people must be doing some really great optimization work to overcome the penalties of using gcc for compilation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they shouldn't be using gcc - from what I've heard, the next version will have some huge improvements - I'm just saying maybe the Gnome people don't deserve all the blame they've been getting.
who the hell do these people think they are anyway deserving the attention of congressmen? they don't even pay the campaign bills.
Oh. My. God. +5 Insightful?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that was supposed to be a joke. I sincerely hope it was supposed to be a joke. Comments like these can end up as self fulfilling prophecies if they're taken too seriously.
the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs.
Nevertheless, with the vast amounts of information on the hubs, there's no way it could have all been junk. Out of all that data, there must have been at least one Library worth of books, classical music, great movies etc.
Yes, most of the stuff on file sharing networks is trash, but it's a huge overgeneralization to say that it's just "Britney Spears and Gigli".
Probably not more than a few hundredths of one percent.
I wouldn't be so sure. The number of scrolls in The Library is estimated to have been somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. Now let's make a very generous allocation of 5MB for each scroll. I've got a 700 page PDF on my desktop that's only 2.5 MB, so this is probably a bit high, but I'd rather guess too high than too low.
5MB for each scroll times 700,000 scrolls comes up to about 3.5 terabytes. 5 hubs that each contained 40 petabytes of data is 200 petabytes. 200 petabytes divided by 3.5 terabytes is 58514.
In terms of raw data, they destroyed more than fifty thousand Libraries of Alexandria.
Now admitidly, scrolls are a more efficient medium for conveying information than movies, and the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs. Nevertheless, it makes our current culture seem hippocratic when you compare this sort of thing to the general opinion that the burning of The Library was a tragedy. Many of the manuscripts contained within The Library were aquired by means no more legitimate than today's file sharing; copying without permission.
That's a nice example and everything, but I think anyone who knows what 'ln -sf/dev/sda/dev/camera' would do, doesn't need to have the concept of mount points explained to them;)
Think of the complaints people made for sport shooting and hunting when gun restrictions (something most slashdotters seem to embrace) were enacted. Same basic premise, completely different reaction from the slashdot crowd.
People aren't upset because of the rocketry restrictions themselves, it's the reason for them that's drawing a negative reaction. If there were some kind of horrible accident involving model rockets, and a law were created that required you to have a license for launching them, it wouldn't create much of a stir. It's the absurd claim that model rockets could be used for terrorism that is causing an uproar.
I can confirm this. I have some songs where I stripped the DRM with an older version of Hymn, and they work fine. Songs that I stripped with the newer version of Hymn however, don't work.
I'm not quite sure why Apple did this. The reason the new version of Hymn leaves all the tags in is to discourage piracy, but I imagine the next version will probably revert to stripping all tags out. It seems like Apple is not only going to be pissing off a lot of people by doing this, but they're also going to be making piracy easier in the long term.
Well it's not that big of a deal if you're a Linux geek, but for a poor innocent person trying to switch away from Windows it could be enough to turn them off of Linux for a long time. I was hoping Fedora Core 2 would turn out to be a great distro for Linux noobs - free, easy to set up, and easy to use - but with the number of bugs I've been hearing about I think we'll have to wait for Fedora Core 3.
Slashdot Mirror
Clever idea, but it can backfire if they depend on a site that only works on IE. I tried something along those lines with one of my relatives, and his banking website wouldn't work. He was horribly freaked out because he thought I had "broken" his "bank account" and he thought he wouldn't be able to withdraw money while he was on a vacation he was leaving for in several days.
Well I explained what was wrong, but he didn't believe me so I spent about an hour on the phone trying first to explain how to open the site in IE, then trying to explain how to change the default browser to IE, then even trying to get him to simply delete Firefox. Unfortunately he was too stupid to figure it out, and I had to drive to his house and fix it for him.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm not going to install Firefox on people's machines anymore unless they know what I'm doing. If a luser is too thick skulled to figure out what a web browser is, then they deserve to be stuck with IE.
Not that I'm bitter or anything... :-P
That's one reason they won't open up their Music Store to other portables, but there's another bigger reason for Apple not to open up their format that seems to go unnoticed for some reason.
If the iPod is the only player that can play the music you bought, you will be restricted to buying iPods forever unless you want to buy your music all over again in a new format.
Remember when the labels were trying to push for a a way to convert DRM'd AAC to DRM'd WMA? I wonder why it never happened...
Remember when Apple tried to shut down the PlayFair project? Everyone said "Oh, but Apple's not evil! The only reason they're doing that is because the record labels are going to shut down our precious store if the DRM is broken!"
Well apparently the labels had second thoughts, because the DRM is still broken and the iTMS is still up.
Long ago, I too was an Apple nut. I still buy stuff from them because I think the iPod is the best portable player out there and I think Mac OS X is the best desktop OS, but I've realized that they're not as benevolent as they seem on the surface.
Now at this point, somebody is going to point out that pure electric cars are more expensive or primitive or something. Let me point out that if there were a tenth the amount of research spent on electric cars as there are gas cars then battery capacity, mileage, time to recharge etc would be miles ahead of where they are now, and they would be much much cheaper than traditional gasoline engines. Gas engines today are incredibly complex, and the only reason they don't cost huge amounts of money is that they're in high demand and they're mass produced.
Warcraft III can run with OpenGL, though it uses DirectX by default on Windows.
We've seen how hard it is to get the internet switched from IPv4 to IPv6. Imagine how hard things would be when you try and switch over the whole internet to something that's not even worth switching to! It just doesn't make sense. If the BIOS, OS, and network interface are "100% secure", why would you need a trusted internet?
Oh, and in regard to that comment about MS not supporting the real net, I highly doubt it. When you look at the kind of lengths they go to in order to ensure backwards compatability, it would seem very uncharateristic of them to go and drop support for the main reason many people currently use computers.
For the time being, I think MUTE is a more pleasant program to use. MUTE's gui is a little weird too, but at least it's intuitive and it uses the native toolkit. ANts may have more features, but it's far too much of a pain for me to consider using it on a day to day basis. Besides the gui sucking, it's written in Java which means that I really can't do anything else with my machine while it's running. I hope that someday we'll see a file sharing app with all the features of ANts in a more convenient package...
Looks like someone has.
I dislike xffm4 as well, but I've found you can replace it quite seamlessly with nautilus if you're willing to tweak some configuration files so that it starts up on login. It used to be a rather weighty file manager, but it's been getting some nice optimizations lately, and with spatial mode it compliments the unbloated philosophy of Xfce quite nicely.
Sorry, when you mentioned "basic functionality" I assumed that you weren't aware you could edit the menu at all.
Shouldn't I be able to right-click the menu whose attributes I want to change instead?
Yeah, that's a good point, and something that's bothered me slightly in the past. I've gotten used to it, so I had forgotten that it had ever been confusing, but that's very true.
So I guess you're right, the menu system needs to be polished up a little, but I still don't agree it needs a menu editor app, it's just a little rough around the edges.
Adding items;
Open the menu you want to add an item to.
Right click.
Choose "Entire menu->Add new item to this menu".
Editing items;
Right click on the item you want to edit.
Choose "Properties".
Deleting items;
Right click on the item you want to delete.
Choose "Remove this item".
Gnome doesn't have a menu editor application because it doesn't need one.
So if "things are just as bad as Windows XP", then the gnome people must be doing some really great optimization work to overcome the penalties of using gcc for compilation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they shouldn't be using gcc - from what I've heard, the next version will have some huge improvements - I'm just saying maybe the Gnome people don't deserve all the blame they've been getting.
Oh. My. God. +5 Insightful?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that was supposed to be a joke. I sincerely hope it was supposed to be a joke. Comments like these can end up as self fulfilling prophecies if they're taken too seriously.
Yeah sorry about that, if you look farther up in the replies you can see I've corrected myself. I meant to say "hypocritical".
the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs.
Nevertheless, with the vast amounts of information on the hubs, there's no way it could have all been junk. Out of all that data, there must have been at least one Library worth of books, classical music, great movies etc.
Yes, most of the stuff on file sharing networks is trash, but it's a huge overgeneralization to say that it's just "Britney Spears and Gigli".
Hehehe, thanks for the correction, I'll never live that one down...
I wouldn't be so sure. The number of scrolls in The Library is estimated to have been somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. Now let's make a very generous allocation of 5MB for each scroll. I've got a 700 page PDF on my desktop that's only 2.5 MB, so this is probably a bit high, but I'd rather guess too high than too low.
5MB for each scroll times 700,000 scrolls comes up to about 3.5 terabytes. 5 hubs that each contained 40 petabytes of data is 200 petabytes. 200 petabytes divided by 3.5 terabytes is 58514.
In terms of raw data, they destroyed more than fifty thousand Libraries of Alexandria.
Now admitidly, scrolls are a more efficient medium for conveying information than movies, and the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs. Nevertheless, it makes our current culture seem hippocratic when you compare this sort of thing to the general opinion that the burning of The Library was a tragedy. Many of the manuscripts contained within The Library were aquired by means no more legitimate than today's file sharing; copying without permission.
Hmmmm...it used to just be the soviet russians, but it looks like it's the canadians now too, eh?
bash$ ln -sf /dev/sda1 /dev/camera
/dev/camera /mnt/camera
bash$ mount
One "/" to root them all , eh ?
That's a nice example and everything, but I think anyone who knows what 'ln -sf /dev/sda /dev/camera' would do, doesn't need to have the concept of mount points explained to them ;)
Why would they bother though? It's not like anybody else's products really need that kind of feature nowadays anyway...
Yeah, that was downright cruel if you ask me. I completely fell for that, and it hurts to fall that far.
People aren't upset because of the rocketry restrictions themselves, it's the reason for them that's drawing a negative reaction. If there were some kind of horrible accident involving model rockets, and a law were created that required you to have a license for launching them, it wouldn't create much of a stir. It's the absurd claim that model rockets could be used for terrorism that is causing an uproar.
...And I've never seen a more inappropriate sig for a comment than yours ;-)
I'm not quite sure why Apple did this. The reason the new version of Hymn leaves all the tags in is to discourage piracy, but I imagine the next version will probably revert to stripping all tags out. It seems like Apple is not only going to be pissing off a lot of people by doing this, but they're also going to be making piracy easier in the long term.
Well it's not that big of a deal if you're a Linux geek, but for a poor innocent person trying to switch away from Windows it could be enough to turn them off of Linux for a long time. I was hoping Fedora Core 2 would turn out to be a great distro for Linux noobs - free, easy to set up, and easy to use - but with the number of bugs I've been hearing about I think we'll have to wait for Fedora Core 3.
Wow, I hope they never get their hands on Civilization...