Since MS fixed the "* html" hack and a few others yet forgot to fix the rest of CSS they shit on, we're going to have fun with this one...
Only if you're a web developer that's been living under a rock lately.
For the best part of last year proeminent webdev figures have adviced people to stop using the * html hack. The better alternative is to make use of the conditional comments supported by all versions of Explorer and conditionally include an extra.css file (or several) on top of the others, that only IE will see.
Those conditionals allow you to pinpoint various IE versions accurately and also let your website validate properly (since all the IE hacks are included via a stylesheet which is technically commented out).
I'm not giving you links, do your own homework people.
Most people don't have voluntary "work flow models" when it comes to computers or web browsing. They have Pavlov's dog reflexes, hardwired by years of use. They "know" where everything in their browser is and they use it as such, no matter how awkward.
I'm afraid that you don't get non-computer-savvy people to switch by preaching. You change their browser, you import their bookmarks, you slap on a Windows XP theme and tell them to suck it. Of course they'll be better off in the long run, but don't expect them to recognize the difference.
They simply don't have what it takes. They're cattle, and cattle don't thank you when you fix their barn.
A machine that cost $1500 back in 2000, no it can't run a 2005/2006 release of an OS.
That's too broad a statement. I can run the latest Ubuntu fine on a computer with 256 megs of RAM and 800 MHz CPU, and use it as a regular desktop machine (web, mail, office).
Globe ending? Perhaps not. Damaging enough to wreck the global economy and cause significant impact to millions if not billions of people, I would certainly say it's possible.
Which brings us to another issue: fusion bombs. All the distructive power, none of the long-lasting ill effects. "Clean" nuclear weapons, so to speak. I wonder how their entrance into widespread use, which will happen at some point, will change our view on nuclear weapons. Most of the dread surrounding fission bombs is caused by the terrible side effects of radiation. Won't their absence make the powers that be more trigger happy? You can level a country with either fission or fusion bombs, but with fusion you can still move in afterwards.
In otherwords, China would not survive a first strike (its fixed sites would be hit) and does not have the to capacity to launch an effective first strike.
I wouldn't bet on that. It has been concluded quite a few decades ago that nuclear weapons are pretty much the only thing that can keep China's potentially huge army (in terms of numbers) in check. China knows that as well. In their place, would you really give up the only thing that restores or overtips the balance? Wouldn't you keep at least one nuclear launch site functional, hidden somewhere, capable of retaliation? One is all it takes.
What are the chances that behind Dunc-Tank is a company such as Microsoft? Offer money to some Debian volunteers but not others, then stand back and watch them turn against each other. Quite a poisoned apple. And you end up crippling one of the most important Linux distributions around, one of the oldest, one that stands at the forefront of many things that Linux also stands for, such as proof that an open, decentralized system is viable. And all that for crumbs as far as money goes. I don't know, it's so insidious it's almost beautiful.
Screw that! What about Santa!? I want my pressies damnit!
Why do you think they all rustle for control of the passage? Wait for Santa on a dark december night with a squadron of marines and you got it made, man...
About MPlayer: 1. MPlayer devs ARE patronizing at best, and the users list is usually not much better than the dev list. 2. Yes, MPlayer devs insist that you use the latest version, preferrably CVS, otherwise they won't even talk to you. 3. gcc 2.96 was never "broken". Its problem was introducing compatibility problem later on. 4. Poor bastard must've gotten used to those 99% video players that come with a graphical interface by default. 5. Who's flamebaiting now?
As for Gentoo, others have already pointed out how ridiculous it is to keep on thinking Gentoo is easy and nice to use. It's not, it's for medium and advanced users or people who have the patience to be run through hoops. I have LFS experience under my belt and still I was impressed by the guy's patience. I no longer have it, I must admit. Nowadays I like to get stuff done, not tweak a machine to death. Give me a distro that installs in 30 minutes max.
[..]it gives me EXACTLY what I want: complete control and customizability from the ground up and high performance on old hardware.
You must be shitting me. How the hell does it give you high performance when you're compiling stuff, on old hardware even? That's some pretty skewed logic. "I'll just abuse this machine constantly for days so that when I come and use it I'll gain several milliseconds."
As for complete control, that's pretty much bullshit too. Gentoo does not offer anything of the kind. Gentoo gives you a compile-from-source framework taken to extreme, but that's it. You can't break out of it anymore than you can break out of what a binary distro imposes upon you. The ability to customize features of the installed packages is pretty much the only "control" you get with Gentoo.
Tell me, have many of the people who sing praises to their masterful use of -O3 ever tried something truly innovative with their Gentoo box? How many have tried to replace their init system? How many have assembled and tweaked their own desktop environment from bits and pieces, without relying on the Gnome or KDE defaults? How many have tried to force a package like the old XFree to get installed into its own directory instead of being mingled with all the others? How many have tweaked their box to stop using FHS directories? How many have enabled SELinux or preloading or overlayed encrypted filesystems or other cool features by hand, without being spoon-fed by the system?
Unless Gentoo users do something like that, they are just monkeys who feed flags they don't understand into their machines and pat each other on the back. Many Linux users of many distro's do that, but they have the decency to not consider themselves uber-1337 for it.
Sorry for being an asshole but it gets rather tyresome at some point to see the old "complete control and performance" myth being flinged around and around.
It was my very first attempt at Linux, and it worked great. In fact the difficulty of the installation process causes me to recommend it to new users, because it forces newbies to learn the ins and outs of the system from the get-go.
Interestingly enough, the above recommends you as both a masochist and a sadist at the same time. Nice!
What exactly has Joe Barr said that is false, both about Gentoo and about MPlayer? As far as I'm concerned he's right on both accounts: they are an usability nightmare from a newcomer's point of view. Hell, I've been using MPlayer for years and I have to keep around the man page, the documentation and a shell script tailored to automate some stuff in order to get the most out of it.
You can argue that Gentoo is not for newbies, but that contradicts the famous "Gentoo helps you learn Linux" statement. You can argue that MPlayer is not for newbies, but then what use is a multimedia player that's only for geeks?
What Joe Barr has done is pointing out something that deep down all serious Linux users know: quite often you'll run into software or distro's that assume a completely out of the ordinary level of knowledge from the part of the user.
I say it comes with the territory, but let's not stick our heads in the sand, call reviewers names, tell them to stop using the software and generally pretend that there's no problem.
This entire kind of attitude has always struck me as a bit odd, frankly. OK, Linux is a meritocracy and people are valued the more they contribute, but there's a difference between that and "put up or shut up". If every developer was the only user of his nifty piece of software, where would we be? Do we really don't want any users that aren't already knowledgeable geeks themselves? Because if that's so then let's stop the hypocritical bullshit about eventually "taking over the world". You can't do that without the users at large. There are only so many geeks.
Kubuntu works fine on a 700 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM. That's not gonna cut it for XP, not really.
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
[..]I have to wait 30 seconds for it to stat the entire freaking directory[..]
This that's bad? Get this: over my many years of using Linux, my ~/ has quite a lot of dot files and entries in it. The file picker opens in my home dir, of course, so every bloody time I open it it stats all those hidden files. The punch line? It doesn't even show them! It's all for nothing!
I don't freakin' want MORE work by any means. They'd better make sure IE7 is closer to the standard because otherwise I'm gonna run amok one of these days and kill everybody in sight. I don't want yet "another" browser to hack CSS and JavaScript for.
Slashdot Mirror
If they pick on ie7.com then it's gonna be all over the media. More publicity for Firefox.
For the best part of last year proeminent webdev figures have adviced people to stop using the * html hack. The better alternative is to make use of the conditional comments supported by all versions of Explorer and conditionally include an extra
Those conditionals allow you to pinpoint various IE versions accurately and also let your website validate properly (since all the IE hacks are included via a stylesheet which is technically commented out).
I'm not giving you links, do your own homework people.
Most people don't have voluntary "work flow models" when it comes to computers or web browsing. They have Pavlov's dog reflexes, hardwired by years of use. They "know" where everything in their browser is and they use it as such, no matter how awkward.
I'm afraid that you don't get non-computer-savvy people to switch by preaching. You change their browser, you import their bookmarks, you slap on a Windows XP theme and tell them to suck it. Of course they'll be better off in the long run, but don't expect them to recognize the difference.
They simply don't have what it takes. They're cattle, and cattle don't thank you when you fix their barn.
I cannot believe you'd forget goatse.cx.
Ask yourselves, does software become increasingly more complex because it does more complicated stuff, or because it tends to become a kitchen sink?
Come on, now. The latest versions of Firefox don't cra
What are the chances that behind Dunc-Tank is a company such as Microsoft? Offer money to some Debian volunteers but not others, then stand back and watch them turn against each other. Quite a poisoned apple. And you end up crippling one of the most important Linux distributions around, one of the oldest, one that stands at the forefront of many things that Linux also stands for, such as proof that an open, decentralized system is viable. And all that for crumbs as far as money goes. I don't know, it's so insidious it's almost beautiful.
About MPlayer:
1. MPlayer devs ARE patronizing at best, and the users list is usually not much better than the dev list.
2. Yes, MPlayer devs insist that you use the latest version, preferrably CVS, otherwise they won't even talk to you.
3. gcc 2.96 was never "broken". Its problem was introducing compatibility problem later on.
4. Poor bastard must've gotten used to those 99% video players that come with a graphical interface by default.
5. Who's flamebaiting now?
As for Gentoo, others have already pointed out how ridiculous it is to keep on thinking Gentoo is easy and nice to use. It's not, it's for medium and advanced users or people who have the patience to be run through hoops. I have LFS experience under my belt and still I was impressed by the guy's patience. I no longer have it, I must admit. Nowadays I like to get stuff done, not tweak a machine to death. Give me a distro that installs in 30 minutes max.
As for complete control, that's pretty much bullshit too. Gentoo does not offer anything of the kind. Gentoo gives you a compile-from-source framework taken to extreme, but that's it. You can't break out of it anymore than you can break out of what a binary distro imposes upon you. The ability to customize features of the installed packages is pretty much the only "control" you get with Gentoo.
Tell me, have many of the people who sing praises to their masterful use of -O3 ever tried something truly innovative with their Gentoo box? How many have tried to replace their init system? How many have assembled and tweaked their own desktop environment from bits and pieces, without relying on the Gnome or KDE defaults? How many have tried to force a package like the old XFree to get installed into its own directory instead of being mingled with all the others? How many have tweaked their box to stop using FHS directories? How many have enabled SELinux or preloading or overlayed encrypted filesystems or other cool features by hand, without being spoon-fed by the system?
Unless Gentoo users do something like that, they are just monkeys who feed flags they don't understand into their machines and pat each other on the back. Many Linux users of many distro's do that, but they have the decency to not consider themselves uber-1337 for it.
Sorry for being an asshole but it gets rather tyresome at some point to see the old "complete control and performance" myth being flinged around and around.
Interestingly enough, the above recommends you as both a masochist and a sadist at the same time. Nice!
What exactly has Joe Barr said that is false, both about Gentoo and about MPlayer? As far as I'm concerned he's right on both accounts: they are an usability nightmare from a newcomer's point of view. Hell, I've been using MPlayer for years and I have to keep around the man page, the documentation and a shell script tailored to automate some stuff in order to get the most out of it.
You can argue that Gentoo is not for newbies, but that contradicts the famous "Gentoo helps you learn Linux" statement. You can argue that MPlayer is not for newbies, but then what use is a multimedia player that's only for geeks?
What Joe Barr has done is pointing out something that deep down all serious Linux users know: quite often you'll run into software or distro's that assume a completely out of the ordinary level of knowledge from the part of the user.
I say it comes with the territory, but let's not stick our heads in the sand, call reviewers names, tell them to stop using the software and generally pretend that there's no problem.
This entire kind of attitude has always struck me as a bit odd, frankly. OK, Linux is a meritocracy and people are valued the more they contribute, but there's a difference between that and "put up or shut up". If every developer was the only user of his nifty piece of software, where would we be? Do we really don't want any users that aren't already knowledgeable geeks themselves? Because if that's so then let's stop the hypocritical bullshit about eventually "taking over the world". You can't do that without the users at large. There are only so many geeks.
Kubuntu works fine on a 700 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM. That's not gonna cut it for XP, not really.
10,000 points will definitely get you a glasses prescription.
I don't freakin' want MORE work by any means. They'd better make sure IE7 is closer to the standard because otherwise I'm gonna run amok one of these days and kill everybody in sight. I don't want yet "another" browser to hack CSS and JavaScript for.
I'm looking to start a campaign for making the next release the "Flatulent Flamingo". I think it has potential. People are going to remember THIS one.
Is it just apt? Or do their release system (stable/testing/unstable and so on) is part of it too?