It's a whole different widget look! Aaaargh! If Linux can't make any headway on the desktop because GTK+ widgets don't look like Qt widgets, then why are we letting Microsoft get away with.NET widgets that don't look like MFC widgets?
Task-based" user interface. What a brilliant innovation that is
I absolutely agree. The task based interface of WinXP sucks. It's almost like Microsoft changed its motto from "where do you want to go today", to "what do we want you to do today." If you're the average Windows user (with 2.4 children and 1.3 cars) then it may work for you. Otherwise it just gets in the way.
In the meantime, decades old usability problems in Windows remain unaddressed. Many of these descend from the days when Windows was a single-tasking single-user system. When will we get a UI that does not assume I'm going to be running one single program at a time? When will I get a file manager that allows me to manipulate multiple files simultaneously? When will I get a MS window manager with more functionality than twm?
I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, but I still recognize the installer as being poor. It definitely needs updating. The problem is that sysinstall was a quick hack that got entrenched. It's better than some installers, but leave a lot to be desired.
It doesn't need to be a GUI, but it could definitely benefit from dumping the current dialog library and switching to something else.
For instance, no one should be allowed to drive a car unless they can also tear down and rebuild an engine.
So close, yet so, so far away.
No one should be allowed to drive a car unless they can demonstrate their ability to properly handle it when a tire blows out. They shouldn't be allowed to drive in the snow or rain unless they've demonstrated how to handle it during a skid. They don't need to know how to build an engine, but they do need to know how to check the oil, radiator, battery, etc.
Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000...
We're actually seeking candidates with three years of XP experience. We also brought in an instructor with a resume listing five years of.NET experience.
Sometimes the requirements aren't impossible, just extremely improbable. When I applied here for an entry SQA job several years ago, I was told that I need to have a Bachelors degree in Software Quality Assurance. At the time, there was only one college in the US that offered such a degree. Everyplace else was just a techschool certificate. I was told by the HR rep to first get a degree, then get 5 years of experience, then come back and reapply.
Out of 18 SQA personnel, none had these qualifications. If he could have listed a masters or doctorate in Software Quality Assurance, I'm sure he would have.
I went over his head to the manager with the req, and got hired. The HR rep never did talk to me afterwards.
As a BSD fan, I must disagree. The GPL shares these attributes with the BSD license. While I personally would not want to license my own work under the GPL, it give me as an end-user exactly the same freedoms as the BSD.
Probably the worst attribute of the GPL is not a part of the license itself, but the attitude of some people that the GPL is a "members-only" license.
Well, yes. But so what? Any exercise of free speech supports free speech. Examples include personal websites, diaries, whining on Slashdot, and muttering under your breath at bus stops.
I'm not seeing a lot of articles about muttering under your breath at bus stops being free speech though. Aren't we making this molehill into a mountain?
Of course Emacs is an editor! But Emacs isn't an operating system. I thought that was self-explanatory. Are you now arguing that the system must be called "GNU/Linux" just because it happens to incude Emacs? What if I don't choose to install Emacs? Or if I do, shouldn't I refer to the system as "Emacs/Linux" instead?
Interesting that you brought up Standard Oil, since it's an example of company that took a monopoly away from someone else. It became a monopoly because it provided a cheaper service than the monopoly it replaced.
What monopoly did the SOBs replace? There were a few, but the biggest were the railroads. With cheap and abundant gasoline, trucks became a viable way to ship goods long distance, and broke the stranglehold the railroads had on the economy. But natural monopolies are fragile things. The more Standard Oil bought out its competitors, the more incentive there was to get into the business. You could get RICH being bought out by them!
p.s. "SOB" stands for "Standard Oil Boy", a name their employees used to wear with pride:-)
Actually, Microsoft is a monopoly, just a different kind. They're a natural monopoly, in that the marketplace elevated them to that status, rather than government decree.
But you are right in that absent that government decree, the marketplace can take that monopoly away from them any time it likes.
Before you move to Europe, do some looking around first. They're just as capitalistic as the US. The only real difference is that their trappings of socialism are tacked on in a different pattern than they are in the US.
I work for a major German corporation, and they're no different than Microsoft, except for the the lack of several billion in of petty cash. We're obeying an anti-trust order only because it's cheaper to do so than to go to court again.
Not at all! That would imply that the OS is just the kernel. But as we all know, because RMS told us, the OS includes compilers, editors, sorting and searching utilities, and of course, a chess program.
The ends do not justify the means. While I fully agree that ending the Saddam regime is a Good Thing(tm), the means to accomplish were not.
Saddam's failure to document that his WMD's had been destroyed in accordance with UN resolutions was not a justification for starting this war. Yet that was our stated reason. All the other little "reasons" were just emotional frosting to get everyone all gung-ho about it.
Warfare is only justified for the defense of the citizens. Iraq did not attack us, nor were they prepared to. They were not holding our citizens captive, nor were they planning to. Though there was some evidence that they had not stopped their research into weapons of mass destruction, there were other means (not requiring a UN imprimatur) that could have been used instead.
While I'm sure your esteemed fire extinguisher does an excellent job of extinguishing fires, it does a very lousy job of preventing them in the first place.
Attacking other nations who have not first attacked us is wrong. But by focusing on Bush pushes this moral fact aside. Is the initiating of war justified as long as the instigator isn't Bush? That seems to be the message.
Frankly, I am very suspicious that the current anti-war demonstrators are not the least bit concerned about initiating warfare, simply because these same people were remarkably quiet when Clinton went into Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo. In neither of those actions was the US attacked or even threatened. Heck, they didn't even have the lame excuse of targeting terrorists.
He wrote the first versions of GCC, but I doubt much of his code is still in the current versions. The vast majority of GNU was written by people other than RMS.
And of course, a lot of "GNU" software was never written for GNU, but only incorporated/adopted afterwards. Examples include GTK+ and (yes) Emacs.
All of GNU's stuff, excepting HURD, works with all UNIX and unix-like operating systems. Which makes me very suspicious that "The GNU System" isn't an operating system at all.
They don't want change, they only want to hate Bush. This is obvious from their rants. For one example, go to an anti-war rally and look at the placards being waved and speeches being made. Three quarters of them focus solely on Bush, NOT the war. Vidal's article is the same. He doesn't say ANYTHING as to why electronic voting is bad, but he says a lot about his hating Bush.
Read through the posts under this article. They range all they way from comparing him to Hitler, to who contributed to his campaign, and to the low intelligence of those that voted for him. What you won't find unless you dig really deep, is any substantial opinion on the administration's policies. It's obvious to me that people don't have Bush's policies, they just hate Bush.
It's very irrational. They only place you're going to find substantiative criticism of Bush is on the "right" side of the aisle from figures like Ron Paul. Heck, I've more objective criticism regarding Bush from Hannity than I have from Kennedy! This decade's US politics are are about hatred, not issues, and that's a very dangerous place to be.
Umm, Thomas Paine? After all, he's the one that exported American style limited government and democracy to France, and may have helped contribute to the French revolution that overthrew the monarchy. That the revolution rapidly degenerated into a new tyranny is a different story.
Although the modern concept of liberty has some minor dependencies on the writing of Voltaire, it also has major dependencies on the writings of Paine, Locke and Jefferson.
I'm looking at switching to Linux because Windows SUCKS. But Linux can't really be very good; I mean, almost all of the Slashdot editors (Slashdot being owned, of course by "the sinister OSDN keiretsu") admit that they use Mac OS X.
I can think of a few reasons why a *some* big name Linux supporters use OSX. First, the laptop. The Powerbook is a simply awesome piece of hardware for the price. On the other hand, PC laptops are bizarre beasts with strange proprietary hardware that can be very difficult to shoehorn Linux into. Heck, they're impossible to shoehorn Windows into with the driver disk from the laptop manufacturer. Second, following on the heels of the first, unified hardware/software is a thing of beauty. NeXTStep was better on the NeXT box. BeOS was better on the BeBox. With OSX, you don't have to worry about the quirks of a generic OS running on commodity hardware. Linux, being generic by design, can't focus and specialize on just one platform. If there were a specialize LinuxBox that everything from the kernel to KDE and GNOME were written specifically for, it would be awesome. But it will never happen. Finally, OSX has tons of eyecandy. It's fun to use. It's cool to own. Your Windows using friends go gaga when they see you minimize an application.
That said, I use FreeBSD on my desktops, with a dual-boot for Windows to account for a couple of specialty Windows-only applications that Wine can't handle. It's more than suitable for the desktop if you're up to the administration side. For some of the "newbie" Linux distros, like Lindows, Lycoris or Xandros, it ought to be a piece of cake for people only slightly above average in the technical department.
p.s. You don't need to switch to Linux. Try dual booting instead. Keep your Windows around and put Linux (or BSD) on another partition or drive. Then play around with it.
In the book FORDO stands up despite the pain and tells them off.
In the book Frodo stops once he gets across the Bruinen and let's the nazgul come for him. He wasn't trying to get away. He was delirious. If it weren't for Elrond's and Gandalf's intervention, they would have had him ten seconds later.
Eomer had 1 platoon...
Yes, but Gandalf rounded up the army that was routed at the fords of Isen. Have you actually read the books? Or are you just badly restating objections you heard elsewhere?
HURONS HURONS HURONS
Now I know you didn't read the books. There were no American Indian tribes anywhere in Tolkien's works. As for the Huorns they're in TTT:EE. We're they too important to leave out? No. They were part of the "mop up" brigade, and not essential to the *movie* adaptation.
I had fits about the Ents becasuse the whole "tricking Fangorn" thing was about as dumb as anything in the whole world.
I somewhat agree. But if you think about it, the Ents deciding not to get involved with the affairs of men is completely in character. That's what the movie audience (and Merry and Pippin) are concerned about. We don't know from the context of the movie that Saruman has cut down vast swaths of Fangorn Forest. Certainly you don't expect the the audience to believe that the Ents would wage war on Saruman just because a few of his orcs cut down a few branches to make a campfire back in an earlier scene? Showing Treebeard stumbling upon the destruction saved about five to ten minutes of boring exposition.
I had REAL fits about Faramir.
Actually, I'm glad they made Faramir into a human being, instead of this superman who can resist the power of the ring even when Gandalf cannot. Put on your logic cap. What works in the book doesn't necessarily work in the movie. "You guys have the one ring of power, I'm stuck here in a major war that could be the complete destruction of my nation, and we're losing badly. No problem, here have some some of our dwindling supplies and be on your way." If you haven't read the books, that would make absolutely no sense!
I had a fucking sezuire when Frodo showed the ring to the Nazgul in the end of TTT
So glad to know that you won't be seeing the next movie. I dont' know if I could endure more of your whining.
Books and movies are completely separate mediums. In the books we have Tolkien telling us that the ring is evil and corrupting. But in the movies the audience needs to see it. What would be twenty times worse than Frodo showing the ring to the Nazgul would be some stupid narrator popping up every ten minutes to remind us how tempting that ring is and how it corrupts all who possess it. But this scene showed visually, in crystal clarity, the changes that Frodo is undergoing. He's succumbing to the power of the ring. He's going out of his mind.
Seriously, what did you want? To have some professor of Medieval Literature stand up and recite the books word for word to the camera? I'll bet you're still pissed that Sam didn't throw an apple at Bill Ferny way back in the first movie. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a whole different widget look! Aaaargh! If Linux can't make any headway on the desktop because GTK+ widgets don't look like Qt widgets, then why are we letting Microsoft get away with .NET widgets that don't look like MFC widgets?
Task-based" user interface. What a brilliant innovation that is
I absolutely agree. The task based interface of WinXP sucks. It's almost like Microsoft changed its motto from "where do you want to go today", to "what do we want you to do today." If you're the average Windows user (with 2.4 children and 1.3 cars) then it may work for you. Otherwise it just gets in the way.
In the meantime, decades old usability problems in Windows remain unaddressed. Many of these descend from the days when Windows was a single-tasking single-user system. When will we get a UI that does not assume I'm going to be running one single program at a time? When will I get a file manager that allows me to manipulate multiple files simultaneously? When will I get a MS window manager with more functionality than twm?
I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, but I still recognize the installer as being poor. It definitely needs updating. The problem is that sysinstall was a quick hack that got entrenched. It's better than some installers, but leave a lot to be desired.
It doesn't need to be a GUI, but it could definitely benefit from dumping the current dialog library and switching to something else.
For instance, no one should be allowed to drive a car unless they can also tear down and rebuild an engine.
So close, yet so, so far away.
No one should be allowed to drive a car unless they can demonstrate their ability to properly handle it when a tire blows out. They shouldn't be allowed to drive in the snow or rain unless they've demonstrated how to handle it during a skid. They don't need to know how to build an engine, but they do need to know how to check the oil, radiator, battery, etc.
Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000...
.NET experience.
We're actually seeking candidates with three years of XP experience. We also brought in an instructor with a resume listing five years of
Sometimes the requirements aren't impossible, just extremely improbable. When I applied here for an entry SQA job several years ago, I was told that I need to have a Bachelors degree in Software Quality Assurance. At the time, there was only one college in the US that offered such a degree. Everyplace else was just a techschool certificate. I was told by the HR rep to first get a degree, then get 5 years of experience, then come back and reapply.
Out of 18 SQA personnel, none had these qualifications. If he could have listed a masters or doctorate in Software Quality Assurance, I'm sure he would have.
I went over his head to the manager with the req, and got hired. The HR rep never did talk to me afterwards.
As a BSD fan, I must disagree. The GPL shares these attributes with the BSD license. While I personally would not want to license my own work under the GPL, it give me as an end-user exactly the same freedoms as the BSD.
Probably the worst attribute of the GPL is not a part of the license itself, but the attitude of some people that the GPL is a "members-only" license.
personal websites support freedom of speech
Well, yes. But so what? Any exercise of free speech supports free speech. Examples include personal websites, diaries, whining on Slashdot, and muttering under your breath at bus stops.
I'm not seeing a lot of articles about muttering under your breath at bus stops being free speech though. Aren't we making this molehill into a mountain?
Of course Emacs is an editor! But Emacs isn't an operating system. I thought that was self-explanatory. Are you now arguing that the system must be called "GNU/Linux" just because it happens to incude Emacs? What if I don't choose to install Emacs? Or if I do, shouldn't I refer to the system as "Emacs/Linux" instead?
So it turned out to be Empire instead of Chess. Sue me for my bad memory. But he's still saying that a game is part of an OS.
Actually, in his GNU Manifesto, he said that his operating system would have a chess program.
Interesting that you brought up Standard Oil, since it's an example of company that took a monopoly away from someone else. It became a monopoly because it provided a cheaper service than the monopoly it replaced.
:-)
What monopoly did the SOBs replace? There were a few, but the biggest were the railroads. With cheap and abundant gasoline, trucks became a viable way to ship goods long distance, and broke the stranglehold the railroads had on the economy. But natural monopolies are fragile things. The more Standard Oil bought out its competitors, the more incentive there was to get into the business. You could get RICH being bought out by them!
p.s. "SOB" stands for "Standard Oil Boy", a name their employees used to wear with pride
Actually, Microsoft is a monopoly, just a different kind. They're a natural monopoly, in that the marketplace elevated them to that status, rather than government decree.
But you are right in that absent that government decree, the marketplace can take that monopoly away from them any time it likes.
Before you move to Europe, do some looking around first. They're just as capitalistic as the US. The only real difference is that their trappings of socialism are tacked on in a different pattern than they are in the US.
I work for a major German corporation, and they're no different than Microsoft, except for the the lack of several billion in of petty cash. We're obeying an anti-trust order only because it's cheaper to do so than to go to court again.
Not at all! That would imply that the OS is just the kernel. But as we all know, because RMS told us, the OS includes compilers, editors, sorting and searching utilities, and of course, a chess program.
Actually, no matter how you define the OS, without applications, it's still pretty useless.
However, with just the kernel, a trivial bit of infrastructure, and busybox, I can make a damened useful emergency recovery floppy.
The ends do not justify the means. While I fully agree that ending the Saddam regime is a Good Thing(tm), the means to accomplish were not.
Saddam's failure to document that his WMD's had been destroyed in accordance with UN resolutions was not a justification for starting this war. Yet that was our stated reason. All the other little "reasons" were just emotional frosting to get everyone all gung-ho about it.
Warfare is only justified for the defense of the citizens. Iraq did not attack us, nor were they prepared to. They were not holding our citizens captive, nor were they planning to. Though there was some evidence that they had not stopped their research into weapons of mass destruction, there were other means (not requiring a UN imprimatur) that could have been used instead.
While I'm sure your esteemed fire extinguisher does an excellent job of extinguishing fires, it does a very lousy job of preventing them in the first place.
Attacking other nations who have not first attacked us is wrong. But by focusing on Bush pushes this moral fact aside. Is the initiating of war justified as long as the instigator isn't Bush? That seems to be the message.
Frankly, I am very suspicious that the current anti-war demonstrators are not the least bit concerned about initiating warfare, simply because these same people were remarkably quiet when Clinton went into Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo. In neither of those actions was the US attacked or even threatened. Heck, they didn't even have the lame excuse of targeting terrorists.
He wrote the first versions of GCC, but I doubt much of his code is still in the current versions. The vast majority of GNU was written by people other than RMS.
And of course, a lot of "GNU" software was never written for GNU, but only incorporated/adopted afterwards. Examples include GTK+ and (yes) Emacs.
All of GNU's stuff, excepting HURD, works with all UNIX and unix-like operating systems. Which makes me very suspicious that "The GNU System" isn't an operating system at all.
They don't want change, they only want to hate Bush. This is obvious from their rants. For one example, go to an anti-war rally and look at the placards being waved and speeches being made. Three quarters of them focus solely on Bush, NOT the war. Vidal's article is the same. He doesn't say ANYTHING as to why electronic voting is bad, but he says a lot about his hating Bush.
Read through the posts under this article. They range all they way from comparing him to Hitler, to who contributed to his campaign, and to the low intelligence of those that voted for him. What you won't find unless you dig really deep, is any substantial opinion on the administration's policies. It's obvious to me that people don't have Bush's policies, they just hate Bush.
It's very irrational. They only place you're going to find substantiative criticism of Bush is on the "right" side of the aisle from figures like Ron Paul. Heck, I've more objective criticism regarding Bush from Hannity than I have from Kennedy! This decade's US politics are are about hatred, not issues, and that's a very dangerous place to be.
Who does America owe the statue of Liberty to?
Umm, Thomas Paine? After all, he's the one that exported American style limited government and democracy to France, and may have helped contribute to the French revolution that overthrew the monarchy. That the revolution rapidly degenerated into a new tyranny is a different story.
Although the modern concept of liberty has some minor dependencies on the writing of Voltaire, it also has major dependencies on the writings of Paine, Locke and Jefferson.
Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?
I have a problem with Bush. But I'm not so arrogant to think that people who don't agree with me are stupid, inept or brainwashed.
I'm looking at switching to Linux because Windows SUCKS. But Linux can't really be very good; I mean, almost all of the Slashdot editors (Slashdot being owned, of course by "the sinister OSDN keiretsu") admit that they use Mac OS X.
I can think of a few reasons why a *some* big name Linux supporters use OSX. First, the laptop. The Powerbook is a simply awesome piece of hardware for the price. On the other hand, PC laptops are bizarre beasts with strange proprietary hardware that can be very difficult to shoehorn Linux into. Heck, they're impossible to shoehorn Windows into with the driver disk from the laptop manufacturer. Second, following on the heels of the first, unified hardware/software is a thing of beauty. NeXTStep was better on the NeXT box. BeOS was better on the BeBox. With OSX, you don't have to worry about the quirks of a generic OS running on commodity hardware. Linux, being generic by design, can't focus and specialize on just one platform. If there were a specialize LinuxBox that everything from the kernel to KDE and GNOME were written specifically for, it would be awesome. But it will never happen. Finally, OSX has tons of eyecandy. It's fun to use. It's cool to own. Your Windows using friends go gaga when they see you minimize an application.
That said, I use FreeBSD on my desktops, with a dual-boot for Windows to account for a couple of specialty Windows-only applications that Wine can't handle. It's more than suitable for the desktop if you're up to the administration side. For some of the "newbie" Linux distros, like Lindows, Lycoris or Xandros, it ought to be a piece of cake for people only slightly above average in the technical department.
p.s. You don't need to switch to Linux. Try dual booting instead. Keep your Windows around and put Linux (or BSD) on another partition or drive. Then play around with it.
I, for one, plan to stand outside the theatre on opening night...
Dude, you need to get a life. After that, you need to get a sense of proportion.
In the book FORDO stands up despite the pain and tells them off.
In the book Frodo stops once he gets across the Bruinen and let's the nazgul come for him. He wasn't trying to get away. He was delirious. If it weren't for Elrond's and Gandalf's intervention, they would have had him ten seconds later.
Eomer had 1 platoon...
Yes, but Gandalf rounded up the army that was routed at the fords of Isen. Have you actually read the books? Or are you just badly restating objections you heard elsewhere?
HURONS HURONS HURONS
Now I know you didn't read the books. There were no American Indian tribes anywhere in Tolkien's works. As for the Huorns they're in TTT:EE. We're they too important to leave out? No. They were part of the "mop up" brigade, and not essential to the *movie* adaptation.
I had fits about the Ents becasuse the whole "tricking Fangorn" thing was about as dumb as anything in the whole world.
I somewhat agree. But if you think about it, the Ents deciding not to get involved with the affairs of men is completely in character. That's what the movie audience (and Merry and Pippin) are concerned about. We don't know from the context of the movie that Saruman has cut down vast swaths of Fangorn Forest. Certainly you don't expect the the audience to believe that the Ents would wage war on Saruman just because a few of his orcs cut down a few branches to make a campfire back in an earlier scene? Showing Treebeard stumbling upon the destruction saved about five to ten minutes of boring exposition.
I had REAL fits about Faramir.
Actually, I'm glad they made Faramir into a human being, instead of this superman who can resist the power of the ring even when Gandalf cannot. Put on your logic cap. What works in the book doesn't necessarily work in the movie. "You guys have the one ring of power, I'm stuck here in a major war that could be the complete destruction of my nation, and we're losing badly. No problem, here have some some of our dwindling supplies and be on your way." If you haven't read the books, that would make absolutely no sense!
I had a fucking sezuire when Frodo showed the ring to the Nazgul in the end of TTT
So glad to know that you won't be seeing the next movie. I dont' know if I could endure more of your whining.
Books and movies are completely separate mediums. In the books we have Tolkien telling us that the ring is evil and corrupting. But in the movies the audience needs to see it. What would be twenty times worse than Frodo showing the ring to the Nazgul would be some stupid narrator popping up every ten minutes to remind us how tempting that ring is and how it corrupts all who possess it. But this scene showed visually, in crystal clarity, the changes that Frodo is undergoing. He's succumbing to the power of the ring. He's going out of his mind.
Seriously, what did you want? To have some professor of Medieval Literature stand up and recite the books word for word to the camera? I'll bet you're still pissed that Sam didn't throw an apple at Bill Ferny way back in the first movie. Get over it.