can someone explain the reference so we can laugh and/or say "cool" too?
Sure. It's from Mobile Suit Gundam (the older Universal Century stuff--not the newfangled alternate universes).
In the series', Minovsky Particles, when scattered in large amounts over an area (also called an I-Field), block radar, sonar, and pretty much every detection system except for visuals (cameras, naked eye, etc.). Well, infrared isn't entirely blocked, but it's scrambled enough so that it's not really useful.
That's a good part of the reason I love Gundam...there's so much really cool psuedoscience there. Mmmm..anime and hard sci-fi in one...geek heaven.
OK so what do you use to develop for a Zaurus?
Yeah sure you can make an ncurses app, but what if you want it to integrate nicely?
So yeah you have some choice but for a commercial app I'd still go with commercial QTopia as would anyone with a bit of common sense..
Well, for one, Java is available for embedded platforms (both Linux/Zaurus and WinCE/PocketPC, IIRC).
Second, Qt/Embedded, just like Qt/X11 and Qt/Mac, is only non-free if your app is also non-free (as in speech, not beer). If you're developing an GPL app, Qt is available under the GPL (there's also the QPL, but I'm not sure if Qt/Embedded is also available under it).
Let's start with the shell--zsh is by far the best one I've used. It has everything.
Moving on, Links (web browser) and Naim (AIM/ICQ/IRC client) rock. The only issue with the former is that Links doesn't support cookies, so I have Lynx in case I want to post on/. or something.
I don't have a console mail client on my machine--I have other methods of getting my email. For accessing my email account with my uni, I ssh into my uni's shell account and use pine from there or I use Links to access the Squirrelmail setup on my web server (over HTTPS, of course). To access my fastmail.fm account, I just use Links to access their web interface (they support both web and IMAP access for free).
For downloading stuff, I use giFTcurs, the btdownloadcurses.py BitTorrent client, and the venerable wget, depending on what I'm looking for and where I'm downloading from.
And, for the part that will generate the most flamage, my text editor of choice: Joe! Its interface is just as simple as nano, but with more features, such as find/replace and decent copy/paste, using text selection. On a related note, I use most as my pager--coloured man pages are good.
Hmm...now I have an urge to find out how to make live CDs, so I can make a ``CLI survival kit'' live CD. Well, maybe not, as I'm too bloody lazy, but it's an idea...
But why aren't a lot of these open source projects labelled a little more clearly?
No different than many proprietary apps, really.
Let's see...from Microsoft, we have Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, and Visual Studio, just to name a few. Windows, Frontpage, and Exchange might also fall into this category. I'm sure you can find tons more examples from other products too...both Windows software and Mac software.
Why do people think it is the wireless providers fault when the phone doesn't work indoors?
Wireless providers DO NOT guarantee service inside buildings. How do you know your building doesn't have a bunch of metal surrounding you and in effect make a virtual faraday cage?
If you read the rest of my post, you'll see that I talked to two people in the same building and on the same floor. Both of them have good service, and both even use the same type of signal (GSM). The only difference? The provider.
Oh, and my phone worked before I moved. In fact, I moved to a different apartment in the same complex, but in a different building and on a different floor. That means that Cingular's service is uneven even within the same apartment complex. How pathetic is that? Move four buildings south and Cingular's service significantly weakens, while everyone else's is fine.
Of course the problem is with personal numbers, rather than office-based ones. Of course your work is one thing that defines you (bob.thompson@company.com), as does your physical location bob.thompson@london.uk. But not everyone has a job, and location based identifiers don't make much sense for mobile numbers. Any solutions?
Same way people have email addresses now. They buy a domain name, get a DynDNS name (what I currently use), or they sign up with an alias provider that sets them up with a username at the provider's domain which redirects to their phone. The user will just have to choose an address when they get their phone service activated.
Another idea: tie domains to the phone provider. Thus, we'll have john.doe@verizon.com, jane.smith@sbc.com, etc.
And, for the record, I think DNS for VoIP is a cool idea. Only question is whether or not it'll use the same DNS namespace as the rest of the Internet, or if it'll use its own.
Because if it's anywhere near as bad as their normal phone service, you'll never be able to connect.
I just moved into a new apartment (about a week and a half ago), and my phone, with Cingular service, isn't much more functional than a paperweight now.
There are about three spots in my apartment I get any signal at all, and I have to be standing up to do so (one spot is right at my couch, so I can test this).
I thought it was because GSM sucks, but that was dispelled after I talked to two of my neighbours, both on the same floor as me--one has AT&T (now owned by Cingular, but they still probably use their old equipment), and the other has T-Mobile. Both are getting great signals, and both providers use GSM--it looks like the problem is entirely Cingular's fault.
Ach--why the hell did I have to get a new phone in December, thus renewing my two-year contract? I'm this close to hiring a lawyer to bully/harrass Cingular into releasing me from my contract...
By any chance, does anyone know anything about how to boost power to the internal antenna of a Sony Ericsson T226, or if doing so will matter signal-wise?
Re:Will there be an official build of GTK2+XFT?
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
·
· Score: 1
You can disable XFT antialiasing! From GNOME: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Fonts.
Except that I'm not a Gnome user. I emerged it once, to check it out, but I don't use it regularly, nor would I ever want to.
My preferred method of disabling XFT, and thus antialiasing, in GTK apps is by doing (as root):
cd/etc
grep -r GDK_USE_XFT *
then changing all GDK_USE_XFT=1 values I find to GDK_USE_XFT=0, and finally restarting X.
Thing is, an XFT-enabled Firefox build acts up big time if GDK_USE_XFT is set to 0. Most apps behave normally with this, but for some reason, Firefox distorts the hell out of all my fonts. The only way to get around it is by using a non-XFT-enabled build.
Thankfully, Gentoo has the moznoxft USE flag, but the ebuild for 0.9 has some problems with it. The Mozilla apps also take much longer to compile than most other apps due to their immense size (tarball is roughly 30MB), so I don't like having to compile it.
Re:Will there be an official build of GTK2+XFT?
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Funny...Mozilla has a GTK1/no-XFT build, and you want a GTK2+XFT one. Firefox has a GTK2+XFT build, and I want a non-XFT one. Funny how our opinions are complete opposites here (well, not entirely opposite--I do like GTK2, but only because it works with the Qt-Engine and GTK1 doesn't).
Anyway, why would you want XFT? It generates nauseating, headache-inducing fonts. Thankfully, the mozilla-firefox-bin in Portage seems to not use XFT, but the ebuild is a tad buggy.
First, the `m' should be capitalised. `M' is for mega- (1000000 times), `m' is for milli- (1/1000).
Second, Mbs means megabits times seconds, not per second. It should either be Mbps or Mb/s. The former is used much more commonly, so let's go with that.
Yeah, I know it's a minor nitpick, but it's irking me, and I had to get it off my chest.
I agree with you on some points...one of the reasons old Mac OS had a spatial interface was because hard drive sizes were small. Not much you could store on a drive that was less than a quarter of a gigabyte in size.
Once multi-GB drives started becoming popular, people started realising how bad spatial was. Eventually, Apple wised up, thankfully.
I have my downloads sorted pretty deeply, and the prospect of having a window open for each directory scares me.
From experience, the command line, using zsh-style tab completion, is the single most efficient file manager I've ever used. Konqueror is also nice--I quite like the ability to split a single window into multiple panes, each one viewing a different folder. K3b (KDE's CD burner, for those who don't know) also uses a similar paradigm, but limited to two panes (source and destination)--it was very good, and really helped me when I was backing things up a few months ago when I switched distros.
I've never tried NeXT's triple-column file manager, or its successor, column view in Mac OS X, but it also sounds like a good concept along the lines of Konqueror's panes.
[OT note: nice little bit of irony that I'm replying to you, considering both of our names]
More like the wave of the past. Mac OS had it for years, since the 1980s (whenever they replaced MFS with HFS), before finally getting rid of this outdated concept with Mac OS X.
Spatial may have worked when hard drives were small and people couldn't keep many files. Now, with larger hard drives, spatial makes navigation impossible. I couldn't imagine navigating most of my home directory, with files carefully organised by category, sub-category, etc. multiple levels deep, with a spatial file manager.
Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.
An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.
No kidding.
Funny how this thread here is the only place where I've heard about anything like this. Most places people are talking about KDE, they're either praising the UI or are talking about other aspects of KDE (and usually in the positive).
Actually, I was referring to GTK's godawful, toylike rendering engine more than I was referring to app design. It really makes me ill to look at.
I'll give you that Konqueror is a tad excessive, but I don't mind it. And I love KDE's abundance of options--after reading some of my last posts siblings, I prolly spent a bit too much time talking about how much I dislike GTK's rendering, and not enough on how much I dislike the GNOME desktop.
I like clutter. Wait--scratch that--I like useful clutter (with a dash of fun clutter as well). I like features. I like options. I like control. I feel crippled in any environment that doesn't give me that, and I hate feeling crippled. I also don't like it when things appear empty--it makes me feel like something's supposed to go there, but it's not there, and it drives me nuts.
If you don't like clutter on your desktop, you'd probably faint if you were to look at mine. Since I'll not Slashdot my server, I'll just describe it in the next paragraph.
First off, I have three Kicker panels--one on the left, at ``Normal'' size, and two on the bottom: one at ``Normal'' size, the other at ``Small'' size. All three are full of buttons, options, and applets. I count 32 clickable icons in my left panel alone. If you were to minimise all open windows, you'd see that I have GKrellM and two SuperKaramba applets running (no desktop icons, however--they're useless, IMO). One SuperKaramba applet shows the weather, the other displays a Fortune message that updates every 60 seconds. GKrellM has most options enabled, plus a plugin or two.
Back to the point--some people here said they don't like KDE because it feels too crowded. I don't like GNOME because it feels too empty. That, and the rendering engine sucks hard.
I feel just the opposite. I think Gnome's interface is elegant and KDE's inteface, while very colorful, it cluttered and knobby.
I can't put my finger on what it is, but there is something about KDE's interface that makes me angry. That may sound dumb, but I can only use KDE for a short while because it is emotionally exhausting to me and always leaves me feeling irritated.
Hmm...my thoughts are exactly the opposite of yours. To me, GTK/GNOME apps just look clunky and childish...like someone just slapped some widgets together on a screen. Like it's not a real program. Even the widgets by themselves don't even look real--they look like something someone scribbled.
Qt/KDE apps, on the other hand, look sleek. It looks like it's a real program, and not something that was slapped together. The widgets have real definition to them.
It's not something theme-dependent either. I've seen some decent GTK themes (ThinIce comes to mind)--hell, I even use the GTK-Qt-Engine, which uses the current Qt theme as a drawing backend, and the apps all have the same ``fake, slapped-together'' feel to them. Conversely, I've seen some pretty ugly Qt themes (Keramik, IMO, is the quintessential ``ugly Qt theme''), and the apps all feel ``real'' and well-crafted.
And I've not even gotten started on the desktops--GNOME, to me, is feature-bare and using it makes me feel like I'm crippled. KDE, on the other hand, is perfect for me.
With the way people move from their ISP from service to service, its nice to have a consistent email address as you float around.
But why use Hotmail? There are other, better free mail services out there.
Fastmail.FM is a good one--pretty reliable, and it even has free IMAP access. You have to provide your own SMTP server tho, if you don't want to pay Fastmail.FM for one--but that's ok...I don't know of an ISP that doesn't provide for one, anyway.
Its web-based interface is also pretty sweet--it's very sleek and minimalist (far more than Hotmail or Yahoo), and you have a choice of style sheets to choose from. You can even upload your own CSS if you don't like any of the pre-made ones.
Do you have some examples of what this will let us do? I know nothing about Avalon, so I've little idea of the potential of Avalon or Cairo, or any examples of useful implementations. On the screenshots for Waimea all I see is a nice OSX kind of look.
I've since lost the link, but I once saw a video demonstrating some of the capabilities of Avalon. It's a fully vector-based graphics rendering system. The video started with simple things like rotating buttons and text at angles.
Then it went onto doing things such as using full-motion video as the background of a dialog box. There were even transparent controls on top of the video (a text box and a push button, IIRC). And the UI all ran smoothly--none of the lag or slowdown you'd expect if you were to do something like that.
Really impressive stuff, and the sooner Linux can get something similar running on it, the better.
(And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)
Ever heard of DistCC? It's pretty useful for setting up Gentoo on a low-power system--might be a tad easier than using a chroot.
And I love Gentoo's ``installer'' (and I use that word loosely)--it lets me customise my system more than any other installer, and the documentation is virtually perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm...Firefox 0.9 on Linux gives the message: ``http could not be found. Please check the name and try again.''
So it's at least not a universal bug.
Good point--for this to take off, there should be an option to encrypt notes (SSL, perhaps?) with a password needed to decrypt them.
can someone explain the reference so we can laugh and/or say "cool" too?
Sure. It's from Mobile Suit Gundam (the older Universal Century stuff--not the newfangled alternate universes).
In the series', Minovsky Particles, when scattered in large amounts over an area (also called an I-Field), block radar, sonar, and pretty much every detection system except for visuals (cameras, naked eye, etc.). Well, infrared isn't entirely blocked, but it's scrambled enough so that it's not really useful.
That's a good part of the reason I love Gundam...there's so much really cool psuedoscience there. Mmmm..anime and hard sci-fi in one...geek heaven.
Now someone just needs to invent Minovsky Particles, and we'll be set.
Cue the FUD about PHP being broken under Apache2...
*sigh*
OK so what do you use to develop for a Zaurus? Yeah sure you can make an ncurses app, but what if you want it to integrate nicely?
So yeah you have some choice but for a commercial app I'd still go with commercial QTopia as would anyone with a bit of common sense..
Well, for one, Java is available for embedded platforms (both Linux/Zaurus and WinCE/PocketPC, IIRC).
Second, Qt/Embedded, just like Qt/X11 and Qt/Mac, is only non-free if your app is also non-free (as in speech, not beer). If you're developing an GPL app, Qt is available under the GPL (there's also the QPL, but I'm not sure if Qt/Embedded is also available under it).
I think it blocks gaim also.
Yup. At least 0.77 is blocked (it tells me my password is incorrect)--I've not emerged 0.78 yet, so I don't know if it's blocked too.
Let's start with the shell--zsh is by far the best one I've used. It has everything.
/. or something.
Moving on, Links (web browser) and Naim (AIM/ICQ/IRC client) rock. The only issue with the former is that Links doesn't support cookies, so I have Lynx in case I want to post on
I don't have a console mail client on my machine--I have other methods of getting my email. For accessing my email account with my uni, I ssh into my uni's shell account and use pine from there or I use Links to access the Squirrelmail setup on my web server (over HTTPS, of course). To access my fastmail.fm account, I just use Links to access their web interface (they support both web and IMAP access for free).
For downloading stuff, I use giFTcurs, the btdownloadcurses.py BitTorrent client, and the venerable wget, depending on what I'm looking for and where I'm downloading from.
And, for the part that will generate the most flamage, my text editor of choice: Joe! Its interface is just as simple as nano, but with more features, such as find/replace and decent copy/paste, using text selection. On a related note, I use most as my pager--coloured man pages are good.
And, finally, who could forget NetHack?
Hmm...now I have an urge to find out how to make live CDs, so I can make a ``CLI survival kit'' live CD. Well, maybe not, as I'm too bloody lazy, but it's an idea...
But why aren't a lot of these open source projects labelled a little more clearly?
No different than many proprietary apps, really.
Let's see...from Microsoft, we have Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, and Visual Studio, just to name a few. Windows, Frontpage, and Exchange might also fall into this category. I'm sure you can find tons more examples from other products too...both Windows software and Mac software.
Why do people think it is the wireless providers fault when the phone doesn't work indoors?
Wireless providers DO NOT guarantee service inside buildings. How do you know your building doesn't have a bunch of metal surrounding you and in effect make a virtual faraday cage?
If you read the rest of my post, you'll see that I talked to two people in the same building and on the same floor. Both of them have good service, and both even use the same type of signal (GSM). The only difference? The provider.
Oh, and my phone worked before I moved. In fact, I moved to a different apartment in the same complex, but in a different building and on a different floor. That means that Cingular's service is uneven even within the same apartment complex. How pathetic is that? Move four buildings south and Cingular's service significantly weakens, while everyone else's is fine.
Of course the problem is with personal numbers, rather than office-based ones. Of course your work is one thing that defines you (bob.thompson@company.com), as does your physical location bob.thompson@london.uk. But not everyone has a job, and location based identifiers don't make much sense for mobile numbers. Any solutions?
Same way people have email addresses now. They buy a domain name, get a DynDNS name (what I currently use), or they sign up with an alias provider that sets them up with a username at the provider's domain which redirects to their phone. The user will just have to choose an address when they get their phone service activated.
Another idea: tie domains to the phone provider. Thus, we'll have john.doe@verizon.com, jane.smith@sbc.com, etc.
And, for the record, I think DNS for VoIP is a cool idea. Only question is whether or not it'll use the same DNS namespace as the rest of the Internet, or if it'll use its own.
Because if it's anywhere near as bad as their normal phone service, you'll never be able to connect.
I just moved into a new apartment (about a week and a half ago), and my phone, with Cingular service, isn't much more functional than a paperweight now.
There are about three spots in my apartment I get any signal at all, and I have to be standing up to do so (one spot is right at my couch, so I can test this).
I thought it was because GSM sucks, but that was dispelled after I talked to two of my neighbours, both on the same floor as me--one has AT&T (now owned by Cingular, but they still probably use their old equipment), and the other has T-Mobile. Both are getting great signals, and both providers use GSM--it looks like the problem is entirely Cingular's fault.
Ach--why the hell did I have to get a new phone in December, thus renewing my two-year contract? I'm this close to hiring a lawyer to bully/harrass Cingular into releasing me from my contract...
By any chance, does anyone know anything about how to boost power to the internal antenna of a Sony Ericsson T226, or if doing so will matter signal-wise?
You can disable XFT antialiasing! From GNOME: Applications->Desktop Preferences->Fonts.
/etc
Except that I'm not a Gnome user. I emerged it once, to check it out, but I don't use it regularly, nor would I ever want to.
My preferred method of disabling XFT, and thus antialiasing, in GTK apps is by doing (as root):
cd
grep -r GDK_USE_XFT *
then changing all GDK_USE_XFT=1 values I find to GDK_USE_XFT=0, and finally restarting X.
Thing is, an XFT-enabled Firefox build acts up big time if GDK_USE_XFT is set to 0. Most apps behave normally with this, but for some reason, Firefox distorts the hell out of all my fonts. The only way to get around it is by using a non-XFT-enabled build.
Thankfully, Gentoo has the moznoxft USE flag, but the ebuild for 0.9 has some problems with it. The Mozilla apps also take much longer to compile than most other apps due to their immense size (tarball is roughly 30MB), so I don't like having to compile it.
Funny...Mozilla has a GTK1/no-XFT build, and you want a GTK2+XFT one. Firefox has a GTK2+XFT build, and I want a non-XFT one. Funny how our opinions are complete opposites here (well, not entirely opposite--I do like GTK2, but only because it works with the Qt-Engine and GTK1 doesn't).
Anyway, why would you want XFT? It generates nauseating, headache-inducing fonts. Thankfully, the mozilla-firefox-bin in Portage seems to not use XFT, but the ebuild is a tad buggy.
200mbs (Yes, mega bits per second)
First, the `m' should be capitalised. `M' is for mega- (1000000 times), `m' is for milli- (1/1000).
Second, Mbs means megabits times seconds, not per second. It should either be Mbps or Mb/s. The former is used much more commonly, so let's go with that.
Yeah, I know it's a minor nitpick, but it's irking me, and I had to get it off my chest.
I agree with you on some points...one of the reasons old Mac OS had a spatial interface was because hard drive sizes were small. Not much you could store on a drive that was less than a quarter of a gigabyte in size.
Once multi-GB drives started becoming popular, people started realising how bad spatial was. Eventually, Apple wised up, thankfully.
I have my downloads sorted pretty deeply, and the prospect of having a window open for each directory scares me.
From experience, the command line, using zsh-style tab completion, is the single most efficient file manager I've ever used. Konqueror is also nice--I quite like the ability to split a single window into multiple panes, each one viewing a different folder. K3b (KDE's CD burner, for those who don't know) also uses a similar paradigm, but limited to two panes (source and destination)--it was very good, and really helped me when I was backing things up a few months ago when I switched distros.
I've never tried NeXT's triple-column file manager, or its successor, column view in Mac OS X, but it also sounds like a good concept along the lines of Konqueror's panes.
[OT note: nice little bit of irony that I'm replying to you, considering both of our names]
Spatial navigation is the wave of the future
More like the wave of the past. Mac OS had it for years, since the 1980s (whenever they replaced MFS with HFS), before finally getting rid of this outdated concept with Mac OS X.
Spatial may have worked when hard drives were small and people couldn't keep many files. Now, with larger hard drives, spatial makes navigation impossible. I couldn't imagine navigating most of my home directory, with files carefully organised by category, sub-category, etc. multiple levels deep, with a spatial file manager.
Ian Hickson mentions other crappy things about SVG in his blog (which I'll be nice and not link to from /. - learn to google)
Link right here.
Only, I would not want to force my users to this emotionally sucking UI; this UI with a high hate potential.
An amazing outcome: Let someone find out why it comes across with this load of aversion induction; finally correct this and we'd have a unified desktop.
No kidding.
Funny how this thread here is the only place where I've heard about anything like this. Most places people are talking about KDE, they're either praising the UI or are talking about other aspects of KDE (and usually in the positive).
Actually, I was referring to GTK's godawful, toylike rendering engine more than I was referring to app design. It really makes me ill to look at.
I'll give you that Konqueror is a tad excessive, but I don't mind it. And I love KDE's abundance of options--after reading some of my last posts siblings, I prolly spent a bit too much time talking about how much I dislike GTK's rendering, and not enough on how much I dislike the GNOME desktop.
I like clutter. Wait--scratch that--I like useful clutter (with a dash of fun clutter as well). I like features. I like options. I like control. I feel crippled in any environment that doesn't give me that, and I hate feeling crippled. I also don't like it when things appear empty--it makes me feel like something's supposed to go there, but it's not there, and it drives me nuts.
If you don't like clutter on your desktop, you'd probably faint if you were to look at mine. Since I'll not Slashdot my server, I'll just describe it in the next paragraph.
First off, I have three Kicker panels--one on the left, at ``Normal'' size, and two on the bottom: one at ``Normal'' size, the other at ``Small'' size. All three are full of buttons, options, and applets. I count 32 clickable icons in my left panel alone. If you were to minimise all open windows, you'd see that I have GKrellM and two SuperKaramba applets running (no desktop icons, however--they're useless, IMO). One SuperKaramba applet shows the weather, the other displays a Fortune message that updates every 60 seconds. GKrellM has most options enabled, plus a plugin or two.
Back to the point--some people here said they don't like KDE because it feels too crowded. I don't like GNOME because it feels too empty. That, and the rendering engine sucks hard.
It's so much easier to point them to 0.0.0.0.
I was agreeing with your post right up until this point. On many machines (mine included), 0.0.0.0 translates to 127.0.0.1.
I recommend finding a LAN-only IP that's not assigned to any machine on your network. I usually use 192.168.0.254 -- nothing on my network uses it.
I feel just the opposite. I think Gnome's interface is elegant and KDE's inteface, while very colorful, it cluttered and knobby. I can't put my finger on what it is, but there is something about KDE's interface that makes me angry. That may sound dumb, but I can only use KDE for a short while because it is emotionally exhausting to me and always leaves me feeling irritated.
Hmm...my thoughts are exactly the opposite of yours. To me, GTK/GNOME apps just look clunky and childish...like someone just slapped some widgets together on a screen. Like it's not a real program. Even the widgets by themselves don't even look real--they look like something someone scribbled.
Qt/KDE apps, on the other hand, look sleek. It looks like it's a real program, and not something that was slapped together. The widgets have real definition to them.
It's not something theme-dependent either. I've seen some decent GTK themes (ThinIce comes to mind)--hell, I even use the GTK-Qt-Engine, which uses the current Qt theme as a drawing backend, and the apps all have the same ``fake, slapped-together'' feel to them. Conversely, I've seen some pretty ugly Qt themes (Keramik, IMO, is the quintessential ``ugly Qt theme''), and the apps all feel ``real'' and well-crafted.
And I've not even gotten started on the desktops--GNOME, to me, is feature-bare and using it makes me feel like I'm crippled. KDE, on the other hand, is perfect for me.
With the way people move from their ISP from service to service, its nice to have a consistent email address as you float around.
But why use Hotmail? There are other, better free mail services out there.
Fastmail.FM is a good one--pretty reliable, and it even has free IMAP access. You have to provide your own SMTP server tho, if you don't want to pay Fastmail.FM for one--but that's ok...I don't know of an ISP that doesn't provide for one, anyway.
Its web-based interface is also pretty sweet--it's very sleek and minimalist (far more than Hotmail or Yahoo), and you have a choice of style sheets to choose from. You can even upload your own CSS if you don't like any of the pre-made ones.
Do you have some examples of what this will let us do? I know nothing about Avalon, so I've little idea of the potential of Avalon or Cairo, or any examples of useful implementations. On the screenshots for Waimea all I see is a nice OSX kind of look.
I've since lost the link, but I once saw a video demonstrating some of the capabilities of Avalon. It's a fully vector-based graphics rendering system. The video started with simple things like rotating buttons and text at angles.
Then it went onto doing things such as using full-motion video as the background of a dialog box. There were even transparent controls on top of the video (a text box and a push button, IIRC). And the UI all ran smoothly--none of the lag or slowdown you'd expect if you were to do something like that.
Really impressive stuff, and the sooner Linux can get something similar running on it, the better.
(And no, I wouldn't have tried to compile software on those boxes. I'd build the system in a chrooted environment on my destop and then tarball the sucker.)
Ever heard of DistCC? It's pretty useful for setting up Gentoo on a low-power system--might be a tad easier than using a chroot.
And I love Gentoo's ``installer'' (and I use that word loosely)--it lets me customise my system more than any other installer, and the documentation is virtually perfect.