"France also had a naive millitary command, and very little resistance. That said, who can blame them? WWII was still a very nasty memory, and none could face the prospect of war again. It was very easy to belive that Hitler only wanted a little bit of Europe, and then he'd be happy."
I know. It's so terrible how that zombie Hitler came back and invaded France again! Damned nazi supermen:-(
since ice is less dense than water, less ice means lower levels. Put water in a cup. Freeze it. Note the little mountains that form.
This is also why ice floats, because it is less dense than water. Saturn is also less dense than water, but I doubt you will find a tub of water big enough to float Saturn in.
While Google seems to have removed its per link click code (which I filtered with Privoxy anyways), they still have the Javascript at the top meant to hide it from the status bar:
function ss(w){window.status=w;return true;} function cs(){window.status='';} function ga(o,e){if (document.getElementById){a=o.id.substring(1); p = "";r = "";g = e.target;if (g) { + t = g.id;f = g.parentNode;if (f) {p = f.id;h = f.parentNode;if (h) r = h.id;}} else{h = e.srcElement +;f = h.parentNode;if (f) p = f.id;t = h.id;}if (t==a || p==a || r==a) return true;location.href=document.getElementById(a).href }}
Maybe they only turn on the indiviual link checking sometimes, perhaps with a random sample?
Mormonism started because of Joseph Smith who made up stories about jesus coming to North America to teach natives, about how he could only read the tablets because of special glasses. Most people of the day thought him a kook, and he and his band of followers were pushed around until they hit Salt Lake City, Utah. He claimed it was the promised land, and they settled.
Then, after he was found to have been sleeping around, he claimed that god came and told him that everyone should practice bigamy.
Mormonism is a cult, the same way every other religion is a cult.
Cult:
2. A system of religious belief and worship.
The people who start it are almost always people looking for personal power, or as an excuse for behaviours they like to perform. While good people can be religious (as pretty much every religion has some good rules inside of it), religion itself is usually someone's vehicle to something else before it's something that's good for the general public.
I respect people's beliefs about religion; I just happen to think that most people have the wrong belief.
I say religion spreads because people are too willing to accept lies which seem like the truth. You can take a true statement: there is no wind on the moon. Then you can twist it: there is no wind on the moon, therefore the moon landing is fake since the flag looks like it flapped. See how easy it was?
RMS is not being given credit at all. The GNU contributors (of which RMS is a part) is being given credit, when you say GNU/Linux.
If you have just the kernel, only the kernel running your system, then you have a pure, only-Linux system. Every disturibution I can think of is based on the GNU/Linux marriage. I don't see why this is so hard for people to understand, the entire system is more than a kernel.
The book was meant to be used as an oracle for school teachers and other people wishing to teach their non-luddite, but-still-easily-mislead friends about the truth behind the moon landings.
The luddite people who think the landings were a hoax have a lot of FUD which is easy to believe on the surface of it, but once you actually learn about the details, they fall apart. Placing all these details in one place is very beneficial.
Look at how far major religions got because a lot of people believed them for a long time. The Mormons were in the 19th century what scientologists are today. Bad memes spread easily among the uneducated.
I wish desktop editing was so easy. Any changes are masked behind undo features, as they should be. The chances you'll undo to a certain level decrease as each day passes, so a timed expire of older undo versions is just another neat feature of this OS he proposes.
Need a really old version? That's what backups and centralized version control are for. ReiserFS wants to address some of this.
"My idea of hell is an editor that auto-saves code that I'm in the process of hacking up in an editor to let me think about the problem over top of code that already works."
I guess you don't use source control, VMS, or ReiserFS.
"My idea of hell is a platform where every document I've ever opened has no way to close it and no way to exit the application that's got it up in a window, because there;s no 'Quit' or 'Exit' option."
You've also never owned a Palm Pilot.
"My idea of hell is not being able to drag something in a GUI from one folder to another, because they have an obscure "parent of my parent" relationship, which makes me have to cut and paste the document, instead of just dragging it, because I on;'y [sic] have one file manager, which is running all the time, instead of a "file picker"."
And you've never used the OS/2 WPS or its file template creation folder, or undershood how this fellow was writing obout how to extend that idea further with branching (see version control above).
"My idea of hell is symbolic links that get changed when I rename a file out from under them because the OS thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it's impossible to replace a file with another, while keeping, and the old one, unless you copy it, rename the original, rename the copy, and then edit the original (instead of replacing it)."
And you've never used hardlinks!
So why, exactly, are you such a highly moderated oracle of knowledge if you've not used the current incantation of the things you rant about? Oh, right, because/. moderators have this crack habit.
Before you react and freak out about something, take a step back and think. Your work habtis will be changed, because the way you work will be changed. Of course if you try and think of your current work habits over top of a new way of working, you'll see problems that aren't there.
That's what ~/.tmp is for. Have it culled of files older than a week automatically. If you need something, you can get it out. Otherwise it will be removed eventually. You won't even have to name it, as the rest of its meta-data attributes will index it in your new OS.
Why is this bad? I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to shift from CLI in GUI to true GUI use.
When you have data files and execution files, all with the extension hidden, many sharing colourful icons (as data files have the same icon as a program), how the hell do you know what you are dragging?
I sure as hell don't, unless I go around turning off all the (say this is a Will Farrel voice) "happy, happy" Windows UI "features."
It's bad design like this that teaches users to always right drag, because then they get a menu of options and can choose the one they want (rather than what Windows thinks they want). Why you can't just left drag and have the menu come up after, I don't know!
Ever notice how you usually click apply before ok in a property sheet dialog? Same crap. Lumping layer upon layer on a UI, never thinking to strip away the useless parts, leads to learned behaviours which are totally non-sensical (like people who type www. in front of everything, because ignorant DNS admins don't include A records for the base domain name).
Making quit harder makes sense. I've accidently quit Mozilla a few times (it stays open until I upgrade my daily, usually once a month if there are no bugs I'm tracking). That loses so much work or items that may be open, it's not funny. Since there is no part of the history dialog that shows what was open when you last quit, I tend to lose information. In an SDI program that has many windows, quit can close other windows that you weren't meaning to close!
Most people wouldn't hit save, ctrl+z, bg, fg a different job, do some work, ctrl+z, bg, fg the original job, etc. Maybe K & R did, but most people just waited until W, X, and NEWS were available before they learned to work that way.
Swapping applications on the command line is annoying and hard, that is why most people who use the CLI a lot use X with many xterms, or they install screen and use fewer (but more than 1) xterms.
"If you care about what you are running on your system, you should already know who contributed what aspects."
Most people don't know, even if they do care. Head over to a LUG meeting. I'd wager the great majority of them care, but only a few properly know the history of the system. Obviously if they're interested, education is something that should be given to them. That's why I tell them about the history of the system, and clarify for confused people (such as yourself) about why it's called GNU/Linux.
"Under this logic, windows graphic and multimedia designers should be calling their machines Adobe/Windows or Macromedia/Windows, etc, etc, etc."
Microsoft does follow the same naming contention very closely: Windows 95 Windows 98 Windows ME Windows NT Windows XP
First is Windows, which encompases the API (libraries) and interface (UI) and most of the userland (the ubiquitous Notepad:)). Second is the kernel (the "friendly name" of it), with flavours following ("Professional," "Server," etc). RMS also answers why it's GNU/Linux instead of GNU Linux because: "Following the rules of English, in the construction "GNU Linux" the word "GNU" modifies "Linux". This can mean either "GNU's version of Linux" or "Linux, which is a GNU package." Neither of those meanings fits the situation at hand."
The BSDs also follow this naming contention, with Free, Open, or Net prefixing the BSD kernel. GNU/BSD would be a BSD distribution which has a complete GNU userland around a BSD kernel, with the slash to denote that they are logically separated.
As for more credit than credit is due: I have no problem for giving RMS the credit for starting freely available, modifyably software back in the 1980s before anyone else was developing software for the purpose of giving it away. If you don't like it, TS. Unless you build a time machine to beat him to the punch, he deserves the credit.
So where on the web that Google knows, or in Google groups, did anyone link the special folders to that enumeration. The only references I found were the MSDN pages for SHGetSpecialFolder (which didn't mention the link), and some Estonian's VB code for using a call to the unmanaged SHGetSpecialFolder (which broke spectacularly in C#).
In a nutshell: The free operating environment he has been trying to create for 20 years is called GNU. This encompases a kernel, userland, system libraries, compilers, etc. It's a whole, big lot of work. They started out with the editors, a C library, and a compiler so they could write the rest, and they went very far. GNU userlands started to supplant the traditional ones on most UNIX machines because GNU applications were full featured and matured quickly (try the BSD userland sometime, you'll start to notice missing options quickly), and because they were open and free.
But their kernel, the Hurd, lagged in development. Linus took the amazing GNU userland and added his Linux kernel. The GNU/Linux system was born, a fusion of the GNU userland and the Linux kernel. Mr. Stallman believes than Linus deserves much credit for bringing a free kernel into the world (remember, it was released when BSD was dealing with much legal ramblings), and that's why it's listed as a part of the name (and not just included in the name "GNU").
As to why it's not including other names, you could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system. XFree86 is just a reference implementation of X11R6 which runs on x86 (and other) hardware.
I would like to see a GNU/BSD system myself, because the Linux kernel can be buggy, and verification that the bug is in the kernel is a lot less hard if I use one system which can boot a few different kernels.
You're retarded because you don't want to break 10 trillion applications and reset your current "I have a browser, I have a word processer," etc progress to a state of nothingness.
You're totally misinterpretting Mr. Stallman's beliefs about naming.
The free operating environment he has been trying to create for 20 years is called GNU. This encompases a kernel, userland, system libraries, compilers, etc. It's a whole, big lot of work. They started out with the editors, a C library, and a compiler so they could write the rest, and they went very far. GNU userlands started to supplant the traditional ones on most UNIX machines because GNU applications were full featured and matured quickly (try the BSD userland sometime, you'll start to notice missing options quickly), and because they were open and free.
But their kernel, the Hurd, lagged in development. Linus took the amazing GNU userland and added his Linux kernel. The GNU/Linux system was born, a fusion of the GNU userland and the Linux kernel. Mr. Stallman believes than Linus deserves much credit for bringing a free kernel into the world (remember, it was released when BSD was dealing with much legal ramblings), and that's why it's listed as a part of the name (and not just included in the name "GNU").
A modular layer deep in the kernel which can be swapped at will is not really relevant to it. You could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system. XFree86 is just a reference version of X11R6 which runs on x86 (and other) hardware. The same can be said of Mach, it's just a reference implementation of some software.
GNU is the only operating environment designed to be free as in freedom from the very start, which is why Mr. Stallman asks that you properly credit the GNU contributors for their many man-centuries of effort.
First, do not, under any circumstances, but ATI's Radeon 8500 dualhead. They suck. As the poster mentioned, DRI is disabled when you use Xinerama. Plus the binary-only Radeon 8500 driver doesn't work with Xinerama, in addition to the opensource ATI driver which doesn't work with Xinerama! Only the older opensource Radeon driver in XF 4.2 does Xinerama in any way on the 8500, and it still has drawing issues (the Gnome logout box sure mangles the one display).
As you mentioned, the "primary" display is the DVI connector. This is horrid because any bus traffic causes that display to show ghosting and other lines everywhere on the 8500. The ATI Radeon 9000 doesn't have this problem, but it's another mark against the card.
For multihead under Linux, I recommend buying a G550 and skipping ATI, because their cards are not fun to setup and debug (I spent an entire day of my time trying to work with their broken drivers).
I found a "known-good" Xinerama config on GoogleGroups, and used it to debug the 8500.
" No one (that I know at least) wants windows that maximize across monitors. "
Maxtrox G550, ctrl+click on maximize, the entire screen is filled with a window. Why would I want this? Right-click, new vertical tab grouping in VS.net (hopefully Mozilla someday). Suddenly MDI makes serious sense when working within a particular application.
Yes, you may like SDI and one app per monitor, but MDI is something that mates so well with multiple monitors, you'll swear at every solution provider that doesn't support it. I find it's as useful as grouping application windows (like The Gimp) on a single virtual desktop in terms of productivity).
Not really different, just flexible.
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2
" or use something totally far out like this. You have a truckload of flexibility as far as UIs are concerned."
Uhm.. that just looks like any classical window manager which used the background image as the "skin" for its menus, titlebars, and vtbackgrounds (with a small colour change to make it somewhat less unreadable). All the windows I see in it use the exact same icons ([], X, -) that Micrsoft Windows uses, the same toolbar widgets, the same menus, etc. It's pretty (in an "I can't read the damned window titles or do work" kind of way), but otherwise it's exactly the same as IceWM, Wmaker, or Microsoft Windows.
I was really hoping you'd point to a truly different way (like the non-overlapping, always tiled WMs, or the 3D wms) of interacting with the computer. Those are most interesting to me (as a UI designer).
If they posted something off the point, you should've said, "Hey, in this case of standands compliant code, Mozilla is misrendering it because of the flow changes."
Instead you went off on a tangent. I've always hated IE's default scroll bar crap, being a person who never got on the IE train (the entire browser feels wrong.. the way it refreshes, etc.. it's a horrid caricature of browsing).
If Mozilla has an internal reflow which doesn't properly trigger when a page which is valid and standards compliant is viewed, that is a bug. File it as such, with that wording. When you sit and see 20,000 new bugs in your mailbox after coming back from a weekend somewhere, you will often times lose track of specifics, and bmark bugs as invalid based on the poor summaries people tend to write.
I betcha you have something faster than the 14,400 kbps modem us Netscape 0.9 users had! 300k is still 3 minutes at 14.4 speeds.
"Okay, it does take a bit longer, on that 14,400 kbps modem, but the Mosaic Communications people have developed it so the text on the pages loads before the pictures. That way, you have something to read while you wait for a picture to load. Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)"
Slashdot Mirror
"France also had a naive millitary command, and very little resistance. That said, who can blame them? WWII was still a very nasty memory, and none could face the prospect of war again. It was very easy to belive that Hitler only wanted a little bit of Europe, and then he'd be happy."
:-(
I know. It's so terrible how that zombie Hitler came back and invaded France again! Damned nazi supermen
since ice is less dense than water, less ice means lower levels. Put water in a cup. Freeze it. Note the little mountains that form.
This is also why ice floats, because it is less dense than water. Saturn is also less dense than water, but I doubt you will find a tub of water big enough to float Saturn in.
While Google seems to have removed its per link click code (which I filtered with Privoxy anyways), they still have the Javascript at the top meant to hide it from the status bar:
f }}
function ss(w){window.status=w;return true;}
function cs(){window.status='';}
function ga(o,e){if (document.getElementById){a=o.id.substring(1); p = "";r = "";g = e.target;if (g) {
+ t = g.id;f = g.parentNode;if (f) {p = f.id;h = f.parentNode;if (h) r = h.id;}} else{h = e.srcElement
+;f = h.parentNode;if (f) p = f.id;t = h.id;}if (t==a || p==a || r==a) return true;location.href=document.getElementById(a).hre
Maybe they only turn on the indiviual link checking sometimes, perhaps with a random sample?
Mormonism started because of Joseph Smith who made up stories about jesus coming to North America to teach natives, about how he could only read the tablets because of special glasses. Most people of the day thought him a kook, and he and his band of followers were pushed around until they hit Salt Lake City, Utah. He claimed it was the promised land, and they settled.
Then, after he was found to have been sleeping around, he claimed that god came and told him that everyone should practice bigamy.
Mormonism is a cult, the same way every other religion is a cult.
Cult:
2. A system of religious belief and worship.
The people who start it are almost always people looking for personal power, or as an excuse for behaviours they like to perform. While good people can be religious (as pretty much every religion has some good rules inside of it), religion itself is usually someone's vehicle to something else before it's something that's good for the general public.
I respect people's beliefs about religion; I just happen to think that most people have the wrong belief.
I say religion spreads because people are too willing to accept lies which seem like the truth. You can take a true statement: there is no wind on the moon. Then you can twist it: there is no wind on the moon, therefore the moon landing is fake since the flag looks like it flapped. See how easy it was?
RMS is not being given credit at all. The GNU contributors (of which RMS is a part) is being given credit, when you say GNU/Linux.
If you have just the kernel, only the kernel running your system, then you have a pure, only-Linux system. Every disturibution I can think of is based on the GNU/Linux marriage. I don't see why this is so hard for people to understand, the entire system is more than a kernel.
The book was meant to be used as an oracle for school teachers and other people wishing to teach their non-luddite, but-still-easily-mislead friends about the truth behind the moon landings.
The luddite people who think the landings were a hoax have a lot of FUD which is easy to believe on the surface of it, but once you actually learn about the details, they fall apart. Placing all these details in one place is very beneficial.
Look at how far major religions got because a lot of people believed them for a long time. The Mormons were in the 19th century what scientologists are today. Bad memes spread easily among the uneducated.
I wish desktop editing was so easy. Any changes are masked behind undo features, as they should be. The chances you'll undo to a certain level decrease as each day passes, so a timed expire of older undo versions is just another neat feature of this OS he proposes.
Need a really old version? That's what backups and centralized version control are for. ReiserFS wants to address some of this.
Start -> Shutdown :)
HTH. HAND!
"My idea of hell is an editor that auto-saves code that I'm in the process of hacking up in an editor to let me think about the problem over top of code that already works."
/. moderators have this crack habit.
I guess you don't use source control, VMS, or ReiserFS.
"My idea of hell is a platform where every document I've ever opened has no way to close it and no way to exit the application that's got it up in a window, because there;s no 'Quit' or 'Exit' option."
You've also never owned a Palm Pilot.
"My idea of hell is not being able to drag something in a GUI from one folder to another, because they have an obscure "parent of my parent" relationship, which makes me have to cut and paste the document, instead of just dragging it, because I on;'y [sic] have one file manager, which is running all the time, instead of a "file picker"."
And you've never used the OS/2 WPS or its file template creation folder, or undershood how this fellow was writing obout how to extend that idea further with branching (see version control above).
"My idea of hell is symbolic links that get changed when I rename a file out from under them because the OS thinks it knows what I want better than I do, so it's impossible to replace a file with another, while keeping, and the old one, unless you copy it, rename the original, rename the copy, and then edit the original (instead of replacing it)."
And you've never used hardlinks!
So why, exactly, are you such a highly moderated oracle of knowledge if you've not used the current incantation of the things you rant about? Oh, right, because
Before you react and freak out about something, take a step back and think. Your work habtis will be changed, because the way you work will be changed. Of course if you try and think of your current work habits over top of a new way of working, you'll see problems that aren't there.
That's what ~/.tmp is for. Have it culled of files older than a week automatically. If you need something, you can get it out. Otherwise it will be removed eventually. You won't even have to name it, as the rest of its meta-data attributes will index it in your new OS.
Why is this bad? I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to shift from CLI in GUI to true GUI use.
When you have data files and execution files, all with the extension hidden, many sharing colourful icons (as data files have the same icon as a program), how the hell do you know what you are dragging?
I sure as hell don't, unless I go around turning off all the (say this is a Will Farrel voice) "happy, happy" Windows UI "features."
It's bad design like this that teaches users to always right drag, because then they get a menu of options and can choose the one they want (rather than what Windows thinks they want). Why you can't just left drag and have the menu come up after, I don't know!
Ever notice how you usually click apply before ok in a property sheet dialog? Same crap. Lumping layer upon layer on a UI, never thinking to strip away the useless parts, leads to learned behaviours which are totally non-sensical (like people who type www. in front of everything, because ignorant DNS admins don't include A records for the base domain name).
Making quit harder makes sense. I've accidently quit Mozilla a few times (it stays open until I upgrade my daily, usually once a month if there are no bugs I'm tracking). That loses so much work or items that may be open, it's not funny. Since there is no part of the history dialog that shows what was open when you last quit, I tend to lose information. In an SDI program that has many windows, quit can close other windows that you weren't meaning to close!
Most people wouldn't hit save, ctrl+z, bg, fg a different job, do some work, ctrl+z, bg, fg the original job, etc. Maybe K & R did, but most people just waited until W, X, and NEWS were available before they learned to work that way.
Swapping applications on the command line is annoying and hard, that is why most people who use the CLI a lot use X with many xterms, or they install screen and use fewer (but more than 1) xterms.
"If you care about what you are running on your system, you should already know who contributed what aspects."
:)). Second is the kernel (the "friendly name" of it), with flavours following ("Professional," "Server," etc). RMS also answers why it's GNU/Linux instead of GNU Linux because:
Most people don't know, even if they do care. Head over to a LUG meeting. I'd wager the great majority of them care, but only a few properly know the history of the system. Obviously if they're interested, education is something that should be given to them. That's why I tell them about the history of the system, and clarify for confused people (such as yourself) about why it's called GNU/Linux.
"Under this logic, windows graphic and multimedia designers should be calling their machines Adobe/Windows or Macromedia/Windows, etc, etc, etc."
Microsoft does follow the same naming contention very closely:
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows NT
Windows XP
First is Windows, which encompases the API (libraries) and interface (UI) and most of the userland (the ubiquitous Notepad
"Following the rules of English, in the construction "GNU Linux" the word "GNU" modifies "Linux". This can mean either "GNU's version of Linux" or "Linux, which is a GNU package." Neither of those meanings fits the situation at hand."
The BSDs also follow this naming contention, with Free, Open, or Net prefixing the BSD kernel. GNU/BSD would be a BSD distribution which has a complete GNU userland around a BSD kernel, with the slash to denote that they are logically separated.
As for more credit than credit is due: I have no problem for giving RMS the credit for starting freely available, modifyably software back in the 1980s before anyone else was developing software for the purpose of giving it away. If you don't like it, TS. Unless you build a time machine to beat him to the punch, he deserves the credit.
So where on the web that Google knows, or in Google groups, did anyone link the special folders to that enumeration. The only references I found were the MSDN pages for SHGetSpecialFolder (which didn't mention the link), and some Estonian's VB code for using a call to the unmanaged SHGetSpecialFolder (which broke spectacularly in C#).
Thank you, thank you!
There's no documented way of calling SHGetFolderLocation from C# without having a System.ExecutionEngineException being thrown.
Your trolling questions are answered in very nice detail here.
In a nutshell:
The free operating environment he has been trying to create for 20 years is called GNU. This encompases a kernel, userland, system libraries, compilers, etc. It's a whole, big lot of work. They started out with the editors, a C library, and a compiler so they could write the rest, and they went very far. GNU userlands started to supplant the traditional ones on most UNIX machines because GNU applications were full featured and matured quickly (try the BSD userland sometime, you'll start to notice missing options quickly), and because they were open and free.
But their kernel, the Hurd, lagged in development. Linus took the amazing GNU userland and added his Linux kernel. The GNU/Linux system was born, a fusion of the GNU userland and the Linux kernel. Mr. Stallman believes than Linus deserves much credit for bringing a free kernel into the world (remember, it was released when BSD was dealing with much legal ramblings), and that's why it's listed as a part of the name (and not just included in the name "GNU").
As to why it's not including other names, you could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system. XFree86 is just a reference implementation of X11R6 which runs on x86 (and other) hardware.
I would like to see a GNU/BSD system myself, because the Linux kernel can be buggy, and verification that the bug is in the kernel is a lot less hard if I use one system which can boot a few different kernels.
You're retarded because you don't want to break 10 trillion applications and reset your current "I have a browser, I have a word processer," etc progress to a state of nothingness.
You're totally misinterpretting Mr. Stallman's beliefs about naming.
The free operating environment he has been trying to create for 20 years is called GNU. This encompases a kernel, userland, system libraries, compilers, etc. It's a whole, big lot of work. They started out with the editors, a C library, and a compiler so they could write the rest, and they went very far. GNU userlands started to supplant the traditional ones on most UNIX machines because GNU applications were full featured and matured quickly (try the BSD userland sometime, you'll start to notice missing options quickly), and because they were open and free.
But their kernel, the Hurd, lagged in development. Linus took the amazing GNU userland and added his Linux kernel. The GNU/Linux system was born, a fusion of the GNU userland and the Linux kernel. Mr. Stallman believes than Linus deserves much credit for bringing a free kernel into the world (remember, it was released when BSD was dealing with much legal ramblings), and that's why it's listed as a part of the name (and not just included in the name "GNU").
A modular layer deep in the kernel which can be swapped at will is not really relevant to it. You could ask why XFree86 is not in the name of GNU/Linux, and you'll be told it's because only the GNU and Linux parts were designed towards the goal of a free system. XFree86 is just a reference version of X11R6 which runs on x86 (and other) hardware. The same can be said of Mach, it's just a reference implementation of some software.
GNU is the only operating environment designed to be free as in freedom from the very start, which is why Mr. Stallman asks that you properly credit the GNU contributors for their many man-centuries of effort.
There are plenty of other microkernels in use very sucessfully. WinNT/2k/XP, Mac OS X, MkLinux, Minix, just to name a few!
Don't make such wide-ranging judgements based off of one case. You're counting your chickens before they are hatched.
First, do not, under any circumstances, but ATI's Radeon 8500 dualhead. They suck. As the poster mentioned, DRI is disabled when you use Xinerama. Plus the binary-only Radeon 8500 driver doesn't work with Xinerama, in addition to the opensource ATI driver which doesn't work with Xinerama! Only the older opensource Radeon driver in XF 4.2 does Xinerama in any way on the 8500, and it still has drawing issues (the Gnome logout box sure mangles the one display).
As you mentioned, the "primary" display is the DVI connector. This is horrid because any bus traffic causes that display to show ghosting and other lines everywhere on the 8500. The ATI Radeon 9000 doesn't have this problem, but it's another mark against the card.
For multihead under Linux, I recommend buying a G550 and skipping ATI, because their cards are not fun to setup and debug (I spent an entire day of my time trying to work with their broken drivers).
I found a "known-good" Xinerama config on GoogleGroups, and used it to debug the 8500.
" No one (that I know at least) wants windows that maximize across monitors. "
Maxtrox G550, ctrl+click on maximize, the entire screen is filled with a window. Why would I want this? Right-click, new vertical tab grouping in VS.net (hopefully Mozilla someday). Suddenly MDI makes serious sense when working within a particular application.
Yes, you may like SDI and one app per monitor, but MDI is something that mates so well with multiple monitors, you'll swear at every solution provider that doesn't support it. I find it's as useful as grouping application windows (like The Gimp) on a single virtual desktop in terms of productivity).
.. ..... ......... ....
yes.
(Damned slashdot filters)
" or use something totally far out like this. You have a truckload of flexibility as far as UIs are concerned."
Uhm.. that just looks like any classical window manager which used the background image as the "skin" for its menus, titlebars, and vtbackgrounds (with a small colour change to make it somewhat less unreadable). All the windows I see in it use the exact same icons ([], X, -) that Micrsoft Windows uses, the same toolbar widgets, the same menus, etc. It's pretty (in an "I can't read the damned window titles or do work" kind of way), but otherwise it's exactly the same as IceWM, Wmaker, or Microsoft Windows.
I was really hoping you'd point to a truly different way (like the non-overlapping, always tiled WMs, or the 3D wms) of interacting with the computer. Those are most interesting to me (as a UI designer).
If they posted something off the point, you should've said, "Hey, in this case of standands compliant code, Mozilla is misrendering it because of the flow changes."
Instead you went off on a tangent. I've always hated IE's default scroll bar crap, being a person who never got on the IE train (the entire browser feels wrong.. the way it refreshes, etc.. it's a horrid caricature of browsing).
If Mozilla has an internal reflow which doesn't properly trigger when a page which is valid and standards compliant is viewed, that is a bug. File it as such, with that wording. When you sit and see 20,000 new bugs in your mailbox after coming back from a weekend somewhere, you will often times lose track of specifics, and bmark bugs as invalid based on the poor summaries people tend to write.
I betcha you have something faster than the 14,400 kbps modem us Netscape 0.9 users had! 300k is still 3 minutes at 14.4 speeds.
"Okay, it does take a bit longer, on that 14,400 kbps modem, but the Mosaic Communications people have developed it so the text on the pages loads before the pictures. That way, you have something to read while you wait for a picture to load. Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)"