As far as I can see it, this really is an internal debate. The complaints have been made, and resolutions are starting to take place, and THEN it ends up on Slashdot? Where's the BS filter gone? This is completely irrelevant for someone outside of the community to solve, and it's the community that will eventually resolve this. In addition, there are multiple discussions that have been mistaken for one here: The bounties are not directly involved with the copyright assignment debate at all.
Just leave it already. Seems that this passes pretty unseen amongst outsiders anyway.
3.0 won't be here for a long time, I think. We will probably see 2.12 or further before that time, and it seems that the GNOME Community is focused on improving 2.x as far as possible and relax a bit on the pressure of releasing major versions.:-)
It boils down to a tool versus user discussion. Giving me a $4000 guitar doesn't make me better on playing it. That's what I could say, I think. And this is not transferable to all other types of things - like quantum computers.
The Gconf/Windows registry comparison is wrong. The only thing is that it contains configuration data stored in one frontend. This interview with Havoc Pennington might clear up some of the misunderstandings.
I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.
This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).
I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.
First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.
Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.
To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.
I use it, though. Mandrake is a great distribution, newbies and power users alike. It has a good set of tools, and often ducks up polished as a "future looking" type of Linux distribution.
Now, they're a bit independent in the whole distro mess, I think they might be the biggest still not-so-extremely commercial distribution while still maintaining a working business model.
I congratulate Mandrake with exiting bankruptcy, and I hope to see a lot of this distribution in the future. It has a good one, I have no doubt;)
I have found the 2.6 kernel to do an immense change here. The entire system feels much more responsive and has a better touch to it now, if I might say so. I run a P400 with ~380MB RAM, and I don't feel that Gnome 2.6 is heavy at all. When doubling it up with OO, evolution with a load of folders, and firefox, it starts chugging, though. But more RAM would solve that problem instantly - nothing ever goes slow before swapping kicks in.
This is a fairly old computer, and I'd say that I wouldn't be surprised if I had to change it long ago using Windows XP. I don't think it handles XP at all, really. But I'm running Mandrake 10.0 at this point, with a self-compiled GNOME on top, and it runs perfectly well.
RAM up your box and let it live even longer. Oh, and upgrade to 2.6.
As you said, not much sleep. My apologies. It was probably that guy in the planetarium who told stories about the astrological aspects of the star sprangled sky who made me say that;)
Our norwegian, super-enthusiastic astrophysiologist, Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, really made my day. Props to him for being who he is, a real geek without being afraid of showing it. And he thinks these things are so extremely fun, that I think so myself.
And the best of it all was that he asked his girlfriend to marry him, in the middle of the whole set. Mad, mad, mad man. But still so great, and so much fun.
Well, and to argue against those just saying "What the heck, it's just a black spot": Well, if I only had the chance of singing "Amazing Grace" once every century, I'd probably do it. Not because it's a good song, but because it's special. After all, it just happens once every seldom time. And the last time, it gave us many answers to astroscientific questions.
Phew, no getting up at 5:30 for astrological events the next few weeks.
A Mercury transit isn't interesting for the common man. It happens "often", though. But it's too small, and a planet without a heavy athmosphere as Venus doesn't make much action.
I halfways agree. Giving them less alternatives is a good idea, and child pornography is completely untolerable. In this debate, it's not freedom of speech, it's a crime.
OTOH, we've created our own alternatives for them, like Freenet. Noone can stop them from sharing this in their inner circles if they want to. We just prohibit ourselves from seeing it. And raising the bar of how hard it is to get into an environment where you can get child pornography. There are both pros and cons. At this time, I think there is a slight overweight of pros.
And for those who dislike registrations,
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 0
I called my old ISP (just before I switched to another), Telenor, which is Norway's biggest ISP. The line sucked, I never got the speed I was supposed to have, and it was down approx. 2 hours every three nights or so. Well, I called them once when things didn't work.
Me: Hello, my DSL Internet connection doesn't work!
Lady on phone: Okay, what is your subscription ID?
*says all the formal stuff...*
Lady: What operating system do you run?
Me: Linux.
Lady: What?
Me: Linux.
Lady: Windows?
Me: Linux!
Lady: What is that, Leniks?
Me: Yes, Linux.
Lady: What is it? Do we support that?
...and at that point I hung up, laughed hard and waited until the problem was sorted out by itself.
And, it's a fact that even if you do believe in a God, or not, a scientist will have to understand that there are things that religion explains for the common guy that science will not. At least not in a very very long time.
There are many sides of religion. You state two very important ones. Religion, if chosen solely by yourself, could aid you in hope, and as you say, having compassion and responsibility. When religion is forced upon you, things get political. That's when it gets nasty. And that is why I say I'm an agnostic - I do not deny the fact that there is a truth in what religion states, but I will not be a part of the political misuse of religion that has caused the world.
Uhm. OK. I'm a bit embarrassed by this, I usually spell correctly and such. My apologies. It all went very fast, and it's been a bad day:)
Now that I've said that, I could also add that I'm still young. And I do cherish the art of using language correctly. Again, I'm sorry. I don't know how I managed to do that.
The methods all have their uses. I don't use google find old classical music scores, but I don't use the library to find recent news stories, software, and such. There's a use for all these things, and it's important to preserve it all.
There's nothing that beats human interaction and direct knowledge in many cases, but people are not there all the time. If I had them right at me, I wouldn't need google. Google (and the library) is a compilation of what a bunch of people once knew, worked on, built further on, et cetera. Now, since it's impossible to reach these people, we wrote books. Books that we can read, to learn what people found out. That has it's value. Now, we can find the book, read about it, even read it, using google, or we could find other information rapidly that the library won't have for a long time - at least not before the next day's newspaper.
After all, the library might even have their search engine against a GoogleServer in the back room:-)
Final point: Cherish all sources of knowledge, and use them appropriately. That will give you the best results.
I agree with this. Though, there are inconsitencies. You could say "Linux 2.6 certified", while it may not work with one distribution's set of kernel patches. Well, if the LSB could be extended somehow, one could use that as a base for certifying. "Linux Standards Base 1.2 Certified" would do better, because distributions could say they are, too. And that's nothing you can fool. Either the lsb test suite runs, or it won't.
Linux open source distribution vendors do not want to use proprietary software in their free systems. Some provide things like NVIDIA drivers, Macromedia Flash players etc. in their paid systems, and give links to their free customers. That's not the main problem. Vendors that give out binary support for their systems, get that used. We see that with Nvidia and ATI, et cetera. The problem is that these vendors do not want to waste resources on making Linux drivers. That's the problem.
Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency, that makes it very hard to provide non-proprietary drivers. There's no hardware vendor that provide you with linux drivers for their odd power management systems.
A bloated kernel is one thing. Building a full-featured kernel is bad, because it'll make the image become ten megs big.
Therefore, someone invented - hold on - modules! Hooray. With modules, you can dynamically load and unload kernel features to memory. Some of them require hooks in the kernel, but they are few and small.
I thought this was old news. Feature bloat is a -nescessity- for larger systems that are supposed to run by default on many systems. If you haven't noticed, even these systems like Mandrake provide different kernels for different systems, where you cannot modularize things - like SMP and >4gb mem support.
Strictly, gentoo users are the people with strange CFLAGS and funny errors, and they file bugs without thinking of their extremely unsupported compiler optimisations, just because they want the thing to go a *little* bit faster. What's the point?
For grandma, the learning curve IS flat. Reason? Spatial nautilus is just how you would want a file manager to be in real life. Think about it. You open a folder, and it contains more folders. It still doesn't make the parent folder disappear. It's what is intuitive.
It's just a bunch of us geeks that have gotten used to other means of doing things, that's why it gets criticism. I, for one, like it.
Re:Free software lacks usability testing
on
GNOME for Grandma
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are built on this. It's been carefully written to ensure intuitive interfaces, and it has evolved over time - maybe, in my opinion, one of the flagships of GNOME. It's a base for the best part of the whole thing, the interface.
But still, I agree that BugZilla aren't a tool for everyone. Filing a bug about something is for better-knowers, not for the average user. Thus, interface problems won't solve without careful research like you state here.
While the projects were before standalone and small, they've now got big corporations and more money behind them. As long as they don't control the software for their own good, as at least Ximian/Novell never has done, I think the window systems will gain much from this in the years to come.
Being a GNOME supporter myself, I'm very happy with the newest release. But there are still things to fix - a lot of things that seem unpolished and featureless. I miss some extendibility in the spatial nautilus, and easier access to configuration here and there. But as earlier problems have been, these will get eliminated in a while.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can see it, this really is an internal debate. The complaints have been made, and resolutions are starting to take place, and THEN it ends up on Slashdot? Where's the BS filter gone? This is completely irrelevant for someone outside of the community to solve, and it's the community that will eventually resolve this. In addition, there are multiple discussions that have been mistaken for one here: The bounties are not directly involved with the copyright assignment debate at all.
Just leave it already. Seems that this passes pretty unseen amongst outsiders anyway.
3.0 won't be here for a long time, I think. We will probably see 2.12 or further before that time, and it seems that the GNOME Community is focused on improving 2.x as far as possible and relax a bit on the pressure of releasing major versions. :-)
It boils down to a tool versus user discussion. Giving me a $4000 guitar doesn't make me better on playing it. That's what I could say, I think. And this is not transferable to all other types of things - like quantum computers.
The Gconf/Windows registry comparison is wrong. The only thing is that it contains configuration data stored in one frontend. This interview with Havoc Pennington might clear up some of the misunderstandings.
I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.
This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).
I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.
First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.
Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.
To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.
I use it, though. Mandrake is a great distribution, newbies and power users alike. It has a good set of tools, and often ducks up polished as a "future looking" type of Linux distribution.
;)
Now, they're a bit independent in the whole distro mess, I think they might be the biggest still not-so-extremely commercial distribution while still maintaining a working business model.
I congratulate Mandrake with exiting bankruptcy, and I hope to see a lot of this distribution in the future. It has a good one, I have no doubt
I have found the 2.6 kernel to do an immense change here. The entire system feels much more responsive and has a better touch to it now, if I might say so. I run a P400 with ~380MB RAM, and I don't feel that Gnome 2.6 is heavy at all. When doubling it up with OO, evolution with a load of folders, and firefox, it starts chugging, though. But more RAM would solve that problem instantly - nothing ever goes slow before swapping kicks in.
This is a fairly old computer, and I'd say that I wouldn't be surprised if I had to change it long ago using Windows XP. I don't think it handles XP at all, really. But I'm running Mandrake 10.0 at this point, with a self-compiled GNOME on top, and it runs perfectly well.
RAM up your box and let it live even longer. Oh, and upgrade to 2.6.
As you said, not much sleep. My apologies. It was probably that guy in the planetarium who told stories about the astrological aspects of the star sprangled sky who made me say that ;)
It was a great event :)
Our norwegian, super-enthusiastic astrophysiologist, Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, really made my day. Props to him for being who he is, a real geek without being afraid of showing it. And he thinks these things are so extremely fun, that I think so myself.
And the best of it all was that he asked his girlfriend to marry him, in the middle of the whole set. Mad, mad, mad man. But still so great, and so much fun.
Well, and to argue against those just saying "What the heck, it's just a black spot": Well, if I only had the chance of singing "Amazing Grace" once every century, I'd probably do it. Not because it's a good song, but because it's special. After all, it just happens once every seldom time. And the last time, it gave us many answers to astroscientific questions.
Phew, no getting up at 5:30 for astrological events the next few weeks.
A Mercury transit isn't interesting for the common man. It happens "often", though. But it's too small, and a planet without a heavy athmosphere as Venus doesn't make much action.
I halfways agree. Giving them less alternatives is a good idea, and child pornography is completely untolerable. In this debate, it's not freedom of speech, it's a crime. OTOH, we've created our own alternatives for them, like Freenet. Noone can stop them from sharing this in their inner circles if they want to. We just prohibit ourselves from seeing it. And raising the bar of how hard it is to get into an environment where you can get child pornography. There are both pros and cons. At this time, I think there is a slight overweight of pros.
the Google-friendly link is here: Article!
I called my old ISP (just before I switched to another), Telenor, which is Norway's biggest ISP. The line sucked, I never got the speed I was supposed to have, and it was down approx. 2 hours every three nights or so. Well, I called them once when things didn't work.
...and at that point I hung up, laughed hard and waited until the problem was sorted out by itself.
Me: Hello, my DSL Internet connection doesn't work!
Lady on phone: Okay, what is your subscription ID?
*says all the formal stuff...*
Lady: What operating system do you run?
Me: Linux.
Lady: What?
Me: Linux.
Lady: Windows?
Me: Linux!
Lady: What is that, Leniks? Me: Yes, Linux.
Lady: What is it? Do we support that?
Yet another reason not to use huge ISPs.
And, it's a fact that even if you do believe in a God, or not, a scientist will have to understand that there are things that religion explains for the common guy that science will not. At least not in a very very long time.
There are many sides of religion. You state two very important ones. Religion, if chosen solely by yourself, could aid you in hope, and as you say, having compassion and responsibility. When religion is forced upon you, things get political. That's when it gets nasty. And that is why I say I'm an agnostic - I do not deny the fact that there is a truth in what religion states, but I will not be a part of the political misuse of religion that has caused the world.
Their website or hosting firm isn't very dynamic, at least. Right now, it's not even static. It's slashdotted.
Uhm. OK. I'm a bit embarrassed by this, I usually spell correctly and such. My apologies. It all went very fast, and it's been a bad day :)
Now that I've said that, I could also add that I'm still young. And I do cherish the art of using language correctly. Again, I'm sorry. I don't know how I managed to do that.
s/all is/is all/;
The methods all have their uses. I don't use google find old classical music scores, but I don't use the library to find recent news stories, software, and such. There's a use for all these things, and it's important to preserve it all.
:-)
There's nothing that beats human interaction and direct knowledge in many cases, but people are not there all the time. If I had them right at me, I wouldn't need google. Google (and the library) is a compilation of what a bunch of people once knew, worked on, built further on, et cetera. Now, since it's impossible to reach these people, we wrote books. Books that we can read, to learn what people found out. That has it's value. Now, we can find the book, read about it, even read it, using google, or we could find other information rapidly that the library won't have for a long time - at least not before the next day's newspaper.
After all, the library might even have their search engine against a GoogleServer in the back room
Final point: Cherish all sources of knowledge, and use them appropriately. That will give you the best results.
I agree with this. Though, there are inconsitencies. You could say "Linux 2.6 certified", while it may not work with one distribution's set of kernel patches. Well, if the LSB could be extended somehow, one could use that as a base for certifying. "Linux Standards Base 1.2 Certified" would do better, because distributions could say they are, too. And that's nothing you can fool. Either the lsb test suite runs, or it won't.
Linux open source distribution vendors do not want to use proprietary software in their free systems. Some provide things like NVIDIA drivers, Macromedia Flash players etc. in their paid systems, and give links to their free customers. That's not the main problem. Vendors that give out binary support for their systems, get that used. We see that with Nvidia and ATI, et cetera. The problem is that these vendors do not want to waste resources on making Linux drivers. That's the problem.
Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency, that makes it very hard to provide non-proprietary drivers. There's no hardware vendor that provide you with linux drivers for their odd power management systems.
A bloated kernel is one thing. Building a full-featured kernel is bad, because it'll make the image become ten megs big.
Therefore, someone invented - hold on - modules! Hooray. With modules, you can dynamically load and unload kernel features to memory. Some of them require hooks in the kernel, but they are few and small.
I thought this was old news. Feature bloat is a -nescessity- for larger systems that are supposed to run by default on many systems. If you haven't noticed, even these systems like Mandrake provide different kernels for different systems, where you cannot modularize things - like SMP and >4gb mem support.
Strictly, gentoo users are the people with strange CFLAGS and funny errors, and they file bugs without thinking of their extremely unsupported compiler optimisations, just because they want the thing to go a *little* bit faster. What's the point?
Where's that in DocBook? :)
For grandma, the learning curve IS flat. Reason? Spatial nautilus is just how you would want a file manager to be in real life. Think about it. You open a folder, and it contains more folders. It still doesn't make the parent folder disappear. It's what is intuitive.
It's just a bunch of us geeks that have gotten used to other means of doing things, that's why it gets criticism. I, for one, like it.
Well, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are built on this. It's been carefully written to ensure intuitive interfaces, and it has evolved over time - maybe, in my opinion, one of the flagships of GNOME. It's a base for the best part of the whole thing, the interface.
But still, I agree that BugZilla aren't a tool for everyone. Filing a bug about something is for better-knowers, not for the average user. Thus, interface problems won't solve without careful research like you state here.
While the projects were before standalone and small, they've now got big corporations and more money behind them. As long as they don't control the software for their own good, as at least Ximian/Novell never has done, I think the window systems will gain much from this in the years to come.
Being a GNOME supporter myself, I'm very happy with the newest release. But there are still things to fix - a lot of things that seem unpolished and featureless. I miss some extendibility in the spatial nautilus, and easier access to configuration here and there. But as earlier problems have been, these will get eliminated in a while.