My point was that the video was badly targeted at "new" users. If you disagree with that, mod away. Those of you modding me down for being "wrong" about the "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" naming debacle should be ashamed of yourselves unless you honestly think that this video was the proper place to even touch upon the question.
Well, I didn't research it in any depth, but in Firefox on the XP machine that I had to hand this morning it fired up a Java applet which proceeded to de-sync the video from the audio. I guess it was just about watchable (though I'm told the applet crashes the browser on a Vista machine), but I'm pretty dubious about it getting any significant exposure outside of the audience already au fait with GNU in that form.
What I mostly run is Eclipse, Tomcat, and a variety of Java based applications. So from my perspective "GNU", BSD, and SysV and indeed Windows systems really are much of a muchness. Should I therefore call it Java/Linux? Obviously not.
I loved the fact that they actually described that GNU meant 'GNU is Not UNIX'. Stephen Fry goes on to say that 'it's a bit like Unix, but not quite'. The Windows user is sitting there asking, what the fuck is Unix?
Yes, I thought that too. It's really a very strange video. Neither a pure "Happy Birthday" nor a particularly well targetted "Welcome to GNU" message.
Oh, and Alan Davies would recommend compiling Slackware with no help from the community as a good way to get started.
It wouldn't be about Linux if they hadn't brought up the subject.
If the FSF want to proudly point to Linux as one of the things that their organisation and license have helped to happen, that's fine by me. If they want to talk about how great GNU is, that's also fine by me.
Bringing up the GNU/Linux name, however, is at best confusing, at worst petty, and most importantly it's completely unnecessary, nay damaging, in a short video with the ostensible purpose of introducing new people to GNU.
If they had celebrated the 25th birthday of Linux you would no doubt be pointing out that linux ain't 25.
... and there was me thinking Stephen Fry was your regular computer luddite.
On the contrary, he's famously geeky. He's proud of the fact that he was the second person in the UK to get a Mac. Given that the first was Douglas Adams that's quite a feat!
I watched this and felt it was an opportunity lost. While Stephen's presentation was as impeccable as always, the content was distinctly lacking.
Firstly it was provided in the Ogg format. Yes, I know that's a "free" format, but what it isn't is a populist format. If you want to introduce new people to the tenets of GNU then providing them with a file format that is only used by the faithful is utterly pointless. Multiple formats including ogg would be the only sensible way to do this. I dare say more sensible people will distribute it in other formats, but it's an indicative triumph of pedantry over good sense.
Then the editing itself was somewhat amateurish. Those cuts to still photographs were pointless, irritating, and somewhat random. Even where they were somewhat pertinent (stephen talking about his first computer) they didn't seem to be correct (I may be wrong, but I doubt he started out with an IBM PC).
The tedious "Gnu/Linux" thing came up again. The childish demands that we call it that make the FSF look petty. It isn't accurate either - I have at least as much Apache, MIT, Mozilla, and BSD software on this machine as GNU and I'm damned if I'm going to pick a less elegant name just for Stallman's self-aggrandizement. We call it Linux because that's the major distinguishing feature. We'd call it GNU if they'd written a complete operating system. They didn't, so we don't. Get over it.
Finally as apparently novice users we are pointed to gNewSense, a distribution with virtually no mind-share and little community to support neophytes.
Loud klaxon, -100 points. Perhaps Alan Davies can take a swing at it?
They try and force you to do things the way the Hibernate developers think
This is somewhat true.
and this is not good because they just regard the database as a persistence layer
This not so much.
I can't speak for other persistence layers, but Hibernate specifically is a good choice if you are designing a schema from scratch. It can be applied to pre-existing schemas (legacy stuff) but the less well designed that schema is, the more painful Hibernate will be to use.
If you disagree, perhaps you could cite some specific things that you think are wrong with Hibernate's default approach, or where you believe it fails to support some legitimate structure in the database?
Java's an entire ecosystem unto itself these days. So there's no simple answer - you have to figure out what kind of apps you want to be involved in building, then that will inform your choice of Java based technologies. For the most part I do enterprise web site development, and that mostly on the server-side, so I'm a Java EE/Hibernate/Spring/Eclipse person. Plenty of professional experienced Java developers will never use any of those technologies!
Once you've figured out what kind of apps you want to be building, I'd suggest visiting the Sun Forums if you have any technical question and then poking around the Java.net site, theserverside.org, JavaRanch and the java usenet newsgroups to get a better feel for what's out there and how it's rated by developers. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions that you want to ask offline.
Ignore the naysayers - for the most part they don't know what they're talking about. Sure you should have other languages under your belt, sure there's offshore competition, but still, Java experts are in demand and they will be for a long time yet.
Yes, well, I expect you're the sort of person who is also convinced that all managers are stupid just because you can't think outside of your own tiny perspective.
Whereas the Tories will no doubt be a shining beacon of moral rectitude when they finally claw their way back into power?
What a load of crap; I detest this partisan bollocks. Politicians of all colours are for the most part honest with a lot of dissembling forced upon them by the spin that the media will put upon any straight and honest answers that they give.
There are bad apples (just as an example a Tory cabinet minister went to prison for perjuring himself in a libel action) but this "oh the government is a monster" crap obscures any real debate about their actual policies. We get the politicians we deserve. Unfortunately.
An aide losing his blackberry is not proof, or even an indicator, of anything at all about the government as a whole. Particularly not the version of the story reported by a right wing newspaper about the left wing government.
When the Tories get in, they will do an adequate job of running the country. Then their lustre will fade and much the same people who complain now will switch allegiance and hail Labour as the new hope for honesty in governance.
your quote portrays a judge who is deliberately biasing the jury in favor of conviction
I think not:
"A beast, but a just beast"
In the story the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. The various dissenters base their opinions on intuition (Wimsey) or the character of the accused(the jury members who force the retrial).
Great explanation. Some words by Dorothy L. Sayers on the subject of reasonable doubt:
You may perhaps wish to hear from me exactly what is meant by the words "reasonable doubt". They mean, just so much doubt as you might have in everyday life about an ordinary matter of business. This is a case of murder, and it might be natural for you to think that, in such a case, the words mean more than this. But that is not so. They do not mean that you must cast about for fantastical solutions of what seems to you plain and simple. They do not mean those nightmare doubts which sometimes torment us at four o'clock in the morning when we have not slept very well. They mean that the proof must be such as you would accept about a plain matter of buying and selling, or some such commonplace transaction. You must not strain your belief in favour of the prisoner any more, of course, than you must accept proof of her guilt without the most careful scrutiny.
Ah, I get you. Interesting. I can't think of a circumstance where I'd need to do it, but then I use email for pretty simple personal and business conversational stuff. What's the specific use case that drives your need for this feature if you don't mind my asking?
You're right, I misunderstood. I'm not sure how one could change the layout to "fix" this though. Unless perhaps drawing the thread relationships with stronger lines when there was an unread mail within the hierarchy would do the trick? Hard to be sure without some user testing though.
People like you give the rest of the profession a bad name. Unless there is an objective reason why a product cannot be used in a particular way, then it is perfectly reasonable for the user to do so.
People should be given web mail accounts with 0 ability to customize anything until they have admin'd their own server for a year. Been running my mail servers since 1993. Please feel free to fuck right off.
It seems to me setting up this simple rule would take massively less time than all of your posts to/. on the subject. I don't doubt it.
Your main complaint seems to be "There's not a button for it," but there -is- a button for it. That button is called "filters" and is there for the times when you can't find the "Easy Button". That is not my complaint. My complaint (and it was really a statement of my preferences, not a complaint as such - I appreciate the ingenuity of your suggestion) is that your hack leaves me with duplicate folders in my hierarchy of mail, redundant copies of said mail, and the potential for the two to get out of synch. That in my view is a bad thing. Given the choice between doing without the feature and creating arbitrary extra folders, I prefer to do without the feature.
Same goes for you Conversation View "problem". The solution is to copy sent messages to your in-box (or wherever). If you don't want to see your own messages in your in box, replace your In Box folder with a search folder that hides emails sent by you. And my "complaint" with this hack is that it puts a lot of crap into my "inbox" which I do not wish to see permanently.
The whole thing would take less time than it took me to write this post. Indeed. But "quick" solutions and "good" solutions aren't necessarily the same thing. I wrote about it here for several reasons, not all selfish - but one of them was that I hoped to hear about an elegant solution.
Yours is devious, but not elegant.
Your original post started out as a proponent of TBird, your subsequent messages make either it or you look like a giant pain in the ass to deal with, when I'm guessing neither is really true. And you sound like a bundle of charm, yourself. I like TBird despite its flaws. My initial post was to say that. Since people including yourself chose to pursue possible solutions to those flaws I was more than happy to discuss them. I am unaware of any moral obligation upon me to accept a "solution" that I consider to be inferior to the status quo.
In one case what I took for a flaw has either been fixed, or was user error on my part. So I haven't wasted my time here. What's your oh so worthy justification for time "wasted" lambasting me?
Ok, mission accomplished. All messages are downloaded, and new messages are available offline. That's extremely pleasing, so thank you for pursuing this. Left to my own devices I might have tested it when T'bird 3 came out, but certainly not before.
My recollection was that I'd tried this before with T'bird 2 so either it's a bugfix since an earlier 2.0.0.x release, or PEBKAC.
Is that true? They have a drafts capability and I rather thought you could create a new message from an existing draft.
For me that's not something I ever actually need to do though. Presumably the developers don't either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not slagging them off for not fixing my bugs either - if they were problems for the developers they would be higher up the priority list, and rightly so.
Why dont you just create a local folder and a rule that creates a copy there of messages incoming in the IMAP folder? That would solve your problem. That's a cunning hack, certainly. I think the best answer I can give is "because I hope the problem will go away of its own accord at some point in the future." Plus I have a worrying feeling that there's a checkbox or config setting somewhere that will make it do what seems like perfectly reasonable default behaviour already! Not that I haven't looked for it mind...
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My point was that the video was badly targeted at "new" users. If you disagree with that, mod away. Those of you modding me down for being "wrong" about the "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" naming debacle should be ashamed of yourselves unless you honestly think that this video was the proper place to even touch upon the question.
GNU means ONLY open, which means... ogg. Get over it. The FSF would make no other choice.
Brilliant. Preaching to the converted. Very edifying... for the converted. But it's basically masturbation.
Well, I didn't research it in any depth, but in Firefox on the XP machine that I had to hand this morning it fired up a Java applet which proceeded to de-sync the video from the audio. I guess it was just about watchable (though I'm told the applet crashes the browser on a Vista machine), but I'm pretty dubious about it getting any significant exposure outside of the audience already au fait with GNU in that form.
No it isn't...
What I mostly run is Eclipse, Tomcat, and a variety of Java based applications. So from my perspective "GNU", BSD, and SysV and indeed Windows systems really are much of a muchness. Should I therefore call it Java/Linux? Obviously not.
I loved the fact that they actually described that GNU meant 'GNU is Not UNIX'. Stephen Fry goes on to say that 'it's a bit like Unix, but not quite'. The Windows user is sitting there asking, what the fuck is Unix?
Yes, I thought that too. It's really a very strange video. Neither a pure "Happy Birthday" nor a particularly well targetted "Welcome to GNU" message.
Oh, and Alan Davies would recommend compiling Slackware with no help from the community as a good way to get started.
Now you're frightening me. Stop it...
Because this is about GNU, not linux.
It wouldn't be about Linux if they hadn't brought up the subject.
If the FSF want to proudly point to Linux as one of the things that their organisation and license have helped to happen, that's fine by me. If they want to talk about how great GNU is, that's also fine by me.
Bringing up the GNU/Linux name, however, is at best confusing, at worst petty, and most importantly it's completely unnecessary, nay damaging, in a short video with the ostensible purpose of introducing new people to GNU.
If they had celebrated the 25th birthday of Linux you would no doubt be pointing out that linux ain't 25.
Yes, no doubt I would. So what?
... and there was me thinking Stephen Fry was your regular computer luddite.
On the contrary, he's famously geeky. He's proud of the fact that he was the second person in the UK to get a Mac. Given that the first was Douglas Adams that's quite a feat!
I watched this and felt it was an opportunity lost. While Stephen's presentation was as impeccable as always, the content was distinctly lacking.
Firstly it was provided in the Ogg format. Yes, I know that's a "free" format, but what it isn't is a populist format. If you want to introduce new people to the tenets of GNU then providing them with a file format that is only used by the faithful is utterly pointless. Multiple formats including ogg would be the only sensible way to do this. I dare say more sensible people will distribute it in other formats, but it's an indicative triumph of pedantry over good sense.
Then the editing itself was somewhat amateurish. Those cuts to still photographs were pointless, irritating, and somewhat random. Even where they were somewhat pertinent (stephen talking about his first computer) they didn't seem to be correct (I may be wrong, but I doubt he started out with an IBM PC).
The tedious "Gnu/Linux" thing came up again. The childish demands that we call it that make the FSF look petty. It isn't accurate either - I have at least as much Apache, MIT, Mozilla, and BSD software on this machine as GNU and I'm damned if I'm going to pick a less elegant name just for Stallman's self-aggrandizement. We call it Linux because that's the major distinguishing feature. We'd call it GNU if they'd written a complete operating system. They didn't, so we don't. Get over it.
Finally as apparently novice users we are pointed to gNewSense, a distribution with virtually no mind-share and little community to support neophytes.
Loud klaxon, -100 points. Perhaps Alan Davies can take a swing at it?
They try and force you to do things the way the Hibernate developers think
This is somewhat true.
and this is not good because they just regard the database as a persistence layer
This not so much.
I can't speak for other persistence layers, but Hibernate specifically is a good choice if you are designing a schema from scratch. It can be applied to pre-existing schemas (legacy stuff) but the less well designed that schema is, the more painful Hibernate will be to use.
If you disagree, perhaps you could cite some specific things that you think are wrong with Hibernate's default approach, or where you believe it fails to support some legitimate structure in the database?
Java's an entire ecosystem unto itself these days. So there's no simple answer - you have to figure out what kind of apps you want to be involved in building, then that will inform your choice of Java based technologies. For the most part I do enterprise web site development, and that mostly on the server-side, so I'm a Java EE/Hibernate/Spring/Eclipse person. Plenty of professional experienced Java developers will never use any of those technologies!
Once you've figured out what kind of apps you want to be building, I'd suggest visiting the Sun Forums if you have any technical question and then poking around the Java.net site, theserverside.org, JavaRanch and the java usenet newsgroups to get a better feel for what's out there and how it's rated by developers. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions that you want to ask offline.
Ignore the naysayers - for the most part they don't know what they're talking about. Sure you should have other languages under your belt, sure there's offshore competition, but still, Java experts are in demand and they will be for a long time yet.
they mentioned that a parcel's return address was "factitious."
Which is a real word correct in context and it's not even a neologism. Buy a dictionary.
Yes, well, I expect you're the sort of person who is also convinced that all managers are stupid just because you can't think outside of your own tiny perspective.
Whereas the Tories will no doubt be a shining beacon of moral rectitude when they finally claw their way back into power?
What a load of crap; I detest this partisan bollocks. Politicians of all colours are for the most part honest with a lot of dissembling forced upon them by the spin that the media will put upon any straight and honest answers that they give.
There are bad apples (just as an example a Tory cabinet minister went to prison for perjuring himself in a libel action) but this "oh the government is a monster" crap obscures any real debate about their actual policies. We get the politicians we deserve. Unfortunately.
An aide losing his blackberry is not proof, or even an indicator, of anything at all about the government as a whole. Particularly not the version of the story reported by a right wing newspaper about the left wing government.
When the Tories get in, they will do an adequate job of running the country. Then their lustre will fade and much the same people who complain now will switch allegiance and hail Labour as the new hope for honesty in governance.
your quote portrays a judge who is deliberately biasing the jury in favor of conviction
I think not:
"A beast, but a just beast"
In the story the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. The various dissenters base their opinions on intuition (Wimsey) or the character of the accused(the jury members who force the retrial).
Great explanation. Some words by Dorothy L. Sayers on the subject of reasonable doubt:
You may perhaps wish to hear from me exactly what is meant by the words "reasonable doubt". They mean, just so much doubt as you might have in everyday life about an ordinary matter of business. This is a case of murder, and it might be natural for you to think that, in such a case, the words mean more than this. But that is not so. They do not mean that you must cast about for fantastical solutions of what seems to you plain and simple. They do not mean those nightmare doubts which sometimes torment us at four o'clock in the morning when we have not slept very well. They mean that the proof must be such as you would accept about a plain matter of buying and selling, or some such commonplace transaction. You must not strain your belief in favour of the prisoner any more, of course, than you must accept proof of her guilt without the most careful scrutiny.
A large part of the Oxford English Dictionary was contributed by a murderer. I can't say it feels particularly morbid looking stuff up.
I wouldn't buy a book from CRC personally: CRC Lawsuit Frequently Asked Questions
Ah, I get you. Interesting. I can't think of a circumstance where I'd need to do it, but then I use email for pretty simple personal and business conversational stuff. What's the specific use case that drives your need for this feature if you don't mind my asking?
You're right, I misunderstood. I'm not sure how one could change the layout to "fix" this though. Unless perhaps drawing the thread relationships with stronger lines when there was an unread mail within the hierarchy would do the trick? Hard to be sure without some user testing though.
People like you give the rest of the profession a bad name. Unless there is an objective reason why a product cannot be used in a particular way, then it is perfectly reasonable for the user to do so. People should be given web mail accounts with 0 ability to customize anything until they have admin'd their own server for a year. Been running my mail servers since 1993. Please feel free to fuck right off.
Yours is devious, but not elegant. Your original post started out as a proponent of TBird, your subsequent messages make either it or you look like a giant pain in the ass to deal with, when I'm guessing neither is really true. And you sound like a bundle of charm, yourself. I like TBird despite its flaws. My initial post was to say that. Since people including yourself chose to pursue possible solutions to those flaws I was more than happy to discuss them. I am unaware of any moral obligation upon me to accept a "solution" that I consider to be inferior to the status quo.
In one case what I took for a flaw has either been fixed, or was user error on my part. So I haven't wasted my time here. What's your oh so worthy justification for time "wasted" lambasting me?
Ok, mission accomplished. All messages are downloaded, and new messages are available offline. That's extremely pleasing, so thank you for pursuing this. Left to my own devices I might have tested it when T'bird 3 came out, but certainly not before.
My recollection was that I'd tried this before with T'bird 2 so either it's a bugfix since an earlier 2.0.0.x release, or PEBKAC.
Thanks again.
Most of the problems there sound like they arise from the use of the Subject instead of the Message ID header.
Is that true? They have a drafts capability and I rather thought you could create a new message from an existing draft.
For me that's not something I ever actually need to do though. Presumably the developers don't either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not slagging them off for not fixing my bugs either - if they were problems for the developers they would be higher up the priority list, and rightly so.