It was January 2009 for me. Actually I should have switches long time before as I lost memory of when it has been the year of the Linux server for me. Compared to now it was a pain to use a Windows client to develop web apps running on Linux. I finally switched when I realized that all the software I was using was available on Linux, from office applications to development tools. I made a check for existence of drivers for my scanner, printer and webcam and bye bye Windows.
I don't have any IE at hand but I zoomed on/. in Firefox, Opera and Chrome and it does look good. Both text and images are scaled and that has been at least since 2007. I'm writing this into a zoomed in text area and I see no problems with the text. Could you post a link to some of those web sites you're having problems with? I'd like to check them with my browsers. Assuming that zoom shouldn't break web sites if one breaks you could open a bug to the browser development team (probably even MS allows that).
I also got my degree in CS before Computer Engineering existed in my country. I did well in pure CS subjects and barely enough in Calculus, Physics, Statistics, Algebra and the like (basically my interest in them was not enough to do well) so I think I understand your feelings.
I don't know much about what they teach in CE but for most people in this business CE is the right way to go now.
Mostly offtopic, why do you guys in the USA have to study history in CS or other scientific courses? There are all those long years of school before university to learn history. Why losing time with that instead of studying something related to CS? I had to study history for 13 years before university. If I didn't know it by then a 6 months course at university would have been useless anyway.
But what good reason is there for CS to exclude the people who can't?
The reason is the S in CS: Science. But companies don't hire scientists with a Ph.D. in chemistry or physics to build houses, right? They hire engineers.
The fact that companies hire people with a CS degree to write programs is a misunderstanding which probably originated when only computer scientists knew how to write programs. To be programmers is more like being engineers than scientists so there is no particular reason why people should get a degree in CS to become programmers now. CS graduates should do science and not write programs for customers. Programmers should come out from engineering schools and if calculus is only required for a very minor application domain (and it is) people should be allowed to complete their studies without learning it.
The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives.
The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.
However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.
The absence of the task bar will puzzle a lot of people used to it since Windows 95 (but I had no problems working without it on X Terminals before then) so removing it is a very bold and risky decision.
I cannot understand why the clock is so important to be in the middle of the top bar. Considering how many times one needs to know the time and how many times one needs to do something else, hiding it into a corner looks just right. Maybe there is a need to fill the top bar after having removed all the open application icons/names from it. It surely has to look bare and empty.
I also don't understand why is so important to show the name of the current application. Another way to fill all that empty space in the bar? But it if is so empty maybe the right thing to do is to remove it and leave only an Activities button to the left and the icons and clock to the right. That leaves more useful space for the applications and vertical space is always precious.
Some people will really get sick when the screen moves so much every time they open the menu. This interface may be not for everybody.
The Plus button to add new desktops uses up so much space (it takes a whole bottom bar with it) that it hints that a lot of people actually use multiple desktops. I do, but are they really so popular?
On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).
Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.
So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.
Why should they care about people using KDE? They should care about people using Gnome 2. I for once really don't know how KDE 3 looks like. Maybe a little like Windows but I'm not sure the screenshots I show where really KDE 3 (or 4 or something else). I'll search youtube.
By the way, not believing in private property is communism
Not really: there is no private property because everything belongs to the state, I'm the King, I'm the state, everything belongs to me but still there is no private property. This happened many times in the history of the world before the idea of communism was born. And even communists had their kings. They just used other names to call them.
He's 78 so he'll be out of business soon. This campaign against the Internet could be the last big one of his career and he's going to lose it. Not that I can tell a billionaire he's a loser, but he could have chosen a better way to leave the show.
Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.
[...]
A spokeswoman for CERN confirmed that baguette was responsible for the latest hiatus, but she conceded that mystery surrounded the way it got into the vital power installation, which is protected by high security fences.
“Nobody knows how it got there,” she told The Times. “The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane.”
“Obviously this was slightly surprising. Within the team there was some amusement once they had relaxed after initial concerns.”
The bread was discovered on a busbar - an electrical connection inside one of eight buildings above ground on the 17-mile (27km) circuit in the Swiss countryside.
The spokeswoman said: “The collider extends over a very large area – you have to have a very comprehensive system to try to avoid problems of this kind. We’re talking about a couple of days down time.”
Scientists hope that the temperature will be restored by around midnight tonight allowing work to continue. The failure of the cooler meant the temperature rose around 5 degrees to the equivalent of about -266C.
A lot of things will drop on sections "of outdoor machinery". It seems that this LHC machine has been designed in such a way that will never get a chance to work.
Maybe we can compare how much technically savvy are the users of different sites by looking at the share of different browsers. We can compare the data of Ars with the data of w3schools (monthly data since 2002).
W3S's share of Firefox is larger that all the IE's together. FF overtook IE at about the beginning of this year.
If the webmaster wants people of other languages to access the site he'll also register a latin domain name. If he don't cares, it's mainly his problem as he loses audience and possibly money.
Second: services to map non-latin domain names into latin ones will appear, similarly to URL shorteners services. That will solve the problem for most of us.
But also think about this: Chinese-language sites have latin domain names and Chinese-speaking users typing on Chinese keyboards now. They'll be able to let their main users to type URLs in their native language. That's definitely a good thing.
Researchers should also investigate which gene variant prevents most American professional drivers to correctly turn right at high speed. That ultimately led to the creation of oval tracks and gave a competitive advantage to foreign drivers which find it easy to go to the USA and win races and titles.
Disclaimer: that was intended to be both fun and informative;-)
Maybe the parent wished to be modded as funny. What happened along the years is that CMS products have been turned into commodities. The White House recognized that and switched the investment into the service of updating the contents. Optimizing the way one spends money looks a basic precept of capitalism to me, very American.
It's simple: each non-free-software company sets up its own repository, instruct users about how to add it to the system sources list and that's all. By using a repository they gain multi architecture support (*) and system-managed updates of the applications.
(*) They have to compile their own software for all architectures and can't rely on distributions to do that, but there is something you to pay if you want to close your software.
What's unnatural about clicking Applications, Add/Remove..., select the applications you want to install (they're split in several categories) and get them installed?
It's way better than having to browse the web to look for the applications web sites, decide what's the right installer for you given your architecture and the versions of you system libraries, download each setup file manually and manually run them.
Basically apt/yum + the repositories are the universal binary thing this guy is proposing and using repositories your system only has to download and install the files you really need. People wanting to sell the software for money can just setup a repository and make their programs ask for a license code the first time they're run.
Universal binaries for Linux are a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Any language that gives a semantic meaning to indentation should be banned from this world, but this is mostly a matter of religion so I won't go deeper into that. What I'm interested into is to learn about objective measures of the auditability of different programming languages. Do you have some references? I googled a little but I didn't find anything meaningful particularly about Python and Ruby . Thanks.
Ubuntu always releases it's x.10 version on October. They're on an April/October release schedule since 2004, with the only exception of version 6.06 on June 2006.
I don't think they were foreseeing the Win7 release date back in 2004, neither I think that Microsoft is releasing on October because of Karmic Koala. It just happened.
It's the 'I'm taking it so nobody else can have it, either" principle.
<fun>So one could patent Being Evil to prevent everybody else from being evil. Sounds Good! Any prior art?</fun>
Actually in the case of Apple they might negate a competitive advantage to other companies, but why are they patenting showing ads and not a million other things? It looks like they have some interests in advertising and don't want someone else to patent it before them.
If I'm the author of a GPLed piece of software I still own the software I wrote so I can decide to make a closed source fork. Did I get it wrong? If I got it right, dual licensing is a pretty normal consequence of my ownership of the code. The only way to prevent it would be to surrender the ownership of the code, but if I don't own it, how can I license it? Without an owner the code would be in the public domain where anybody can take it and use it for closed source projects. So what's the way out? Maybe a license that binds me to use the code only under its terms?
I'm not as optimist as the GP but it was the year of Linux on the desktop for me. I formatted my Windows PC back in January and installed Ubuntu. I've got a few Windows VM for testing sites with IE6/7/8 and it's not something I do daily. I even bought a Linux EEEPC a few months ago. In my job (web development for the open source stack) more than half of the people I know use a Mac (because it's Unix and because it just works, they say, but they have still to install a lot of things to be productive) and the remaining part is split between several flavours of Linux and a few flavours of Windows. More Linux boxes than Windows ones I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
It was January 2009 for me. Actually I should have switches long time before as I lost memory of when it has been the year of the Linux server for me. Compared to now it was a pain to use a Windows client to develop web apps running on Linux. I finally switched when I realized that all the software I was using was available on Linux, from office applications to development tools. I made a check for existence of drivers for my scanner, printer and webcam and bye bye Windows.
I don't have any IE at hand but I zoomed on /. in Firefox, Opera and Chrome and it does look good. Both text and images are scaled and that has been at least since 2007. I'm writing this into a zoomed in text area and I see no problems with the text. Could you post a link to some of those web sites you're having problems with? I'd like to check them with my browsers. Assuming that zoom shouldn't break web sites if one breaks you could open a bug to the browser development team (probably even MS allows that).
I also got my degree in CS before Computer Engineering existed in my country. I did well in pure CS subjects and barely enough in Calculus, Physics, Statistics, Algebra and the like (basically my interest in them was not enough to do well) so I think I understand your feelings.
I don't know much about what they teach in CE but for most people in this business CE is the right way to go now.
Mostly offtopic, why do you guys in the USA have to study history in CS or other scientific courses? There are all those long years of school before university to learn history. Why losing time with that instead of studying something related to CS? I had to study history for 13 years before university. If I didn't know it by then a 6 months course at university would have been useless anyway.
The reason is the S in CS: Science. But companies don't hire scientists with a Ph.D. in chemistry or physics to build houses, right? They hire engineers.
The fact that companies hire people with a CS degree to write programs is a misunderstanding which probably originated when only computer scientists knew how to write programs. To be programmers is more like being engineers than scientists so there is no particular reason why people should get a degree in CS to become programmers now. CS graduates should do science and not write programs for customers. Programmers should come out from engineering schools and if calculus is only required for a very minor application domain (and it is) people should be allowed to complete their studies without learning it.
The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives. The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.
However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.
On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).
Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.
So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.
Why should they care about people using KDE? They should care about people using Gnome 2. I for once really don't know how KDE 3 looks like. Maybe a little like Windows but I'm not sure the screenshots I show where really KDE 3 (or 4 or something else). I'll search youtube.
Not really: there is no private property because everything belongs to the state, I'm the King, I'm the state, everything belongs to me but still there is no private property. This happened many times in the history of the world before the idea of communism was born. And even communists had their kings. They just used other names to call them.
He's 78 so he'll be out of business soon. This campaign against the Internet could be the last big one of his career and he's going to lose it. Not that I can tell a billionaire he's a loser, but he could have chosen a better way to leave the show.
I belong to that cross section. Either I'm non-existent or your post has to be modded as flamebait or troll.
Whatever the case, Esquire made a mistake not using a technology that could be ported easily to any platform (Java?)
This article gives more information
A lot of things will drop on sections "of outdoor machinery". It seems that this LHC machine has been designed in such a way that will never get a chance to work.
Maybe we can compare how much technically savvy are the users of different sites by looking at the share of different browsers. We can compare the data of Ars with the data of w3schools (monthly data since 2002).
W3S's share of Firefox is larger that all the IE's together. FF overtook IE at about the beginning of this year.
If the webmaster wants people of other languages to access the site he'll also register a latin domain name. If he don't cares, it's mainly his problem as he loses audience and possibly money.
Second: services to map non-latin domain names into latin ones will appear, similarly to URL shorteners services. That will solve the problem for most of us.
But also think about this: Chinese-language sites have latin domain names and Chinese-speaking users typing on Chinese keyboards now. They'll be able to let their main users to type URLs in their native language. That's definitely a good thing.
Researchers should also investigate which gene variant prevents most American professional drivers to correctly turn right at high speed. That ultimately led to the creation of oval tracks and gave a competitive advantage to foreign drivers which find it easy to go to the USA and win races and titles.
Disclaimer: that was intended to be both fun and informative ;-)
Glad to have been helpful :-)
By parent I meant Rockoon's post. Sorry for not being clear about it. BTW, I'd also like to know what the WH was using before Drupal.
Maybe the parent wished to be modded as funny. What happened along the years is that CMS products have been turned into commodities. The White House recognized that and switched the investment into the service of updating the contents. Optimizing the way one spends money looks a basic precept of capitalism to me, very American.
It's simple: each non-free-software company sets up its own repository, instruct users about how to add it to the system sources list and that's all. By using a repository they gain multi architecture support (*) and system-managed updates of the applications.
(*) They have to compile their own software for all architectures and can't rely on distributions to do that, but there is something you to pay if you want to close your software.
What's unnatural about clicking Applications, Add/Remove..., select the applications you want to install (they're split in several categories) and get them installed? It's way better than having to browse the web to look for the applications web sites, decide what's the right installer for you given your architecture and the versions of you system libraries, download each setup file manually and manually run them.
Basically apt/yum + the repositories are the universal binary thing this guy is proposing and using repositories your system only has to download and install the files you really need. People wanting to sell the software for money can just setup a repository and make their programs ask for a license code the first time they're run.
Universal binaries for Linux are a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Any language that gives a semantic meaning to indentation should be banned from this world, but this is mostly a matter of religion so I won't go deeper into that. What I'm interested into is to learn about objective measures of the auditability of different programming languages. Do you have some references? I googled a little but I didn't find anything meaningful particularly about Python and Ruby . Thanks.
Ubuntu always releases it's x.10 version on October. They're on an April/October release schedule since 2004, with the only exception of version 6.06 on June 2006.
I don't think they were foreseeing the Win7 release date back in 2004, neither I think that Microsoft is releasing on October because of Karmic Koala. It just happened.
>
It's the 'I'm taking it so nobody else can have it, either" principle.
<fun>So one could patent Being Evil to prevent everybody else from being evil. Sounds Good! Any prior art?</fun>
Actually in the case of Apple they might negate a competitive advantage to other companies, but why are they patenting showing ads and not a million other things? It looks like they have some interests in advertising and don't want someone else to patent it before them.
If I'm the author of a GPLed piece of software I still own the software I wrote so I can decide to make a closed source fork. Did I get it wrong? If I got it right, dual licensing is a pretty normal consequence of my ownership of the code. The only way to prevent it would be to surrender the ownership of the code, but if I don't own it, how can I license it? Without an owner the code would be in the public domain where anybody can take it and use it for closed source projects. So what's the way out? Maybe a license that binds me to use the code only under its terms?
As Apple took FreeBSD and Mach and slapped a pretty GUI on top, making millions on the new product, [...]
So it was the year of FreeBSD on the desktop :-)
I'm not as optimist as the GP but it was the year of Linux on the desktop for me. I formatted my Windows PC back in January and installed Ubuntu. I've got a few Windows VM for testing sites with IE6/7/8 and it's not something I do daily. I even bought a Linux EEEPC a few months ago. In my job (web development for the open source stack) more than half of the people I know use a Mac (because it's Unix and because it just works, they say, but they have still to install a lot of things to be productive) and the remaining part is split between several flavours of Linux and a few flavours of Windows. More Linux boxes than Windows ones I'd say.