I use terminals quite a lot, of course. I've been using Nautilus a lot more for file handling recently, however; especially for handling images it is a lot more convenient than using a terminal (digital cameras are fun, but you tend to end up with a _lot_ of crappy pictures:) ).
The panel is also a very convenient aspect of desktops for me. Starting frequently used apps by clicking their icon in the panel is usually quicker than typing it in a terminal. Stuff like the desktop pager, clock, battery indicator and so on lets me eaasily see what's going on. Also, I have a few Gnumeric files I have reason to open and edit every single day, and those I have on the desktop - a lot easier to just click on one to edit it than cd:ing to the right subdirectory and running gnumeric on it.
So yes, I do use both. Both ways ow working have their strengths and their weaknesses; the trick is of course to know when to use either.
Of course, you really need to consider that those libs are shared with a host of other applications as well; they are only loaded into memory once after all. If you are already running Gnome or KDE, the overhead of another application using the libs is effectively zero. So no, taking that overhead into consideration would not be honest.
Of course, when looking at Xterm or rxvt, you should not factor in the use of X libraries or libc either.
I think people may in general read more inteo the gpl-demands than is actually the case.
Assume that they have their own application on top of a normal embedded linux system.
First, they are not obliged to release a single line of source from their own app.
Second, for all the gpl software theyy use, they are only obliged to give source to their customers, and only on request. They can easily fulfil both letter and intent by, for example, have a pre-adressed postcard in the back of the owner's manual to request the source, which will then be sent in the form of a CD./Janne
I sort of wanted that as well, previously. But I've been using the Adblocker extensions for the past six months now, and as it turns out 99.9% of all animated gif:s I do not want to see are part of an ad, which Adblocker kills.
With Adblocker and the Flash click-to-view extension, there is very rarely any unwanted blinking or moving on webpages nowadays.
Exchange "anime" -> "books", "making" -> "writing", "Adult Swim" -> "Amazon" and you have a nice description of the fiction market. Do the same for music and it fits there as well. Ditto sculpture, photography and so on.
Most of anything creative is bad, almost by definition. As a poster pointed out elsewhere, you have a situation with millions of people willing to do the craft, with an inverse exponential talent distribution - and subjective criteria for what constitutes a good instance, so you can not reliably actually separate the wheat from the chaff. You will end up with mostly crap no matter how you do it. Today you may have a thousand releases, 950 of which are no good (in your eyes, of course). If you allowed only twenty releases a year, you would end up with 19 lousy examples and one good one.
Hollywood is no different. Most of it is bad. What is not bad for everyone is good for some people, but bad for others. Very, very few movies (Hollywood or other) are actually good for a large majority of recpients. You can even argue with some plausibility that Hollywood is streamlining its process to such a degree that they increase its hitrate for one audience segment (male, european/american, 15-30) at the cost of losing most other demographics altogether.
Of course, Sweden and Finland are, alongside Japan, among the most unwired countries in the world - and thay manage to handle the expense of overing not only the densely populated urban centers and southern areas, but most of the (very sparse) countryside as well.
Well, he does touch on a couple of sort of important points: How to actually force the use of nuclear power _rather_ than fossil fuels, not _in_addition_ to them; and how to deal with the inevitable security concerns. Some nations will be very anxious to have a tight control on all aspects of nuclear use around the world (risk of not only nuclear arms construction, but also of dirty bombs from the normal waste products of reactor use), while many other nations will be very nervous at the prospect of having a potentially very unfriendly nation controlling their national energy availability. This is not easy to resolve.
What makes this discussion moot, to a point, is that nuclear power (at least, uranium-based power) is no more a long-term solution than oil. Uranium has its own Hubbert's peak; estimates vary, but seems to hover at about 25-40 years if we start developing nuclear power as a full alternative. You would do a massive, hugely expensive, conversion of all our energy systems for a breathing space of a few decades.
And, of course, uranium mines are possibly the most polluting operations humanity currently engages in. Since that seems to only affect people on other continents, it never seems to become a big issue in the US or Europe, though...
I got a whole load of responses to this comment. Most of them sort of missed the point, though; I'll comment on them here.
First, nothing we say or do here or in other vaguely pro-OSS venues will make a dent in the publishers or the authors reputation. The vast majority who buy the book will be institutional libraries, or no-quality magazines eager for anything to fill their pages (what? You wonder from where your in-flight magazine articles come?).
Whatever the source, it _just_does_not_matter_ what we think of them. These are people long inured to publishing riveting accounts of how the shroud of Turin is authentic or how you too can enjoy a better sexlife through the ingestion of rubberband-smoke. Mere facts is not going to reach them.
Second, it may well be libelious. Again, who cares? Mr. Torvalds could sue the sorry excuse for an author for a million bucks, win toatlly, decicively and utterly, and only be recorded as a mogul mashing the poor unknown by his might, preventing the real truth in the process.
Publishing a book, paper or article: who's going to read it? Again, we have a strong, vigorous culture of debunkers doing this for all kinds of religius and psychic nonsense; do you have any feeling that the "geneal public" is even aware of these strong efforts to bring out the scientific facts in the face of frauds?
I really _mean_ "why bother".
If humanity does not want to know about science, let them wallow in ignorance. If people insist - despite all pressure to the contrary - on being sheep, let them be sheep.
If you, or a relative of yours, is dying from a disease - tough. If you want scientists to actually work on it, then don't freaking piss on every base science is rightly depending on to work.
If you want to depend on "the stars" for your life, the freaking depend on them when you get cancer too, and don't come crying about it, ok?
The sad part of this is that it really makes little difference just how much people rip into this piese of literary excrement. Since it is "published" the majority of its intended audience will never even hear a whiff of any criticism, no matter how much we holler here.
Compare to the thriving business of fortune telling or psycics (or evangelists), or of convinced political partisans. Debunking is happening continuously, but it doesn't even make a dent in these charlatans pocketbooks, as their marks do not hear about it anyway. They just aren't consumers of the kind of media that will publish anything critical of their chosen belief.
So does Evolution, by default. The webmail I have for one of my addresses does too. And apparently, so will the next version of Outlook, effectively killing this service.
Note that you have 4k of ROM, that in addition can be bank-switched. "All" you need the RAM for is for changing variables, really. Not that it's not a pretty demanding limit (seeing how apparently the 6502 stack needs to fit as well), but you do have a bit more margin to play with that it seems at first. Most microcontrollers today look similar, with what seems like a ridiculously low amount of RAM compared to ROM.
Compare to the Commodore VIC20 - precursor to the C64 (and a wonderful machine in many ways). You had 5k total, of which 1.5k went for the video buffer. That left you with about the same amount of total codespace to play with, and there were no shortage of really good games for that machine either. The defining limitation of the 2600 really seems to be the lack of a framebuffer far more than the low amount of RAM.
"knowing a word or two" != "wanting to run the destop in English". I speak, read and write English fluently, and I prefer to have my desktop in Swedish anyway - together with support for Japanese, as I am studying the language.
Camerahpones are fine for serendipitous picture taking; you always have the camera with you, after all. However, a camera phone is no match for even low-to-mid end consumer digital cameras. The phones have fairly low resolution (around 1mbit or less, usually), pretty crappy optics, usually no optical zoom, no way to manually adjust parameters, and so on.
As a neat toy or way to document sudden events, the phone is certainly good enough, but if you find yourself bitten by the photography bug, you really should take the plunge and get a semi-serious camera. No need to get some hideosuly expensive, huge monstrosity with removable lenses or anything; a mid-price camera with good optics, good resolution (5-6 megapixels) and decent control over the image taking will go a very, very long way. It is of course true that equipment never is a substitute for talent, but, on the other hand, lack of decent equipment certainly doesn't help either.
yes, of course it is a good thing. The comparison in the artictle linked to by the news item is just rather incomplete; the most used OSS spreadsheet is gnumeric and is not subject to the faults as listed by the article writer as it stands.
As Jody says in another post, the actual charting is still in its early stages for Gnumeric - but improving rapidly (and user feedback is of course of prime importance).
For the important background parts - getting the mathematics right - Gnumeric is _very_ mature. It has far more reliable models than excel.
(self-serving promotion ahead) It also has a pretty decent Swedish translation...
I mean, Gnumeric is excellent - it even emulates excel bugs if you want to (and will not, otherwise). I seriously do not understand why people would use another spreadhseet.
Galeon does not follow the HIG that core apps are expect to do, and epiphany does.
That does not imply that Galeon isn't a cool browser or anything, just that you'll need to download it yourself or have your distribution include it - just as before.
Actually, I've had absolutely no problem with reading long novels on my Yopy. The screen may be small and only show two paragraphs total, but it is clear and crisp, and I very rapidly got into the habit of flipping "pages" often. A book like "Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom" (greatly recommended!) did not take substantially longer time for me to read than it would have on paper.
I can contrast that with the experience on my Palm. The screen could display about as much information, but it was muggy and lower contrast. Reading any serious amount of text was out of the question. The quality of the screen really is much more important than the number of characters you fit on it.
I can get most reasonably current papers in PDF format online through my university. That accounts for a lot of my professional reading. Also, a surprising amount of reading material is available on the net in various nooks and crannies - and it is perfectly legal to get a copy if you own the original (which you really want to anyway - as I said, this is not a replacement for physical books). The "Safari" system of O'Reilly is one example, as is Baen Books promotion of great series by free downloads of older parts.
Also, in the context of University, for really important reference works, it turns out to be surprisingly easy to convince your colleagues to each take a stint with a scanner and OCR software so everybody can get an imperfect, error-ridden, but searchable and mobile copy to have on your computer.
I think you misunderstand the intended use of devices like this.
I have a PDA for reading, but for me it not as an alternative to books - it's an alternative to _no_ books. It's something I can carry around that can contain several hundred texts (including reference works, fiction and so on) when I am travelling, when I am not at home, or (as now) when I live in a different country for a time. Bringing along hundreds of physical books is just not an option.
The feature set of this device is (for me) properly compared with the PDA I currently use, rather than with a physical book. Sadly, while the screen seems very good, the use of DRM will likely cripple the device so badly it might as well not exist for me.
I have zero interest in buying content for it - I just want to be able to easily upload any textual content in a standard format (be it html, pdf or whatever) and display and search it on the device. I suspect that this is not possible with this device.
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I use terminals quite a lot, of course. I've been using Nautilus a lot more for file handling recently, however; especially for handling images it is a lot more convenient than using a terminal (digital cameras are fun, but you tend to end up with a _lot_ of crappy pictures :) ).
The panel is also a very convenient aspect of desktops for me. Starting frequently used apps by clicking their icon in the panel is usually quicker than typing it in a terminal. Stuff like the desktop pager, clock, battery indicator and so on lets me eaasily see what's going on. Also, I have a few Gnumeric files I have reason to open and edit every single day, and those I have on the desktop - a lot easier to just click on one to edit it than cd:ing to the right subdirectory and running gnumeric on it.
So yes, I do use both. Both ways ow working have their strengths and their weaknesses; the trick is of course to know when to use either.
Of course, you really need to consider that those libs are shared with a host of other applications as well; they are only loaded into memory once after all. If you are already running Gnome or KDE, the overhead of another application using the libs is effectively zero. So no, taking that overhead into consideration would not be honest.
Of course, when looking at Xterm or rxvt, you should not factor in the use of X libraries or libc either.
I think people may in general read more inteo the gpl-demands than is actually the case.
/Janne
Assume that they have their own application on top of a normal embedded linux system.
First, they are not obliged to release a single line of source from their own app.
Second, for all the gpl software theyy use, they are only obliged to give source to their customers, and only on request. They can easily fulfil both letter and intent by, for example, have a pre-adressed postcard in the back of the owner's manual to request the source, which will then be sent in the form of a CD.
I sort of wanted that as well, previously. But I've been using the Adblocker extensions for the past six months now, and as it turns out 99.9% of all animated gif:s I do not want to see are part of an ad, which Adblocker kills.
With Adblocker and the Flash click-to-view extension, there is very rarely any unwanted blinking or moving on webpages nowadays.
Exchange "anime" -> "books", "making" -> "writing", "Adult Swim" -> "Amazon" and you have a nice description of the fiction market. Do the same for music and it fits there as well. Ditto sculpture, photography and so on.
Most of anything creative is bad, almost by definition. As a poster pointed out elsewhere, you have a situation with millions of people willing to do the craft, with an inverse exponential talent distribution - and subjective criteria for what constitutes a good instance, so you can not reliably actually separate the wheat from the chaff. You will end up with mostly crap no matter how you do it. Today you may have a thousand releases, 950 of which are no good (in your eyes, of course). If you allowed only twenty releases a year, you would end up with 19 lousy examples and one good one.
Hollywood is no different. Most of it is bad. What is not bad for everyone is good for some people, but bad for others. Very, very few movies (Hollywood or other) are actually good for a large majority of recpients. You can even argue with some plausibility that Hollywood is streamlining its process to such a degree that they increase its hitrate for one audience segment (male, european/american, 15-30) at the cost of losing most other demographics altogether.
Of course, Sweden and Finland are, alongside Japan, among the most unwired countries in the world - and thay manage to handle the expense of overing not only the densely populated urban centers and southern areas, but most of the (very sparse) countryside as well.
Well, he does touch on a couple of sort of important points: How to actually force the use of nuclear power _rather_ than fossil fuels, not _in_addition_ to them; and how to deal with the inevitable security concerns. Some nations will be very anxious to have a tight control on all aspects of nuclear use around the world (risk of not only nuclear arms construction, but also of dirty bombs from the normal waste products of reactor use), while many other nations will be very nervous at the prospect of having a potentially very unfriendly nation controlling their national energy availability. This is not easy to resolve.
What makes this discussion moot, to a point, is that nuclear power (at least, uranium-based power) is no more a long-term solution than oil. Uranium has its own Hubbert's peak; estimates vary, but seems to hover at about 25-40 years if we start developing nuclear power as a full alternative. You would do a massive, hugely expensive, conversion of all our energy systems for a breathing space of a few decades.
And, of course, uranium mines are possibly the most polluting operations humanity currently engages in. Since that seems to only affect people on other continents, it never seems to become a big issue in the US or Europe, though...
I got a whole load of responses to this comment. Most of them sort of missed the point, though; I'll comment on them here.
First, nothing we say or do here or in other vaguely pro-OSS venues will make a dent in the publishers or the authors reputation. The vast majority who buy the book will be institutional libraries, or no-quality magazines eager for anything to fill their pages (what? You wonder from where your in-flight magazine articles come?).
Whatever the source, it _just_does_not_matter_ what we think of them. These are people long inured to publishing riveting accounts of how the shroud of Turin is authentic or how you too can enjoy a better sexlife through the ingestion of rubberband-smoke. Mere facts is not going to reach them.
Second, it may well be libelious. Again, who cares? Mr. Torvalds could sue the sorry excuse for an author for a million bucks, win toatlly, decicively and utterly, and only be recorded as a mogul mashing the poor unknown by his might, preventing the real truth in the process.
Publishing a book, paper or article: who's going to read it? Again, we have a strong, vigorous culture of debunkers doing this for all kinds of religius and psychic nonsense; do you have any feeling that the "geneal public" is even aware of these strong efforts to bring out the scientific facts in the face of frauds?
I really _mean_ "why bother".
If humanity does not want to know about science, let them wallow in ignorance. If people insist - despite all pressure to the contrary - on being sheep, let them be sheep.
If you, or a relative of yours, is dying from a disease - tough. If you want scientists to actually work on it, then don't freaking piss on every base science is rightly depending on to work.
If you want to depend on "the stars" for your life, the freaking depend on them when you get cancer too, and don't come crying about it, ok?
The sad part of this is that it really makes little difference just how much people rip into this piese of literary excrement. Since it is "published" the majority of its intended audience will never even hear a whiff of any criticism, no matter how much we holler here.
Compare to the thriving business of fortune telling or psycics (or evangelists), or of convinced political partisans. Debunking is happening continuously, but it doesn't even make a dent in these charlatans pocketbooks, as their marks do not hear about it anyway. They just aren't consumers of the kind of media that will publish anything critical of their chosen belief.
So does Evolution, by default. The webmail I have for one of my addresses does too. And apparently, so will the next version of Outlook, effectively killing this service.
Note that you have 4k of ROM, that in addition can be bank-switched. "All" you need the RAM for is for changing variables, really. Not that it's not a pretty demanding limit (seeing how apparently the 6502 stack needs to fit as well), but you do have a bit more margin to play with that it seems at first. Most microcontrollers today look similar, with what seems like a ridiculously low amount of RAM compared to ROM.
Compare to the Commodore VIC20 - precursor to the C64 (and a wonderful machine in many ways). You had 5k total, of which 1.5k went for the video buffer. That left you with about the same amount of total codespace to play with, and there were no shortage of really good games for that machine either. The defining limitation of the 2600 really seems to be the lack of a framebuffer far more than the low amount of RAM.
No, he just had a guest account.
"knowing a word or two" != "wanting to run the destop in English". I speak, read and write English fluently, and I prefer to have my desktop in Swedish anyway - together with support for Japanese, as I am studying the language.
Ah, didn't realize that. Thanks for pointing it out. /Janne
If someone has changed these ISO:s in some way, I'd think they'd simply generate new MD5sums to send along as well.
They've been testing a preproduction prototype for over ten years now; I think they have a decent handle on the structural characteristics by now.
Camerahpones are fine for serendipitous picture taking; you always have the camera with you, after all. However, a camera phone is no match for even low-to-mid end consumer digital cameras. The phones have fairly low resolution (around 1mbit or less, usually), pretty crappy optics, usually no optical zoom, no way to manually adjust parameters, and so on.
As a neat toy or way to document sudden events, the phone is certainly good enough, but if you find yourself bitten by the photography bug, you really should take the plunge and get a semi-serious camera. No need to get some hideosuly expensive, huge monstrosity with removable lenses or anything; a mid-price camera with good optics, good resolution (5-6 megapixels) and decent control over the image taking will go a very, very long way. It is of course true that equipment never is a substitute for talent, but, on the other hand, lack of decent equipment certainly doesn't help either.
yes, of course it is a good thing. The comparison in the artictle linked to by the news item is just rather incomplete; the most used OSS spreadsheet is gnumeric and is not subject to the faults as listed by the article writer as it stands.
As Jody says in another post, the actual charting is still in its early stages for Gnumeric - but improving rapidly (and user feedback is of course of prime importance).
For the important background parts - getting the mathematics right - Gnumeric is _very_ mature. It has far more reliable models than excel.
(self-serving promotion ahead)
It also has a pretty decent Swedish translation...
Like Gnumeric, you mean?
I mean, Gnumeric is excellent - it even emulates excel bugs if you want to (and will not, otherwise). I seriously do not understand why people would use another spreadhseet.
Galeon does not follow the HIG that core apps are expect to do, and epiphany does.
That does not imply that Galeon isn't a cool browser or anything, just that you'll need to download it yourself or have your distribution include it - just as before.
Actually, I've had absolutely no problem with reading long novels on my Yopy. The screen may be small and only show two paragraphs total, but it is clear and crisp, and I very rapidly got into the habit of flipping "pages" often. A book like "Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom" (greatly recommended!) did not take substantially longer time for me to read than it would have on paper.
I can contrast that with the experience on my Palm. The screen could display about as much information, but it was muggy and lower contrast. Reading any serious amount of text was out of the question. The quality of the screen really is much more important than the number of characters you fit on it.
I can get most reasonably current papers in PDF format online through my university. That accounts for a lot of my professional reading. Also, a surprising amount of reading material is available on the net in various nooks and crannies - and it is perfectly legal to get a copy if you own the original (which you really want to anyway - as I said, this is not a replacement for physical books). The "Safari" system of O'Reilly is one example, as is Baen Books promotion of great series by free downloads of older parts.
Also, in the context of University, for really important reference works, it turns out to be surprisingly easy to convince your colleagues to each take a stint with a scanner and OCR software so everybody can get an imperfect, error-ridden, but searchable and mobile copy to have on your computer.
I think you misunderstand the intended use of devices like this.
I have a PDA for reading, but for me it not as an alternative to books - it's an alternative to _no_ books. It's something I can carry around that can contain several hundred texts (including reference works, fiction and so on) when I am travelling, when I am not at home, or (as now) when I live in a different country for a time. Bringing along hundreds of physical books is just not an option.
The feature set of this device is (for me) properly compared with the PDA I currently use, rather than with a physical book. Sadly, while the screen seems very good, the use of DRM will likely cripple the device so badly it might as well not exist for me.
I have zero interest in buying content for it - I just want to be able to easily upload any textual content in a standard format (be it html, pdf or whatever) and display and search it on the device. I suspect that this is not possible with this device.