Ok, I'll try to refrain from using this quote. Ironically (?) my Mum is a qualified lactation consultant. Believe me, I know all the things that can go wrong with breast feeding.
Why is it OK for Linux to patch the hell outta itself but a damn near capital crime if Microsoft has to?
Because patch is the unix/linux tool used to apply a file generated by diff. All our updates are therefore "patches". You non-Unix people latch onto this word and think that Linux programmers and/or users must be constantly running around fixing problems. In reality only a few critical problems with Linux come up each year. Most of the "patches" you refer to are for new drivers or functionality, or more mundane bugs that *don't* open the system up to a remote exploit.
grammer -> grammar
D'oh! I was afraid of missing something. I was being really careful too.
noname -> no-name
That's debatable. Either way, you're making a compound word. Down here in.AU, "noname" actually is a brand name. Although they certainly don't make network switches.
castor wheels -> casters
Nup, "castor" is in my Oxford dictionary. It specifically mentions wheels on furniture. Perhaps "caster" is an Americanism.
16 wheeler -> 18 wheeler
Do I look like a trucker? Is this TruckDot? Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with spelling or grammar.
plug into -> plug in to
Alright. Note to self: "into" is quite different to "in to".
centre -> center
Once again, an Americanism. The correct Commonwealth spelling is centre. (BTW, it's annoying that the American spelling is in the HTML standard)
a days time -> a day's time
I always thought this was another Americanism but it seems it isn't. I'm trying really hard to remember what I learnt in school. Hmmm...
Geez dude, go back to school and learn how to punctuate properly and the proper use of there/they're/their. I'm not a grammer/spelling nazi. Even though mistakes annoy the shit out of me, I usually let it pass. I know I make the occasional mistake myself. But your post was just too much.
I don't know why I'm doing this, but here's a corrected version of your post:
Working at AboveNet, Google has pulled their machines in and out of our data centers many a time. It's incredible the way they have their shit set up.
They fit about 100 or so 1U machines on each side of the rack. They're double sided cabinets that look like refrigerators, separated in the center by noname brand switches and they have castor wheels on the bottom. Google can at the drop of a dime roll their machines out of a data centre onto their 16 wheeler then move, unload and plug into a new data centre in less than a days time.
As always, the problem is in the meaning of the word "free". The FSF, and ESR in the text you quoted, uses the word in the context of "freedom". You specifically use the phrase "no cost". That's not the same. The only thing the GNU GPL says about cost is that the license is free. You can charge for the media and even the software, but not the license. The FSF has lots of documents about their philosophy. Sorry I can't find you the relevent doc, searching for "free" on that page is useless. Hope that helped.
About your problem with Add/Remove programs: My younger brother used to have this problem with his XP box. It turned out to be caused by some weird theme he had installed, IIRC. Do you have anything like that installed?
When I was talking about the brain not being hard-coded to recognize or prefer certain UI elements, I should have clarified it by saying "at the high-level". Sure, as you say, there are parts of the visual cortex that detect edges and motion etc. The edge information is used to recognize features and objects. Our binocular vision can place objects in 3D space, and along with the motion information can give fairly accurate estimates of an objects motion in 3D space.
Our GUI designs are probably more an evolution of designs from paper (e.g books, magazines, posters, flyers, resaurant menus, written notes). Apart from buttons, most attempts to use real-world physical objects as GUI elements are just badideas.
Window - like a piece of paper.
Menu bars, pop-up/down menus - items on a menu or itemized list?
Tabs - the use of bookmarks, tabs, and even scooped-out finger-holds (?) have been used in books for a while.
Scroll bars - a bit of a stretch, but public decrees and such used to be read from scrolls. That was probably back when paper was made from animal skin. Now we mass-produce it from chewed up trees and sheets are just more practical.
Your idea of using a fog effect on background windows is interesting. I don't like these ideas to make a "3D desktop" but something simple like that could maybe help. And thanks to 3D gaming, graphics cards have developed some formidable texturing abilities over the last 7-8 years. It's certainly do-able.
Ok. I'm not sure I'd call it chaotic. That seems a bit of an exaggeration to me, and a misuse of the word chaotic. But you do have a point. It's just that it's been fixed in 2.0. Gimp 2.0 entered Debian Sid/unstable almost a month ago so hopefully it will enter Testing soon and you'll be able to see it. Don't you at least have the 1.3 development version available? In 1.3/2.0 the transform tool has been split up and each task (rotate, scale, shear, perspective) is now a seperate icon in the tool palette. I've made a screenshot of the main window in my setup (go easy on my home ADSL link). The new icons are the last four in the second row.
Another insteresting feature is that all the layers/channels/brushes/etc dialogs are now dockable. I can drag one off into a new window and drag it back to the main window. They can be added, removed, and re-ordered to suit your fancy. Each window (either the main Gimp window, or a stand-alone dialog window) can have many tabs, as well as many docks stacked vertically. You can see this in my screenshot. I have Layers, Channels, Gradients, Brushes, and Gradients all stacked in one dock, and the Device status (Wacom Intuos stuff) in a seperate dock down the bottom. It's all very flexible and easy to simply drag things about.
The Gimp 2.0 is much nicer. A lot of work has gone into the interface since 1.2.
Ah, thank you for missing the main point of my post. My aim was to simply discuss the single-menu Macintosh interface and Microsofts MDI. Instead you seemed to have reacted to my little $0.02 comment at the end and have even quoted parts of my post out of context. Lovelly. Well since you brought it up, here's a little rant about interfaces.
People should never forget:
The nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned.
Intuitionn. (power of) knowing without learning or reasoning. Intuitiveadj., intuitivelyadv.
I think people often get mixed up when they talk of intuitive interfaces. I know you didn't mention the I word, but it sounded like you were coming close. When people talk about something being intuitive, they really mean that it's familiar. They've already used something that looks or acts like this new thing and they can carry over their experience. That's all. The human brain is a wonderfully flexible thing. Just look at how far our science and technology has advanced in a few thousand years with little to no biological evolution. I seriously doubt there's anything hard-coded into our hunter-gatherer brains that prefers MDI over multiple top-level windows. Or any other GUI element over another. How can it be anything else than preference and experience? Unless things are very different in your part of the world, there's nothing else in real-life that looks or operates anything like an image window. Or a drop-down menu. Or bucket fill. Or scroll bars. Or even a mouse for that matter. People developed these things over time and we learned how these things operate. Get over it.
</rant>
On a more constructive note: Can people be a little more constructive and descriptive in their criticisms of The Gimp? Saying that PS is a more positive experience or somesuch doesn't really help. For me, all the negative posts here just sound like a bunch of whingers. wah, it's not like PhotoShop! To hear a lot of people complaining with little or no detail doesn't help. Not one bit. Provide some constructive help or STFU.
And what is MDI anyway? It's Microsoft's workaround to put the menu bar where it belongs: At the top of the screen, for all windows in a single application.
That's been pretty much my take on MDI for many years. MDI was, as far as I can tell, Microsofts attempt to imitate the Macintosh layout in a multiple-window environment. Just maximize an MDI window and, apart from the title bar at the top and the main window covering everything else, you pretty much have the Macintosh style.
Now, IMNSHO, perhaps one of the main reasons the Macintosh did things this way was to save screen real estate. The original Mac was 640x480 or less, on a tiny 12 or 13 inch screen. Keeping one menu for all your windows saved space. With large screens and higher resolutions being so common nowadays, I think this style of screen layout is less justified. It's a style and some people like it, yes. There's just less of a reason to do things that way. And, once again IMNSHO, the Microsoft Windows method of having one window covering everything is just plain ugly and clumsy.
Give me virtual desktops, lazy focus-follows-mouse, and multiple top-level windows please. That's the way I like to work. Then again, I am a long-time Linux geek and my name's (still) in The Gimp credits. I may be just a little biased:)
Better Value: Windows XP Full (home) edition: 264.99 at Staples.com. FreeBSD/Linux....0.00 Value? WTF?
Value != Cost
With Microsofts' profit margin on both Windows and Office being around 80%, the actual value of Windows is more like $53. When you compare how much software comes with a typical Linux distribution or *BSD, Linux and BSD should be valued at several times that amount. $200-$300 perhaps.
Bullshit. You obviously never used Reveal Codes. It was not binary. IIRC, it was very much like HTML, only with square brackets and the "codes" obviously were a little different. Oh, and the opening code was uppercase, the closing code lowercase. [B]bold[b] [U]underline[u] [I]italic[i]. Something like that. Anyone remember?
<sarcasm>Wow, I didn't know DOS managed memory at such a low level!</sarcasm>
s/DOS/the 8086/g;
You're really referring to the horrible segmented memory layout used by the Intel 8086 processor and its later derivitives. I did all this shit years ago in university. Almost every lesson my fellow students and I (and the lecturer as well) would end up cursing Intel for their whacky processor design. Interestingly Intel introduced a similar scheme in (IIRC) its Xeon processors to produce (IIRC) 36-bit addresses and access more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory on a 32-bit processor.
No, you're right. I was replying to a poster whom I'm now certain is some sort of anti-OSS troll (and is thus now on my foes list, grrr). He was trying to be whitty and criticize a "Linux user" for using KDE and the MS-isms therein. I made a simple parody of his post but at least two people seem to have missed my point. Maybe because the original post was soon modded as troll, maybe because my post was so short and I didn't qualify it with an explaination. I simply tried to come up with some "features" of Windows that were developed outside of MS (which isn't hard, really).
Multitasking - Multics, Unix, VMS. This feature goes way back to time-sharing mainframes. It's probably difficult nowadays to ascertain who really did it first.
...says the (presumebly) Windows user - running a multitasking operating system, with a GUI, using a mouse, with (most likely) audio and 3D graphics hardware, and connected to the internet;)
I find the low comment count (for an anti-Microsoft article) amusing. Clearly people are just bored with this whole agenda that OSDN has against its competitors...
Getting a little off-topic here. I don't know about others, but I know that I'm just sick of all the MS apologists that troll this site nowadays. I don't mind some debate and so forth. But it just gets so depressing to see the same old FUD posted and (usually) debunked time and again. I mean, for a bunch of geeks, I thought all of this shit had been put to bed many years ago. I don't know how many of them are really trolling and how many are simply misguided, but it's a huge annoyance to me.
BTW, just who are OSDN's competitors? I haven't really looked into everything they own. What is it? Two news sites and a few other sites. Plus, they fund some Open Source development (doesn't Linus work for them now?). Sheesh. You make them sound like some mega-conglomerate that's out to silence the truth. Give it a break.
Yes, I would say you are probably quite wrong about these "Hardcore APIs". How else would people be able to make Media Player Classic, a Matroska demuxer, an OGM demuxer and Ogg vorbis decoder, and a port of FFMpeg to allow the playing of DiVX 3/4/5 and XViD video? It seems to me that if Open Source projects can make DirectShow demuxers and decoders, then the APIs are not so "hardcore" and secretive. Real simply don't want their codecs to blend in with the other codecs. They want to "brand the experience" of playing a Real stream/file with their player.
Those two "stories" are from our good pal Rob Enderle. They're probably just click-bait, to get people looking at the banner ads. He rants and raves in his usual fashion and eventually concludes that SCO will win the court case. The guy is a nutter and clearly has an agenda against Open Source(tm) and Linux. In one of his pieces I remember reading the little "about the writer" blurb at the bottom. According to this blurb, he dreams of building a house free of Open Source software. Good luck connecting to the Internet without a BSD-derived IP stack, Rob! You lunatic.
Which is why Windows 95 came with a lot of MSN software and libraries (then based on proprietary protocols) and no TCP/IP stack at all.
Bzzt, wrong. This is getting offtopic, but Windows 95 was in fact the first version of Windows to be shipped with an IP stack from MS. Before then it was Trumpet Winsock or a number of other commercial stacks. You're right about the focus on the original MSN service though. And despite MS's attempts to rewrite history, IE only started shipping with Windows 95 OSR (OEM Second Release) in '96 or '97 (can't remember exactly).
I know that if I did some work, then it was taken and used by lots of people...
There's your problem right there. You're using emotive language and I wouldn't be surprised to see you modded down because of it. A person can't really take something when it's already been given away, now can they?
Why do people write OSS? I just don't understand this question. I mean, is it that hard for people to understand someone wanting to contribute to a community project? It's not such an alien concept. Is it so different just because it involves writing software, instead of helping out at a local school or non-profit organization?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'll try to refrain from using this quote. Ironically (?) my Mum is a qualified lactation consultant. Believe me, I know all the things that can go wrong with breast feeding.
Ok, IHBT:
Because patch is the unix/linux tool used to apply a file generated by diff. All our updates are therefore "patches". You non-Unix people latch onto this word and think that Linux programmers and/or users must be constantly running around fixing problems. In reality only a few critical problems with Linux come up each year. Most of the "patches" you refer to are for new drivers or functionality, or more mundane bugs that *don't* open the system up to a remote exploit.
I know, it's weird. I thought I'd be modded down "offtopic" or "flamebait" in the blink of an eye. Slashdot moderation is just plain weird nowadays.
D'oh! I was afraid of missing something. I was being really careful too.
That's debatable. Either way, you're making a compound word. Down here in
Nup, "castor" is in my Oxford dictionary. It specifically mentions wheels on furniture. Perhaps "caster" is an Americanism.
Do I look like a trucker? Is this TruckDot? Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with spelling or grammar.
Alright. Note to self: "into" is quite different to "in to".
Once again, an Americanism. The correct Commonwealth spelling is centre. (BTW, it's annoying that the American spelling is in the HTML standard)
I always thought this was another Americanism but it seems it isn't. I'm trying really hard to remember what I learnt in school. Hmmm...
Slowly becomming a grammar and spelling nazi...
Geez dude, go back to school and learn how to punctuate properly and the proper use of there/they're/their. I'm not a grammer/spelling nazi. Even though mistakes annoy the shit out of me, I usually let it pass. I know I make the occasional mistake myself. But your post was just too much.
I don't know why I'm doing this, but here's a corrected version of your post:
As always, the problem is in the meaning of the word "free". The FSF, and ESR in the text you quoted, uses the word in the context of "freedom". You specifically use the phrase "no cost". That's not the same. The only thing the GNU GPL says about cost is that the license is free. You can charge for the media and even the software, but not the license. The FSF has lots of documents about their philosophy. Sorry I can't find you the relevent doc, searching for "free" on that page is useless. Hope that helped.
About your problem with Add/Remove programs: My younger brother used to have this problem with his XP box. It turned out to be caused by some weird theme he had installed, IIRC. Do you have anything like that installed?
When I was talking about the brain not being hard-coded to recognize or prefer certain UI elements, I should have clarified it by saying "at the high-level". Sure, as you say, there are parts of the visual cortex that detect edges and motion etc. The edge information is used to recognize features and objects. Our binocular vision can place objects in 3D space, and along with the motion information can give fairly accurate estimates of an objects motion in 3D space.
Our GUI designs are probably more an evolution of designs from paper (e.g books, magazines, posters, flyers, resaurant menus, written notes). Apart from buttons, most attempts to use real-world physical objects as GUI elements are just bad ideas.
Your idea of using a fog effect on background windows is interesting. I don't like these ideas to make a "3D desktop" but something simple like that could maybe help. And thanks to 3D gaming, graphics cards have developed some formidable texturing abilities over the last 7-8 years. It's certainly do-able.
Ok. I'm not sure I'd call it chaotic. That seems a bit of an exaggeration to me, and a misuse of the word chaotic. But you do have a point. It's just that it's been fixed in 2.0. Gimp 2.0 entered Debian Sid/unstable almost a month ago so hopefully it will enter Testing soon and you'll be able to see it. Don't you at least have the 1.3 development version available? In 1.3/2.0 the transform tool has been split up and each task (rotate, scale, shear, perspective) is now a seperate icon in the tool palette. I've made a screenshot of the main window in my setup (go easy on my home ADSL link). The new icons are the last four in the second row.
Another insteresting feature is that all the layers/channels/brushes/etc dialogs are now dockable. I can drag one off into a new window and drag it back to the main window. They can be added, removed, and re-ordered to suit your fancy. Each window (either the main Gimp window, or a stand-alone dialog window) can have many tabs, as well as many docks stacked vertically. You can see this in my screenshot. I have Layers, Channels, Gradients, Brushes, and Gradients all stacked in one dock, and the Device status (Wacom Intuos stuff) in a seperate dock down the bottom. It's all very flexible and easy to simply drag things about.
The Gimp 2.0 is much nicer. A lot of work has gone into the interface since 1.2.
Ah, thank you for missing the main point of my post. My aim was to simply discuss the single-menu Macintosh interface and Microsofts MDI. Instead you seemed to have reacted to my little $0.02 comment at the end and have even quoted parts of my post out of context. Lovelly. Well since you brought it up, here's a little rant about interfaces.
People should never forget:
Intuition n. (power of) knowing without learning or reasoning.
Intuitive adj., intuitively adv.
I think people often get mixed up when they talk of intuitive interfaces. I know you didn't mention the I word, but it sounded like you were coming close. When people talk about something being intuitive, they really mean that it's familiar. They've already used something that looks or acts like this new thing and they can carry over their experience. That's all. The human brain is a wonderfully flexible thing. Just look at how far our science and technology has advanced in a few thousand years with little to no biological evolution. I seriously doubt there's anything hard-coded into our hunter-gatherer brains that prefers MDI over multiple top-level windows. Or any other GUI element over another. How can it be anything else than preference and experience? Unless things are very different in your part of the world, there's nothing else in real-life that looks or operates anything like an image window. Or a drop-down menu. Or bucket fill. Or scroll bars. Or even a mouse for that matter. People developed these things over time and we learned how these things operate. Get over it.
</rant>
On a more constructive note: Can people be a little more constructive and descriptive in their criticisms of The Gimp? Saying that PS is a more positive experience or somesuch doesn't really help. For me, all the negative posts here just sound like a bunch of whingers. wah, it's not like PhotoShop! To hear a lot of people complaining with little or no detail doesn't help. Not one bit. Provide some constructive help or STFU.
That's been pretty much my take on MDI for many years. MDI was, as far as I can tell, Microsofts attempt to imitate the Macintosh layout in a multiple-window environment. Just maximize an MDI window and, apart from the title bar at the top and the main window covering everything else, you pretty much have the Macintosh style.
Now, IMNSHO, perhaps one of the main reasons the Macintosh did things this way was to save screen real estate. The original Mac was 640x480 or less, on a tiny 12 or 13 inch screen. Keeping one menu for all your windows saved space. With large screens and higher resolutions being so common nowadays, I think this style of screen layout is less justified. It's a style and some people like it, yes. There's just less of a reason to do things that way. And, once again IMNSHO, the Microsoft Windows method of having one window covering everything is just plain ugly and clumsy.
Give me virtual desktops, lazy focus-follows-mouse, and multiple top-level windows please. That's the way I like to work. Then again, I am a long-time Linux geek and my name's (still) in The Gimp credits. I may be just a little biased :)
What the hell are you talking about? Clearly not the same XviD that everyone else knows.
Value != Cost
With Microsofts' profit margin on both Windows and Office being around 80%, the actual value of Windows is more like $53. When you compare how much software comes with a typical Linux distribution or *BSD, Linux and BSD should be valued at several times that amount. $200-$300 perhaps.
Dude, that's some old music you've got there!
Mod Doesn't understand sarcasm -1
Bullshit. You obviously never used Reveal Codes. It was not binary. IIRC, it was very much like HTML, only with square brackets and the "codes" obviously were a little different. Oh, and the opening code was uppercase, the closing code lowercase. [B]bold[b] [U]underline[u] [I]italic[i]. Something like that. Anyone remember?
<sarcasm>Wow, I didn't know DOS managed memory at such a low level!</sarcasm>
s/DOS/the 8086/g;
You're really referring to the horrible segmented memory layout used by the Intel 8086 processor and its later derivitives. I did all this shit years ago in university. Almost every lesson my fellow students and I (and the lecturer as well) would end up cursing Intel for their whacky processor design. Interestingly Intel introduced a similar scheme in (IIRC) its Xeon processors to produce (IIRC) 36-bit addresses and access more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory on a 32-bit processor.
No, you're right. I was replying to a poster whom I'm now certain is some sort of anti-OSS troll (and is thus now on my foes list, grrr). He was trying to be whitty and criticize a "Linux user" for using KDE and the MS-isms therein. I made a simple parody of his post but at least two people seem to have missed my point. Maybe because the original post was soon modded as troll, maybe because my post was so short and I didn't qualify it with an explaination. I simply tried to come up with some "features" of Windows that were developed outside of MS (which isn't hard, really).
An anonymous post got the general gyst though.
Show some respect for your elders, or at least know them ;)
Getting a little off-topic here. I don't know about others, but I know that I'm just sick of all the MS apologists that troll this site nowadays. I don't mind some debate and so forth. But it just gets so depressing to see the same old FUD posted and (usually) debunked time and again. I mean, for a bunch of geeks, I thought all of this shit had been put to bed many years ago. I don't know how many of them are really trolling and how many are simply misguided, but it's a huge annoyance to me.
BTW, just who are OSDN's competitors? I haven't really looked into everything they own. What is it? Two news sites and a few other sites. Plus, they fund some Open Source development (doesn't Linus work for them now?). Sheesh. You make them sound like some mega-conglomerate that's out to silence the truth. Give it a break.
Yes, I would say you are probably quite wrong about these "Hardcore APIs". How else would people be able to make Media Player Classic, a Matroska demuxer, an OGM demuxer and Ogg vorbis decoder, and a port of FFMpeg to allow the playing of DiVX 3/4/5 and XViD video? It seems to me that if Open Source projects can make DirectShow demuxers and decoders, then the APIs are not so "hardcore" and secretive. Real simply don't want their codecs to blend in with the other codecs. They want to "brand the experience" of playing a Real stream/file with their player.
Those two "stories" are from our good pal Rob Enderle. They're probably just click-bait, to get people looking at the banner ads. He rants and raves in his usual fashion and eventually concludes that SCO will win the court case. The guy is a nutter and clearly has an agenda against Open Source(tm) and Linux. In one of his pieces I remember reading the little "about the writer" blurb at the bottom. According to this blurb, he dreams of building a house free of Open Source software. Good luck connecting to the Internet without a BSD-derived IP stack, Rob! You lunatic.
Bzzt, wrong. This is getting offtopic, but Windows 95 was in fact the first version of Windows to be shipped with an IP stack from MS. Before then it was Trumpet Winsock or a number of other commercial stacks. You're right about the focus on the original MSN service though. And despite MS's attempts to rewrite history, IE only started shipping with Windows 95 OSR (OEM Second Release) in '96 or '97 (can't remember exactly).
I see them sometimes when checking through my spam folder. All I can think is "well, I guess I don't need your software then!".
There's your problem right there. You're using emotive language and I wouldn't be surprised to see you modded down because of it. A person can't really take something when it's already been given away, now can they?
Why do people write OSS? I just don't understand this question. I mean, is it that hard for people to understand someone wanting to contribute to a community project? It's not such an alien concept. Is it so different just because it involves writing software, instead of helping out at a local school or non-profit organization?