> This always seemed like a pretty stupid way of doing things to me
Fine. No problem. You don't want to relearn how to do a basic GUI operation that you've been doing the same way for years. Neither do I. That's what this is about.
The reason for keeping them separate is so people like me who like highlight/middle-click and people like the ggpp who prefer Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V can each use our favorite method consistantly from app to app and have it just work. You seem to be misunderstanding the distinction between the two clipboards; when done properly (i.e. the way you just claimed is a confusing mess) it just works as expected for either group of users.
> Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
It's a shame that things have gotten so crummy lately... it didn't used to be this way. When I started using Linux, everything was consistant; highlight, middle-click. It ALL worked that way, and it was good. Some people clamoured for a keystroke-based copy, and they made sound arguments, but it was really a matter of preference, and we had something that worked and was consistant. Then the Ctrl-C Ctrl-V zealots got louder and more influential, and some major apps and toolkits started using that, but not all. And now here we sit with the current mixup.
> Here is a hint, all those apps that Fedora installs is not part of Linux, they are 3rd party
Sheer brilliance here. Going to a dozen different websites, crawling through ads and hoping to find the few "trusted" mirrors that won't dump a purple monkey spyware onto my system, or getting GPG-signed packages straight from the vendor of my distribution? If that sounds the same to you, then I postulate that you are a monkey.
> you do realize those codecs Mplayer are using aren't put there by the bit fairies right?
No, they're put there by Fabrice Bellard, and God bless him for the good work he does.
> To play an avi file in a web browser on Windows I install a codec.
You do realize those codecs don't appear on your hard drive thanks to http client socket faeries, don't you? You have to pick through virus-laden pr0n sites to get them, and then fire up one of the 3 or 4 adware players to use them. And, if you succeed in throwing together all the codecs that are supported by the combination of ffmpeg (linked above for your convenience, monkey) and the one big tarball from the mplayer site, then maybe you're smarter than your posting habits make you sound.
> You don't need to defrag every day, you don't need to purge temporary internet files, don't run any software from > places you don't trust(you know, like you do in linux) and you wont get a virus, and actually pay attention when > you surf instead of hitting the enter button blindly and you wont get spyware
Please explain your rules to the man who's concerned about being able to "just drive" his computer without maintainence. My apt-get dist-upgrade keeps me secure and has all the software that I'll probably ever want to install.
> Linux does not cure stupidity, but I guess it lets you hide it better
And all's well that ends well, ok? So I'll end this shit with a "FUCK you, but have a nice day!"
> Windows may splutter and be prone to accidents, but you just drive it.
While I enthusiastically agree that Linux has lots of room to improve in ease of use and troublefree administration, I strongly reject the notion that Windows is far ahead in this regard. All things being equal, Windows is MUCH harder to use for day-to-day work than Linux. Common tasks like marking up photos or chatting on AIM require finding and installing lots of third-party software. All of these have a long, scary EULA, most have popups galore and take up a portion of my main view with intrusive ads. Depending on where I get them from, I'm as liable as not to get a virus/trojan just trying to get a basic level of minimum functionality out of my system. If I want to install a new device, I have to get a driver that's specific to the vendor of the product I have; no generic usb-storage, for instance, but a separate driver for my lexar, sandisk, and maxtor usb storage devices, all with their own bugs, incompatibilities, and adware bundles.
And oh, forget about trying to play downloaded video files! Granted, I haven't used Windows as my main system for several years, but when I get an AVI, MOV, RM, or whatever video file in Linux, I just play it with mplayer, don't care what codec, it just works. I have no clue how to get a video player in Windows to have the same ease of use, and not for lack of trying.
I won't even address in detail the disconnect of people who want to "just drive" their computers being faced with an hour a day of defragmenting, temporary internet file purging, virus defs updating and scanning, malware defs updating and scanning, etc etc ad nauseum, except to say, God bless apt-get dist-upgrade.
Now, granted, I started this spiel by saying "All things being equal", and all things most certainly are not equal. Most people get Windows pre-installed, so they are spared the horror of Windows drivers. And, many more people already have experience dealing with the Windows shortcomings, and less with the Linux shortcomings. But, the notion that somehow Windows is a model for self-maintainence and ease of administration is laughably false.
> The part where the placement of a physical object in a building is equal to a law.
-shrug- I don't see the Constitutional problem in placing a monument of the 10 commandments in a court building. It's immoral and unethical, but probably not unconstitutional or illegal. What is illegal, however, is failing to remove it when a federal judge orders you to do so, which is why Roy Moore got in so much trouble.
> the simple fact of it being located in that building does not equal a LAW passed by whatever level of > Government stating one must follow or be a member of said religion, nor does the placement of such an > objects or objects restrict anyones choice to believe in any religion or none at all.
Placing a religious icon representing a particular faith's beliefs about laws and judgment in a supposedly secular house of law and judgment certainly creates a hostile environment for members of other faiths or of no faith, and goes a long way toward "respecting an establishment of religion" in that courthouse, in my opinion. While I don't go so far as to say it's unconstitutional, it's definitely wrong, immoral, and unamerican.
> Actually they can, and I'm supprised no-one has brought up a lawsuit against libraries yet
The fact that they can merely means the system isn't perfect yet. You're attempting to use the restrictions on libraries to justify also restricting peer to peer, to a group of people who largely thinks the restrictions on libraries are immoral! (Which is to say, adults who value freedom.)
> the faulty idea of "Seperation of Church and State"
Which part of "Congress shall make no law" do you find most confusing/faulty ?
> increasing taxes on the rich leads to less capitol for the businesses that hire workers.
I should think the last 10 years of history would have shattered this myth to even the most devout supply-sider's satisfaction, but there are too many people clinging to that thoroughly disproven notion for me to dismiss it out of hand.
When the rich pay their fair share as they did under Clinton, then SO MUCH is saved due to the preventive, rather than reactive responses to crime, sickness, poverty, and even war, that everyone, rich and poor, becomes richer. Not to mention being safer, having cleaner air to breathe, a richer workforce from which to draw employees, safer from foreign attacks, etc. You end up with massive surpluses that you can put to the public good to continue the gold rush, even while individual wealth in EVERY tax bracket increases. This isn't pie-in-the-sky... it happened, less than a dozen years ago, in this country !
Then, somebody comes along and flips the script, tells the richest Americans that they don't owe anything to the country that made them rich, throws the yoke back on the working class, and starts cutting social spending to make the numbers add up, and watch the crime rates climb, watch the poisons start flowing back into the air, watch the foreign terrorists start churning into a fit of activity, watch tuitions rise and IQ scores drop.
If the tone of my message sounds scolding, I apologize. It just makes my stomach do flips to see so many of my countrymen steering us further and further to the right when that's the exact manuever that veered this country into the ditch we've been in for the first half of the decade.
You responded to a borderline troll with sincerity, so I'll attempt to do likewise.
I would submit that if the state invests in the common welfare of all citizens, then the resultant increases in public health, education, and environmental enrichment pay back many times over for _all_ citizens, rich and poor alike. Your comments suggest that you view tax payments as a bottomless pit into which your money simply disappears; likewise welfare spending. I would submit that, for the relatively small amount of your wealth that goes to taxes, you reap an enormously disproportionate reward in terms of the reduced crime, reduced risk of exposure to infectious diseases, cleaner air, cleaner water, society-wide scientific progress, public art, access to education, national defense... the list goes on and on. The wealth that every individual in the U.S. achieves could not exist without investments in the general welfare. At the simplest level, most Americans depend on publically funded roads. Those who make their livings as business owners and employers depend on having a work force that is well educated, healthy, secure and reasonably expectant of and motivated by opportunities to better themselves. NONE of this would exist without investments in infrastructure, education, defense, etc.
I submit that your world view of a few virtuous rich being leached upon by a mass of greedy poor is flawed. What you perceive as laziness and greediness is in reality hopelessness and desperation; the reductions in crime, teen pregnancy, and the welfare rolls when liberal tax policy is applied supports my assertion. If you invest in the most needy in society, the payback is rich.
So, you believe average people should have the right to vote? You believe people, not ONLY fortune 500 CEOs, should have a voice in the government of this nation? Then you are a yellow-dog Democrat, my friend, no matter what you've been told by the corporate/GOP media.
about making public monuments extremely shiny like this. Memphis, TN tried that with the pyramid thing they built, and after a few years of it blinding people and running them off the road, they finally dulled it somewhat.
In what way did Saddam "bluff"? He claimed he had no WMD (a claim that has since been proven true) and offered significant cooperation with international inspectors to prove it.
-shrug- I know this is heresy to UI wonks, but there are some tasks that are too complex for an idiot-proof interface. That's not to say that friendly and discoverable interfaces are unattainable, just that making an interface without _any_ learning curve might be unrealistic.
If anybody has achieved this for a featureful graphics-editing application, I haven't seen it yet... Photoshop is incredibly non-intuitive in my limited experience with it, Paint Shop Pro only slightly less so... but then, I'm just "used to" the Gimp.
> nvidia implements a standard driver [which X can talk to and works in OpenGL]. > They follow standards. The fact that the source is closed shouldn't bother people.
Speaking only for myself, the main difference is that the nVidia driver has to be linked with the kernel. This may seem like an unbelievably eggheaded reason to dislike it, but I'll try to explain. When nvidia's giant binary blob is linked with my kernel, all bets are off as to debugging any problems that might arise. If the driver crashes, it takes the kernel down with it. The nvidia module lives in the same place as my hard drive and filesystem drivers, so it could presumably cause data loss. All manner of undesirable consequences.
I work a lot with wireless cards; here's another example. Atheros has generously assisted with the creation of a very high-quality mostly-open driver for their cards in Linux. I say mostly because of a sizable binary HAL that is linked in, to prevent free reprogramming of the radio (FCC regs, blah blah).
On the other hand, you have the Intersil prism 54g. It has a fully open-source driver, also high-quality and functional. They comply with non-reprogrammability requirements by having a binary-only firmware that is loaded at module init time. Now, there's still closed, untouchable code in there... but it runs on the card's chipset, not on my CPU where my kernel and other things live. And, since the driver is fully open, it's included with the mainstream kernel, so much more convenient and more likely to work with any of the weird kernels I cobble together. And a bug in that card's firmware is much less likely to cause my whole system to come crashing down, although it's certainly possible.
(All bitching aside, much thanks to nVidia, ATI, Atheros, Intersil, and all the other hardware companies out there who throw Linux a bone every now and then.)
> parties other than the government are "violating > their first amendment rights."
-nod- Your point is well taken. However, I would suggest that USian culture also has a tradition of free speech that exists as a seperate entity from the first amendment, which codifies it into law as relates to acts of Congress. Americans (in general) don't like ANYBODY restricting their freedom of speech, whether Congress, their employer or the copyright holder of the software they're reviewing. This may not relate to the first amendment, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the complaint imo.
-nod- I had a similar experience over the holiday season; I was driving from Atlanta to my family home in St Louis, and as you may recall there was more than a little ice on the road in the midwest, Memphis being one of my waypoints. I saw a pickup less than 2 carlengths behind me start to fishtail and smack into the side of an iced-over bridge, and I actually turned to my girlfriend in the passenger seat and said "Wall takedown !" before realizing how evil that was. =/
> Work visas are only good for making money in a wealthy country and then going home to a poor > country. They suck for working in a poor country and then going home to a wealthy country.
Yeah, unless all the jobs have been moved out of the rich country into the poor country. There's a point of desperation where having a roof over your head and free food is more than enough compensation for a day's work.
Slashdot Mirror
> This always seemed like a pretty stupid way of doing things to me
Fine. No problem. You don't want to relearn how to do a basic GUI operation that you've been doing the same way for years.
Neither do I. That's what this is about.
The reason for keeping them separate is so people like me who like highlight/middle-click and people like the ggpp who
prefer Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V can each use our favorite method consistantly from app to app and have it just work. You seem to
be misunderstanding the distinction between the two clipboards; when done properly (i.e. the way you just claimed is
a confusing mess) it just works as expected for either group of users.
> Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
It's a shame that things have gotten so crummy lately... it didn't used to be this way. When I started using
Linux, everything was consistant; highlight, middle-click. It ALL worked that way, and it was good. Some
people clamoured for a keystroke-based copy, and they made sound arguments, but it was really a matter of
preference, and we had something that worked and was consistant. Then the Ctrl-C Ctrl-V zealots got louder
and more influential, and some major apps and toolkits started using that, but not all. And now here we sit
with the current mixup.
> There goes your credibility...
;)
If my credibility hinged on my slashdot posting record, I was already up a creek, but thanks for the sentiment
> Here is a hint, all those apps that Fedora installs is not part of Linux, they are 3rd party
Sheer brilliance here. Going to a dozen different websites, crawling through ads and hoping to find the few "trusted" mirrors
that won't dump a purple monkey spyware onto my system, or getting GPG-signed packages straight from the vendor of my
distribution? If that sounds the same to you, then I postulate that you are a monkey.
> you do realize those codecs Mplayer are using aren't put there by the bit fairies right?
No, they're put there by Fabrice Bellard, and God bless him for the good work he does.
> To play an avi file in a web browser on Windows I install a codec.
You do realize those codecs don't appear on your hard drive thanks to http client socket faeries, don't you? You have
to pick through virus-laden pr0n sites to get them, and then fire up one of the 3 or 4 adware players to use them.
And, if you succeed in throwing together all the codecs that are supported by the combination of ffmpeg (linked above
for your convenience, monkey) and the one big tarball from the mplayer site, then maybe you're smarter than your posting
habits make you sound.
> You don't need to defrag every day, you don't need to purge temporary internet files, don't run any software from
> places you don't trust(you know, like you do in linux) and you wont get a virus, and actually pay attention when
> you surf instead of hitting the enter button blindly and you wont get spyware
Please explain your rules to the man who's concerned about being able to "just drive" his computer without
maintainence. My apt-get dist-upgrade keeps me secure and has all the software that I'll probably ever want to
install.
> Linux does not cure stupidity, but I guess it lets you hide it better
And all's well that ends well, ok? So I'll end this shit with a "FUCK you, but have a nice day!"
> Windows may splutter and be prone to accidents, but you just drive it.
While I enthusiastically agree that Linux has lots of room to improve in ease of use and troublefree administration,
I strongly reject the notion that Windows is far ahead in this regard. All things being equal, Windows is MUCH
harder to use for day-to-day work than Linux. Common tasks like marking up photos or chatting on AIM require finding
and installing lots of third-party software. All of these have a long, scary EULA, most have popups galore and take up a
portion of my main view with intrusive ads. Depending on where I get them from, I'm as liable as not to get a
virus/trojan just trying to get a basic level of minimum functionality out of my system. If I want to install a new
device, I have to get a driver that's specific to the vendor of the product I have; no generic usb-storage, for
instance, but a separate driver for my lexar, sandisk, and maxtor usb storage devices, all with their own bugs,
incompatibilities, and adware bundles.
And oh, forget about trying to play downloaded video files! Granted, I haven't used Windows as my main system
for several years, but when I get an AVI, MOV, RM, or whatever video file in Linux, I just play it with mplayer,
don't care what codec, it just works. I have no clue how to get a video player in Windows to have the same ease
of use, and not for lack of trying.
I won't even address in detail the disconnect of people who want to "just drive" their computers being faced with
an hour a day of defragmenting, temporary internet file purging, virus defs updating and scanning, malware defs
updating and scanning, etc etc ad nauseum, except to say, God bless apt-get dist-upgrade.
Now, granted, I started this spiel by saying "All things being equal", and all things most certainly are not equal.
Most people get Windows pre-installed, so they are spared the horror of Windows drivers. And, many more people
already have experience dealing with the Windows shortcomings, and less with the Linux shortcomings. But,
the notion that somehow Windows is a model for self-maintainence and ease of administration is laughably false.
Now Mac OS X, on the other hand...
> Blalock is the only reason anybody watches that show.
Actually, imo Linda Park is the hottie of Enterprise. But, we watch because we love Trek, and it's all the
(new) Trek that there is.
> The part where the placement of a physical object in a building is equal to a law.
-shrug- I don't see the Constitutional problem in placing a monument of the 10 commandments in a court building.
It's immoral and unethical, but probably not unconstitutional or illegal. What is illegal, however, is failing to remove it
when a federal judge orders you to do so, which is why Roy Moore got in so much trouble.
> the simple fact of it being located in that building does not equal a LAW passed by whatever level of
> Government stating one must follow or be a member of said religion, nor does the placement of such an
> objects or objects restrict anyones choice to believe in any religion or none at all.
Placing a religious icon representing a particular faith's beliefs about laws and judgment in a supposedly secular
house of law and judgment certainly creates a hostile environment for members of other faiths or of no faith, and goes
a long way toward "respecting an establishment of religion" in that courthouse, in my opinion. While I don't go so far as
to say it's unconstitutional, it's definitely wrong, immoral, and unamerican.
> Actually they can, and I'm supprised no-one has brought up a lawsuit against libraries yet
The fact that they can merely means the system isn't perfect yet. You're attempting to use the restrictions on libraries
to justify also restricting peer to peer, to a group of people who largely thinks the restrictions on libraries are immoral!
(Which is to say, adults who value freedom.)
> the faulty idea of "Seperation of Church and State"
Which part of "Congress shall make no law" do you find most confusing/faulty ?
Fortunately, what liquidpele says, does not the law make.
> They refuse to release proper specs on their video chipsets in order to let
> X use the proper panel size on a laptop.
There's a patch out there that gets this working. Google for 1280patch. Yes, I work for a company that puts Linux on laptops. =)
> increasing taxes on the rich leads to less capitol for the businesses that hire workers.
I should think the last 10 years of history would have shattered this myth to even the most devout supply-sider's
satisfaction, but there are too many people clinging to that thoroughly disproven notion for me to dismiss it out
of hand.
When the rich pay their fair share as they did under Clinton, then SO MUCH is saved due to the preventive,
rather than reactive responses to crime, sickness, poverty, and even war, that everyone, rich and poor,
becomes richer. Not to mention being safer, having cleaner air to breathe, a richer workforce from which to
draw employees, safer from foreign attacks, etc. You end up with massive surpluses that you can put to the public
good to continue the gold rush, even while individual wealth in EVERY tax bracket increases. This isn't pie-in-the-sky...
it happened, less than a dozen years ago, in this country !
Then, somebody comes along and flips the script, tells the richest Americans that they don't owe anything to
the country that made them rich, throws the yoke back on the working class, and starts cutting social spending to
make the numbers add up, and watch the crime rates climb, watch the poisons start flowing back into the air, watch the
foreign terrorists start churning into a fit of activity, watch tuitions rise and IQ scores drop.
If the tone of my message sounds scolding, I apologize. It just makes my stomach do flips to see so many of
my countrymen steering us further and further to the right when that's the exact manuever that veered this
country into the ditch we've been in for the first half of the decade.
You responded to a borderline troll with sincerity, so I'll attempt to do likewise.
I would submit that if the state invests in the common welfare of all citizens, then the resultant increases in public
health, education, and environmental enrichment pay back many times over for _all_ citizens, rich and poor alike.
Your comments suggest that you view tax payments as a bottomless pit into which your money simply disappears; likewise
welfare spending. I would submit that, for the relatively small amount of your wealth that goes to taxes, you reap
an enormously disproportionate reward in terms of the reduced crime, reduced risk of exposure to infectious diseases,
cleaner air, cleaner water, society-wide scientific progress, public art, access to education, national defense...
the list goes on and on. The wealth that every individual in the U.S. achieves could not exist without investments in the
general welfare. At the simplest level, most Americans depend on publically funded roads. Those who make their
livings as business owners and employers depend on having a work force that is well educated, healthy, secure and
reasonably expectant of and motivated by opportunities to better themselves. NONE of this would exist without
investments in infrastructure, education, defense, etc.
I submit that your world view of a few virtuous rich being leached upon by a mass of greedy poor is flawed. What you
perceive as laziness and greediness is in reality hopelessness and desperation; the reductions in crime, teen
pregnancy, and the welfare rolls when liberal tax policy is applied supports my assertion. If you invest in
the most needy in society, the payback is rich.
So, you believe average people should have the right to vote? You believe people, not ONLY fortune 500 CEOs, should have a
voice in the government of this nation? Then you are a yellow-dog Democrat, my friend, no matter what you've been told by
the corporate/GOP media.
about making public monuments extremely shiny like this. Memphis, TN tried that with the pyramid thing they built,
and after a few years of it blinding people and running them off the road, they finally dulled it somewhat.
In what way did Saddam "bluff"? He claimed he had no WMD (a claim that has since been proven true) and offered significant cooperation
with international inspectors to prove it.
Yeah, I'm sure that'll calm down the people who think the Daemon is inappropriate...
-shrug- I know this is heresy to UI wonks, but there are some tasks that are too complex for an idiot-proof interface.
That's not to say that friendly and discoverable interfaces are unattainable, just that making an interface without _any_
learning curve might be unrealistic.
If anybody has achieved this for a featureful graphics-editing application, I haven't seen it yet... Photoshop is
incredibly non-intuitive in my limited experience with it, Paint Shop Pro only slightly less so... but then, I'm just
"used to" the Gimp.
> nvidia implements a standard driver [which X can talk to and works in OpenGL].
> They follow standards. The fact that the source is closed shouldn't bother people.
Speaking only for myself, the main difference is that the nVidia driver has to be linked with the kernel.
This may seem like an unbelievably eggheaded reason to dislike it, but I'll try to explain. When nvidia's
giant binary blob is linked with my kernel, all bets are off as to debugging any problems that might arise. If
the driver crashes, it takes the kernel down with it. The nvidia module lives in the same place as my hard drive and
filesystem drivers, so it could presumably cause data loss. All manner of undesirable consequences.
I work a lot with wireless cards; here's another example. Atheros has generously assisted with the creation
of a very high-quality mostly-open driver for their cards in Linux. I say mostly because of a sizable
binary HAL that is linked in, to prevent free reprogramming of the radio (FCC regs, blah blah).
On the other hand, you have the Intersil prism 54g. It has a fully open-source driver, also high-quality
and functional. They comply with non-reprogrammability requirements by having a binary-only firmware
that is loaded at module init time. Now, there's still closed, untouchable code in there... but it runs on the card's chipset,
not on my CPU where my kernel and other things live. And, since the driver is fully open, it's included with
the mainstream kernel, so much more convenient and more likely to work with any of the weird kernels I cobble together.
And a bug in that card's firmware is much less likely to cause my whole system to come crashing down, although
it's certainly possible.
(All bitching aside, much thanks to nVidia, ATI, Atheros, Intersil, and all the other hardware companies out there
who throw Linux a bone every now and then.)
> parties other than the government are "violating
> their first amendment rights."
-nod- Your point is well taken. However, I would suggest that USian culture also has a tradition
of free speech that exists as a seperate entity from the first amendment, which codifies it into
law as relates to acts of Congress. Americans (in general) don't like ANYBODY restricting their
freedom of speech, whether Congress, their employer or the copyright holder of the software
they're reviewing. This may not relate to the first amendment, but that doesn't necessarily
invalidate the complaint imo.
You have to bring Democracy to the people. Modern history tells us the most expeditious way to do this is to invade and occupy them.
> So by the same idea, Linux users should be supporting and
> patching MS products. Unpatched MS machines affect Linux users
Don't you think that if we had the source, we would be doing that very thing ?
-nod- I had a similar experience over the holiday season; I was driving from Atlanta to my family home in St Louis,
and as you may recall there was more than a little ice on the road in the midwest, Memphis being one of my waypoints.
I saw a pickup less than 2 carlengths behind me start to fishtail and smack into the side of an iced-over bridge,
and I actually turned to my girlfriend in the passenger seat and said "Wall takedown !" before realizing how evil
that was. =/
> Work visas are only good for making money in a wealthy country and then going home to a poor
> country. They suck for working in a poor country and then going home to a wealthy country.
Yeah, unless all the jobs have been moved out of the rich country into the poor country. There's
a point of desperation where having a roof over your head and free food is more than enough
compensation for a day's work.
> Don't listen to him ! It's just this kind of
> thinking which is keeping people from investing in > my perpetual motion machine !
Let me guess; Slinky on an escalator ?