The quality of a program is irrelevant if you have to run it on top of a bad OS. MS makes okay apps. The problem is that they have keep releasing them for the worst OS on the planet.
Any time you pitch the idea to replace someone's existing OS with another, no matter what the situation, it is sort of your responsibility to make sure they are informed about how this will affect existing apps, as that should be part of the decision of whether or not to switch. If your parents were under the impression that their existing Windows software would run under Linux then it seems like you didn't properly inform them.
I'm just curious. Most of the Linux zealots came from the Amiga and OS/2 worlds.
Care to give some type of evidence for that absurd claim? (And yes, it is absurd, since there are enough Linux users than the population of ex-Amiga and ex-OS/2 users cannot account for a majority of them.)
Yeah we can play fast games on X but window dragging with content is still very jerky compared to X on SGI, Exceed on Solaris over a network, and Windows (they're all silky smooth). Until this one is fixed, XFree86 is still very unresponsive to me.
But this is in direct opposition to the original poster's claim that X is at fault for his percieved slowness of response. Solaris and SGI are both also running graphical systems that implement the X protocol. So if there is a problem, it's not with X - it's with Xfree86's implementation of X. And if that's the case, then trashing X to "fix" the problem is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Your results are different than mine. I get smooth results all the time, including linux/xfree86, *except* when running KDE or GNOME. There is bloat and slowness there, but it's not the low level X's fault. It's coming from the window manager. Picking a "no frills" window manager speeds it up tremendously. Using a window manager that is also trying to be a file manager and desktop manager makes it slow.
Throwing away network portability is a step back.
on
A Linux User Goes Back
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· Score: 2
While I agree that X11 is dated, I disagree strongly with the notion many seem to have that the fix must be to replace it with something that is locally usable only. No, no, no, a thousand times, NO! Making it so each individual application needs to decide on its own if it will support some type of remotablity is plain wrong. It should not be necessary to destroy unix's usefulness as a server in order to make it more useful as a desktop machine. If I wanted an OS that sucked at serving I'd run some variant of Windows.
X's "problem" is that is not really a full-fledged windowing system. Properly viewed, it's more of a hardware abstraction layer for the screen, keyboard, and mouse. The rest of the system on top of that fills in the rest of the functionality - the window manager, the desktop (Kde, Gnome, etc). What needs to be done is to make a subsystem inside X that maps directly to the hardware and doesn't bother going over the network when it realizes the display is intended to be on the local machine. But, Wait, that's already been done. It already works that way. So the problem is non-existant. (or at least, isn't something to scrap X over, the problem is at a higher level than that.)
I've got true type font capability on my linux system, and am "borrowing" the fonts from a directory on the windows partition. It works fine, but only for *some* programs, and then only for *some* parts of those programs. What gives? I thought font management should be invisible to the high-level apps and handled entirely by the X libraries. For example, if I install the "prisoner" font (the font used in the Prisoner TV show), I can use it in menus of Opera, but not in the text of the web page inside Opera - If I select it, a completely different font is used instead that looks nothing like it. I get the same behaviour with other apps too. The only common point seems to be that it happens with the serif fonts (of which the prisoner font is one).
Ignorance of something is different from lack of intelligence. The fact that so many slashdot readers don't know about his books is evidence of their *ignorance* of the history of computer science, NOT their intellectual level.
Uh, the EU (NOT including Russia) has a larger land-area, population and Economy than the US.
That's impossible unless there are countries in the EU for which the "E" part is not true. (Non European countries). The size of Europe, including all the ex-Soviet Union nations, is 9,938,037 km^2. The size of the US is 9,161,972 km^2. So unless you think that the Russian portion of Europe accounts for less than 7% of Europe (yeah, right), then what you say isn't even physically possible.
1. The only poeple who give a flying fuck about the fact that linux isn't technically legallt allowed to be called unix are lawyers and trolls like you and that "Rev Don Cool" idiot on usenet.
2. IE support on the few unixen where it does run is awful and the thing is too bloated to be practical (since instead of porting IE to unix APIs they ported parts of the Windows API and put IE on top of that, the executable is gigantic on unix.)
3. You did say "IE 6", which even on the few unixes where IE 6 exists, it doesn't go up to that version number, so clearly you are lying.
Yes, they are using MS software, but this once they are using it to export things into a well documented, open format that could be made to work with anything (unlike a Word document). Sure, maybe different browsers aren't good at reading the XML the government is putting it out in the way that makes IE most comfortable, but at least it is in a DOCUMENTED format this time, one that the open source community can respond to and implement fairly quickly if there's incentive to (and I think having all major US government stuff in that format would be a big enough incentive.)
Is it still biased in favor of IE users right now? Absolutely, I won't deny that. But if it is actually a properly documented format for once then that bias won't last. This isn't a perfect situation, but it's a major step up from publishing things in proprietary binary word processor formats like they did in the past.
Why not just use IE? Because it only works if you are using a shitty Operating System underneath it, and the OS you use affects a lot more stuff than just your web browser. There are reasons completely unrelated to web browsing that make me want to be running Linux most of the time except for the occasional game. I think that this is the primary reason for the IE hostility a lot of geeks have. To use it we have to dumb-down *everything* we use (which is what happens it feels like to use Windows after being used to using Unix), just to get a particular web browser. If I.E. was produced by a company other than the one that has a vested interest in keeping the Windows monopoly in place, it wouldn't be a problem because they would make a Linux version.
land...yes.
Europe is tiny except for *one* country - that
portion of Russia that lays west of the Urals, and incedentally does not share in that trend of excellent mobile phone systems that the rest of Europe has. The part that is covered well with mobile phone services is smaller than the US, and more densely populated, which is part of why it has better coverage. (It's damn hard to make money by selling services to rural areas that still need a lot of infrastructure to cover the area even though there's much less population.)
There is no constitutional conflict here. The president is free to pick judges by any criteria he wishes.
The President takes an oath to "defend and protect the Constitution of the United States", and Article 6 Section 3 of that constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for any public office. That would include judges. There is a Constitutional conflict when someone who is sworn to uphold the Constitution chooses to ignore a part of it. Now, I do agree with you that no real action can be taken to remedy the situation, because as you say we can't read the mind of the President and tell why he chose to reject some judgeship candidate. But I don't call that "no constitutional conflict". If it happens that the President choses a candidate based partly on the candidate's religious beliefs, then it is a constitutional conflict - unfortunately it's one that can never be proven as such, though.
And even in cases where it can be proven that The President has violated the Constitution, the only "remedy" available under the law is impeachment (and then of course it has to be something that pisses off the majority of the Congress, a category to which trampling the rights of atheists alas does not fit.) So whether you can sue him over it or not (you can't) is irrelevant to whether or not it is a Constitutional conflict.
Except that Bush has stated publicly that he will only appoint judges that fail to uphold the first amendment (*), so I wouldn't count on his appointees being strict constitutionalists.
* - Okay, he didn't say it in those terms, but he did say he would only appoint judges who believe belief in God is a neccessary part of being a member of American culture, which amounts to the same thing.
The conclusion that the media covers news stories differently based on sensationalism is of course true, but Katz's slant on this one is waaay off. The Milwaukee case is not getting as much attention as the Salt Lake case NOT because of racial reasons or richness of the audience. It's because the Milwaukee case is much less unusual, and therefore less interesting of a story. In Milwaukee, the girl went missing while outside of the house. In Salt Lake, the girl went missing right from within the confines of the house, indicating that someone probably got inside and took her. That's a much more rare and "interesting" story than someone going missing from somewhere out on the streets, because it puts more fear in people's minds to have it happen right under their own roof.
Consider another older incident from Milwaukee, that of Jeffrey Dahmer. All his victims were poor. Most were not white. Most (but not all) were gay or bi. That puts them right into the kind of demographic Katz believes the media loves to ignore. But it got a *hell of a lot* of media coverage when he got found out. Why? Because it was a sensational story - one that makes a good "yarn" - and *that* is the primary determinant for the news outlets. They want the ratings, just like every other entertainment show, and that means they want to cover the more interesting plots.
Nothing in the wording contained the implication that capitalism is always greedy. He described Gates and a greedy capitalist, which says nothing about whether he calls all capitalists greedy. (In fact, it's just the opposite. It hints that he thinks there do exist non-greedy capitalists, since he wouldn't need to use the modifier if he thought capitalism always included greediness. If he thought capitalism always meant greediness then saying "greedy capitalist" would be redundant, like saying, "two-wheeled bicycle". The fact that he felt a need to add the word indicates just the opposite of what you read into it.
I guess all the children who were murdered in that attack had it coming to them, right?
Speaking of trolls, his post EXPLICITLY MENTIONED that the children weren't responsible and how that's the only reason he held back and said it was *almost* just desserts.
There's one way he's right - firing guns directly up into the air is incredibly stupid. Those bullets eventually fall down at deadly velocity. The terminal velocity of bullets is rather high, since they are explicitly designed to reduce air drag. And, it will come back down carried by the wind to somewhere you can't predict. It's irresponsible to shoot live ammo straight up and assume the bullets will just vanish in a magic puff of smoke and never come back down.
Not that this excuses the mistake made by the air crew, but the adults at the party are not entirely blameless either. The pilots saw someone firing guns up at them and assumed from that they had found a remaining cell of fighters.
Okay, who's the idiot who modded my post above as "overrated" when it hadn't even ever been "rated" in the first place? It's illogical for the very first moderation on a post to say it's been "overrated".
If this guy thinks we want special case laws to exempt the internet, then he just hasn't been paying attention. What the "cyberbuffs' have been clamoring for for years now is to get the government to STOP making special case laws for the internet. It's not the technophiles who have been making special case internet-only laws, it's the technophobes, and it shows in the nature of the laws they come up with. Stuff that is perfectly legal offline, such as fair-use photocopying a small number of pages from a reference book, or copying a music album for the purpose of changing the recording media format for personal use (like converting old vinyl records to a cassette tape form), are becoming illegal when you do the equivilent on-line version of these activites.
So I say, *YES*, please DO get the government to treat the internet the same way everything else gets treated in public life, which means undoing the crap they've passed about it in the last few years. Destroy the DMCA, the CDAs I and II, and don't lie and call piracy theft. Theft implies that the original owner has had his property taken away rather than just copied. No, I'm not saying piracy is good, just that calling it theft puts the punishment out of proportion to the degree of the crime. Treating piracy as theft is like convicting someone for murder when all he did was get into a minor fist fight and nobody died.
It would be far better for people to simply be given a means to categorize sites, without giving them a moral judgement of any kind, and then sites could configure filter software to respond to these categories. One place might block any site related to "sex" without specifying whether that's evil porn or sexual medical information - just all sex sites of any kind. A very strict site might choose to block all stuff NOT listed as "education", and so on. The massive array of humans doing group voting on these sites would then NOT be making judgement calls based on whether they find a site offensive or not. They would be simply categorizing type of subject, and it's up to people to decide what sites fit under what subjects, regardless of whether they are "good" or "bad" sites.
Granted, not having any censorware in place at all would be a far better thing, but if it is going to be there, I think it's vital from an conflict-of-interest standpoint to have the categorizing list be made by someone other than the people producing the software. The list should be something that gets generated entirely by the public.
Slashdot Mirror
The quality of a program is irrelevant if you have to run it on top of a bad OS. MS makes okay apps. The problem is that they have keep releasing them for the worst OS on the planet.
I *know*!! That was the whole point. Geeze.
Any time you pitch the idea to replace someone's existing OS with another, no matter what the situation, it is sort of your responsibility to make sure they are informed about how this will affect existing apps, as that should be part of the decision of whether or not to switch. If your parents were under the impression that their existing Windows software would run under Linux then it seems like you didn't properly inform them.
Your results are different than mine.
I get smooth results all the time,
including linux/xfree86, *except* when
running KDE or GNOME. There is bloat and slowness there, but it's not the low
level X's fault. It's coming from the window manager. Picking a "no frills" window manager speeds it up tremendously. Using a window manager that is also trying to be a file manager and desktop manager makes it slow.
While I agree that X11 is dated, I disagree strongly with the notion many seem to have that the fix must be to replace it with something that is locally usable only. No, no, no, a thousand times, NO! Making it so each individual application needs to decide on its own if it will support some type of remotablity is plain wrong. It should not be necessary to destroy unix's usefulness as a server in order to make it more useful as a desktop machine. If I wanted an OS that sucked at serving I'd run some variant of Windows.
X's "problem" is that is not really a full-fledged windowing system. Properly viewed, it's more of a hardware abstraction layer for the screen, keyboard, and mouse. The rest of the system on top of that fills in the rest of the functionality - the window manager, the desktop (Kde, Gnome, etc). What needs to be done is to make a subsystem inside X that maps directly to the hardware and doesn't bother going over the network when it realizes the display is intended to be on the local machine. But, Wait, that's already been done. It already works that way. So the problem is non-existant. (or at least, isn't something to scrap X over, the problem is at a higher level than that.)
I've got true type font capability on my linux system, and am "borrowing" the fonts from a directory on the windows partition. It works fine, but only for *some* programs, and then only for *some* parts of those programs. What gives? I thought font management should be invisible to the high-level apps and handled entirely by the X libraries. For example, if I install the "prisoner" font (the font used in the Prisoner TV show), I can use it in menus of Opera, but not in the text of the web page inside Opera - If I select it, a completely different font is used instead that looks nothing like it. I get the same behaviour with other apps too. The only common point seems to be that it happens with the serif fonts (of which the prisoner font is one).
build one for them. It might not work well, but it sure would be fun to watch.
* - Or "Scrapheap Challenge" if you saw it under its original title on the other side of the pond.
Ignorance of something is different from lack of intelligence. The fact that so many slashdot readers don't know about his books is evidence of their *ignorance* of the history of computer science, NOT their intellectual level.
Err, delete that "6" from the second "IE 6". The dangers of cutting and pasting.
1. The only poeple who give a flying fuck about the fact that linux isn't technically legallt allowed to be called unix are lawyers and trolls like you and that "Rev Don Cool" idiot on usenet.
2. IE support on the few unixen where it does run is awful and the thing is too bloated to be practical (since instead of porting IE to unix APIs they ported parts of the Windows API and put IE on top of that, the executable is gigantic on unix.)
3. You did say "IE 6", which even on the few unixes where IE 6 exists, it doesn't go up to that version number, so clearly you are lying.
Yes, they are using MS software, but this once they are using it to export things into a well documented, open format that could be made to work with anything (unlike a Word document). Sure, maybe different browsers aren't good at reading the XML the government is putting it out in the way that makes IE most comfortable, but at least it is in a DOCUMENTED format this time, one that the open source community can respond to and implement fairly quickly if there's incentive to (and I think having all major US government stuff in that format would be a big enough incentive.)
Is it still biased in favor of IE users right now? Absolutely, I won't deny that. But if it is actually a properly documented format for once then that bias won't last. This isn't a perfect situation, but it's a major step up from publishing things in proprietary binary word processor formats like they did in the past.
Why not just use IE? Because it only works if you are using a shitty Operating System underneath it, and the OS you use affects a lot more stuff than just your web browser. There are reasons completely unrelated to web browsing that make me want to be running Linux most of the time except for the occasional game. I think that this is the primary reason for the IE hostility a lot of geeks have. To use it we have to dumb-down *everything* we use (which is what happens it feels like to use Windows after being used to using Unix), just to get a particular web browser. If I.E. was produced by a company other than the one that has a vested interest in keeping the Windows monopoly in place, it wouldn't be a problem because they would make a Linux version.
And even in cases where it can be proven that The President has violated the Constitution, the only "remedy" available under the law is impeachment (and then of course it has to be something that pisses off the majority of the Congress, a category to which trampling the rights of atheists alas does not fit.) So whether you can sue him over it or not (you can't) is irrelevant to whether or not it is a Constitutional conflict.
Except that Bush has stated publicly that he will only appoint judges that fail to uphold the first amendment (*), so I wouldn't count on his appointees being strict constitutionalists.
* - Okay, he didn't say it in those terms, but he did say he would only appoint judges who believe belief in God is a neccessary part of being a member of American culture, which amounts to the same thing.
The conclusion that the media covers news stories differently based on sensationalism is of course true, but Katz's slant on this one is waaay off. The Milwaukee case is not getting as much attention as the Salt Lake case NOT because of racial reasons or richness of the audience. It's because the Milwaukee case is much less unusual, and therefore less interesting of a story. In Milwaukee, the girl went missing while outside of the house. In Salt Lake, the girl went missing right from within the confines of the house, indicating that someone probably got inside and took her. That's a much more rare and "interesting" story than someone going missing from somewhere out on the streets, because it puts more fear in people's minds to have it happen right under their own roof.
Consider another older incident from Milwaukee, that of Jeffrey Dahmer. All his victims were poor. Most were not white. Most (but not all) were gay or bi. That puts them right into the kind of demographic Katz believes the media loves to ignore. But it got a *hell of a lot* of media coverage when he got found out. Why? Because it was a sensational story - one that makes a good "yarn" - and *that* is the primary determinant for the news outlets. They want the ratings, just like every other entertainment show, and that means they want to cover the more interesting plots.
Nothing in the wording contained the implication that capitalism is always greedy. He described Gates and a greedy capitalist, which says nothing about whether he calls all capitalists greedy. (In fact, it's just the opposite. It hints that he thinks there do exist non-greedy capitalists, since he wouldn't need to use the modifier if he thought capitalism always included greediness. If he thought capitalism always meant greediness then saying "greedy capitalist" would be redundant, like saying, "two-wheeled bicycle". The fact that he felt a need to add the word indicates just the opposite of what you read into it.
Speaking of trolls, his post EXPLICITLY MENTIONED that the children weren't responsible and how that's the only reason he held back and said it was *almost* just desserts.
There's one way he's right - firing guns directly up into the air is incredibly stupid. Those bullets eventually fall down at deadly velocity. The terminal velocity of bullets is rather high, since they are explicitly designed to reduce air drag. And, it will come back down carried by the wind to somewhere you can't predict. It's irresponsible to shoot live ammo straight up and assume the bullets will just vanish in a magic puff of smoke and never come back down.
Not that this excuses the mistake made by the air crew, but the adults at the party are not entirely blameless either. The pilots saw someone firing guns up at them and assumed from that they had found a remaining cell of fighters.
Okay, who's the idiot who modded my post above as "overrated" when it hadn't even ever been "rated" in the first place? It's illogical for the very first moderation on a post to say it's been "overrated".
If this guy thinks we want special case laws to exempt the internet, then he just hasn't been paying attention. What the "cyberbuffs' have been clamoring for for years now is to get the government to STOP making special case laws for the internet. It's not the technophiles who have been making special case internet-only laws, it's the technophobes, and it shows in the nature of the laws they come up with. Stuff that is perfectly legal offline, such as fair-use photocopying a small number of pages from a reference book, or copying a music album for the purpose of changing the recording media format for personal use (like converting old vinyl records to a cassette tape form), are becoming illegal when you do the equivilent on-line version of these activites.
So I say, *YES*, please DO get the government to treat the internet the same way everything else gets treated in public life, which means undoing the crap they've passed about it in the last few years. Destroy the DMCA, the CDAs I and II, and don't lie and call piracy theft. Theft implies that the original owner has had his property taken away rather than just copied. No, I'm not saying piracy is good, just that calling it theft puts the punishment out of proportion to the degree of the crime. Treating piracy as theft is like convicting someone for murder when all he did was get into a minor fist fight and nobody died.
Cold, uncaring censorship just to cover one's ass is worse than that done for misguided moral reasons.
It would be far better for people to simply be given a means to categorize sites, without giving them a moral judgement of any kind, and then sites could configure filter software to respond to these categories. One place might block any site related to "sex" without specifying whether that's evil porn or sexual medical information - just all sex sites of any kind. A very strict site might choose to block all stuff NOT listed as "education", and so on. The massive array of humans doing group voting on these sites would then NOT be making judgement calls based on whether they find a site offensive or not. They would be simply categorizing type of subject, and it's up to people to decide what sites fit under what subjects, regardless of whether they are "good" or "bad" sites.
Granted, not having any censorware in place at all would be a far better thing, but if it is going to be there, I think it's vital from an conflict-of-interest standpoint to have the categorizing list be made by someone other than the people producing the software. The list should be something that gets generated entirely by the public.