I used to use fvwm2 that way - it had an option to allow things to work like that (mostly - the desktop was not infinitely large, but you could scroll the viewport over your desktops.) But it had some practical problems that I'm not sure how to fix:
- Speed vs memory: Either it's slow, or a memory hog (but not both at once). Either you allocate a virtual framebuffer in memory that is huge enough to store the entire pannable desktop space, which can be absurdly large, or you 'forget' all data drawn outside the current viewport, but if you do that, then you have to issue massive redraw requests to the apps every time you scroll the viewport a few more pixels, and that's incredibly slow.
- The tendency to forget where your mouse is on the screen is normally not a big deal. But it gets really annoying when wiggling it around (to try to see it) ends up panning the viewport because the mouse was near the edge of the screen.
(Sorry about that previous empty post - I'm using a new browser, one in which RETURN submits the form, when I'm used to one in which RETURN just moves down the the next widget.)
Anyway, How do you make two windows appear at theie full size at the same time when they both need more than 50% of the screen? Answer: Either you overlap them, or you can't do it period.
I see the value of a window manager that LETS me easily arrange windows in a tiled fashion. I do not see the value in one that FORCES me to do it for every single window.
Try telling that to the morons* who work the phones and sales. We know that "unsupported" doesn't have to mean "won't work". But the people we have to talk to to get things set up (or to let them know they have a problem on their end) don't know that. Instead we get ignored unless we are willing to lie and pretend to be using a different OS.
I understand that they shouldn't have to understand the technical details of all OS'es. I'm not asking them to. I'm saying they shouldn't assume all problems are on the customer's end - which is exactly what they are doing when they refuse to talk to anyone not running an OS the phone people know about. They should at least *check* that things are working on their end before they blow you off and say, "not our problem."
This problem, I think, comes from the fact that phone support these days starts with a mandatory bozo filter - a checklist to walk through that catches the cases of PEBKAK* before escalating to a person with actual technical knowlege. That bozo filter checklist is tailored to the OS the user is using. If you can't pass the bozo filter, you can't get to someone who might actually know something. If they have no bozo list for your OS's setup procedure, then you can't get past the level 1 people.
* - Not all phone people are morons. Some of them are qualified. But the majority of them aren't anymore.
* - PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
Lying doesn't fix the problem - that they discriminate against anyone not using the approved software. It just lets them continue to live in their delusional world where alternatives don't exist. It's like setting your User Agent string to lie to a website - same problem - They never realize that other alternatives exist because their logs keep telling them that everyone is using Internet Explorer. (Plus this inflates the usage statistics that get quoted to marketers.)
I don't think open source software is more error prone. I just think it's more likely to *tell* you when an error happens rather than just sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. OSS doesn't lie. If something went wrong, it TELLS you. I'd love to see that kind of behaviour out of my Win98 desktop, so I could actually figure out why it keeps launching goofy things at startup that I don't even have installed (resulting in blank windows I have to close by hand.)
What if the problem isn't repeatable on someone else's machine, because it is specific to their setup for you? (NOT your local setup, but their setup on their end as it pertains to you.) To use the cable modem ISP example - what if they got your physical address wrong, so they enabled the wrong line for your account, so you can't get a connection? Or what if they spelled your username wrong when setting it up, so you can't log in? What if the problem is in a local router that doesn't get used when you travel to friend's house to try from there? These problems don't require them to know your OS, but they STILL won't talk to you unless you have the OS they want installed. They refuse to escalate the problem past the basic list of idiot questions, and that list insists that you be running the OS they tell you to.
They wouldn't *have* to know your OS if they would just believe you when you tell then the source of the problem.
The problem is that the Mac didn't give you the *choice* to pick low-end hardware for those components you don't care about. (No, I don't want to buy a top of the line sound system for my business computer.) This is exactly what I was talking about. The PC was more open. You had more choice, which means it's cheaper. You only have to pay top dollar for those components that you really want to be top of the line The irony is that this lead to the success of MS, which is now all about not letting people have choice. The success of MS has nothing to do with MS itself, and everything to do with the PC clone manufacturers.
This fails to address the real problem, which isn't the physical details of how to lock out the developers, but whether or not locking them out is a good idea in the first place.
It is not. A developer that needs a quick little tool doesn't need it next week after a long bueracratic approval process. He needs it today. Now.
Although putting the policy on the questionaire right away at the beginning during the interview process would be a good idea. It would allow the good developers to know that this is a company to avoid.
Not all problems are the user's fault. The problem with this policy (We won't support you unless you let us treat you like a child who doesn't know how to use his computer) is that it cuts off any avenue of communicating IT's problems to IT. This is what has happened with the end-user phone support world. If your system differs from their approved setup in any way at all, then they won't even talk to you to find out if the problem has anything to do with the changes you made. They automatically assume it does and leave it at that. This is the reason so many cable ISP providers insist you have them install the modem for Windows and won't tell you the numbers so you can install it yourself for something other than Windows. If you don't cave in to the majority, then they won't listen to your support problems to see if they are on their end or not. You end up with monopoly by fear - use the monopoly product or we won't be accountable for any problems, be they
our fault or not.
I'm also getting Konqueror blocked by the site. Out of curiosity I set my agent string to:
"bogus/made-up browser"
And that got blocked too. So it is NOT maintaining a blacklist, but rather it is maintaining a whitelist, which is even worse from a proprietary lock-in standpoint.
It doesn't just refuse certain browsers. It's denying all browsers except a select few.
When Microsoft tried calling J++ code "Java", it was guilty of false advertising. Plain and simple. Sun took away Microsoft's "right" to lie about what language it was implementing. (One of the rules of Java is about *where* you put extensions to the language such that they are obviously outside the portable portion of Java. MS could make as many additions to Java as they wanted. They just weren't allowed to lie to the public by making the additions appear to be part of the standard java.* classes. They had to call them something else. That's all. And they weren't willing to do so. They deserve NO SYMPATHY over this. NONE.)
When it comes to a Microsoft product, it's not possible to both be informative and refrain from giving a negative opinion of it. It's not the authors' fault that the truth is slanderous of MS.
The real reason for the success of MS over MacOS is that the Mac hardware was proprietary and expensive, and the PC hardware was open and cheap. The irony is that such a closed OS as MS got popular because of an open archetecture such as the PC. People didn't pick their OS first and then pick the hardware. They picked the hardware and then took whatever OS it came with.
but what is to keep you from running X for remote applications, and using DirectFB for your desktop?
The fact that if DirectFB becomes the standard, the X clients will no longer be ubiquitous, and DirectFB has no provision for remote usability itself. This notion that remote usability is "legacy" is bullshit. I don't want to be forced to walk to the server room (which night not even be in the same building or even the same city) in order to have full use of the programs on it. This very real-world problem, of how to put graphical ability on a multiuser system, was addressed by Unix ages ago, thus X was born. Now it has become quite dated, but people, please if you want to replace it, then replace it with something that doesn't *reduce* the functionality.
One of the reasons I don't want to admin Windows servers is that I like knowing that *everything* I might ever want to run on the server is remote-usable, all the time. Most of our servers don't even have monitors on them.
Why call X programs "legacy" apps?
I would welcome directFB IF AND ONLY IF it is used JUST by those programmers that need the speed, like games programmers and perhaps some CAD/rendering programmers. I would hate to see the situation where everyone forgets how useful remote apps were and the notion falls by the wayside. For most apps, the lightning fast video speed is irrelevant, and for those apps, portable X should be used.
the State can easily maintain control.
It was the COMPANY making the policy he was complaining about. How you say that amounts to "the State" maintaining control I don't know. (Unless you are implying that the state and big business are the same thing - a fact which is, admittedly, becomning closer to true lately. But there still is a difference (for now).)
Can someone fix the link for this article? I clicked it and didn't find anything whatsoever about disney - just a blank article with a sidebar. I searched around on the site for a while but failed to find ay article with a reference to "disney".
I can understand the "punish the citizens so they push to change their bad laws" attitude expressed here, but only when applied to something that includes those who favor the bad laws among the punished. But the stupid thing is that the only people punished by this are the minority who already want this law changed. Those who NEED to be personally inconvienienced by the DMCA to see what is happening are, for the most part, NOT people who care about the changelog Alan is witholding. Those who are up on security enough to want to see the changelog ALREADY oppose the DMCA.
He's not just preaching to the converted, he's making them pay pennance.
About the only thing you mention that was a technical issue was point #1 - the kernels.
Everything else is a marketplace issue. DirectX is NOT better than openGL, but it has more proliferation, and therefore coding to it gives you access to more types of hardware. Windows hardware support is also due to marketplace, given that Microsoft doesn't do the work to support the hardware, the HARDWARE vendor chooses to do the work to support Windows. The OS itself can't do a damn thing to fix the "I don't feel like supporting you because you are a small market" problem. The package issue has nothing to do with the package technology itself and everything to do with the decision of which packages to include on the installation media. Windows games always come bundled with the libraries they use, like DirectX, in case you don't have them installed already, or your installed version is too old. This is, again, a marketplace issue, NOT a technical one.
The really big problem is social rather than technical. There's this recursion that it's very hard to break out of - Linux distro's won't be popular until they have the features that are aimed at joe average. But they won't put in such features until it becomes popular with joe average. (until then the linux market, consisting mostly of technical types, doesn't
care about those features and often thinks of them as a detriment.)
One thing that has annoyed me is that these games that require hardware accelleration don't actually *look* any better. It seems to me that they are using the accelleration not to make a better game, but to reduce the workload of the programmers so they don't have to write 'tight' code. (It's the typical situation: hardware is cheaper than programmer time - so go ahead and write inefficient code and just increase the hardware requirements. End result - we buy better and better hardware but don't see any real benefit from it.)
There's a difference between technical suitability and marketplace suitability. Windows gets the games first because it's a big market. It's a big market because it gets the games first. Round and round it goes - infinite recursion without a base case. From a technical standpoint, it's not very good at all for games.
He also said that Linux should give up on the desktop because MS has already won there.
As I've just posted in another thread further down - that's the worst advice ever. I agreed with his points about OS Bigotry getting in the way, but he's an idiot for suggesting that the desktop market should just be ignored. If MS gets 100% control of the desktop, then all other servers (not just Linux) on the market will die shortly after that. (Think "embrace and extend" - applied to network protocols.)
So someone claiming to have good business sense actually suggests that Linux advocates give up on the desktop altogether as an unwinnable battle and instead concentrate of Linux's strengths?
Worst.. Advice.. Ever..
Give up the desktop to MS and we end up giving up the server as well. It is MS's strategy to use their desktop dominance to take over the server side as well. And it can be done. What difference does it make that Linux can run a good server when MS continues to hijack the protocol standards, and MS has final say over what the OS on the client machines is?
Lose the desktop, and then lose the server. And no, we don't need to *win* the desktop, per se - just have a respectable enough percentage that the world isn't totally MS desktops everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, How do you make two windows appear at theie full size at the same time when they both need more than 50% of the screen? Answer: Either you overlap them, or you can't do it period.
I see the value of a window manager that LETS me easily arrange windows in a tiled fashion. I do not see the value in one that FORCES me to do it for every single window.
I understand that they shouldn't have to understand the technical details of all OS'es. I'm not asking them to. I'm saying they shouldn't assume all problems are on the customer's end - which is exactly what they are doing when they refuse to talk to anyone not running an OS the phone people know about. They should at least *check* that things are working on their end before they blow you off and say, "not our problem."
This problem, I think, comes from the fact that phone support these days starts with a mandatory bozo filter - a checklist to walk through that catches the cases of PEBKAK* before escalating to a person with actual technical knowlege. That bozo filter checklist is tailored to the OS the user is using. If you can't pass the bozo filter, you can't get to someone who might actually know something. If they have no bozo list for your OS's setup procedure, then you can't get past the level 1 people.
* - Not all phone people are morons. Some of them are qualified. But the majority of them aren't anymore.
* - PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
Lying doesn't fix the problem - that they discriminate against anyone not using the approved software. It just lets them continue to live in their delusional world where alternatives don't exist. It's like setting your User Agent string to lie to a website - same problem - They never realize that other alternatives exist because their logs keep telling them that everyone is using Internet Explorer. (Plus this inflates the usage statistics that get quoted to marketers.)
I don't think open source software is more error prone. I just think it's more likely to *tell* you when an error happens rather than just sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. OSS doesn't lie. If something went wrong, it TELLS you. I'd love to see that kind of behaviour out of my Win98 desktop, so I could actually figure out why it keeps launching goofy things at startup that I don't even have installed (resulting in blank windows I have to close by hand.)
They wouldn't *have* to know your OS if they would just believe you when you tell then the source of the problem.
The problem is that the Mac didn't give you the *choice* to pick low-end hardware for those components you don't care about. (No, I don't want to buy a top of the line sound system for my business computer.) This is exactly what I was talking about. The PC was more open. You had more choice, which means it's cheaper. You only have to pay top dollar for those components that you really want to be top of the line The irony is that this lead to the success of MS, which is now all about not letting people have choice. The success of MS has nothing to do with MS itself, and everything to do with the PC clone manufacturers.
It is not. A developer that needs a quick little tool doesn't need it next week after a long bueracratic approval process. He needs it today. Now.
Although putting the policy on the questionaire right away at the beginning during the interview process would be a good idea. It would allow the good developers to know that this is a company to avoid.
Not all problems are the user's fault. The problem with this policy (We won't support you unless you let us treat you like a child who doesn't know how to use his computer) is that it cuts off any avenue of communicating IT's problems to IT. This is what has happened with the end-user phone support world. If your system differs from their approved setup in any way at all, then they won't even talk to you to find out if the problem has anything to do with the changes you made. They automatically assume it does and leave it at that. This is the reason so many cable ISP providers insist you have them install the modem for Windows and won't tell you the numbers so you can install it yourself for something other than Windows. If you don't cave in to the majority, then they won't listen to your support problems to see if they are on their end or not. You end up with monopoly by fear - use the monopoly product or we won't be accountable for any problems, be they our fault or not.
I'm also getting Konqueror blocked by the site. Out of curiosity I set my agent string to:
"bogus/made-up browser"
And that got blocked too. So it is NOT maintaining a blacklist, but rather it is maintaining a whitelist, which is even worse from a proprietary lock-in standpoint.
It doesn't just refuse certain browsers. It's denying all browsers except a select few.
MS == Pompus twits.
When Microsoft tried calling J++ code "Java", it was guilty of false advertising. Plain and simple. Sun took away Microsoft's "right" to lie about what language it was implementing. (One of the rules of Java is about *where* you put extensions to the language such that they are obviously outside the portable portion of Java. MS could make as many additions to Java as they wanted. They just weren't allowed to lie to the public by making the additions appear to be part of the standard java.* classes. They had to call them something else. That's all. And they weren't willing to do so. They deserve NO SYMPATHY over this. NONE.)
When it comes to a Microsoft product, it's not possible to both be informative and refrain from giving a negative opinion of it. It's not the authors' fault that the truth is slanderous of MS.
The real reason for the success of MS over MacOS is that the Mac hardware was proprietary and expensive, and the PC hardware was open and cheap. The irony is that such a closed OS as MS got popular because of an open archetecture such as the PC. People didn't pick their OS first and then pick the hardware. They picked the hardware and then took whatever OS it came with.
GOTO 4
?LINE NOT FOUND
What universe do you live in, where Linux is "constantly losing ground to other platforms"?
Why call X programs "legacy" apps? I would welcome directFB IF AND ONLY IF it is used JUST by those programmers that need the speed, like games programmers and perhaps some CAD/rendering programmers. I would hate to see the situation where everyone forgets how useful remote apps were and the notion falls by the wayside. For most apps, the lightning fast video speed is irrelevant, and for those apps, portable X should be used.
the State can easily maintain control. It was the COMPANY making the policy he was complaining about. How you say that amounts to "the State" maintaining control I don't know. (Unless you are implying that the state and big business are the same thing - a fact which is, admittedly, becomning closer to true lately. But there still is a difference (for now).)
Can someone fix the link for this article? I clicked it and didn't find anything whatsoever about disney - just a blank article with a sidebar. I searched around on the site for a while but failed to find ay article with a reference to "disney".
He's not just preaching to the converted, he's making them pay pennance.
The really big problem is social rather than technical. There's this recursion that it's very hard to break out of - Linux distro's won't be popular until they have the features that are aimed at joe average. But they won't put in such features until it becomes popular with joe average. (until then the linux market, consisting mostly of technical types, doesn't care about those features and often thinks of them as a detriment.)
One thing that has annoyed me is that these games that require hardware accelleration don't actually *look* any better. It seems to me that they are using the accelleration not to make a better game, but to reduce the workload of the programmers so they don't have to write 'tight' code. (It's the typical situation: hardware is cheaper than programmer time - so go ahead and write inefficient code and just increase the hardware requirements. End result - we buy better and better hardware but don't see any real benefit from it.)
There's a difference between technical suitability and marketplace suitability. Windows gets the games first because it's a big market. It's a big market because it gets the games first. Round and round it goes - infinite recursion without a base case. From a technical standpoint, it's not very good at all for games.
As I've just posted in another thread further down - that's the worst advice ever. I agreed with his points about OS Bigotry getting in the way, but he's an idiot for suggesting that the desktop market should just be ignored. If MS gets 100% control of the desktop, then all other servers (not just Linux) on the market will die shortly after that. (Think "embrace and extend" - applied to network protocols.)
Worst.. Advice.. Ever..
Give up the desktop to MS and we end up giving up the server as well. It is MS's strategy to use their desktop dominance to take over the server side as well. And it can be done. What difference does it make that Linux can run a good server when MS continues to hijack the protocol standards, and MS has final say over what the OS on the client machines is?
Lose the desktop, and then lose the server. And no, we don't need to *win* the desktop, per se - just have a respectable enough percentage that the world isn't totally MS desktops everywhere.