Yes, you can use AIGLX with Compiz. I'm using it right now on a laptop with an Intel i855GM graphics chip, with excellent speed. Feels snappier than normal GNOME, actually, and with nice things like Exposé clone. As for the Metacity stuff, if you're using Quinn's CVS, which has the latest and nicest and fastest bits of Compiz, it comes with a nice window decorator called cgwd (compiz-generic-window-decorator?) which is light-years ahead of Metacity. Quinn has also produced a properly transparent gnome-terminal, which is very handy for coding (i.e., text stays fully opaque, but the black background becomes transparent (on a sliding scale of opacity), so you can look at a PDF file with whatever in it and keep typing without alt-tabbing all the time).
Despite the effects being built-in, I can't really see the Metacity compositing effects becoming too popular, because of said driver issues, and Compiz seems to be getting a good head of steam up (the amount of development, and the pace of it, is truly astonishing). Compiz also happens to be portable -- you can use it in KDE too if you swing that way. And isn't Compiz included by default (or at least AIGLX) with Edgy Eft?
No I think you'll find on most laptops that that Fn+F11/F12 or whatever it might be actually does generate a key event; they work exactly the same as multimedia keys on desktop keyboards, the only reason they do it with Fn key is to save keyboard area. This is certainly the case on my laptop (which is by no means cheap or offbrand), and on nearly all laptops that I've seen which lack the wee little potentiometre setups.
My laptop is permanently muted anyway; who the hell listens to sounds coming out of your laptop speakers? Sounds like arse. And even when the headphones are plugged in, you still get major interference from the integrated sound chip.
Back on the... wait... either the Commodore 64 or the BBC Micro (I had both, I can't remember which one though) there was both a Caps-Lock and a Shift-Lock (as you describe). I think it was the Beeb the more I think about it.
Note that you don't need to hack anything around, if you're running Gnome all you need to do is set up Keyboard->Keyboard Layout Options->Caps-Lock Behaviour and you can make it a Shift-Lock if you'd prefer.
LyX, easier to use than Word? Get real! LyX has to be one of the most horrible user interfaces I've ever tried to use. I use LaTeX for almost everything; I can't remember the last time I submitted a paper using Word or even OpenOffice; but LyX? Hell no, just write it by hand, it will save you so much time.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's because the free java implementation (gcj et al) has only implemented up to 1.4.2. 1.5 is in the works. Sun Java, however, is at 1.5 level on linux and it doesn't take much to install. It may even be within the package manager with this new licensing business.
Um. Ok, next time you're in Australia, for anybody on Slashdot, don't go waving around that name (Keith Windschuttle). He's a highly controversial revisionist historian... along the lines of a Holocaust denier, really. He can say all he likes, really, I have no problem with people saying what they like, but he does say a lot of stupid mixed-up things.
I'm sure the politically-correct loonies in the 60s did go a bit overboard from time to time, but Windschuttle goes as far as implying the so-called `Stolen Generation' never took place, and Australia's well documented period of government policy against non-whites (`White Australia Policy') was falsified and exaggerated. He's a parochial, white, right, conservative tosspot of the type that Australia is unfortunately too full of, and a good example of why I got fed up and went home to Auckland where people of all races manage to live quite nicely alongside one another without lynchings or race-riots.
And it has complex, inconsistent, and worst of all multiple competing models of GUI design!
As compared to Linux desktops... ?
This is actually a point in favour of Linux being ready for the desktop. People go on and on how the GTK/Qt thing is bad news for new Linux users, but Microsoft has been doing it for years and people don't seem to be too confused.
BTW, shouldn't we be pleased that at least MS responded to user feedback for once?
Nup. The internet, of course, has been around for ages, but Tim Berners-Lee (spelling?) wrote his ENQUIRE programme in 1981, IIRC. This was the ancestor of the Web, many things were different, but the essentials (such as hyperlinks) were all there. For more information, read Berners-Lee's excellent autobiography that I can't remember the name of.
Now that I re-read your post, it looks like you may have been confusing the internet with the World Wide Web. A strange thing for a slashdotter to do. The internet has been around since Al Gore invented it and called it ARPANET in 1969, which ties in with your decade-earlier thing. For those readers who don't know the difference between the 'net and the web, the internet is just the whole network thing of all the computers joined together, and on top of that you run different systems which use it, such as the web, or email, or ftp, or your favourite online role-playing game. Think of the internet as the telephone wires running around your country, but on top of those telephone wires you run the actual telephone service, and the fax service, and dial-up internet etc etc. A simplification but close enough.
Although I normally think the constant `Linux pwns M$' thing often goes over the top around here, I would actually say there's probably a good chance the parent is just stating the truth as he's experienced it here. The protocols he mentions, USB and Firewire, have at different times had issues running at full speed on Windows XP. Don't quote me on this, as I'm not 100% sure which SP it was, but I'm pretty sure before SP1, Windows XP didn't have proper support for USB 2.0. USB 1 speeds worked fine but I definitely recall having issues personally running at full speed. I imagine there was a patch for it fairly quickly but in the usual tradition of patching Windows most people didn't bother. There are also quite a few comments above regarding the recent issue with SP2 and breaking Firewire 400 speed -- it throttles it back to just 100 speed. There is, again, a simple patch to fix it. But my point is, is that it's quite possible to have problems with USB/Firewire under Windows and not have an issue (at least after it was implemented ^_^) with those two protocols under Linux.
Aside from all the utter bullshit marketing/corporate language, this so-called agile development methodology seems to be pretty similar to how people develop outside of any particular methodology constraints (such as the dreaded waterfall, oh how I hate you). In particular, it seems to be particularly close to how the open-source community write software. In this land of eternal betas (not you, Google), this is how it happens; first the bare, most basic, but core features will be written, and then slowly the project will sort of fill out with other important features and polish. In fact, I thought that was part of the Unix philosophy -- didn't Doug McIlroy say `Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.'
At the end of the day, I thoroughly dislike any enforced development methodology, but this `agile' system seems to be relatively close to how programmers naturally work, so I'd imagine it's a lot more intuitive to work with.
I don't think it's my wrist setup; my hands tend to shake all the time. I think it's something to do with playing music for many years... I know for certain the way I hold the bow has left my little finger with a groove in the flesh; I wouldn't be surprised if the tension in my hands is what causes them to shake. Probably like programmer-RSI. I will try out moving my arm though instead, it might be able to improve my unreadable writing as well.
I'd say it was done with a graphics tablet, much like sketching with paper and pen, not placing each individual line with a mouse/keyboard. Still, seriously amazing... I've never been able to grasp drawing, not only can I not lay everything out in my head properly, but my hands shake and I can't draw lines with any consistency hahah. Perhaps why I never like to use the mouse if I can help it. Visual artists are sufficiently advanced that they're indistinguishable from magic to me ^_^.
`A REAL email account'... what's that? Are you just Microsoft bashing again, or do you think that everybody should have a proper POP3/IMAP account with their ISP? Webmail is unavoidable these days; I personally use my gmail account exclusively. If your problem is with Hotmail specifically, then I'm not sure why. Hotmail is one of the more old-fashioned webmail systems (Yahoo and gmail are much nicer in terms of UI) but there are far far more dodgy and poor webmail systems out there. I'm sure somebody will reply with stacks of reasons why Hotmail is awful, but it simply isn't/that/ bad. I would, for instance, feel far more secure using Hotmail than Windows (to compare apples with oranges)...
Sorry to the rest of Slashdot for metaposting, but the is the parent on crack to-night or something? I think every single one of his posts (save just one) has been troll/flame... what's that ad campaign, `Don't be a bloody idiot - don't drink and post!'
Oh come on! I got the (slightly lame) joke, but I just get pissed off when people keep repeating this fallacy of Moore's Law being clockspeed. Sorry if that makes me a bit anal, and yes, I do always think the Nazis like I was in this case tend to look a bit stupid, but it's like `rediculous' and `MAC' and `legos'... sometimes you just get irritated heheh.
I really shouldn't reply. But here goes. First of all, I'm hardly a Windows fan; currently I'm using Ubuntu but for most of the time before that I've been working with Amiga and Apple systems.
Now, I don't know about your wyoguide or whether it is an effective platform or not - I'm primarily working on the command-line, and have little experience with GUIs. But I'll say this; recommending it for use instead of whatever anybody else has already chosen for their own reasons is ridiculous (or should I say rediculous). It's on the same level as everytime some hole in Windows is revealed, all the Slashbots tell them to change to Linux, no matter how unreasonable. Now Google has already invested a massive amount of time writing Picasa; do you have even the slightest idea how difficult (or even possible) it would be to rewrite it with a different GUI toolkit? I don't even think it would be possible to have even close to the same functionality; let's face it, wxWidgets is hardly on the level of QT, or GTK - I doubt in wxWidgets you would be able to match the look-and-feel of Picasa. And this is undoubtedly important to Google.
Now I will stop typing, as I have much better things to do, but really, you ought to know that everytime somebody does something that could be done (or even couldn't be done) with your particular pet project, instead of recommending everybody use it as it's the best thign since sliced bread, think of their own requirements. You, sir, are the epitome of that awful, cringe-worthy, almost embarrassing Slashbot mindset of `Linux is the answer to everything', except you haven't even done it with such an excellent and proven product as the Linux OS.
Mod parent down; I see this guy all the time. Any time something even remotely cross-platform is mentioned (sometimes even not), he promotes his website as being the answer to solve all the problems. I've seen it promoted for everything from user-interface guidelines as a replacement to fix up Gnome, to somehow using it instead of WINE. This guy is a troll; mod him down.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't it be 1.10 then? I didn't know version numbers were decimals.
Note that I'm not disputing the 2.0 moniker, it feels like 2.0 to me at least.
Yes, you can use AIGLX with Compiz. I'm using it right now on a laptop with an Intel i855GM graphics chip, with excellent speed. Feels snappier than normal GNOME, actually, and with nice things like Exposé clone. As for the Metacity stuff, if you're using Quinn's CVS, which has the latest and nicest and fastest bits of Compiz, it comes with a nice window decorator called cgwd (compiz-generic-window-decorator?) which is light-years ahead of Metacity. Quinn has also produced a properly transparent gnome-terminal, which is very handy for coding (i.e., text stays fully opaque, but the black background becomes transparent (on a sliding scale of opacity), so you can look at a PDF file with whatever in it and keep typing without alt-tabbing all the time).
Despite the effects being built-in, I can't really see the Metacity compositing effects becoming too popular, because of said driver issues, and Compiz seems to be getting a good head of steam up (the amount of development, and the pace of it, is truly astonishing). Compiz also happens to be portable -- you can use it in KDE too if you swing that way. And isn't Compiz included by default (or at least AIGLX) with Edgy Eft?
No I think you'll find on most laptops that that Fn+F11/F12 or whatever it might be actually does generate a key event; they work exactly the same as multimedia keys on desktop keyboards, the only reason they do it with Fn key is to save keyboard area. This is certainly the case on my laptop (which is by no means cheap or offbrand), and on nearly all laptops that I've seen which lack the wee little potentiometre setups.
My laptop is permanently muted anyway; who the hell listens to sounds coming out of your laptop speakers? Sounds like arse. And even when the headphones are plugged in, you still get major interference from the integrated sound chip.
[a/e/x]Mule. RAR'd CUE+WAV. Waaaaaaaaay more rare/unusual stuff than bittorrent. It'll just take three days to download.
That's not the point, dipshit. 75% of DAPs are iPods. Linux people want more users. See a reason for wanting iTunes on Linux?
>Let there be light!
More proof Christians are deluded. The bible was clearly written in BASIC...
Back on the... wait... either the Commodore 64 or the BBC Micro (I had both, I can't remember which one though) there was both a Caps-Lock and a Shift-Lock (as you describe). I think it was the Beeb the more I think about it.
Note that you don't need to hack anything around, if you're running Gnome all you need to do is set up Keyboard->Keyboard Layout Options->Caps-Lock Behaviour and you can make it a Shift-Lock if you'd prefer.
Me? Mine's an extra Ctrl key (vi user ^_^)...
-Tommi
LyX, easier to use than Word? Get real! LyX has to be one of the most horrible user interfaces I've ever tried to use. I use LaTeX for almost everything; I can't remember the last time I submitted a paper using Word or even OpenOffice; but LyX? Hell no, just write it by hand, it will save you so much time.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's because the free java implementation (gcj et al) has only implemented up to 1.4.2. 1.5 is in the works. Sun Java, however, is at 1.5 level on linux and it doesn't take much to install. It may even be within the package manager with this new licensing business.
Um. Ok, next time you're in Australia, for anybody on Slashdot, don't go waving around that name (Keith Windschuttle). He's a highly controversial revisionist historian... along the lines of a Holocaust denier, really. He can say all he likes, really, I have no problem with people saying what they like, but he does say a lot of stupid mixed-up things.
I'm sure the politically-correct loonies in the 60s did go a bit overboard from time to time, but Windschuttle goes as far as implying the so-called `Stolen Generation' never took place, and Australia's well documented period of government policy against non-whites (`White Australia Policy') was falsified and exaggerated. He's a parochial, white, right, conservative tosspot of the type that Australia is unfortunately too full of, and a good example of why I got fed up and went home to Auckland where people of all races manage to live quite nicely alongside one another without lynchings or race-riots.
-Tommi =^_^=
As compared to Linux desktops... ?
This is actually a point in favour of Linux being ready for the desktop. People go on and on how the GTK/Qt thing is bad news for new Linux users, but Microsoft has been doing it for years and people don't seem to be too confused.
BTW, shouldn't we be pleased that at least MS responded to user feedback for once?
-Tommi =^_^=
Nup. The internet, of course, has been around for ages, but Tim Berners-Lee (spelling?) wrote his ENQUIRE programme in 1981, IIRC. This was the ancestor of the Web, many things were different, but the essentials (such as hyperlinks) were all there. For more information, read Berners-Lee's excellent autobiography that I can't remember the name of.
Now that I re-read your post, it looks like you may have been confusing the internet with the World Wide Web. A strange thing for a slashdotter to do. The internet has been around since Al Gore invented it and called it ARPANET in 1969, which ties in with your decade-earlier thing. For those readers who don't know the difference between the 'net and the web, the internet is just the whole network thing of all the computers joined together, and on top of that you run different systems which use it, such as the web, or email, or ftp, or your favourite online role-playing game. Think of the internet as the telephone wires running around your country, but on top of those telephone wires you run the actual telephone service, and the fax service, and dial-up internet etc etc. A simplification but close enough.
-Tommi =^_^=
Although I normally think the constant `Linux pwns M$' thing often goes over the top around here, I would actually say there's probably a good chance the parent is just stating the truth as he's experienced it here. The protocols he mentions, USB and Firewire, have at different times had issues running at full speed on Windows XP. Don't quote me on this, as I'm not 100% sure which SP it was, but I'm pretty sure before SP1, Windows XP didn't have proper support for USB 2.0. USB 1 speeds worked fine but I definitely recall having issues personally running at full speed. I imagine there was a patch for it fairly quickly but in the usual tradition of patching Windows most people didn't bother. There are also quite a few comments above regarding the recent issue with SP2 and breaking Firewire 400 speed -- it throttles it back to just 100 speed. There is, again, a simple patch to fix it. But my point is, is that it's quite possible to have problems with USB/Firewire under Windows and not have an issue (at least after it was implemented ^_^) with those two protocols under Linux.
Aside from all the utter bullshit marketing/corporate language, this so-called agile development methodology seems to be pretty similar to how people develop outside of any particular methodology constraints (such as the dreaded waterfall, oh how I hate you). In particular, it seems to be particularly close to how the open-source community write software. In this land of eternal betas (not you, Google), this is how it happens; first the bare, most basic, but core features will be written, and then slowly the project will sort of fill out with other important features and polish. In fact, I thought that was part of the Unix philosophy -- didn't Doug McIlroy say `Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.'
At the end of the day, I thoroughly dislike any enforced development methodology, but this `agile' system seems to be relatively close to how programmers naturally work, so I'd imagine it's a lot more intuitive to work with.
Spelt?
I don't think it's my wrist setup; my hands tend to shake all the time. I think it's something to do with playing music for many years... I know for certain the way I hold the bow has left my little finger with a groove in the flesh; I wouldn't be surprised if the tension in my hands is what causes them to shake. Probably like programmer-RSI. I will try out moving my arm though instead, it might be able to improve my unreadable writing as well.
I'd say it was done with a graphics tablet, much like sketching with paper and pen, not placing each individual line with a mouse/keyboard. Still, seriously amazing... I've never been able to grasp drawing, not only can I not lay everything out in my head properly, but my hands shake and I can't draw lines with any consistency hahah. Perhaps why I never like to use the mouse if I can help it. Visual artists are sufficiently advanced that they're indistinguishable from magic to me ^_^.
`A REAL email account'... what's that? Are you just Microsoft bashing again, or do you think that everybody should have a proper POP3/IMAP account with their ISP? Webmail is unavoidable these days; I personally use my gmail account exclusively. If your problem is with Hotmail specifically, then I'm not sure why. Hotmail is one of the more old-fashioned webmail systems (Yahoo and gmail are much nicer in terms of UI) but there are far far more dodgy and poor webmail systems out there. I'm sure somebody will reply with stacks of reasons why Hotmail is awful, but it simply isn't /that/ bad. I would, for instance, feel far more secure using Hotmail than Windows (to compare apples with oranges)...
On the Ubuntu wiki's RestrictedFormats page there is information pertaining to getting stuff from iTMS: here
Sorry to the rest of Slashdot for metaposting, but the is the parent on crack to-night or something? I think every single one of his posts (save just one) has been troll/flame... what's that ad campaign, `Don't be a bloody idiot - don't drink and post!'
Oh come on! I got the (slightly lame) joke, but I just get pissed off when people keep repeating this fallacy of Moore's Law being clockspeed. Sorry if that makes me a bit anal, and yes, I do always think the Nazis like I was in this case tend to look a bit stupid, but it's like `rediculous' and `MAC' and `legos'... sometimes you just get irritated heheh.
You do know Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on a chip, and doesn't have anything to do with clock speed, right?
I really shouldn't reply. But here goes. First of all, I'm hardly a Windows fan; currently I'm using Ubuntu but for most of the time before that I've been working with Amiga and Apple systems.
Now, I don't know about your wyoguide or whether it is an effective platform or not - I'm primarily working on the command-line, and have little experience with GUIs. But I'll say this; recommending it for use instead of whatever anybody else has already chosen for their own reasons is ridiculous (or should I say rediculous). It's on the same level as everytime some hole in Windows is revealed, all the Slashbots tell them to change to Linux, no matter how unreasonable. Now Google has already invested a massive amount of time writing Picasa; do you have even the slightest idea how difficult (or even possible) it would be to rewrite it with a different GUI toolkit? I don't even think it would be possible to have even close to the same functionality; let's face it, wxWidgets is hardly on the level of QT, or GTK - I doubt in wxWidgets you would be able to match the look-and-feel of Picasa. And this is undoubtedly important to Google.
Now I will stop typing, as I have much better things to do, but really, you ought to know that everytime somebody does something that could be done (or even couldn't be done) with your particular pet project, instead of recommending everybody use it as it's the best thign since sliced bread, think of their own requirements. You, sir, are the epitome of that awful, cringe-worthy, almost embarrassing Slashbot mindset of `Linux is the answer to everything', except you haven't even done it with such an excellent and proven product as the Linux OS.
Mod parent down; I see this guy all the time. Any time something even remotely cross-platform is mentioned (sometimes even not), he promotes his website as being the answer to solve all the problems. I've seen it promoted for everything from user-interface guidelines as a replacement to fix up Gnome, to somehow using it instead of WINE. This guy is a troll; mod him down.
And yet you still post here?