Unlike most other nations' legal systems, human dignity and therefore privacy is central to the German constitution
Luckily, the EU constitution will fix all that. The EU constitution does no longer try only to protect the rights of the people, instead, it "balances" between civil rights and the rights of companies. For example:
The Union contributes to the preservation and to the development of these common values while respecting the diversity of the cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe as well as the national identities of the Member States and the organisation of their public authorities at national, regional and local levels; it seeks to promote balanced and sustainable development and ensures free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and the freedom of establishment.
So the EU contributes to preserving common values, respects cultures... and ensures free movement of capital. You can clearly see the priorities.
Also, that means they are balancing between free movement and industry interests? Now how is that supposed to protect civil rights? A formulation like that could never, ever, give a person any means to fight against laws that they consider unconstitutional.
Never before had the industry access to lobby around the consitution...
2. Intellectual property shall be protected.
...but obviously, that's changed. Throughout the whole constitution, most formulations are so poor that civil rights can seriously be damaged, because they are put into the same context with industry rights and "security". Another example:
Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.
Is this formulation trying to make it possible to restrict freedoms by establishing so-called anti-terrorism mechanisms? We all know that the big brother is trying to protect us, but I'd like better not having to live in that confidence.
There are many examples, especially where business interests are involved, browse the EU constitution online and you see what I mean.
companies. All they'd have to do is make the source available for download, and then sell their Linux products to that 90% of the consumer market that doesn't compile programs from source, and just wants to double-click a download to make it install.
And there's still Ubuntu for those who prefer to install programs using single click.
I've downloaded the kubuntu preview today and it had neither a graphical network configuration client (you could install one from a different repository but a lack of answers in the channel leads me to the conclusion that there's no gui way to change repositories)
In Ubuntu Hoary you can use the (GNOME-based) Ubuntu Update Manager to add new repositories, it is installed by default. (System -> Administration -> Ubuntu Update Manager, in the new dialog click 'Preferences')
You can also run 'gnome-software-properties' on the command line directly. (or 'update-manager')
I never tried to discuss with them to see how they intend to do business, so I have no idea, only guesses: Maybe they forward your orders to some company in another country, that can't really be held responsible. Or maybe these guys just want to take surveys or something.
Either way, I'm not going to place an order to try out whether I get a chance to sue them.
Just try and start documenting perl - since there is more than one way to do things, you'll end up giving in to the urge to change code as you document it - so the documentation never gets written.
Is there any other language that has an equal amount of code equally well documented? CPAN has the best documentation of reusable code in comparison with other languages. Sure, there's always a bad example, but seriously, saying that documenting Perl is hard is certainly far from the truth.
-Samuel
I found that progress of open source software can often be measured by the availability of generic code. Once that code has been written as a generic library, collaboration is easy and higher level code is more maintainable. This is where Open Source software can have one huge advantage: Collaboration can take place on the libraries, and many applications take profit from that work *between different projects*. You have much more possibilities then in commercial software projects, where you seldom share much work between companies.
That also makes generic code even more important for OS. We have seen huge progress in the last years and most of the lower level stuff has appeared or become more mature. Unfortunately though, this is also what I still found to be the most lacking in higher level libraries. Most projects go like this:
"We need a really cool search front-end for Google. Let's see whether there's a cool library for this. Nothing yet? Ok, then let's just start from scratch."
And then a library is implemented, with an API for searching using Google. It is perfectly usable for exactly what the developer wanted.
Now this seems reasonable at first, but think about this: In OS development, we are not bound to time lines. Why should we chose a half-hearted attack on a problem that will surely hit others after us again? Instead, the developer could also ask, "if I create a generic library, how generic can I make it? Do we have to limit it's capabilities to requesting stuff from Google? Or maybe I could even create a library that allows to query any search engine? Or maybe, provide an API the lets you query anything, like search engines, your local hard disk, p2p networks and a local database."
In commercial software development, this would be completely unreasonable overkill. In OS however, it's a great way to collaborate. And once implemented, the foundation for a lot of applications has been lied. And it's also fun - writing libraries is fun. It is a great component model either. And it is also a pleasure to see when the work is done, because once the foundation was set writing the actual application is as easy as plugging components together.
There are also good examples, of course. Gstreamer is one. But there is still so much potential. I would like to see this kind of thinking more and more.
Apple/did/ have some nice cases, but you have way, way less issues running Linux on PC hardware. No need to compile most packages (more i386 binaries available in Apt), no nasty problems with endianess and pretty much all Distros run out of the box on PCs.
Also, I like the idea of having an advertising-free case;).
I wonder whether that's the bot that has been scanning my website for three days by attempting to "crawl" through all session ids and causing more then 1 GByte of traffic.
"msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
It was only stoppable by blocking the IP. (robots.txt was only read once before it started) Great, smart bot, really.
Contrast this with many GTK themes, which are often pixmaps chopped up and used to build widgets, lines and buttons in a piecemeal fashion.
What are you talking about? There are almost no pixmap-based themes for GNOME out there. In fact, there is only one single pixmap engine, which is poorly maintained and almost never used.
recolouring pixmaps in GTK is effectively impossible, as far as I know
Wrong again. Take a look at the smooth engine - it is using a canvas and you can draw to the canvas whatever you wish.
Also, it can be highly configured, so you can change all the colors in gtkrc.
Plus, they run terribly slowly. On my PC with a recent Qt and GTK, complex Qt dialogues appear almost instantly, while GTK ones visibly draw.
And wrong again. This highly depends on the theme engine used. If you want something fast, try the Industrial engine, which outperforms QT in every way. It still lets you choose the widget colors and look very slick.
Yes, I really want my PC to look like a cheap knock-off of a modern Mac. If I want Aqua, I use my iBook.
The misassumption some QT users seem to make is that a GUI toolkit able to drive advanced themes is bad. You don't have to use advanced themes. But the great thing is: They look slick and you can use them if you like them. There's no drawback.
Compare your teenager-designed GTK themes with a properly implemented Qt theme, like Plastik - while it looks fairly plain
While I can not really believe somebody might find this theme better then the GNOME counterparts (Plastik is IMO an attempt to clone GNOME's Smooth-Engine style), you can still use all QT themes within GNOME.
If this is really possible then I don't know, but then why do even the highest rated themes look so bad? Do GNOME and KDE have a completely different idea of what a theme engine can do? Where can I get informations on the QT theme engine?
For example and comparism, let's have a look at the highest rated KDE theme:
Baghira
And the still not highest rated, but same style GNOME theme:
GnoMetal
And there are/way/ better GNOME themes at gnome-look.org.
The themes from kde-look.org all look like made by geeks who have no idea of visual design whatsoever. Everybody could draw such a theme.
Nope. GNOME's theming is *way* more flexible in comparism with QT, because it lets you exchange the complete engine. That's the reason why many GNOME themes are superior to the KDE themes, it is also the reason why there is a GTK-QT engine and no QT-KDE engine. (You can use any KDE theme in GNOME, but not v.v.)
Hell, there are even SVG-based GNOME themes.
Plus, you could never fix the KDE inconsistency and UI clutter by configuration.
QT's theming just isn't that flexible. In GNOME, you can easily exchange the theme engine, that's what made the GTK-QT Engine possible. Also, GNOME has enough applications of it's own, so that would probably be a huge waste of time.
Also note that in GNOME it is possible to use all QT themes, but not the other way round.
Though GNOME themes look much better, of course, so I wonder who whould actually want to do that;).
My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.
You ARE paying the service by looking at the Ads.
Since you will still have to login to read the mail, you are still paying.
Slashdot Mirror
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Here's how I would have designed the application:
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[Cancel] [Spend $251,000,000]
Nice, but for a complete solution I would at least expect a surround module for the home cinema room. I'd seriously consider buying this then.
Unlike most other nations' legal systems, human dignity and therefore privacy is central to the German constitution
...but obviously, that's changed.
Luckily, the EU constitution will fix all that. The EU constitution does no longer try only to protect the rights of the people, instead, it "balances" between civil rights and the rights of companies. For example:
The Union contributes to the preservation and to the development of these common values while respecting the diversity of the cultures and traditions of the peoples of Europe as well as the national identities of the Member States and the organisation of their public authorities at national, regional and local levels; it seeks to promote balanced and sustainable development and ensures free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and the freedom of establishment.
So the EU contributes to preserving common values, respects cultures... and ensures free movement of capital. You can clearly see the priorities.
Also, that means they are balancing between free movement and industry interests? Now how is that supposed to protect civil rights? A formulation like that could never, ever, give a person any means to fight against laws that they consider unconstitutional.
Never before had the industry access to lobby around the consitution...
2. Intellectual property shall be protected.
Throughout the whole constitution, most formulations are so poor that civil rights can seriously be damaged, because they are put into the same context with industry rights and "security". Another example:
Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.
Is this formulation trying to make it possible to restrict freedoms by establishing so-called anti-terrorism mechanisms? We all know that the big brother is trying to protect us, but I'd like better not having to live in that confidence.
There are many examples, especially where business interests are involved, browse the EU constitution online and you see what I mean.
companies. All they'd have to do is make the source available for download, and then sell their Linux products to that 90% of the consumer market that doesn't compile programs from source, and just wants to double-click a download to make it install. And there's still Ubuntu for those who prefer to install programs using single click.
This is how GNOME does it.
So "eth0" is still visible, though it looks a bit easier since it's only a subtitle.
I've downloaded the kubuntu preview today and it had neither a graphical network configuration client (you could install one from a different repository but a lack of answers in the channel leads me to the conclusion that there's no gui way to change repositories)
In Ubuntu Hoary you can use the (GNOME-based) Ubuntu Update Manager to add new repositories, it is installed by default. (System -> Administration -> Ubuntu Update Manager, in the new dialog click 'Preferences')
You can also run 'gnome-software-properties' on the command line directly. (or 'update-manager')
I never tried to discuss with them to see how they intend to do business, so I have no idea, only guesses: Maybe they forward your orders to some company in another country, that can't really be held responsible. Or maybe these guys just want to take surveys or something.
Either way, I'm not going to place an order to try out whether I get a chance to sue them.
In Germany telesales are illegal and I still get those calls. Of course, they do not tell you who it is they are working for.
We are also working on a Cairo based canvas, currently using gtkmm, but with portability in mind.
It will be good.
Oh, (and of course I had absolutely no intention to say that when I started writing this posting), btw., we are still looking for developers.
Just try and start documenting perl - since there is more than one way to do things, you'll end up giving in to the urge to change code as you document it - so the documentation never gets written.
Is there any other language that has an equal amount of code equally well documented? CPAN has the best documentation of reusable code in comparison with other languages. Sure, there's always a bad example, but seriously, saying that documenting Perl is hard is certainly far from the truth. -Samuel
I found that progress of open source software can often be measured by the availability of generic code. Once that code has been written as a generic library, collaboration is easy and higher level code is more maintainable. This is where Open Source software can have one huge advantage: Collaboration can take place on the libraries, and many applications take profit from that work *between different projects*. You have much more possibilities then in commercial software projects, where you seldom share much work between companies.
That also makes generic code even more important for OS. We have seen huge progress in the last years and most of the lower level stuff has appeared or become more mature.
Unfortunately though, this is also what I still found to be the most lacking in higher level libraries. Most projects go like this:
"We need a really cool search front-end for Google. Let's see whether there's a cool library for this. Nothing yet? Ok, then let's just start from scratch."
And then a library is implemented, with an API for searching using Google. It is perfectly usable for exactly what the developer wanted.
Now this seems reasonable at first, but think about this: In OS development, we are not bound to time lines. Why should we chose a half-hearted attack on a problem that will surely hit others after us again? Instead, the developer could also ask, "if I create a generic library, how generic can I make it? Do we have to limit it's capabilities to requesting stuff from Google? Or maybe I could even create a library that allows to query any search engine? Or maybe, provide an API the lets you query anything, like search engines, your local hard disk, p2p networks and a local database."
In commercial software development, this would be completely unreasonable overkill. In OS however, it's a great way to collaborate. And once implemented, the foundation for a lot of applications has been lied. And it's also fun - writing libraries is fun. It is a great component model either. And it is also a pleasure to see when the work is done, because once the foundation was set writing the actual application is as easy as plugging components together.
There are also good examples, of course. Gstreamer is one. But there is still so much potential. I would like to see this kind of thinking more and more.
They probably had a look at slashdot and figured slashdotters seem to like stuff like that.
[i]It's easily the worst movie I have ever seen.[/i] You haven't seen 'Spartacus'?
Apple /did/ have some nice cases, but you have way, way less issues running Linux on PC hardware. No need to compile most packages (more i386 binaries available in Apt), no nasty problems with endianess and pretty much all Distros run out of the box on PCs.
Also, I like the idea of having an advertising-free case ;).
Who has more expierience solving space problems than the NASA?
I wonder whether that's the bot that has been scanning my website for three days by attempting to "crawl" through all session ids and causing more then 1 GByte of traffic.
"msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
It was only stoppable by blocking the IP. (robots.txt was only read once before it started) Great, smart bot, really.
Contrast this with many GTK themes, which are often pixmaps chopped up and used to build widgets, lines and buttons in a piecemeal fashion.
What are you talking about? There are almost no pixmap-based themes for GNOME out there. In fact, there is only one single pixmap engine, which is poorly maintained and almost never used.
recolouring pixmaps in GTK is effectively impossible, as far as I know
Wrong again. Take a look at the smooth engine - it is using a canvas and you can draw to the canvas whatever you wish. Also, it can be highly configured, so you can change all the colors in gtkrc.
Plus, they run terribly slowly. On my PC with a recent Qt and GTK, complex Qt dialogues appear almost instantly, while GTK ones visibly draw.
And wrong again. This highly depends on the theme engine used. If you want something fast, try the Industrial engine, which outperforms QT in every way. It still lets you choose the widget colors and look very slick.
Yes, I really want my PC to look like a cheap knock-off of a modern Mac. If I want Aqua, I use my iBook.
The misassumption some QT users seem to make is that a GUI toolkit able to drive advanced themes is bad. You don't have to use advanced themes. But the great thing is: They look slick and you can use them if you like them. There's no drawback.
Compare your teenager-designed GTK themes with a properly implemented Qt theme, like Plastik - while it looks fairly plain
While I can not really believe somebody might find this theme better then the GNOME counterparts (Plastik is IMO an attempt to clone GNOME's Smooth-Engine style), you can still use all QT themes within GNOME.
If this is really possible then I don't know, but then why do even the highest rated themes look so bad? Do GNOME and KDE have a completely different idea of what a theme engine can do? Where can I get informations on the QT theme engine?
/way/ better GNOME themes at gnome-look.org.
For example and comparism, let's have a look at the highest rated KDE theme: Baghira
And the still not highest rated, but same style GNOME theme: GnoMetal
And there are
The themes from kde-look.org all look like made by geeks who have no idea of visual design whatsoever. Everybody could draw such a theme.
No idea what you mean by that. If you want different colours, why don't you just use another theme? Or change them in gtkrc?
KDE can be anything you want it to be.
Nope. GNOME's theming is *way* more flexible in comparism with QT, because it lets you exchange the complete engine. That's the reason why many GNOME themes are superior to the KDE themes, it is also the reason why there is a GTK-QT engine and no QT-KDE engine. (You can use any KDE theme in GNOME, but not v.v.) Hell, there are even SVG-based GNOME themes.
Plus, you could never fix the KDE inconsistency and UI clutter by configuration.
My Precious.
They should build a FAQ for the screenshots.
QT's theming just isn't that flexible. In GNOME, you can easily exchange the theme engine, that's what made the GTK-QT Engine possible. Also, GNOME has enough applications of it's own, so that would probably be a huge waste of time.
Also note that in GNOME it is possible to use all QT themes, but not the other way round. Though GNOME themes look much better, of course, so I wonder who whould actually want to do that ;).
You gotta be kidding. Those KDE shots look like an accident, or a broken toolkit or something.
My feeling is that if it's a *FREE* service (meaning you don't pay Google anything to use Gmail) then no, you shouldn't be free to use whatever third party software you choose.
You ARE paying the service by looking at the Ads. Since you will still have to login to read the mail, you are still paying.