Mod parent up.
I'm really, really fed up to listen to people that think that making things easy for the end user means imprisoning it inside your questionable usability decisions. Users must have maximum flexibility. They want it, they need it, they love it. It is obvious they need reasonable defaults, but they must be free to change them as they like.
Does a programmer really have to know what is the function of mitochondria?
Yes. And vice versa. My interest in programming greatly helped me working in biotechnology, for example.
People should of course specialize, but specialization doesn't mean ignoring the whole world around you. This is a disaster for society already (here in Italy we have to vote for a referendum on stem cell research next week: you can imagine how much even learned people misunderstand the problem) Kids can and should simply learn much more at school than today. Stupidity is incurable, but ignorance not.
Moreover, most interesting things in science today happen at the interfaces between knowledge fields. The world of science would be much poorer in a world like the one you seem to want.
the majority download for permanent use. That is lost sales.
Huh? Why? You can keep thousands of things you would never buy, but you permanently use just because you were able to download them for free.
Frankly,I want and fight for people to be able to download anything -software,music,films- for personal use for free. Call me zealot if you like. But file sharing did nothing else than finally allowing people to share information and arts with anyone else, boosting the opportunities for our brains to learn and enjoy interesting things. Would you condamn free food if it was available, just because it would mean lost sales for McDonalds? File sharing means our brains are finally free from intellectual famine. I don't care if it means someone will pay for this, the advantages for humankind are too high.
As Stallmann himself stated, in a world without IP laws (at least, without the kind of IP laws we experience), there would be no need for the GPL. The GPL somehow "hijacks" the current IP copyright model to achieve the exact opposite of copyright - that is, copyleft. We must defend copyright on the GPL not because we like copyright, but because we fight it in the end.
As someone stated above, violations of proprietary SW/music/books copyright is an advantage for many and (perhaps) a loss for a few. Violations of GPL are an advantage for a few and a loss for many. There definitively IS a difference for the community.
Since I submitted this story to/., I bite the flamebait.
Personally I have no clear opinions on the Calipari case, because in this cases all information that slips to civilians is of course filtered and in the best case only a pale approximation of the truth. There is too much truly classified information about this, like about anything relating to a war. Truth will perhaps eventually arise, but it's matter of years.
About illegality/irresponsability, well, you have to question not me nor CmdrTaco integrity, but the journalistic integrity of all major Italian media. All sites of prominent Italian newspapers and even Italian national television broadcast service are highlighting this scoop with great fanfare. The link to the unclassified document comes from and is hosted by the Corriere della Sera website, the major Italian newspaper.
So it's plain silly to think/. should have silenced this. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else to post this.
Moreover someone already pointed out in comments that is better for people that may risk something by this disclosure to know they risk something. The vulnerability was there. It should have been an advantage for someone if it was secret. Being that much publicized, such info it is not an advantage for any enemy more.
Well, I did my graduate thesis presentation in OO.org 1.1.2 on my Linux box. Problem was students graduating had to upload their PPT files on a WinXP, Office 2003 machine.
Since my university was aware that PowerPoint presentations are particularly sensitive to Office version changes (let alone OO.org!), they allowed students to "test" their PPT files on the machine they would have used the next day.
My PPT was almost OK. There were minor issues: some font rendered slightly differently and arrows and graphs needed a bit of care. But it was nothing more than 30 minutes of work, and it was absolutely comparable with corrections people using non-MS Office 2003 had to do. I was pretty satisfied of OO.org this time.
You're right. It seems to me that's the only rational comment (included my ones).
BTW,I don't think KDE is really so prevalent. I think GNOME users are more political fanboys and that they're accustomed to their DE, they defend it. GNOME users only seldomly seriously tried KDE or any other WM/DE. All KDE users sometimes try to use GNOME, to see what's behind the hype, and in most cases they simply conclude it's not worth. It seems to me GNOME has real zealots. KDE has just users that like it.
Surely it runs with no problems, it's that (1)I hadn't a week to install it and (2)my parents' house has no bandwidth (only 56K...sigh). So Gentoo was not the best choice.
you'll mod down anything you disagree with as a troll.
I mod down people as a troll when they state subtly but utterly false assertions trying to create a flamebait. Isn't it a definition of trolling?
Damn fast... [Slackware] it's no faster than either Fedora or any other distro.
Hahaha. I *tried* before. I tried on this poor old machine Mandrake, Fedora, Debian and Slackware. Slackware is the only one that does not chew up all memory. Sure, it is fairly possible to recompile a vanilla kernel on Fedora, shutting down services, avoid useless desktop managers and so on. But why should I care to install Fedora then? With plain Slack, I simply don't need it., and I didn't have to do any bigger configuration effort than I had with other distros. Don't like plain Slack? Try Vectorlinux. Note that I don't like Slackware at 100% (package management sucks of course), but it best fits my needs on this machine. Oh, but sure you didn't try either one, because they don't have a funky hat painted on the start button, isn't it?
You start with a blatantly false fact (people start with Knoppix, Mandrake or Linspire) and base your entire case on it. What are the size of userbases for those distros BTW... compared to Fedora/RHEL.
You're from USA,isnt'it? Come here in Europe - where Linux penetration in the market is higher. Fedora is just one choice, and RHEL is almost unknown. Mandrake owns the vast majority of Linux desktop users, followed by SuSE, Knoppix and then Fedora. With KDE desktops.
so that's you and your mum, who wouldn't know the difference between KDE and a lampost. So you installed your own personal super-favorite desktop for her.
Hahaha. I recycle old PCs and I sometimes re-sell 'em to friends, students and people with a polished Linux install. People that want to surf the web, write a graduate thesis in Latex and don't have/don't want to waste the money to afford a shiny new PC. In this case -oooh,you'll be surprised- I do not install KDE, because of course a Pentium Pro with 96 Mb RAM can't use KDE. So I tried GNOME, because people kept tell me it's faster and lighter. Good point for you: GNOME apps are surely faster. Bad point: GNOME desktops are a nightmare. For me when I try to configure them and for end users (Nautilus behaves like Win95, no decent configuration app, no decent printer management app, "why the hell the buttons are in such odd places?" etc.etc.etc.). Now I only use XFCE for them. They thank me to have helped them drop "that shitty GNOME thing". I'm sorry, it's a fact.
Another fact. When last year I went to the Italian Webbit - the biggest IT fair of Italy, with a lot of attention on OSS and a bazillion stands by LUGs - ALL people were running KDE or light windowmanagers on their laptops and PCs. I didn't see a single GNOME desktop. Quite odd.
the only KDE program worth mentioning. All the others suck balls compared to their GNOME counterparts
Text editors: where's the counterpart of Kate? Does Eye-of-Gnome compares decently with Kuickshow? Oh, I wrote my graduate thesis with Kile! Where's a GNOME LaTeX environment? O-oh, I'd like to see the GNOME equivalent of KPresenter...
Sure,there are apps that are quite good. I'm not such a KDE fanboy to tell anything KDE does is good and anything GNOME does is bad. AbiWord and Gnumeric for example are nice, Inkscape rocks, Gimp has no competitors, and Gaim is very good (Kopete is not nearly as good IMHO). But they're not real GNOME apps, they're GTK apps that for this reason integrate somehow better with GNOME.
Your grandiloquence betrays your addled zealotry-fuelled opinions better than any amount of factual inaccuracy.
So tell me why should I use Nautilus instead of Konqueror. I'm here to hear you.
*All* the biggest money making distros selling to businesses are GNOME based.
Maybe. Most desktop Linux users use KDE. I hope GNOME adoption by corporations will help GNOME be better, of course. I'd like a tough KDE competitor:).
Since I don't have modpoints to mod you troll, I'll bite the bait.
First. I'm seriously using Slackware right now (with IceWM). Why? Because I'm at my parents home, and they have a really old pc (266 MHz AMD K6) that had 96 Mb of RAM until a couple of months ago (now it got 128). Slackware is by my experience the lightest of all up-to-date distro (except carefully squeezed things like DamnSmallLinux). Almost everything else on this machine is too heavy. Given the processor speed, even Gentoo is not a choice.
I also have the hobby to recycle and resurrect old PC. Guess what? I use Slackware on them because Slackware works and it is damn fast. And it is fairly easy to install and configure for anyone with a bit of Linux experience.
Second. It is true for example that Fedora defaults on Gnome. Guess what? All my friends that use Fedora use KDE as their main desktop. Debian is also GNOME-centric, but all their users I know use KDE. Which distro people pick up to begin with Linux? Mainly Knoppix, Mandrake and Linspire. Guess what? They all default to KDE. Why do they do it, if GNOME is sooooo much more usable and sooooo much better for the end user? I used, maintained, configured a lot of desktops for myself and for people, on various systems. Almost everything, from Fluxbox to IceWM to FVWM...to KDE and GNOME. Guess what was the only one that is perfect from the start? KDE. Guess what was the most painful and hateful to configure? GNOME. And,oh,Gentoo does not default on KDE (it doesn't default at all, that's the shining point of Gentoo): it is simply most Gentoo users choose KDE.
Third. GNOME has decent points, I fairly admit it, and KDE can miss some. I still wait for a couple of decent things on GNOME desktops. Something shiny and that really helps usability like the KDE Control Center. Or a wonderful CD-burning program like K3b. And most of all, a file manager that doesn't flee in shame in front of Konqueror, probably the single best Linux/Unix desktop app. Nautilus is not better than the Win95 Explorer, thank you.
Business sticks on GNOME for two reasons. First that's that RH sticked on GNOME, and corporates want to play on RH playground. Second it's hard for them to build non-free KDE apps due to Trolltech QT licensing -and that's the only good point GNOME has, if only GTK didn't suck. But all distros that really focus on usability, really focus on KDE (apart from Ubuntu...but it required just a year to see Kubuntu) But I think the dropping of GNOME from Slackware, a little, historical, niche distribution, could be the begin of the reversal of the tide.
we have to spend five minutes explaining that it is not related to devil worship etc, and the history of the daemon. That's five minutes we do not have to explain something about what FreeBSD is useful for.
Do you think Linux and OSS is a real, tough competitor for Microsoft? And if not, why do we see such a big Linux-related marketing campaign? Does MS fear Linux?
My roommate, does hobby music with Windows trackers, like FruityLoops. He is an IT student, he was a Linux sysadmin and he used Linux a lot. He is now forced to use winXP because there's nothing that is even close to Windows audio editing software. The collection of plugins that you can find for FruityLoops is to say the least gigantic. Is there anything likely for Rosegarden?
As for the GIMP its power is crippled by the horribile interface. It's not the main interface design -it's odd but you get easily accustomed to it. It's the details. It's senseless you have to dig deep in menus,preferences and buttons to do a single straight line.
You're right on some points. Embedded video is a real pain. As for IM, well, Gaim 1.x seems to be a really big improvement. I don't have a Yahoo!IM account, but on the MSN Gaim finally has full file transfer and user icons support.
There is as always the somehow lacking hardware support. Now is limited, for the average user, mainly to: internal modems, USB ADSL modems and mobile phones (for file transfer/sync). Only a few models in these three categories work well with Linux.
Anyway I think a preinstalled Linux system should be a more than viable solution for the SOHO users. No viruses, a pleasant and easy desktop, and a lot of apps ready to work. Many people don't ask for more,and that's that people Linux should be pushed on.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when "must" users have maximum flexibility?
Since users want to decide what to do with your computer, not viceversa.
Good design is not when you have nothing left to add; It is when you have nothing left to take away.
And what has this motto to do with the discussion?
Mod parent up.
I'm really, really fed up to listen to people that think that making things easy for the end user means imprisoning it inside your questionable usability decisions. Users must have maximum flexibility. They want it, they need it, they love it. It is obvious they need reasonable defaults, but they must be free to change them as they like.
two days ago, i'd like to know what do you think about.
Yes. And vice versa. My interest in programming greatly helped me working in biotechnology, for example.
People should of course specialize, but specialization doesn't mean ignoring the whole world around you. This is a disaster for society already (here in Italy we have to vote for a referendum on stem cell research next week: you can imagine how much even learned people misunderstand the problem) Kids can and should simply learn much more at school than today. Stupidity is incurable, but ignorance not.
Moreover, most interesting things in science today happen at the interfaces between knowledge fields. The world of science would be much poorer in a world like the one you seem to want.
Huh? Why? You can keep thousands of things you would never buy, but you permanently use just because you were able to download them for free.
Frankly,I want and fight for people to be able to download anything -software,music,films- for personal use for free. Call me zealot if you like. But file sharing did nothing else than finally allowing people to share information and arts with anyone else, boosting the opportunities for our brains to learn and enjoy interesting things. Would you condamn free food if it was available, just because it would mean lost sales for McDonalds? File sharing means our brains are finally free from intellectual famine. I don't care if it means someone will pay for this, the advantages for humankind are too high.
This is not hypocritical. This is logical at all.
As Stallmann himself stated, in a world without IP laws (at least, without the kind of IP laws we experience), there would be no need for the GPL. The GPL somehow "hijacks" the current IP copyright model to achieve the exact opposite of copyright - that is, copyleft. We must defend copyright on the GPL not because we like copyright, but because we fight it in the end.
As someone stated above, violations of proprietary SW/music/books copyright is an advantage for many and (perhaps) a loss for a few. Violations of GPL are an advantage for a few and a loss for many. There definitively IS a difference for the community.
Since I submitted this story to /., I bite the flamebait.
Personally I have no clear opinions on the Calipari case, because in this cases all information that slips to civilians is of course filtered and in the best case only a pale approximation of the truth. There is too much truly classified information about this, like about anything relating to a war. Truth will perhaps eventually arise, but it's matter of years.
About illegality/irresponsability, well, you have to question not me nor CmdrTaco integrity, but the journalistic integrity of all major Italian media. All sites of prominent Italian newspapers and even Italian national television broadcast service are highlighting this scoop with great fanfare. The link to the unclassified document comes from and is hosted by the Corriere della Sera website, the major Italian newspaper.
So it's plain silly to think /. should have silenced this. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else to post this.
Moreover someone already pointed out in comments that is better for people that may risk something by this disclosure to know they risk something. The vulnerability was there. It should have been an advantage for someone if it was secret. Being that much publicized, such info it is not an advantage for any enemy more.
This summary makes the most sense I've seen in a long time :)
Wow! This is a HUGE accomplishment here on /. !
Thank you.
Well, I did my graduate thesis presentation in OO.org 1.1.2 on my Linux box. Problem was students graduating had to upload their PPT files on a WinXP, Office 2003 machine.
Since my university was aware that PowerPoint presentations are particularly sensitive to Office version changes (let alone OO.org!), they allowed students to "test" their PPT files on the machine they would have used the next day.
My PPT was almost OK. There were minor issues: some font rendered slightly differently and arrows and graphs needed a bit of care. But it was nothing more than 30 minutes of work, and it was absolutely comparable with corrections people using non-MS Office 2003 had to do. I was pretty satisfied of OO.org this time.
Very odd. I save .doc (or .xls) documents with OO.org every day.
You're right. It seems to me that's the only rational comment (included my ones).
BTW,I don't think KDE is really so prevalent. I think GNOME users are more political fanboys and that they're accustomed to their DE, they defend it. GNOME users only seldomly seriously tried KDE or any other WM/DE. All KDE users sometimes try to use GNOME, to see what's behind the hype, and in most cases they simply conclude it's not worth. It seems to me GNOME has real zealots. KDE has just users that like it.
Surely it runs with no problems, it's that (1)I hadn't a week to install it and (2)my parents' house has no bandwidth (only 56K...sigh). So Gentoo was not the best choice.
you'll mod down anything you disagree with as a troll.
I mod down people as a troll when they state subtly but utterly false assertions trying to create a flamebait. Isn't it a definition of trolling?
Damn fast... [Slackware] it's no faster than either Fedora or any other distro.
Hahaha. I *tried* before. I tried on this poor old machine Mandrake, Fedora, Debian and Slackware. Slackware is the only one that does not chew up all memory. Sure, it is fairly possible to recompile a vanilla kernel on Fedora, shutting down services, avoid useless desktop managers and so on. But why should I care to install Fedora then? With plain Slack, I simply don't need it., and I didn't have to do any bigger configuration effort than I had with other distros. Don't like plain Slack? Try Vectorlinux. Note that I don't like Slackware at 100% (package management sucks of course), but it best fits my needs on this machine. Oh, but sure you didn't try either one, because they don't have a funky hat painted on the start button, isn't it?
You start with a blatantly false fact (people start with Knoppix, Mandrake or Linspire) and base your entire case on it. What are the size of userbases for those distros BTW... compared to Fedora/RHEL.
You're from USA,isnt'it? Come here in Europe - where Linux penetration in the market is higher. Fedora is just one choice, and RHEL is almost unknown. Mandrake owns the vast majority of Linux desktop users, followed by SuSE, Knoppix and then Fedora. With KDE desktops.
so that's you and your mum, who wouldn't know the difference between KDE and a lampost. So you installed your own personal super-favorite desktop for her.
Hahaha. I recycle old PCs and I sometimes re-sell 'em to friends, students and people with a polished Linux install. People that want to surf the web, write a graduate thesis in Latex and don't have/don't want to waste the money to afford a shiny new PC. In this case -oooh,you'll be surprised- I do not install KDE, because of course a Pentium Pro with 96 Mb RAM can't use KDE. So I tried GNOME, because people kept tell me it's faster and lighter. Good point for you: GNOME apps are surely faster. Bad point: GNOME desktops are a nightmare. For me when I try to configure them and for end users (Nautilus behaves like Win95, no decent configuration app, no decent printer management app, "why the hell the buttons are in such odd places?" etc.etc.etc.). Now I only use XFCE for them. They thank me to have helped them drop "that shitty GNOME thing". I'm sorry, it's a fact.
Another fact. When last year I went to the Italian Webbit - the biggest IT fair of Italy, with a lot of attention on OSS and a bazillion stands by LUGs - ALL people were running KDE or light windowmanagers on their laptops and PCs. I didn't see a single GNOME desktop. Quite odd.
the only KDE program worth mentioning. All the others suck balls compared to their GNOME counterparts
Text editors: where's the counterpart of Kate? Does Eye-of-Gnome compares decently with Kuickshow? Oh, I wrote my graduate thesis with Kile! Where's a GNOME LaTeX environment? O-oh, I'd like to see the GNOME equivalent of KPresenter...
Sure,there are apps that are quite good. I'm not such a KDE fanboy to tell anything KDE does is good and anything GNOME does is bad. AbiWord and Gnumeric for example are nice, Inkscape rocks, Gimp has no competitors, and Gaim is very good (Kopete is not nearly as good IMHO). But they're not real GNOME apps, they're GTK apps that for this reason integrate somehow better with GNOME.
Your grandiloquence betrays your addled zealotry-fuelled opinions better than any amount of factual inaccuracy.
So tell me why should I use Nautilus instead of Konqueror. I'm here to hear you.*All* the biggest money making distros selling to businesses are GNOME based.
Maybe. Most desktop Linux users use KDE. I hope GNOME adoption by corporations will help GNOME be better, of course. I'd like a tough KDE competitor :).
Since I don't have modpoints to mod you troll, I'll bite the bait.
First. I'm seriously using Slackware right now (with IceWM). Why? Because I'm at my parents home, and they have a really old pc (266 MHz AMD K6) that had 96 Mb of RAM until a couple of months ago (now it got 128). Slackware is by my experience the lightest of all up-to-date distro (except carefully squeezed things like DamnSmallLinux). Almost everything else on this machine is too heavy. Given the processor speed, even Gentoo is not a choice.
I also have the hobby to recycle and resurrect old PC. Guess what? I use Slackware on them because Slackware works and it is damn fast. And it is fairly easy to install and configure for anyone with a bit of Linux experience.
Second. It is true for example that Fedora defaults on Gnome. Guess what? All my friends that use Fedora use KDE as their main desktop. Debian is also GNOME-centric, but all their users I know use KDE. Which distro people pick up to begin with Linux? Mainly Knoppix, Mandrake and Linspire. Guess what? They all default to KDE. Why do they do it, if GNOME is sooooo much more usable and sooooo much better for the end user? I used, maintained, configured a lot of desktops for myself and for people, on various systems. Almost everything, from Fluxbox to IceWM to FVWM...to KDE and GNOME. Guess what was the only one that is perfect from the start? KDE. Guess what was the most painful and hateful to configure? GNOME. And,oh,Gentoo does not default on KDE (it doesn't default at all, that's the shining point of Gentoo): it is simply most Gentoo users choose KDE.
Third. GNOME has decent points, I fairly admit it, and KDE can miss some. I still wait for a couple of decent things on GNOME desktops. Something shiny and that really helps usability like the KDE Control Center. Or a wonderful CD-burning program like K3b. And most of all, a file manager that doesn't flee in shame in front of Konqueror, probably the single best Linux/Unix desktop app. Nautilus is not better than the Win95 Explorer, thank you.
Business sticks on GNOME for two reasons. First that's that RH sticked on GNOME, and corporates want to play on RH playground. Second it's hard for them to build non-free KDE apps due to Trolltech QT licensing -and that's the only good point GNOME has, if only GTK didn't suck. But all distros that really focus on usability, really focus on KDE (apart from Ubuntu...but it required just a year to see Kubuntu) But I think the dropping of GNOME from Slackware, a little, historical, niche distribution, could be the begin of the reversal of the tide.
Ever heard of projects like Wikipedia? (just to point at the most obvious example)
we have to spend five minutes explaining that it is not related to devil worship etc, and the history of the daemon. That's five minutes we do not have to explain something about what FreeBSD is useful for.
Why do you have to?Do you think Linux and OSS is a real, tough competitor for Microsoft? And if not, why do we see such a big Linux-related marketing campaign? Does MS fear Linux?
In all my Linux installs, XviD was supported out of the box, even in Gentoo or Slackware systems...
This is what comes to your mind. To me Gimp reminds nothing else than the nice Wilbur icon.
(By the way, my ex-girlfriend absolutely loved the Gimp name and the association with the icon. She said it looked very nice and friendly)
Anyway here's what the Merriam-Webster says about the word "gimp":
an ornamental flat braid or round cord used as a trimming
-what's so terrible in this?
(Disclaimer: I don't like the Gimp that much, I think its interface is quite terrible etc. But I always loved its name.)
GIMP does not convey an image of a good, reliable program
Huh?And why PhotoShop does? What do you mean?
Ok,I know it's (1)the most trivial thing to say on /. and (2)looks like plain karma-whoring, but someone had to say it.
I know about Kaffe, but it seems to not work that well (most Java programs don't work with Kaffe)...
Yes
excuse me,to which question?
Ever heard about that mysterious thing called MULTISESSION disks? Or do you throw out a cd-r everytime you burn 20 mb on it?
My roommate, does hobby music with Windows trackers, like FruityLoops. He is an IT student, he was a Linux sysadmin and he used Linux a lot. He is now forced to use winXP because there's nothing that is even close to Windows audio editing software. The collection of plugins that you can find for FruityLoops is to say the least gigantic. Is there anything likely for Rosegarden?
As for the GIMP its power is crippled by the horribile interface. It's not the main interface design -it's odd but you get easily accustomed to it. It's the details. It's senseless you have to dig deep in menus,preferences and buttons to do a single straight line.
You're right on some points. Embedded video is a real pain. As for IM, well, Gaim 1.x seems to be a really big improvement. I don't have a Yahoo!IM account, but on the MSN Gaim finally has full file transfer and user icons support.
There is as always the somehow lacking hardware support. Now is limited, for the average user, mainly to: internal modems, USB ADSL modems and mobile phones (for file transfer/sync). Only a few models in these three categories work well with Linux.
Anyway I think a preinstalled Linux system should be a more than viable solution for the SOHO users. No viruses, a pleasant and easy desktop, and a lot of apps ready to work. Many people don't ask for more,and that's that people Linux should be pushed on.