Let's look at it a bit further. Right clicking on the clock and selecting "Time and Date Format" (not "Configure clock" which a newbie would likely select) gives you a nice dialog where I can select my country. What the fuck that has to do with "Time and Date Format", the context entry you select, is anybody's guess.
But we tab to the "Time and Dates" page and continue on, probably saving the programmer a few lines of code. No 24H setting here either, but there's a dropdown that allows you to choose between "HH:MM:SS" and "pH:MM:SS". "pH?, wtf" the user is thinking about now. A google search only turn up programming related matches. That's right, it's the fucking formatting string of the unix date function. According to the help the 'p' is "locale's upper case AM or PM indicator (blank in many locales)" modifier. But we can plug in 'N' for nanoseconds if we want, so it's ok!
The user doesn't know shit about any of this of course, so through trial and error we see that the first selection is indeed a 24hour format. But wait, there more! KDE needs to be shut down each time you change something related to the "Time and Date Format" functions, joy. It tells me this in a friendly pop-up dialog (incidentaly the title on the dialog doesn't fit the window).
I've used a dozen window managers over the years, twm, fvwm, sawfish, enlightenment (which was the default GNOME window manager not so many years ago, back in the RH 5.x days, a real piece of shit. Polished to a shine, but a turd nevertheless.) etc. Today I don't want to hear the damn word window manager, I click the windows and they focus, end of story. At some level I acknowledge that Metacity must be running in the background but that is about as interesting a factoid as that ksoftirqd is the kernel process that loadbalances my two processors. The entire notion, except from a purely technical viewpoint, that your window manager and desktop is somehow different is brain damaged at worst and a relic that refuses to die at best. I'm using a dual-head xinerama setup and NEVER once in recent years have I thought "hmm, I wish I could configure my window manager.
I'm not messing with you, please seriously tell me what needs you have that more configuration options could fix? I'll give you those options as gconf keys so that you, the power user, can change them. But I will not force them upon everyone just because you can't live without them.
It's fringe users and developers pet features that are keeping Unix interfaces in the stone age. We therefore need dictators to keep these seemingly harmless features from clogging up the entire system at every point. It's only because of a benevolent dictator that Firefox has recently managed to rise out of the bog of mediocricity that is the Mozilla suite. You are the kind of person who doesn't even realize that there's something wrong with the suite. If the suite works for you, great, but we're trying to make something bigger over here. The dictator is able to save a project from itself and its developers. It's an ungrateful job but someone has to do it, otherwise we end up with projects like sawfish.
It would seem more and more OSes and DM are going to path of "please the unsavvy users FIRST!", and thus simplifying things down to a horrid level. This not only upsets those who have followed Gnome since damn near day one, but it complicated backwards compatability when us vets have resort to the command line yet again, because a crucial tool within Gnome was 'simplified' and the power of it removed.
No, the entire point of the first article was that it isn't just about pleasing the newbies. As a power user and GNOME user since day 1 I love the new simplicity in GNOME 2.6. Just because I know how things work under the hood doesn't mean I want to tweak my desktop all day long. I want the damn thing to just work out of the box. It's all about setting setting reasonable defaults and getting the hell out of the way so I can be productive.
While using KDE 3.2 I regularly go "Holy, shit, you've got to be kidding me" at a lot of the feature-on-crack things I see. For instance opening the context-menu in Konqueror. Have you seen the amount of ludicrous crap they've stuffed in there? Scanning the dialog is mentally exhausting, it's crammed full of completely non-relevant options. "Do I want to add this image I right-clicked to a tar.gz file?", no I blody well do not. It's impossible to find anything in the kontrol center without using the search function, the modules are a patchwork of features laid out haphazardly without any thought given to cohesion. The bookmark manager in konqueror is an monstrous application to itself that I could rant for days about. There's a lot of "import bookmarks from application X" menu choices that don't seem to do anything except open a file dialog in a specific locations based on what application X is. It doesn't understand Mozilla "Personal toolbar" bookmarks, in fact it doesn't matter at all which importer you choose the result is always the same. Somehow this feature doesn't seem quite worthy of 4-5 menu entries... In fact even if they did do different things why not do it with one menu entry and scan the contents of the bookmarks file to determine from which application it comes? Because the developer didn't think things through and shoved the task on to the user, that's why. I'm of the firm belief that every single damn text string you present in an interface must be justified and reviewed by someone else than the one implementing the feature, every single string.
I recently tried to change my clock to 24-hour format in KDE, in GNOME I right-click the clock in the panel and choose "Clock type: 24 hour" which is the first option of 4. If someone can please tell me how to accomplish this in KDE I'd be grateful. I've programmed for god knows how many users, used everything from CDE to OSX and I can't figure out the damn KDE clock. How exactly are all these wonderful KDE features helping me, when in fact they just seem to get in the way?
Overall I find using KDE simply exhausting, nearly every single thing just rubs me the wrong way, from the wording in dialogs to the feel of the start menu (The damn thing keeps being left open, forcing me to return to the start button again and again to close it, though I'm sure there's a really neat preference option somewhere to make the thing behave like I expect).
Okay, end of rant:) I feel much better now. Carry on.
The video resolution is crap, but on the other hand it's quite long. Overall the quality of the works seems quite high. There's a couple pieces I'd have left out that are a bit mediocree, but there's also some really impressive and funny ones (love the Three Kings parody with the camel in the desert;)
It certainly got me interested in Blender again, once the website isn't Slashdotted I'm giving the program a second look. At least this reel proves that you can create professional quality works with Blender.
The IKEA owner Ingvar Kamprad did overtake Gates back in April, but since the dollar has strengthened slightly since then it's hard to say who's richer at the moment.
If they really wanted to get rid of a lot of crime and health problems and save the world billions of dollars, here's what they should do:
Do exactly the opposite of what they're doing now. Concede that drugs can never be eliminated and instead work towards negating all the negative aspects of drugs one by one.
Research safe and approved alternatives that would provide the desired good feeling without the side effects or the addictiveness. Pop a pill in the evening, but be up for work next morning without a hangover. Beats getting wasted at the bar.
Make the stuff relatively cheap, driving the black market and oranized crime out of the drug business.
The idea is to provide a safe and supervised alternative. By supervised I mean the stuff shouldn't be provided to minors or lunatics. There should be heavy penalties for driving while under influence and/or technical solutions to make it impossible. For instance, in some places in Europe they've installed alcohol-locks in cars that seem to work pretty well.
Why it will never happen in the US: - The tobacca and alcohol lobby would bury anyone who tried to push it. - Unfortunately for a lot of people this sort of pragmatic solution is unacceptable. It's not about eliminating crime or saving lives, it's about legislating (their) morality. - Once you've spent billions on something stupid it's hard to pull the plug and admit defeat. Those who've worked in IT sees this every day, some stupid project is beyond all salvation and everybody knows it but more money is being inject solely because a shitload has already been spent.
I'm sure Windows XP SP2 is going to fix every known security problem, block pop-ups and make your cows give 10% more milk. But what about us non-XP customers? To this day at my company we're putting Windows 2000 on all new computers, and we're not about to change to XP anyime soon, looks more like never in fact (except for new laptops where it makes sense).
Last time I checked W2K was still on the list of fully supported operating systems for at several years. In fact, I've got black on white that we're promised security fixes at least up till 2007. Up until now W2K and XP have recieved new patches in sync, is this about to change? As they say, Microsofts worst competitor is their own older products, maybe this is a new way of "encouraging" upgrading.
Very few software distribution licenses are ever proven valid, because you've always got the right to refuse the license and go somewhere else. The reason the GPL hasn't been contested in court before is that it's a lose-lose situation for the one trying to get it invalidated because the outcome is either:
1. The GPL is valid. Comply with the terms of the license or cease all distribution. 2. The GPL is not valid. You have no right to distibute anything released the GPL you didn't write yourself because of basic copyright law.
Mono could become the melting pot of all things cool. Imagine doing and , inlined in the same web page just for the hell of it, running on mod_mono. The whole lot would then be compiled down to CLR in one pass.
Throw in GD from PHP or Python, ADO.NET from Mono, C# for a rigid backend and you'll end up with a real bouillabaisse of either the best bits of all languages... or something horrible, very much like my cooking. At the very least it would be interesting. This way you could choose the language and libraries best suited for the particular problem domain for each programming task, a language would just be another tool in your programmer's toolbox.
Forget Mono/C# vs PHP vs Python. I want it all! Once you've programmed long enough you realize that languages come and go and really the only significant thing that separate them is their applicability to specific problem domains. Yes you can probably force a language into any niche, but usually it's like forcing a square peg into a round hole. I wouldn't want to code a 50kloc backend in PHP, and I wouldn't want to code my presentation layer in C#. With Mono I wouldn't have to make an either/or choice or implement some horrible xmlrpc kludge.
There is a high-res slideshow mode - go into Options > Slideshow and check "Do full-resolution slideshow" if your videocard has enough 2D performance, it's WAY better.
This improves the images being shown (the default fast but ugly mode is a poor choice in my opinion), but the Picasa slideshow and timeline interface itself looks horrible in my case. It looks exactly like someone took a 320x480 image and did a bilinear resampling on it to whatever you actual resolution happens to be. Well the software is still young, it's likely to improve.
Remote vulnerabilities are always annoying. But in this case the target is an obscure optional Netfilter module, not something that will bring down just any Linux machine. There is no distribution that ships a default iptables script that uses a tcp-options based rule (unless you've recently released your own distro;). I'm not even aware of any popular iptables generator frontend that would make use of tcp-options. It's not really a big deal.
All relevant distros have already released updates packages... last month! In that way Gentoo Security is a latecomer to the party. In no way is this bug deserving of its own Slashdot story at this point, maybe when it was fresh but even that is debatable.
I just tried it and couldn't find any spyware or ads. I ran AdAware and Spybot after installing and they didn't have any complaints. Didn't find any references to Picasa being spyware on Google Groups either.
Overall I like it. It's very similar to Adobe Album, except the interface is more minimalistic and cleaner. Compared to Album 2.0 Picasa is a real speed daemon on my older Athlon 800Mhz, 512MB RAM, machine. Album chugs in both the thumbnail view and viewing a single picture full-screen is atrociously slow, easily the slowest image viewing program I've seen in years. I mean you can see the damn thing loading the pictures progressively as if it was downloading the pictures. Adobe should buy the ACDSee viewing engine or something. Picasa is pretty slow at importing stuff but after that it's real speedy.
One thing I like is that you don't have to use the import feature in Picasa as you do in Adobe Album. You simply mark folders to be watched for changes and the program figures out new additions for itself. Album never does this for me, I have to manually run import every damn time I've imported new images with Photoshop or some other application.
What I don't really like is that Picasa uses your real folders on your HD for categorizing images, and it likes to place picasa.ini files all over the place. It's ok, but the Album way of attaching metadata, very rapidly attaching labels, and allowing a picture to be in multiple categories is in my opinion superior as you can perform very neat queries on the data. On the other hand, most users probably never use either categorizing feature and just dump everything in one place. Heck, I do too, I have about 6GB of uncategorized pictures at the moment and I'm not about to sort them anytime soon. In that sort of usage Picasa is probably better since the thumbnail view is much more responsive.
It's got some newbie friendly features like mailing (and automatically resizing the pictures to some predetermined max resolution, no more 10MB attachments from Mom) pictures that my parents might use. Unlike Adobe Album Picasa works perfectly with Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird. For some reason the slideshow feature looks like total ass. I'm guessing the interface is done in some fixed resolution and it's scaling it up (poorly) to my 1600x1200 resolution.
Overall I like it. The download is small and it doesn't try to hijack your system in any way. Unlike other software it didn't even want to associate itself with every picture extension known to man.
I've pretty much gone exactly the opposite way. Started with Slackware 0.96 back in the day. Configured my machine day in day out, messed with X modelines on black and white monitors and 386's, configured everything just because I could.
These days I run Fedora core. I issue "yum install monodevelop" and the system downloads and configures a whole damn new development toolchain and runtime environment for me, probably downloads a hundred megs of binary software distributed over twenty packages or so. 10 minutes of Slashdot reading later I've got a new development IDE to play with. You know what? I don't miss the bad old days at all.
It's not that I can't configure anything you throw at me. But for all that configuration over the years I've got zip to show. You've configured something once, why in the world would you ever want to do it again? If you're writing your CUPS config by hand in this day and age you're a damn fool or have too much time on your hands. If you're using lpr, well... let's not go there. Now writing software, that gives you something quite tangible. To that I end I choose a distro that doesn't require me to babysit every damn little thing and just lets me get stuff done. I get a feeling that all these newbiews who rave about Gentoo and what not (heh, I like an old fart now, "get off my damn lawn you kids...") aren't actually doing anything with their machines except running Linux as a self serving purpose.
The first release of Xorg was indeed pretty much XFree86 4.4rc + some patches. But technical praise is still merited IMO, take a look at one of the Xorg mailing lists. They've managed to rally all the relevant X developers to their banner, and there's lots of neat stuff going on. Particularly check out the "Next X.Org Foundation release plan" thread. Probably in August we will see the first Xorg release with the much awaited desktop composition manager. In comparison, the XFree86 developer mailing list is an empty wasteland and the "forum" list is all spam these days.
Forking XFree86 was the best thing to happen to desktop Linux in a long time.
I don't think this sort of system would be appropriate for Linux as the distributions fill this role nicely with packaged security updates. You can't really go around changing files in Linux outside of the users home directories willy-nilly anyway, as an autoupdater would. On windows this is not unheard of, many Adobe programs for example have a system service that check and optionally update your programs for you.
It's not like no other software has ever implemented automated updates before...
Something as simple as signing the patches with a Mozilla Foundation private key thwarts any DNS attacks.
ANY security failure scenario you're likely to devise is probably just as effective even if you don't have automatic updates. Automation would likely be an improvement as the program itself can do strict cryptographic signature checking instead of a million users blindly downloading binaries from ftp.mozilla.org, download.com, tucows, betanews, and god knows where, any of which could be compromised. And the bottom line is, without an automatic system a large portion of the userbase will NEVER update.
It needs an update feature that can be made to automagically download and apply the latest versions without any user interaction whatsoever if so desired, but of course optionally also a "ask before installing" feature. That would be a great boon for home users (install and forget) and lazy sysadmins (what, you expect me to walk around the office installing stuff manually, dream on).
If Firefox follows the Mozilla stable/latest branching system the updater should allow you to follow one of the branches. For example you could configure the browser to keep up with the 1.0 branch and grandma would silently get 1.0.1, 1.0.2 etc. installed with security updates and bugfixes. For more experienced user the first time after an 1.0->1.1 update there could be a one-time page describing the new cool features on the next startup.
Shadow Warrior: I'll give you this one, 3DRealms made it. Wolfenstein 3D: WOLFENSTEIN! Are you nuts, this is the game that put iD on the map before 3D Realms was a speckle in Miller's eye. Maybe they own the rights now or something, but credit where credit is due. Max Payne 1/2: Developed by the boys at Remedy way over in Finland. Can't really use this as a excuse for DNF never getting done.
I really don't see why people are waiting for DNF in the first place. Sure, Duke3D was sort of fun in it's time, I used to play it online a lot. But what makes people believe the Duke team has any sort of idea of how to create a modern game, why get hung up on Duke3D and not some other game? Except for their one single hit Duke3D the team's track record is frankly crap. Where the hell did all the expectations come from? Duke as a franchise is entirely mediocre if you take away the hype.
Some goes for the sciences. Math, physics, chemistry, biology etc. These represent true science with scientific methods and models. Political science, economic science, social science, religious science, even computer science and everything else with science tacked on at the end are quackery at worst and questionable at best. And I studied computer science.
- I see the Freedesktop.org HAL code is being included in test1. That will be interesting to see if and how integrated it will be in the final release. We'll probably also see some sort of real udev support this time.
- The timetable for the next official X.org release is planned to sync with Fedora Core 3. I'm a bit skeptical they can make it in time, but it would be really cool if they did. This will be the first X.org to include the new desktop composition extension from Keith Packards kdrive test.
The standard layout these days seem to be with Europe as center. But I think that decision is pretty arbitrary as well, who says the zero longitude couldn't be defined to be in the left corner and then right corner would be 360. Of course longitude is arbitary by defintion, there's been a dozen different prime meridans over time, centered on Rome, Pisa, Paris, hell even Philadelphia tried it one time.
When I was a kid we had this huge wallmap with America as the center, like this that probably skewed my world view for good. When I visited Japan I saw maps like this all over the place. It really suprised me at the time.
North and South are completely arbitrarily chosen conventions in any case. Wouldn't it be cool if when the compasses showed north to be what we now consider the south pole to simple flip around all the maps:) People don't realise how it's all relative in any case, it's very strange to look at 2D world maps from Europe or far east Asia when you're familiar with USA produced maps. All the different maps are centered over their respective areas. It makes sense of course, but it looks alien at first glance.
Or will we just re-define north as being the opposite of the magnetic pole and get rid of all non digital compasses?
Red Hat still achieved a healthy net gain in the number of total machines running RH, so it's not exactly time to be panicking yet. I'm sure they knew some would turn to alternatives when the new support lifecycles/Fedora were announced.
In fact I'm a bit suprised the aren't more switchers. I guess people don't just up and change distro that easily in a commercial setting. In the next fiscal quarter report it will be very interesting to see just how many more licenses RH is selling now compared to when they were still offering RH9. I'm betting the change pushed a lot of companies that were sitting on the edge into becoming Red Hat Enterprise subscribers.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at it a bit further. Right clicking on the clock and selecting "Time and Date Format" (not "Configure clock" which a newbie would likely select) gives you a nice dialog where I can select my country. What the fuck that has to do with "Time and Date Format", the context entry you select, is anybody's guess.
But we tab to the "Time and Dates" page and continue on, probably saving the programmer a few lines of code. No 24H setting here either, but there's a dropdown that allows you to choose between "HH:MM:SS" and "pH:MM:SS". "pH?, wtf" the user is thinking about now. A google search only turn up programming related matches. That's right, it's the fucking formatting string of the unix date function. According to the help the 'p' is "locale's upper case AM or PM indicator (blank in many locales)" modifier. But we can plug in 'N' for nanoseconds if we want, so it's ok!
The user doesn't know shit about any of this of course, so through trial and error we see that the first selection is indeed a 24hour format. But wait, there more! KDE needs to be shut down each time you change something related to the "Time and Date Format" functions, joy. It tells me this in a friendly pop-up dialog (incidentaly the title on the dialog doesn't fit the window).
I've used a dozen window managers over the years, twm, fvwm, sawfish, enlightenment (which was the default GNOME window manager not so many years ago, back in the RH 5.x days, a real piece of shit. Polished to a shine, but a turd nevertheless.) etc. Today I don't want to hear the damn word window manager, I click the windows and they focus, end of story. At some level I acknowledge that Metacity must be running in the background but that is about as interesting a factoid as that ksoftirqd is the kernel process that loadbalances my two processors. The entire notion, except from a purely technical viewpoint, that your window manager and desktop is somehow different is brain damaged at worst and a relic that refuses to die at best. I'm using a dual-head xinerama setup and NEVER once in recent years have I thought "hmm, I wish I could configure my window manager.
I'm not messing with you, please seriously tell me what needs you have that more configuration options could fix? I'll give you those options as gconf keys so that you, the power user, can change them. But I will not force them upon everyone just because you can't live without them.
It's fringe users and developers pet features that are keeping Unix interfaces in the stone age. We therefore need dictators to keep these seemingly harmless features from clogging up the entire system at every point. It's only because of a benevolent dictator that Firefox has recently managed to rise out of the bog of mediocricity that is the Mozilla suite. You are the kind of person who doesn't even realize that there's something wrong with the suite. If the suite works for you, great, but we're trying to make something bigger over here. The dictator is able to save a project from itself and its developers. It's an ungrateful job but someone has to do it, otherwise we end up with projects like sawfish.
No, the entire point of the first article was that it isn't just about pleasing the newbies. As a power user and GNOME user since day 1 I love the new simplicity in GNOME 2.6. Just because I know how things work under the hood doesn't mean I want to tweak my desktop all day long. I want the damn thing to just work out of the box. It's all about setting setting reasonable defaults and getting the hell out of the way so I can be productive.
While using KDE 3.2 I regularly go "Holy, shit, you've got to be kidding me" at a lot of the feature-on-crack things I see. For instance opening the context-menu in Konqueror. Have you seen the amount of ludicrous crap they've stuffed in there? Scanning the dialog is mentally exhausting, it's crammed full of completely non-relevant options. "Do I want to add this image I right-clicked to a tar.gz file?", no I blody well do not. It's impossible to find anything in the kontrol center without using the search function, the modules are a patchwork of features laid out haphazardly without any thought given to cohesion. The bookmark manager in konqueror is an monstrous application to itself that I could rant for days about. There's a lot of "import bookmarks from application X" menu choices that don't seem to do anything except open a file dialog in a specific locations based on what application X is. It doesn't understand Mozilla "Personal toolbar" bookmarks, in fact it doesn't matter at all which importer you choose the result is always the same. Somehow this feature doesn't seem quite worthy of 4-5 menu entries... In fact even if they did do different things why not do it with one menu entry and scan the contents of the bookmarks file to determine from which application it comes? Because the developer didn't think things through and shoved the task on to the user, that's why. I'm of the firm belief that every single damn text string you present in an interface must be justified and reviewed by someone else than the one implementing the feature, every single string.
I recently tried to change my clock to 24-hour format in KDE, in GNOME I right-click the clock in the panel and choose "Clock type: 24 hour" which is the first option of 4. If someone can please tell me how to accomplish this in KDE I'd be grateful. I've programmed for god knows how many users, used everything from CDE to OSX and I can't figure out the damn KDE clock. How exactly are all these wonderful KDE features helping me, when in fact they just seem to get in the way?
Overall I find using KDE simply exhausting, nearly every single thing just rubs me the wrong way, from the wording in dialogs to the feel of the start menu (The damn thing keeps being left open, forcing me to return to the start button again and again to close it, though I'm sure there's a really neat preference option somewhere to make the thing behave like I expect).
Okay, end of rant
The video resolution is crap, but on the other hand it's quite long. Overall the quality of the works seems quite high. There's a couple pieces I'd have left out that are a bit mediocree, but there's also some really impressive and funny ones (love the Three Kings parody with the camel in the desert ;)
It certainly got me interested in Blender again, once the website isn't Slashdotted I'm giving the program a second look. At least this reel proves that you can create professional quality works with Blender.
The IKEA owner Ingvar Kamprad did overtake Gates back in April, but since the dollar has strengthened slightly since then it's hard to say who's richer at the moment.
If they really wanted to get rid of a lot of crime and health problems and save the world billions of dollars, here's what they should do:
Do exactly the opposite of what they're doing now. Concede that drugs can never be eliminated and instead work towards negating all the negative aspects of drugs one by one.
Research safe and approved alternatives that would provide the desired good feeling without the side effects or the addictiveness. Pop a pill in the evening, but be up for work next morning without a hangover. Beats getting wasted at the bar.
Make the stuff relatively cheap, driving the black market and oranized crime out of the drug business.
The idea is to provide a safe and supervised alternative. By supervised I mean the stuff shouldn't be provided to minors or lunatics. There should be heavy penalties for driving while under influence and/or technical solutions to make it impossible. For instance, in some places in Europe they've installed alcohol-locks in cars that seem to work pretty well.
Why it will never happen in the US:
- The tobacca and alcohol lobby would bury anyone who tried to push it.
- Unfortunately for a lot of people this sort of pragmatic solution is unacceptable. It's not about eliminating crime or saving lives, it's about legislating (their) morality.
- Once you've spent billions on something stupid it's hard to pull the plug and admit defeat. Those who've worked in IT sees this every day, some stupid project is beyond all salvation and everybody knows it but more money is being inject solely because a shitload has already been spent.
I'm sure Windows XP SP2 is going to fix every known security problem, block pop-ups and make your cows give 10% more milk. But what about us non-XP customers? To this day at my company we're putting Windows 2000 on all new computers, and we're not about to change to XP anyime soon, looks more like never in fact (except for new laptops where it makes sense).
Last time I checked W2K was still on the list of fully supported operating systems for at several years. In fact, I've got black on white that we're promised security fixes at least up till 2007. Up until now W2K and XP have recieved new patches in sync, is this about to change? As they say, Microsofts worst competitor is their own older products, maybe this is a new way of "encouraging" upgrading.
Very few software distribution licenses are ever proven valid, because you've always got the right to refuse the license and go somewhere else. The reason the GPL hasn't been contested in court before is that it's a lose-lose situation for the one trying to get it invalidated because the outcome is either:
1. The GPL is valid. Comply with the terms of the license or cease all distribution.
2. The GPL is not valid. You have no right to distibute anything released the GPL you didn't write yourself because of basic copyright law.
Mono could become the melting pot of all things cool. Imagine doing and , inlined in the same web page just for the hell of it, running on mod_mono. The whole lot would then be compiled down to CLR in one pass.
Throw in GD from PHP or Python, ADO.NET from Mono, C# for a rigid backend and you'll end up with a real bouillabaisse of either the best bits of all languages... or something horrible, very much like my cooking. At the very least it would be interesting. This way you could choose the language and libraries best suited for the particular problem domain for each programming task, a language would just be another tool in your programmer's toolbox.
Forget Mono/C# vs PHP vs Python. I want it all! Once you've programmed long enough you realize that languages come and go and really the only significant thing that separate them is their applicability to specific problem domains. Yes you can probably force a language into any niche, but usually it's like forcing a square peg into a round hole. I wouldn't want to code a 50kloc backend in PHP, and I wouldn't want to code my presentation layer in C#. With Mono I wouldn't have to make an either/or choice or implement some horrible xmlrpc kludge.
There is a high-res slideshow mode - go into Options > Slideshow and check "Do full-resolution slideshow" if your videocard has enough 2D performance, it's WAY better.
This improves the images being shown (the default fast but ugly mode is a poor choice in my opinion), but the Picasa slideshow and timeline interface itself looks horrible in my case. It looks exactly like someone took a 320x480 image and did a bilinear resampling on it to whatever you actual resolution happens to be. Well the software is still young, it's likely to improve.
Remote vulnerabilities are always annoying. But in this case the target is an obscure optional Netfilter module, not something that will bring down just any Linux machine. There is no distribution that ships a default iptables script that uses a tcp-options based rule (unless you've recently released your own distro ;). I'm not even aware of any popular iptables generator frontend that would make use of tcp-options. It's not really a big deal.
All relevant distros have already released updates packages... last month! In that way Gentoo Security is a latecomer to the party. In no way is this bug deserving of its own Slashdot story at this point, maybe when it was fresh but even that is debatable.
I just tried it and couldn't find any spyware or ads. I ran AdAware and Spybot after installing and they didn't have any complaints. Didn't find any references to Picasa being spyware on Google Groups either.
Overall I like it. It's very similar to Adobe Album, except the interface is more minimalistic and cleaner. Compared to Album 2.0 Picasa is a real speed daemon on my older Athlon 800Mhz, 512MB RAM, machine. Album chugs in both the thumbnail view and viewing a single picture full-screen is atrociously slow, easily the slowest image viewing program I've seen in years. I mean you can see the damn thing loading the pictures progressively as if it was downloading the pictures. Adobe should buy the ACDSee viewing engine or something. Picasa is pretty slow at importing stuff but after that it's real speedy.
One thing I like is that you don't have to use the import feature in Picasa as you do in Adobe Album. You simply mark folders to be watched for changes and the program figures out new additions for itself. Album never does this for me, I have to manually run import every damn time I've imported new images with Photoshop or some other application.
What I don't really like is that Picasa uses your real folders on your HD for categorizing images, and it likes to place picasa.ini files all over the place. It's ok, but the Album way of attaching metadata, very rapidly attaching labels, and allowing a picture to be in multiple categories is in my opinion superior as you can perform very neat queries on the data. On the other hand, most users probably never use either categorizing feature and just dump everything in one place. Heck, I do too, I have about 6GB of uncategorized pictures at the moment and I'm not about to sort them anytime soon. In that sort of usage Picasa is probably better since the thumbnail view is much more responsive.
It's got some newbie friendly features like mailing (and automatically resizing the pictures to some predetermined max resolution, no more 10MB attachments from Mom) pictures that my parents might use. Unlike Adobe Album Picasa works perfectly with Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird. For some reason the slideshow feature looks like total ass. I'm guessing the interface is done in some fixed resolution and it's scaling it up (poorly) to my 1600x1200 resolution.
Overall I like it. The download is small and it doesn't try to hijack your system in any way. Unlike other software it didn't even want to associate itself with every picture extension known to man.
I've pretty much gone exactly the opposite way. Started with Slackware 0.96 back in the day. Configured my machine day in day out, messed with X modelines on black and white monitors and 386's, configured everything just because I could.
These days I run Fedora core. I issue "yum install monodevelop" and the system downloads and configures a whole damn new development toolchain and runtime environment for me, probably downloads a hundred megs of binary software distributed over twenty packages or so. 10 minutes of Slashdot reading later I've got a new development IDE to play with. You know what? I don't miss the bad old days at all.
It's not that I can't configure anything you throw at me. But for all that configuration over the years I've got zip to show. You've configured something once, why in the world would you ever want to do it again? If you're writing your CUPS config by hand in this day and age you're a damn fool or have too much time on your hands. If you're using lpr, well... let's not go there. Now writing software, that gives you something quite tangible. To that I end I choose a distro that doesn't require me to babysit every damn little thing and just lets me get stuff done. I get a feeling that all these newbiews who rave about Gentoo and what not (heh, I like an old fart now, "get off my damn lawn you kids...") aren't actually doing anything with their machines except running Linux as a self serving purpose.
The first release of Xorg was indeed pretty much XFree86 4.4rc + some patches. But technical praise is still merited IMO, take a look at one of the Xorg mailing lists. They've managed to rally all the relevant X developers to their banner, and there's lots of neat stuff going on. Particularly check out the "Next X.Org Foundation release plan" thread. Probably in August we will see the first Xorg release with the much awaited desktop composition manager. In comparison, the XFree86 developer mailing list is an empty wasteland and the "forum" list is all spam these days.
Forking XFree86 was the best thing to happen to desktop Linux in a long time.
I don't think this sort of system would be appropriate for Linux as the distributions fill this role nicely with packaged security updates. You can't really go around changing files in Linux outside of the users home directories willy-nilly anyway, as an autoupdater would. On windows this is not unheard of, many Adobe programs for example have a system service that check and optionally update your programs for you.
It's not like no other software has ever implemented automated updates before...
Something as simple as signing the patches with a Mozilla Foundation private key thwarts any DNS attacks.
ANY security failure scenario you're likely to devise is probably just as effective even if you don't have automatic updates. Automation would likely be an improvement as the program itself can do strict cryptographic signature checking instead of a million users blindly downloading binaries from ftp.mozilla.org, download.com, tucows, betanews, and god knows where, any of which could be compromised. And the bottom line is, without an automatic system a large portion of the userbase will NEVER update.
Now all it needs is an easy update feature.
It needs an update feature that can be made to automagically download and apply the latest versions without any user interaction whatsoever if so desired, but of course optionally also a "ask before installing" feature. That would be a great boon for home users (install and forget) and lazy sysadmins (what, you expect me to walk around the office installing stuff manually, dream on).
If Firefox follows the Mozilla stable/latest branching system the updater should allow you to follow one of the branches. For example you could configure the browser to keep up with the 1.0 branch and grandma would silently get 1.0.1, 1.0.2 etc. installed with security updates and bugfixes. For more experienced user the first time after an 1.0->1.1 update there could be a one-time page describing the new cool features on the next startup.
RedHat (it's wone word, with no space in it!)
No it's not, it's spelled "Red Hat" (22 times on that page).
First rule of Direct Connect: You do not talk about Direct Connect.
Seriously. Don't ruin it for the rest of us. If the *AA's knew the scope of that thing they'd shit their pants.
Shadow Warrior: I'll give you this one, 3DRealms made it.
Wolfenstein 3D: WOLFENSTEIN! Are you nuts, this is the game that put iD on the map before 3D Realms was a speckle in Miller's eye. Maybe they own the rights now or something, but credit where credit is due.
Max Payne 1/2: Developed by the boys at Remedy way over in Finland. Can't really use this as a excuse for DNF never getting done.
I really don't see why people are waiting for DNF in the first place. Sure, Duke3D was sort of fun in it's time, I used to play it online a lot. But what makes people believe the Duke team has any sort of idea of how to create a modern game, why get hung up on Duke3D and not some other game? Except for their one single hit Duke3D the team's track record is frankly crap. Where the hell did all the expectations come from? Duke as a franchise is entirely mediocre if you take away the hype.
Some goes for the sciences. Math, physics, chemistry, biology etc. These represent true science with scientific methods and models. Political science, economic science, social science, religious science, even computer science and everything else with science tacked on at the end are quackery at worst and questionable at best. And I studied computer science.
Things that interest me:
- I see the Freedesktop.org HAL code is being included in test1. That will be interesting to see if and how integrated it will be in the final release. We'll probably also see some sort of real udev support this time.
- The timetable for the next official X.org release is planned to sync with Fedora Core 3. I'm a bit skeptical they can make it in time, but it would be really cool if they did. This will be the first X.org to include the new desktop composition extension from Keith Packards kdrive test.
The standard layout these days seem to be with Europe as center. But I think that decision is pretty arbitrary as well, who says the zero longitude couldn't be defined to be in the left corner and then right corner would be 360. Of course longitude is arbitary by defintion, there's been a dozen different prime meridans over time, centered on Rome, Pisa, Paris, hell even Philadelphia tried it one time.
When I was a kid we had this huge wallmap with America as the center, like this that probably skewed my world view for good. When I visited Japan I saw maps like this all over the place. It really suprised me at the time.
North and South are completely arbitrarily chosen conventions in any case. Wouldn't it be cool if when the compasses showed north to be what we now consider the south pole to simple flip around all the maps :) People don't realise how it's all relative in any case, it's very strange to look at 2D world maps from Europe or far east Asia when you're familiar with USA produced maps. All the different maps are centered over their respective areas. It makes sense of course, but it looks alien at first glance.
Or will we just re-define north as being the opposite of the magnetic pole and get rid of all non digital compasses?
Red Hat still achieved a healthy net gain in the number of total machines running RH, so it's not exactly time to be panicking yet. I'm sure they knew some would turn to alternatives when the new support lifecycles/Fedora were announced.
In fact I'm a bit suprised the aren't more switchers. I guess people don't just up and change distro that easily in a commercial setting. In the next fiscal quarter report it will be very interesting to see just how many more licenses RH is selling now compared to when they were still offering RH9. I'm betting the change pushed a lot of companies that were sitting on the edge into becoming Red Hat Enterprise subscribers.