*Cough* And when I say "adjective", I of course mean "adjective or adverb", as is the case with "publishing business-wise" in the original sentence, and some other usages of hyphenated words which end in "-wise".
*slinks off*
Re:I for one do not welcome our advertising overlo
on
Don't Click on the Blue E
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Dude! His grammar is not fine. o_O
In the first sentence, "publishing business wise" should be "publishing business-wise" - if you want to turn a noun into an adjective by adding "-wise", "-like", "-esque" or other such suffixes, you use a hyphenated word, not two words. Personally, I think it's clumsy to use this construction at all when your noun phrase consists of more than one word; it just looks weird.
The second sentence is a jumbled mess with two concord errors. First, "Kick out as many thick books (...) is great for business" should be "Kicking out (...) is great for business". Second, "...teaching you..." clashes with "...confusing or intimidating them..." further down; either "them" should be changed to "you" or the first "you" should be changed to "readers" (or another third-person plural noun describing the people who are being taught and also confused and intimidated) and the second "you" should be changed to "they".
Good luck with your Fedora. Now I will scare you with complications, and hopefully prevent you from ever experiencing package-related horrors. As you may know, you need to observe some caution when selecting third-party repositories to avoid clashes. There are two main warring factions of third-party packagers - Dag/Dries/FreshRPMs/NewRPMs and Livna/Fedora.us. I think the former support a wider range of packages, but the latter traditionally have had better support for commercial drivers (like Nvidia and Flash), and are considered to be more "officially sanctioned". I've always gone with Dag, et al.
As far as I know, installing selected, isolated packages (like drivers) from one isn't going to screw around with your system if you mostly use packages from the other, but you shouldn't use both sets of repositories simultaneously when upgrading the bulk of your system - I think the main problem is that they have different versions of the same packages.
Fortunately, the latest versions of yum make management of feuding repositories easy. You can put all of them in the configuration file, turn some of them on by default and some of them off, and toggle individual repositories on and off with command-line options if you need to.
I've never had any problems (once I had a clash between FreshRPMs and Atrpms, but yum reported that a clash existed and didn't install the offending package), but I've heard horror stories, hence the warning.
The problem with having a central repository of software is that the user is stuck with the version of software that the packagers give them, assuming they even package it at all. It's just too much work to keep up with all the minor bugfixes for thousands of packages.
In my experience, packagers are pretty good about catching up to the source releases of any sufficiently popular packages (at least in the Fedora world, where there is a group of very active, co-operating third-party packagers; I'm not sure how things are in Debian/Ubuntu-land). Sure, there is a lag (which is irritating if the latest packaged version has a particularly annoying bug), and some obscure things don't get packaged, but on the whole it's fine.
The delay is a disadvantage of packaging, but it's hardly a disadvantage of Linux, since the alternative which does not have this disadvantage is installing from source. Traditional Windows software upgrades are even worse when in comes to updates and bug fixes, since they are infrequent and you usually have to download something huge every time you upgrade.
When I switched jobs, I went from Fedora to FreeBSD. I update software from source using the ports system. On the one hand, it's nice to be on the cutting edge, and to be able to upgrade to the latest version of anything almost as soon as it comes out. On the other hand, I am relieved that updating packages with yum is so simple whenever I do it at home.
I haven't had any utter compilation disasters at work, but I have had to work through various annoying and weird problems which I would not wish on a non-programmer. I don't think the ports system is impossibly difficult for a lay user to learn, but it's definitely less user-friendly and more error-prone. You need to be familiar with at least the basics of the compilation process in order to be able to diagnose what kind of thing has gone wrong and where you should look for further help. Not recommended for grandmothers.:)
Great, another "It's all different and confusing! Learning new things is hard! Why can't it be just like Windows?!" article. How exciting.
I wonder how many of the people who constantly whine about dependencies and packaging systems are people who have completely missed the point and have been trying to install software on Linux the "Windows way". The way in which they briefly and dismissively mention centralised package installers, almost as an afterthought, is what gives me this sneaking suspicion.
The "Windows way" is to hunt around on the internet for the program you want, download it and run the installer. Now, if you find a random RPM on the web and try to install it, yes indeed, chances are that it will complain that is missing libraries. If you painstakingly locate those libraries on the web and try to install them, they will possibly complain about the absence of further libraries, and so forth. Clearly, this is an unpleasant and difficult way to install anything. It is also a retarded way to try to install anything on just about any modern distro. I understand that it may be a method which a prior user of Windows would instinctively try to use, because of his or her Windows experience, but the failure of this method is not a failure of packaging systems in general. If you read any how-to introducing new users to a distro like Fedora, you will certainly find a section describing how to upgrade and install software using the distro's package installer.
There is nothing inherently wrong with packaging software with external dependencies, and recursively installing dependencies as needed. I think that it is considerably better than statically including everything an application needs in one huge, bloated installer. Dependencies only cause difficulties if a user has to resolve them manually, and the user of a modern package-based Linux system does not have to resolve dependencies manually. How can anyone seriously claim that typing "yum install foo" (or clicking on "foo" in a GUI, if one is CLI-phobic) is more difficult and confusing than looking for foo's special, unique and enormous installer on the web (or running it from a CD)?
In the several years that I have used Fedora, I have had a dependency problem once while running yum. This dependency problem arose because a piece of software was incorrectly packaged and did not link to one of its dependencies. After pasting the error message I was getting into Google, I rapidly found the name of the missing package and installed it. No problem.
Did I have to set up extra repositories to get everything I wanted? Yes. Was it a terrible, unreasonable ordeal? No. It involves copying and pasting some stuff into a text file. There are dozens of sites which describe the process in painstaking, elaborate detail. I am confident that my mom could follow those instructions.
Mind you, further up the page someone claims that if you have to Google for help when trying to do something with your computer, then your operating system's interface has failed you. Are you serious? Do you seriously expect to be able to operate a complex system with which you are unfamiliar without ever having to read any instructions? Do you think that cars have an unacceptably awful user interface because people have to take driving lessons in order to be able to use them?
Er, I think you're confusing dangling participles with ending sentences with prepositions.
This is an example of a dangling participle:
Speeding towards the overturned truck, an accident seemed imminent.
What this sentence means to say is "As [person] was speeding towards the overturned truck, an accident seemed imminent." However, when the subject of the first part of the sentence is removed, together with the auxillary verb, the participle (speeding) is left "dangling", and attaches itself to the subject of the second sentence - and the resulting sentence is actually saying that the accident, which seemed imminent, was speeding towards the overturned truck. Which is silly. In this particular case, the error is grating, but the meaning can still be deduced because the literal meaning of the sentence is nonsensical. However, the literal meaning could parse to something meaningful and cause confusion. I definitely consider this to be a serious grammatical error.
On the other hand, I frequently end sentences with prepositions, because I am too lazy to think up elaborate alternatives. I don't think that's really a grammatical error; it's more of an inadvisable (by some people) writing style, like long, rambling elaborate sentences like this (or using nested brackets (like this (personally, I think nested brackets are great; they allow you to insert arbitrarily nested footnotes inline, and still leave the text reasonably legible. I wouldn't put something like this in a formal letter, but I used to do it in friendly emails all the time))).
This reminds me of archaic Polish grammar (from around the turn of the twentieth century), in which the favoured style convention appeared to be "put the subject first, then the direct object, then chuck in all the adverbial phrases and indirect objects you have, the more the better, then stick the verb right at the very end", which led to a very quirky and recognisable sentence structure. The fun thing about Polish is that just about every word is completely unambiguously conjugated to imply a particular role in the sentence, so you can reorder the words almost arbitrarily and the sentence will still be correct and retain the same meaning. Ths is very helpful when you are writing structured poetry.
I don't think there is any direct correlation between being a hacker or computer programmer and having atrocious English skills. The scary incompetence in spelling and grammar that you're complaining about is also commonly found in the corporate world, and just about everywhere else.
I think its prevalence in current generations of English speakers is caused partially by poor language education in school, but mostly by lack of recreational reading. I've said this before; you learn good language skills by example.
Everyone who posts here is a computer geek to some degree. Some people have good language skills, some people are consistently awful, and some people (probably the majority) are OK, but constantly make the same basic mistakes. Of course, some people are just really bad at remembering spelling and some people are really good, but my theory is that the major distinguishing factor is how much [proofread, orthographically and grammatically correct material] a particular poster reads.
If all you ever read are internet posts full of mangled it's/its, they're/their/there and your/you're, dangling participles and other misuses of common phrases, you are likely to become desensitised to those mistakes, and stop noticing them.
I don't correct spelling on Slashdot, because I think spelling-correcting posts are just noise (unless the error is particularly hilarious). There isn't really any mechanism for criticising spelling on a forum without being an asshat and filling up the discussion with crap - which is a pity, because in principle I think it's a good idea to correct spelling mistakes.
I think that there are two fundamental mistakes lots of people make when designing interfaces for completely blind people.
The first is the idea that we should just slap a screen reader on top of a regular GUI, so that the blind user hears a description of everything that a sighted user would see on the screen - and that will be just great, and make the GUI accessible. I think that's a silly approach. I'm not saying that screen readers are useless - I imagine that they are a helpful tool for partially sighted people and blind people who can't read braille, and they are a quick and dirty solution for blind people who are given no other options - but they are hardly the best we can do (and obviously totally useless to those who are both blind and deaf).
Instead of interpreting an interface which was designed and optimised for sighted people so that it is not utterly useless to blind people, we should construct an interface specially optimised for blind people, which takes full advantage of the senses that they are skilled in using. It should have both audio and tactile input and output methods.
There is a good reason why sight is the most important sense to sighted people. Sight provides us with a vastly larger amount of information than any of our other senses. We can see further and more accurately than we can hear. Sight allows us to scan rapidly over a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object, pick out an area of interest and access it directly.
When blind people access text, whether it's through a screen reader or a one-line braille display, it's one-dimensional, sequential access, which by nature is slower and less efficient. That's why we should make every effort to optimise such interfaces, rather than using them as half-assed interpreters of existing interfaces.
I also think that we should be searching for new ways to allow blind people to absorb more information more accurately using the senses of sound and touch. This is more of a hardware problem, and this is where I think lots of people get bogged down by the second fundamental mistake: the idea that a computer interface should be a metaphor for an existing real-world interface.
This assumption is by no means restricted to this narrow category of interface design. I've often seen designers of conventional GUIs argue that a suggested feature is "bad" because it "breaks the metaphor".
There's a whole rant in here which I won't get into now. Broadly, my opinion is that I don't want my computer to be a newspaper, a filing cabinet or a typewriter - I want it to be a computer, and let me do all the useful things that simply cannot be done without a computer.
Back to my original point - computers can potentially allow us to build interfaces which we could never have imagined constructing without computers. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to interface with optic nerves, or the parts of the brain which interpret signals from the optic nerves, and allow blind people to "see" in some sense. At the moment this is still a pipe dream, as far as I know, but we can try passing data to blind people in other ways, and see if we find something that works well enough to be widely adopted.
I remember hearing about a study in which spatial data was translated into pressure applied to the backs of the test subjects (anybody remember this? Got a link?). They learned to interpret the sensations as information about three-dimensional terrain in front of them. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I don't know if it can efficiently be made into something accurate enough to read text, but we won't know unless we try.
I suspect that the question was worded by someone more familiar with the Windows/Mac world, in which the operating system and user interface are bundled together in an inseparable blob (or at least inseparable from the average user's viewpoint) and referred to, collectively, as "the operating system".
I've already seen some posts which question the efficiency of writing a whole operating system especially for blind people, and wondering if the filesystem should have a fundamentally different structure. Sigh.
I think most people agree that we should be talking about the user interface to the operating system (I won't say "window manager", because I'm not convinced that the window metaphor would be very useful in an interface for blind people). Naturally, this is a much smaller and more focused task. There's no reason why someone can't develop a user interface layer especially for blind people, which is completely useless to sighted people. Everyone can run whatever interface suits them the best on top of their OS.
If you completely drain someone's infected HIV blood... flush their system out with this frigid saline solution... and then refill them with clean blood....
would this not be a cure for AIDS?
Um, no. HIV is a virus. It enters the cells of an infected person, and hijacks the replicating processes of a cell's nucleus in order to replicate itself. It is merely transmitted through the blood and other bodily fluids. Flushing out the transmission medium once wouldn't be very helpful.
Well, if I am going to die unless they try the fake blood, I don't think I'm going to be upset with them for trying it, even if I experience unpleasant side-effects afterwards. Possibly being sick or dead is better than definitely being dead. And somebody needs to be a guinea pig in order for the technology to get better; it may as well be me.
"Oh well, all those mean, stupid people who disagree with my point of view for no rational reason are going to disagree with it again. I bet they are going to make specious arguments A, B and C. Obviously, the reason they all hate the thing I like so much is petty justification X, and they won't be swayed by any reasonable arguments. Which is a pity, because the thing I like is the best thing ever, and totally unfairly maligned and oppressed, as you can clearly see."
If this isn't trolling, it's certainly fishing for a reaction.
What does it even have to do with TFA? Mind you, it doesn't help that the headline, which is supposed to give some vague indication of what TFA is about, has nothing to do with TFA either.
Obviously you can't actually view webpages in Galeon without a GUI,
Yes, that is the point you were missing. Come on, we're talking about apps with a significant degree of command line functionality here. Not just apps which can be launched from a command line (which includes all Windows apps).
I think you missed what I just said. Galeon has command-line functionality beyond "being launchable from the command line", which is obviously a trivial criterion satisfied by any application at all. I named specific commands which can be issued to Galeon from the command line.
It is possible that the great-great-grandparent poster was completely missing this, and was actually claiming that "being launchable from the command line" counts as integration. Nevertheless, the application he chose for his example is actually integrated with the command line quite well for a GUI browser. So are many other GUI apps in Linux - you can often enter a command in a terminal to have something happen within a GUI interface. This does not eliminate the need for the GUI; it supplements the GUI.
As far as I remember, though, the original point was that in Linux you can perform just about any task from the command line (that is, that both command line and GUI apps exist for any task), not that you can use any specific GUI app from the command line (a proposition which doesn't make much sense).
I can confirm that this is true. I can perform administrative tasks from the command line. I can edit text from the command line. I can browse the web and use email from the command line. I don't actually do the last two very often, but the option is there, and is very useful if you're working on a server which has no GUI installed. And the most important thing is that the command line is a fully-featured useful tool, and not just a neglected and ignored fallback mechanism.
I'm not claiming that you can't achieve the same thing in Windows, since I haven't used Windows enough to be familiar with it, but from my limited experience I don't think the Windows interface encourages that kind of use - and I've never seen a Windows sysadmin use anything except a GUI to do things.
This new shell may improve things, but not by very much if it doesn't come with command line utilities. Sure, if there are libraries which allow script-writers to access the internals of the system, it will be possible for them to write scripts to duplicate the functionality of those utilities, but they will still have to write them.
I suspect that what will end up happening is widespread adoption of common scripts, which will become the de facto standard utilities - but it really should be Microsoft's job to write them in the first place. I consider system utilities to be core functionality of any complete operating system. Offering an environment for running them, but leaving the user to reinvent the wheel by himself, seems a half-hearted effort, and an inferior solution compared to, for example, Cygwin.
2) You're completely missing the point. Galeon does not have any browsing functionality which is not dependant on a GUI interface; you can start it from a command line but you can't do anything else with it.
On the contrary; there are quite a few things that you can do with Galeon from the command line. You can open a link in a new window, in a new tab in an existing window (with the option of mot raising the tab), toggle full-screen display of currently open galeon windows, add a bookmark or open a session file.
Obviously you can't actually view webpages in Galeon without a GUI, because what Galeon is is a GUI web browser. However, it's integrated with the command line as well as an app which displays multimedia in a GUI can be, and this functionality makes it more useful to me. "galeon -n --noraise %s" is my system-wide browser command. It lets me unobtrusively open links from anywhere in the background of my open Galeon window.
More pertinent to the original point, though, is that in Linux many GUI apps are just skins for established, fully functional CLI applications. You can use the GUI if you want, but you can also just use the bare command line app if that's what you prefer. I don't think that there is any functionality in Linux which can only be accessed through a GUI (perhaps the configuration of some GUI app preferences - but usually those are stored in editable configuration files).
You're thinking of "--All You Zombies--". "By His Bootstraps" is a similarly structured story about a man who is visited by future versions of himself, who give him advice. It is also a closed time loop, but I think the one in "All You Zombies" is considerably more convoluted.
The circumstances of the protagonist's conception and birth are an elaborate setup which can exist only because of the interference of the protagonist as an older man in his own past - he is his own mother and father, and in various other ways responsible for his own existence. He feels as if he is the only real person in the world, hence the title: "I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?"
What? I've heard that the US is a very car-heavy country, but elsewhere in the world many people don't drive.
There are many cities with sufficiently good public transport that a large portion of the population does not drive - London, for example, is known for this, and I think Warsaw is like that too. It is normal for European cities to have extensive and reasonably well-functioning train networks.
You are also neglecting the fact that many people (a very large percentage in developing countries) cannot afford cars or petrol. There are vast numbers of people where I live who commute to work on public transport (which has patchy coverage and is a bit dodgy - in South African cities, it's a hassle not to have a car).
SA used to keep driver's licence information in the ID book (there's a space there for it), but there have been separate driver's licence cards for as long as I can remember.
Well, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be required to carry a driver's licence on you when you are driving a vehicle. If your licence is bundled with an identity document, then this will obviously have the side effect of everyone who drives being required to carry an ID document. This is why I think having a separate ID and driver's licence is a good idea.
I'm not sure that you would even be able to identify people claiming to be in the system when they aren't, all they will need to say is "Oh no, I'm not THAT John Smith. I'm another John Smith altogether"
Uh, not unless they've had plastic surgery, put glue on their fingertips and surgically removed their eyeballs. That's what the photo and biometrics are for - if there's no physical characteristic check, then the only thing you can prove with a card is that you are currently in possession of the card.
Under the proposed system, you wouldn't really need to carry a card around at all; your physical characteristics would be the card. Therefore, if you don't match the prints, photo and retinal scan on record for a particular ID number, you will not be able to pretend that it is your ID number. Conversely, if you do match a particular set of biometric data, you will not be able to claim that you are not that person - for example, that you are somebody else in the system, or that you are not in the system.
The only people whose identity will not be additionally protected from theft by the system are people who are not in the system, since there will be no authoritative biometric data available on them.
The fact that it also hinders any future evil governments plans for genocide based on complete knowledge of it's citizens is only incidental !
What "complete knowledge"? At the moment, the most extensive and "controversial" list appears to include (apart from the biometrics) things like name, address, date and place of birth, whether the person is a citizen, whether the person is legally allowed to be in the country, numbers of other identification documents and various similar pieces of information which I imagine every government on Earth keeps about its citizens. It's all administrative crap, and some extra administrative crap dealing with the system itself (who has accessed the recorded information, ID cards issued, etc.)
Come back to me when someone proposes storing religious affiliation or participation in political parties. And please don't say "it's only a matter of time!" or "but if we let them do this, then what will prevent them from trying X?" unless you have some supporting material. Slippery slope arguments need some sort of evidence of intent, or they are just hysteria.
I agree that the non-compulsory period is just silly. Either they're doing it, or they're not doing it. I don't think "ten years" has been specified, though; I imagine they would prefer to make it compulsory earlier, but it looks like they had to make it voluntary at first to have it considered at all.
It still won't be completely useless if it's voluntary, assuming they institute some basic checks, like confirming that someone who claims not to be in the system is actually not in the system (and not trying to impersonate someone who is without presenting ID).
The competence of the people doing th implementation and the cost-effectiveness of all the shiny new biometric tests are what mostly concerns me about this scheme. The much-maligned central database and the nature of the data which is to be stored do not particularly worry me. I wouldn't really care if my government wanted to rearrange information about me that it already had into a more convenient and accessible form. Maybe then I could change my address in one fricking place, and all other government organisations would automagically be informed.
"You will not be forced to carry it around with you 24/7"
Yes, so you have an ID card scheme where there is no actual requirement for you to have any ID.
I think your logic is a bit confused there. Not being forced to *carry* an ID all the time doesn't mean that you are not required to *have* and ID or that you are *never* required to carry an ID.
We have national ID books in South Africa. We are required to produce them as proof of identity when we open bank accounts, apply for loans, offer to purchase property, or engage in other transactions with strangers in which proof of identity is required. If you look like you're under the legal drinking age, you might not be sold alcohol if you can't provide an ID. However, as far as I am aware, there is no legal requirement for you to carry your ID book around with you all the time. And if there is such a legal requirement, then it is certainly not enforced. Policemen don't do spot checks in the street.
Considering the specifics of South Africa's apartheid history (people who weren't white used to have "pass" documents, which they were notoriously required to carry around with them all the time, or face arrest), if any politician today suggested that this was a good idea, he or she would be shot down in flames.
In spite of having a government-controlled identification document, South Africa is not a totalitarian regime. I really don't see what the fuss is about. How is having such a document any worse than alternative means of identification? At least it is a dedicated document which serves only to demonstrate that you are who you say you are, and doesn't give away unnecessary personal information.
Actually, a reviewer who is always wrong can be useful. Just go to see the films he hates.
Hahaha! Yes! Here in SA we have a prominent movie reviewer called Barry Ronge. He has a pretty good track record of slating movies that I liked and praising movies I thought were awful. He's a very good indicator of what not to see.:)
My word. What an impressive display of conservative asshattery.
Both jobs I've had so far have had no real dress code. The old one kind of expected us to deal with clients occasionally, and had a no-jeans-when-you're-talking-to-clients rule, but it seems that unfaded black jeans don't count as jeans, because they never had any issues with me.
I wear black most of the time. Not lacy victorian goth attire with raccoon makeup, mind you, just relatively plain black pants and black shirts (especially now, in winter). This has invited curious comment from co-workers precisely once at each job (why nobody ever notices when people wear an unusually large amount of pink, I don't know), but nobody cares. I haven't noticed if anyone has any tattoos or piercings, but if anyone did, I doubt anyone would care either.
Anal dress code rules are an indication that other stupid rules may also be in force, and stupid rules are symptomatic of a) an unpleasant and oppressive working environment and b) a company too bogged down by micromanagement by self-important, clueless bureaucrats to get anything interesting done. Show me a company which has a strict suit-and-tie policy but is otherwise an absolutely lovely and relaxed place to work, and I'll be very surprised.
This may be repeating an obvious point which has already been made, but - if you're not desparate, then keep looking until you find a nice place to work. Life is too short to be miserable for eight hours out of every working day unless you really have no choice. Companies without retarded policies do exist; they may just be tricky to find. If you have the time, try.
I've skimmed through it again, and I don't think he says anywhere that he doesn't like anime. He just says that he has in the past hated movies everyone else loved and loved movies everyone else hated. He doesn't seem to have any bias against the medium (or genre).
I haven't seen a lot of Studio Ghibli stuff. I really enjoyed Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa, I quite liked Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, and I thought Kiki's Delivery Service and the two about the cats were OK, but not amazing (more or less for the reasons you mention, but also because the characters and settings didn't really grab me).
I'm hoping to watch more sometime, if I can get hold of it. Even the movies that I had a lukewarm reaction to beat the pants off a lot of mainstream blockbusters I've seen recently. I don't mind occasional slowness or inexplicable magical events that much, as long as the whole is reasonably coherent.
And Miyazaki can put warm, fuzzy messages about friendship, family, loyalty, etc. into his movies without triteness, cloying sentimentality or song-and-dance routines - an ability which almost everyone else in the world seems to have lost. Or never had.
Slashdot Mirror
*Cough* And when I say "adjective", I of course mean "adjective or adverb", as is the case with "publishing business-wise" in the original sentence, and some other usages of hyphenated words which end in "-wise".
*slinks off*
Dude! His grammar is not fine. o_O
In the first sentence, "publishing business wise" should be "publishing business-wise" - if you want to turn a noun into an adjective by adding "-wise", "-like", "-esque" or other such suffixes, you use a hyphenated word, not two words. Personally, I think it's clumsy to use this construction at all when your noun phrase consists of more than one word; it just looks weird.
The second sentence is a jumbled mess with two concord errors. First, "Kick out as many thick books (...) is great for business" should be "Kicking out (...) is great for business". Second, "...teaching you..." clashes with "...confusing or intimidating them..." further down; either "them" should be changed to "you" or the first "you" should be changed to "readers" (or another third-person plural noun describing the people who are being taught and also confused and intimidated) and the second "you" should be changed to "they".
Good luck with your Fedora. Now I will scare you with complications, and hopefully prevent you from ever experiencing package-related horrors. As you may know, you need to observe some caution when selecting third-party repositories to avoid clashes. There are two main warring factions of third-party packagers - Dag/Dries/FreshRPMs/NewRPMs and Livna/Fedora.us. I think the former support a wider range of packages, but the latter traditionally have had better support for commercial drivers (like Nvidia and Flash), and are considered to be more "officially sanctioned". I've always gone with Dag, et al.
As far as I know, installing selected, isolated packages (like drivers) from one isn't going to screw around with your system if you mostly use packages from the other, but you shouldn't use both sets of repositories simultaneously when upgrading the bulk of your system - I think the main problem is that they have different versions of the same packages.
Fortunately, the latest versions of yum make management of feuding repositories easy. You can put all of them in the configuration file, turn some of them on by default and some of them off, and toggle individual repositories on and off with command-line options if you need to.
I've never had any problems (once I had a clash between FreshRPMs and Atrpms, but yum reported that a clash existed and didn't install the offending package), but I've heard horror stories, hence the warning.
The problem with having a central repository of software is that the user is stuck with the version of software that the packagers give them, assuming they even package it at all. It's just too much work to keep up with all the minor bugfixes for thousands of packages.
In my experience, packagers are pretty good about catching up to the source releases of any sufficiently popular packages (at least in the Fedora world, where there is a group of very active, co-operating third-party packagers; I'm not sure how things are in Debian/Ubuntu-land). Sure, there is a lag (which is irritating if the latest packaged version has a particularly annoying bug), and some obscure things don't get packaged, but on the whole it's fine.
The delay is a disadvantage of packaging, but it's hardly a disadvantage of Linux, since the alternative which does not have this disadvantage is installing from source. Traditional Windows software upgrades are even worse when in comes to updates and bug fixes, since they are infrequent and you usually have to download something huge every time you upgrade.
When I switched jobs, I went from Fedora to FreeBSD. I update software from source using the ports system. On the one hand, it's nice to be on the cutting edge, and to be able to upgrade to the latest version of anything almost as soon as it comes out. On the other hand, I am relieved that updating packages with yum is so simple whenever I do it at home.
I haven't had any utter compilation disasters at work, but I have had to work through various annoying and weird problems which I would not wish on a non-programmer. I don't think the ports system is impossibly difficult for a lay user to learn, but it's definitely less user-friendly and more error-prone. You need to be familiar with at least the basics of the compilation process in order to be able to diagnose what kind of thing has gone wrong and where you should look for further help. Not recommended for grandmothers. :)
Great, another "It's all different and confusing! Learning new things is hard! Why can't it be just like Windows?!" article. How exciting.
I wonder how many of the people who constantly whine about dependencies and packaging systems are people who have completely missed the point and have been trying to install software on Linux the "Windows way". The way in which they briefly and dismissively mention centralised package installers, almost as an afterthought, is what gives me this sneaking suspicion.
The "Windows way" is to hunt around on the internet for the program you want, download it and run the installer. Now, if you find a random RPM on the web and try to install it, yes indeed, chances are that it will complain that is missing libraries. If you painstakingly locate those libraries on the web and try to install them, they will possibly complain about the absence of further libraries, and so forth. Clearly, this is an unpleasant and difficult way to install anything. It is also a retarded way to try to install anything on just about any modern distro. I understand that it may be a method which a prior user of Windows would instinctively try to use, because of his or her Windows experience, but the failure of this method is not a failure of packaging systems in general. If you read any how-to introducing new users to a distro like Fedora, you will certainly find a section describing how to upgrade and install software using the distro's package installer.
There is nothing inherently wrong with packaging software with external dependencies, and recursively installing dependencies as needed. I think that it is considerably better than statically including everything an application needs in one huge, bloated installer. Dependencies only cause difficulties if a user has to resolve them manually, and the user of a modern package-based Linux system does not have to resolve dependencies manually. How can anyone seriously claim that typing "yum install foo" (or clicking on "foo" in a GUI, if one is CLI-phobic) is more difficult and confusing than looking for foo's special, unique and enormous installer on the web (or running it from a CD)?
In the several years that I have used Fedora, I have had a dependency problem once while running yum. This dependency problem arose because a piece of software was incorrectly packaged and did not link to one of its dependencies. After pasting the error message I was getting into Google, I rapidly found the name of the missing package and installed it. No problem.
Did I have to set up extra repositories to get everything I wanted? Yes. Was it a terrible, unreasonable ordeal? No. It involves copying and pasting some stuff into a text file. There are dozens of sites which describe the process in painstaking, elaborate detail. I am confident that my mom could follow those instructions.
Mind you, further up the page someone claims that if you have to Google for help when trying to do something with your computer, then your operating system's interface has failed you. Are you serious? Do you seriously expect to be able to operate a complex system with which you are unfamiliar without ever having to read any instructions? Do you think that cars have an unacceptably awful user interface because people have to take driving lessons in order to be able to use them?
Er, I think you're confusing dangling participles with ending sentences with prepositions.
This is an example of a dangling participle:
What this sentence means to say is "As [person] was speeding towards the overturned truck, an accident seemed imminent." However, when the subject of the first part of the sentence is removed, together with the auxillary verb, the participle (speeding) is left "dangling", and attaches itself to the subject of the second sentence - and the resulting sentence is actually saying that the accident, which seemed imminent, was speeding towards the overturned truck. Which is silly. In this particular case, the error is grating, but the meaning can still be deduced because the literal meaning of the sentence is nonsensical. However, the literal meaning could parse to something meaningful and cause confusion. I definitely consider this to be a serious grammatical error.
On the other hand, I frequently end sentences with prepositions, because I am too lazy to think up elaborate alternatives. I don't think that's really a grammatical error; it's more of an inadvisable (by some people) writing style, like long, rambling elaborate sentences like this (or using nested brackets (like this (personally, I think nested brackets are great; they allow you to insert arbitrarily nested footnotes inline, and still leave the text reasonably legible. I wouldn't put something like this in a formal letter, but I used to do it in friendly emails all the time))).
This reminds me of archaic Polish grammar (from around the turn of the twentieth century), in which the favoured style convention appeared to be "put the subject first, then the direct object, then chuck in all the adverbial phrases and indirect objects you have, the more the better, then stick the verb right at the very end", which led to a very quirky and recognisable sentence structure. The fun thing about Polish is that just about every word is completely unambiguously conjugated to imply a particular role in the sentence, so you can reorder the words almost arbitrarily and the sentence will still be correct and retain the same meaning. Ths is very helpful when you are writing structured poetry.
I don't think there is any direct correlation between being a hacker or computer programmer and having atrocious English skills. The scary incompetence in spelling and grammar that you're complaining about is also commonly found in the corporate world, and just about everywhere else.
I think its prevalence in current generations of English speakers is caused partially by poor language education in school, but mostly by lack of recreational reading. I've said this before; you learn good language skills by example.
Everyone who posts here is a computer geek to some degree. Some people have good language skills, some people are consistently awful, and some people (probably the majority) are OK, but constantly make the same basic mistakes. Of course, some people are just really bad at remembering spelling and some people are really good, but my theory is that the major distinguishing factor is how much [proofread, orthographically and grammatically correct material] a particular poster reads.
If all you ever read are internet posts full of mangled it's/its, they're/their/there and your/you're, dangling participles and other misuses of common phrases, you are likely to become desensitised to those mistakes, and stop noticing them.
I don't correct spelling on Slashdot, because I think spelling-correcting posts are just noise (unless the error is particularly hilarious). There isn't really any mechanism for criticising spelling on a forum without being an asshat and filling up the discussion with crap - which is a pity, because in principle I think it's a good idea to correct spelling mistakes.
I think that there are two fundamental mistakes lots of people make when designing interfaces for completely blind people.
The first is the idea that we should just slap a screen reader on top of a regular GUI, so that the blind user hears a description of everything that a sighted user would see on the screen - and that will be just great, and make the GUI accessible. I think that's a silly approach. I'm not saying that screen readers are useless - I imagine that they are a helpful tool for partially sighted people and blind people who can't read braille, and they are a quick and dirty solution for blind people who are given no other options - but they are hardly the best we can do (and obviously totally useless to those who are both blind and deaf).
Instead of interpreting an interface which was designed and optimised for sighted people so that it is not utterly useless to blind people, we should construct an interface specially optimised for blind people, which takes full advantage of the senses that they are skilled in using. It should have both audio and tactile input and output methods.
There is a good reason why sight is the most important sense to sighted people. Sight provides us with a vastly larger amount of information than any of our other senses. We can see further and more accurately than we can hear. Sight allows us to scan rapidly over a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object, pick out an area of interest and access it directly.
When blind people access text, whether it's through a screen reader or a one-line braille display, it's one-dimensional, sequential access, which by nature is slower and less efficient. That's why we should make every effort to optimise such interfaces, rather than using them as half-assed interpreters of existing interfaces.
I also think that we should be searching for new ways to allow blind people to absorb more information more accurately using the senses of sound and touch. This is more of a hardware problem, and this is where I think lots of people get bogged down by the second fundamental mistake: the idea that a computer interface should be a metaphor for an existing real-world interface.
This assumption is by no means restricted to this narrow category of interface design. I've often seen designers of conventional GUIs argue that a suggested feature is "bad" because it "breaks the metaphor".There's a whole rant in here which I won't get into now. Broadly, my opinion is that I don't want my computer to be a newspaper, a filing cabinet or a typewriter - I want it to be a computer, and let me do all the useful things that simply cannot be done without a computer.
Back to my original point - computers can potentially allow us to build interfaces which we could never have imagined constructing without computers. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to interface with optic nerves, or the parts of the brain which interpret signals from the optic nerves, and allow blind people to "see" in some sense. At the moment this is still a pipe dream, as far as I know, but we can try passing data to blind people in other ways, and see if we find something that works well enough to be widely adopted.
I remember hearing about a study in which spatial data was translated into pressure applied to the backs of the test subjects (anybody remember this? Got a link?). They learned to interpret the sensations as information about three-dimensional terrain in front of them. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I don't know if it can efficiently be made into something accurate enough to read text, but we won't know unless we try.
I suspect that the question was worded by someone more familiar with the Windows/Mac world, in which the operating system and user interface are bundled together in an inseparable blob (or at least inseparable from the average user's viewpoint) and referred to, collectively, as "the operating system".
I've already seen some posts which question the efficiency of writing a whole operating system especially for blind people, and wondering if the filesystem should have a fundamentally different structure. Sigh.
I think most people agree that we should be talking about the user interface to the operating system (I won't say "window manager", because I'm not convinced that the window metaphor would be very useful in an interface for blind people). Naturally, this is a much smaller and more focused task. There's no reason why someone can't develop a user interface layer especially for blind people, which is completely useless to sighted people. Everyone can run whatever interface suits them the best on top of their OS.
Right, the HIV Virus infects "CD4+ helper T-cell" which are located in the blood.
No, T-cells are lymphocytes, and thus found mostly in the lymphatic system, although they also enter the blood. HIV is found in all bodily fluids.
Um, no. HIV is a virus. It enters the cells of an infected person, and hijacks the replicating processes of a cell's nucleus in order to replicate itself. It is merely transmitted through the blood and other bodily fluids. Flushing out the transmission medium once wouldn't be very helpful.
Well, if I am going to die unless they try the fake blood, I don't think I'm going to be upset with them for trying it, even if I experience unpleasant side-effects afterwards. Possibly being sick or dead is better than definitely being dead. And somebody needs to be a guinea pig in order for the technology to get better; it may as well be me.
This is "+4 interesting"?
"Oh well, all those mean, stupid people who disagree with my point of view for no rational reason are going to disagree with it again. I bet they are going to make specious arguments A, B and C. Obviously, the reason they all hate the thing I like so much is petty justification X, and they won't be swayed by any reasonable arguments. Which is a pity, because the thing I like is the best thing ever, and totally unfairly maligned and oppressed, as you can clearly see."
If this isn't trolling, it's certainly fishing for a reaction.
What does it even have to do with TFA? Mind you, it doesn't help that the headline, which is supposed to give some vague indication of what TFA is about, has nothing to do with TFA either.
I think you missed what I just said. Galeon has command-line functionality beyond "being launchable from the command line", which is obviously a trivial criterion satisfied by any application at all. I named specific commands which can be issued to Galeon from the command line.
It is possible that the great-great-grandparent poster was completely missing this, and was actually claiming that "being launchable from the command line" counts as integration. Nevertheless, the application he chose for his example is actually integrated with the command line quite well for a GUI browser. So are many other GUI apps in Linux - you can often enter a command in a terminal to have something happen within a GUI interface. This does not eliminate the need for the GUI; it supplements the GUI.
As far as I remember, though, the original point was that in Linux you can perform just about any task from the command line (that is, that both command line and GUI apps exist for any task), not that you can use any specific GUI app from the command line (a proposition which doesn't make much sense).
I can confirm that this is true. I can perform administrative tasks from the command line. I can edit text from the command line. I can browse the web and use email from the command line. I don't actually do the last two very often, but the option is there, and is very useful if you're working on a server which has no GUI installed. And the most important thing is that the command line is a fully-featured useful tool, and not just a neglected and ignored fallback mechanism.
I'm not claiming that you can't achieve the same thing in Windows, since I haven't used Windows enough to be familiar with it, but from my limited experience I don't think the Windows interface encourages that kind of use - and I've never seen a Windows sysadmin use anything except a GUI to do things.
This new shell may improve things, but not by very much if it doesn't come with command line utilities. Sure, if there are libraries which allow script-writers to access the internals of the system, it will be possible for them to write scripts to duplicate the functionality of those utilities, but they will still have to write them.
I suspect that what will end up happening is widespread adoption of common scripts, which will become the de facto standard utilities - but it really should be Microsoft's job to write them in the first place. I consider system utilities to be core functionality of any complete operating system. Offering an environment for running them, but leaving the user to reinvent the wheel by himself, seems a half-hearted effort, and an inferior solution compared to, for example, Cygwin.
2) You're completely missing the point. Galeon does not have any browsing functionality which is not dependant on a GUI interface; you can start it from a command line but you can't do anything else with it.
On the contrary; there are quite a few things that you can do with Galeon from the command line. You can open a link in a new window, in a new tab in an existing window (with the option of mot raising the tab), toggle full-screen display of currently open galeon windows, add a bookmark or open a session file.
Obviously you can't actually view webpages in Galeon without a GUI, because what Galeon is is a GUI web browser. However, it's integrated with the command line as well as an app which displays multimedia in a GUI can be, and this functionality makes it more useful to me. "galeon -n --noraise %s" is my system-wide browser command. It lets me unobtrusively open links from anywhere in the background of my open Galeon window.
More pertinent to the original point, though, is that in Linux many GUI apps are just skins for established, fully functional CLI applications. You can use the GUI if you want, but you can also just use the bare command line app if that's what you prefer. I don't think that there is any functionality in Linux which can only be accessed through a GUI (perhaps the configuration of some GUI app preferences - but usually those are stored in editable configuration files).
You're thinking of "--All You Zombies--". "By His Bootstraps" is a similarly structured story about a man who is visited by future versions of himself, who give him advice. It is also a closed time loop, but I think the one in "All You Zombies" is considerably more convoluted.
The circumstances of the protagonist's conception and birth are an elaborate setup which can exist only because of the interference of the protagonist as an older man in his own past - he is his own mother and father, and in various other ways responsible for his own existence. He feels as if he is the only real person in the world, hence the title: "I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?"
What? I've heard that the US is a very car-heavy country, but elsewhere in the world many people don't drive.
There are many cities with sufficiently good public transport that a large portion of the population does not drive - London, for example, is known for this, and I think Warsaw is like that too. It is normal for European cities to have extensive and reasonably well-functioning train networks.
You are also neglecting the fact that many people (a very large percentage in developing countries) cannot afford cars or petrol. There are vast numbers of people where I live who commute to work on public transport (which has patchy coverage and is a bit dodgy - in South African cities, it's a hassle not to have a car).
SA used to keep driver's licence information in the ID book (there's a space there for it), but there have been separate driver's licence cards for as long as I can remember.
Well, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be required to carry a driver's licence on you when you are driving a vehicle. If your licence is bundled with an identity document, then this will obviously have the side effect of everyone who drives being required to carry an ID document. This is why I think having a separate ID and driver's licence is a good idea.
I'm not sure that you would even be able to identify people claiming to be in the system when they aren't, all they will need to say is "Oh no, I'm not THAT John Smith. I'm another John Smith altogether"
Uh, not unless they've had plastic surgery, put glue on their fingertips and surgically removed their eyeballs. That's what the photo and biometrics are for - if there's no physical characteristic check, then the only thing you can prove with a card is that you are currently in possession of the card.
Under the proposed system, you wouldn't really need to carry a card around at all; your physical characteristics would be the card. Therefore, if you don't match the prints, photo and retinal scan on record for a particular ID number, you will not be able to pretend that it is your ID number. Conversely, if you do match a particular set of biometric data, you will not be able to claim that you are not that person - for example, that you are somebody else in the system, or that you are not in the system.
The only people whose identity will not be additionally protected from theft by the system are people who are not in the system, since there will be no authoritative biometric data available on them.
The fact that it also hinders any future evil governments plans for genocide based on complete knowledge of it's citizens is only incidental !
What "complete knowledge"? At the moment, the most extensive and "controversial" list appears to include (apart from the biometrics) things like name, address, date and place of birth, whether the person is a citizen, whether the person is legally allowed to be in the country, numbers of other identification documents and various similar pieces of information which I imagine every government on Earth keeps about its citizens. It's all administrative crap, and some extra administrative crap dealing with the system itself (who has accessed the recorded information, ID cards issued, etc.)
Come back to me when someone proposes storing religious affiliation or participation in political parties. And please don't say "it's only a matter of time!" or "but if we let them do this, then what will prevent them from trying X?" unless you have some supporting material. Slippery slope arguments need some sort of evidence of intent, or they are just hysteria.
I agree that the non-compulsory period is just silly. Either they're doing it, or they're not doing it. I don't think "ten years" has been specified, though; I imagine they would prefer to make it compulsory earlier, but it looks like they had to make it voluntary at first to have it considered at all.
It still won't be completely useless if it's voluntary, assuming they institute some basic checks, like confirming that someone who claims not to be in the system is actually not in the system (and not trying to impersonate someone who is without presenting ID).
The competence of the people doing th implementation and the cost-effectiveness of all the shiny new biometric tests are what mostly concerns me about this scheme. The much-maligned central database and the nature of the data which is to be stored do not particularly worry me. I wouldn't really care if my government wanted to rearrange information about me that it already had into a more convenient and accessible form. Maybe then I could change my address in one fricking place, and all other government organisations would automagically be informed.
I think your logic is a bit confused there. Not being forced to *carry* an ID all the time doesn't mean that you are not required to *have* and ID or that you are *never* required to carry an ID.
We have national ID books in South Africa. We are required to produce them as proof of identity when we open bank accounts, apply for loans, offer to purchase property, or engage in other transactions with strangers in which proof of identity is required. If you look like you're under the legal drinking age, you might not be sold alcohol if you can't provide an ID. However, as far as I am aware, there is no legal requirement for you to carry your ID book around with you all the time. And if there is such a legal requirement, then it is certainly not enforced. Policemen don't do spot checks in the street.
Considering the specifics of South Africa's apartheid history (people who weren't white used to have "pass" documents, which they were notoriously required to carry around with them all the time, or face arrest), if any politician today suggested that this was a good idea, he or she would be shot down in flames.
In spite of having a government-controlled identification document, South Africa is not a totalitarian regime. I really don't see what the fuss is about. How is having such a document any worse than alternative means of identification? At least it is a dedicated document which serves only to demonstrate that you are who you say you are, and doesn't give away unnecessary personal information.
Actually, a reviewer who is always wrong can be useful. Just go to see the films he hates.
Hahaha! Yes! Here in SA we have a prominent movie reviewer called Barry Ronge. He has a pretty good track record of slating movies that I liked and praising movies I thought were awful. He's a very good indicator of what not to see. :)
My word. What an impressive display of conservative asshattery.
Both jobs I've had so far have had no real dress code. The old one kind of expected us to deal with clients occasionally, and had a no-jeans-when-you're-talking-to-clients rule, but it seems that unfaded black jeans don't count as jeans, because they never had any issues with me.
I wear black most of the time. Not lacy victorian goth attire with raccoon makeup, mind you, just relatively plain black pants and black shirts (especially now, in winter). This has invited curious comment from co-workers precisely once at each job (why nobody ever notices when people wear an unusually large amount of pink, I don't know), but nobody cares. I haven't noticed if anyone has any tattoos or piercings, but if anyone did, I doubt anyone would care either.
Anal dress code rules are an indication that other stupid rules may also be in force, and stupid rules are symptomatic of a) an unpleasant and oppressive working environment and b) a company too bogged down by micromanagement by self-important, clueless bureaucrats to get anything interesting done. Show me a company which has a strict suit-and-tie policy but is otherwise an absolutely lovely and relaxed place to work, and I'll be very surprised.
This may be repeating an obvious point which has already been made, but - if you're not desparate, then keep looking until you find a nice place to work. Life is too short to be miserable for eight hours out of every working day unless you really have no choice. Companies without retarded policies do exist; they may just be tricky to find. If you have the time, try.
I've skimmed through it again, and I don't think he says anywhere that he doesn't like anime. He just says that he has in the past hated movies everyone else loved and loved movies everyone else hated. He doesn't seem to have any bias against the medium (or genre).
I haven't seen a lot of Studio Ghibli stuff. I really enjoyed Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa, I quite liked Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, and I thought Kiki's Delivery Service and the two about the cats were OK, but not amazing (more or less for the reasons you mention, but also because the characters and settings didn't really grab me).
I'm hoping to watch more sometime, if I can get hold of it. Even the movies that I had a lukewarm reaction to beat the pants off a lot of mainstream blockbusters I've seen recently. I don't mind occasional slowness or inexplicable magical events that much, as long as the whole is reasonably coherent.
And Miyazaki can put warm, fuzzy messages about friendship, family, loyalty, etc. into his movies without triteness, cloying sentimentality or song-and-dance routines - an ability which almost everyone else in the world seems to have lost. Or never had.