I don't believe there are any real (as in frequently used) legitimate reasons for P2P networks to exist other than to distribute material illegally. It's the very last place I'd ever look to legally obtain software or media. I would in every single case get the material direct from the author's website, or via some legitimate web service, searching P2P as a last resort (so "last resort" that I've never had to do it). I'm not saying that it's not possible to use P2P networks for legit reasons, and I'm not saying that on occasion people do obtain legal materials from them. Really though, it's not a good way for an author to market something (no tracking, no content control, no targeting, etc), and it's not a convenient way for the consumer to retrieve something (file descriptors can be poor, you get queued up, you have to share back to get good rates with some services, etc).
The playlist sharing makes it a very convenient way to get music. You find a playlist from someone with a bunch of songs you already have on it (the software helps you), and then just right click to download any others. I think there are dedicated programs like irate that do this with specifically free music, and of course you can just use audioscrobbler and search for the songs once you find a band you like, but it's still a nice way to do things.
Re:Rather than a 'Safe Cigarette'
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
Because that won't help addicts at all. What should be done is the opposite - make it easy to get nicotine without tobacco. The drug itself is relatively harmless, it's all the other gunk in the plant that gets you.
Very true, which is why it is better to give users a choice. But if you're going to restrict people to one desktop environment, KDE gives you a choice of looks at the start, wheras with gnome you get one look and you better like it. (Yes, you can get your own themes for either, but that's more effort than the typical user will go to).
IMHO, GTK2+/Gnome beats the pants off of KDE in both looks and usability. KDE looks like a cheap knockoff of Microsoft Windows and is just about as stable.
Now see, to me KDE looks like what windows is trying to do but done right. Gtk is in its default look just oppressively dull and grey, and looks more like an old version of windows in terms of the actual widgets - the scrollbars and dropdown menus are identical, the buttons look pretty similar and are too rectangular visually. It's at once dull and harsh. As far as usability's concerned, all I've seen of the gnome usability focus is confirmation dialogs switching the buttons around making me overwrite a file I didn't mean to, a filemanager spawning new windows all over the place and no way to stop it short of manually editing the registry, having to make an extra click before I can actually choose where I want to save a file, and some ridiculous button naming to learn. (What does "save" do in the context of a preferences dialog? Will it dismiss the box? Will it apply the changes? The answer seems to vary from application to application. I've even seen one with save/apply/cancel/ok. Ok/Apply/Cancel is a standard buttonset that I'm used to and know what it does, whatever happened to the principle of least surprise?) And I've never had any stability problems, that sounds like fud from here.
But then again, I've only been using Linux since 1995, and *nix since 1975. What do I know.
I suspect this makes you more minimalist as goes UIs than the average person. CDE would have driven me insane if I had to use it for extended periods, the grey would have got to me. Flashy widgets do make it easier to use the thing, not because they do anything different but because it's more pleasant to be looking at them.
I have a feeling that many Gnome users are blind in there hatred and really wants to eliminate Kde of the face of earth.
However, I have never really seen the same hate from Kde users towards Gnome - more a dislike of the DE.
Yes, I've seen exactly this, and it seems to extend to distros as well - the gnome distros like redhat seem to be really rabidly anti-kde, wheras kde distros like suse was until a few days ago seemed to take a far more even-handed, "use whichever you like" approach. I think it's part of the gnome philosophy that there should be only one option for everything, and the gnome devs know best, wheras kde seems to say choice is good and you should do what you want.
So why are so many gnome users so damn happy about this? If you are a Gnome user you probaly not use Suse since thier Gnome support have never been good. My only guess is that Gnome users are fanaticly wanting to destroy KDE, erase it from this planet.
From the way gnome is still spreading fud about the qt licensing several years on, I think this is the situation. It might be because once Qt became free gnome had no real reason to exist, so they make the purpose of their existence to eliminate KDE.
Gnome winning the desktop wars would almost certainly mean more stuff for linux being pay-for rather than free software. If users are used to paying for their software, they might be more willing to pay for upgrades from their commercial linux vendors. Just a guess.
Why isn't there an Xfce version of Ubuntu? There are tons of lightweight shells out there that work perfectly well ontop of Ubuntu...without breaking it like KDE does.
That's not KDE's fault, it's Ubuntu's. KDE works perfectly fine on many distributions without breaking them.
All that being said...Gnome is like an older Mac interface...KDE is sorta like windows...and it seems to me that Shuttlesworth is trying to capture Windows users...so using a KDE interface seems like a good idea. But, honestly, KDE is too complicated for most windows users, IMHO.
It may be too complicated for the typical windows user (though I would dispute even that. The KDE defaults are sensible, it doesn't diminish your usage experience any to have the preferences there for if you need them), but the target market is not the typical windows user but a windows user who is willing to try a new OS. Which is more likely to be a power user who wants things to fiddle with.
I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license.
If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users.
It does make a difference. If gnome was the standard linux desktop I would be using windows.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now.
Why? Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant. As a desktop they are inferior. From a customer's standpoint there is no reason to standardise on gnome, ever.
The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things.
The Qt toolkit is still the best-looking toolkit on Linux, and the kde approach has given us the best desktop environment around. Full steam ahead for KDE.
Just as it seems we are making progress toward at least having ONE standard DE for most of the desktops used out there,
Didn't look like that to me. The distros were moving to a standard DE, it's just not the one that users choose when they have the opportunity. Shttleworth is showing to me that he cares about what his users want. Forcing users to do one thing even when they would prefer to do something else so that everyone is the same is emphatically not the linux philosophy (though it is worryingly seeming to be the gnome philosophy these days)
America is not at war with Iraq. America has never been at war with Iraq. Report to your nearest re-education centre immediately!
(The US can't go to war without (IIRC it's congressional) approval, something the war against Iraq didn't have, hence the doublespeak used when discussing it.
The are a number of well known alternate root services. Some just mirror the ICANN zone, some do their own thing. Some even conflict with ICANN zones (like New.net).
Some even conflict with ICANN zones because ICANN deliberately introduces conflicts whenever an alternative DNS is becoming too popular. This makes it impossible on a practical level to set up an alternative DNS root and be successful with it - you can't really sell.mynewdomain under your root because ICANN can and will sell.mynewdomain to other people solely to fuck you up. What it did with e.g..biz seems very much to be abuse of its monopoly to me.
There's no reason why the US can't keep control of.com.
How about that it's a global TLD? The US has its own perfectly good.us, that it made it sterile with stupid naming rules is your own problem. Companies from anywhere else should have just as much right to a.com; ideally, it should be reserved for multinational companies. Why does the US seem to regard.com as its own?
Does anyone really believe that the government could make it illegal to record anything in analog?
Of course they can. Governments make all sorts of stupid things illegal.
Even if such a bill were to be passed, it would be laughed at as the public went on its merry way using older analog and unencumbered digital devices.
But if they ever need to get someone, they have something else that they're guilty of. There is a school of thought that says it's in a government's interest to have every citizen breaking the law - at that point they have control over everyone.
The recommended copyright text is "version 2 or any later version". Authors who blindly copied that will be giving their users a choice of either 2 or 3. Authors who thought about it and copied that will be getting what they want. Authors who thought about it and didn't want that, as in the case of the linux kernel, will have used a different copyright text.
The correct thing to do at 2. is stop posting the fricking dupes, not just link to them. Or fix the moderation system at 4., but what're the odds of that happening?
I tried it and just found it looked horrible. Really really horrible. It was like I'd gone back 10 years to when the best option was CDE on solaris, only worse. Yes, it doesn't really affect the functionality, but for the typical user, looks matter as well as what it can do. I'll stick with KDE with beautiful shiny shiny widgets.
KDE has awesome working drag and drop. Drag a link to a playlist into a media player and it starts playing. Drag an email into an address book and the sender gets added. Drag a file onto an IM contact and you send it to them. Etc, etc.
Because that's bad for the community, something redhat cares about, even if the kernel developers don't seem to. They probably will ship their own xen version for the moment, but the less difference between their kernel and the mainline one the better it is for everyone.
Like I always say in the Real threads, it doesn't matter how big scumbags they are, they deserve the protection of the law like everyone else. They've been wronged here and they deserve compensation, regardless of anything else.
There's talk of Rambus 'abusing' the patents -- but that doesn't make sense to me. I thought that was the whole point of patents; for a limited time (17 years?) you get to be the only one to do whatever it is that you've patented.
I think the issue is they tried to get their patented algorithms into a memory standard, which would have required everyone who wanted to make ram to license their patents, which seems unfair. By all means, use your patented methods to make your ram 3x faster than everyone else's, and license them to other people who want their ram to be faster, but once you start saying everyone has to license your patents that's going too far.
Don't you mean "Intelligent Design whackos or Evolutionist whackos"?...or maybe we could (gasp!) be courteous and try "Intelligent Design proponents or Evolutionists"?
They intentionally represent proponents of science, so I think calling them whackos is fully justified.
Why with anyone write a chat program where you can install (and obviously run) a program just by clicking on a link?
You want people to be able to send each other links to websites. That's what friends often do. But you want more, if they're fixing up an unreal tournament game they should be able to send each other unreal:// links. If they're going to an irc channel it's nice to let them send each other irc:// links. They might want to discuss a newsgroup, in which case they need to be able to send each other news:// links, and so on. The only logical response to this, and the one AIM adopts, is to hand off any URL to the OS and let it handle it. The problem that arises is that windows uses URLs to do local stuff, and doesn't make any distinction between them - iirc you can run arbitrary installed programs via system:// urls, meaning you might well be able to just make a link which would format someone's harddisk.
Besides that, in Windows isn't there a way to run programs (like chat) as an innocuous (nobody) user limited only to that user's home directory and with limited write capabilities?
Not really. It's getting better but for a long time it was very hard to do this in any useful way, the restricted accounts are too restricted. I'm reasonably security-conscious but gave up using a restricted account, it's just too much hassle. (For comparison I run as user under *nix but don't take the trouble to run my daemons under chroots, which seems to be a similar level of effort)
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I would pay $0.01 for it. But nowhere's willing to sell it to me for less than 1GPB.
Grokster was the only decent legit client for fasttrack, which is still I think the most popular network, certainly used to be. I'm sad to see it go.
The playlist sharing makes it a very convenient way to get music. You find a playlist from someone with a bunch of songs you already have on it (the software helps you), and then just right click to download any others. I think there are dedicated programs like irate that do this with specifically free music, and of course you can just use audioscrobbler and search for the songs once you find a band you like, but it's still a nice way to do things.
Because that won't help addicts at all. What should be done is the opposite - make it easy to get nicotine without tobacco. The drug itself is relatively harmless, it's all the other gunk in the plant that gets you.
Very true, which is why it is better to give users a choice. But if you're going to restrict people to one desktop environment, KDE gives you a choice of looks at the start, wheras with gnome you get one look and you better like it. (Yes, you can get your own themes for either, but that's more effort than the typical user will go to).
IMHO, GTK2+/Gnome beats the pants off of KDE in both looks and usability. KDE looks like a cheap knockoff of Microsoft Windows and is just about as stable.
Now see, to me KDE looks like what windows is trying to do but done right. Gtk is in its default look just oppressively dull and grey, and looks more like an old version of windows in terms of the actual widgets - the scrollbars and dropdown menus are identical, the buttons look pretty similar and are too rectangular visually. It's at once dull and harsh. As far as usability's concerned, all I've seen of the gnome usability focus is confirmation dialogs switching the buttons around making me overwrite a file I didn't mean to, a filemanager spawning new windows all over the place and no way to stop it short of manually editing the registry, having to make an extra click before I can actually choose where I want to save a file, and some ridiculous button naming to learn. (What does "save" do in the context of a preferences dialog? Will it dismiss the box? Will it apply the changes? The answer seems to vary from application to application. I've even seen one with save/apply/cancel/ok. Ok/Apply/Cancel is a standard buttonset that I'm used to and know what it does, whatever happened to the principle of least surprise?) And I've never had any stability problems, that sounds like fud from here.
But then again, I've only been using Linux since 1995, and *nix since 1975. What do I know.
I suspect this makes you more minimalist as goes UIs than the average person. CDE would have driven me insane if I had to use it for extended periods, the grey would have got to me. Flashy widgets do make it easier to use the thing, not because they do anything different but because it's more pleasant to be looking at them.
Yes, I've seen exactly this, and it seems to extend to distros as well - the gnome distros like redhat seem to be really rabidly anti-kde, wheras kde distros like suse was until a few days ago seemed to take a far more even-handed, "use whichever you like" approach. I think it's part of the gnome philosophy that there should be only one option for everything, and the gnome devs know best, wheras kde seems to say choice is good and you should do what you want.
So why are so many gnome users so damn happy about this? If you are a Gnome user you probaly not use Suse since thier Gnome support have never been good. My only guess is that Gnome users are fanaticly wanting to destroy KDE, erase it from this planet.
From the way gnome is still spreading fud about the qt licensing several years on, I think this is the situation. It might be because once Qt became free gnome had no real reason to exist, so they make the purpose of their existence to eliminate KDE.
Gnome winning the desktop wars would almost certainly mean more stuff for linux being pay-for rather than free software. If users are used to paying for their software, they might be more willing to pay for upgrades from their commercial linux vendors. Just a guess.
That's not KDE's fault, it's Ubuntu's. KDE works perfectly fine on many distributions without breaking them.
All that being said...Gnome is like an older Mac interface...KDE is sorta like windows...and it seems to me that Shuttlesworth is trying to capture Windows users...so using a KDE interface seems like a good idea. But, honestly, KDE is too complicated for most windows users, IMHO.
It may be too complicated for the typical windows user (though I would dispute even that. The KDE defaults are sensible, it doesn't diminish your usage experience any to have the preferences there for if you need them), but the target market is not the typical windows user but a windows user who is willing to try a new OS. Which is more likely to be a power user who wants things to fiddle with.
If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users.
It does make a difference. If gnome was the standard linux desktop I would be using windows.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now.
Why? Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant. As a desktop they are inferior. From a customer's standpoint there is no reason to standardise on gnome, ever.
The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things.
The Qt toolkit is still the best-looking toolkit on Linux, and the kde approach has given us the best desktop environment around. Full steam ahead for KDE.
Didn't look like that to me. The distros were moving to a standard DE, it's just not the one that users choose when they have the opportunity. Shttleworth is showing to me that he cares about what his users want. Forcing users to do one thing even when they would prefer to do something else so that everyone is the same is emphatically not the linux philosophy (though it is worryingly seeming to be the gnome philosophy these days)
(The US can't go to war without (IIRC it's congressional) approval, something the war against Iraq didn't have, hence the doublespeak used when discussing it.
Some even conflict with ICANN zones because ICANN deliberately introduces conflicts whenever an alternative DNS is becoming too popular. This makes it impossible on a practical level to set up an alternative DNS root and be successful with it - you can't really sell .mynewdomain under your root because ICANN can and will sell .mynewdomain to other people solely to fuck you up. What it did with e.g. .biz seems very much to be abuse of its monopoly to me.
How about that it's a global TLD? The US has its own perfectly good .us, that it made it sterile with stupid naming rules is your own problem. Companies from anywhere else should have just as much right to a .com; ideally, it should be reserved for multinational companies. Why does the US seem to regard .com as its own?
On the contrary, if you would think of your netblock when asked where you live you're the perfect person to enter.
Of course they can. Governments make all sorts of stupid things illegal.
Even if such a bill were to be passed, it would be laughed at as the public went on its merry way using older analog and unencumbered digital devices.
But if they ever need to get someone, they have something else that they're guilty of. There is a school of thought that says it's in a government's interest to have every citizen breaking the law - at that point they have control over everyone.
The recommended copyright text is "version 2 or any later version". Authors who blindly copied that will be giving their users a choice of either 2 or 3. Authors who thought about it and copied that will be getting what they want. Authors who thought about it and didn't want that, as in the case of the linux kernel, will have used a different copyright text.
The correct thing to do at 2. is stop posting the fricking dupes, not just link to them. Or fix the moderation system at 4., but what're the odds of that happening?
I tried it and just found it looked horrible. Really really horrible. It was like I'd gone back 10 years to when the best option was CDE on solaris, only worse. Yes, it doesn't really affect the functionality, but for the typical user, looks matter as well as what it can do. I'll stick with KDE with beautiful shiny shiny widgets.
KDE has awesome working drag and drop. Drag a link to a playlist into a media player and it starts playing. Drag an email into an address book and the sender gets added. Drag a file onto an IM contact and you send it to them. Etc, etc.
Because that's bad for the community, something redhat cares about, even if the kernel developers don't seem to. They probably will ship their own xen version for the moment, but the less difference between their kernel and the mainline one the better it is for everyone.
Like I always say in the Real threads, it doesn't matter how big scumbags they are, they deserve the protection of the law like everyone else. They've been wronged here and they deserve compensation, regardless of anything else.
I think the issue is they tried to get their patented algorithms into a memory standard, which would have required everyone who wanted to make ram to license their patents, which seems unfair. By all means, use your patented methods to make your ram 3x faster than everyone else's, and license them to other people who want their ram to be faster, but once you start saying everyone has to license your patents that's going too far.
They intentionally represent proponents of science, so I think calling them whackos is fully justified.
No he doesn't, not only is there no such word as "Exteded", but TLD stands for "Top Level Domain", which .mobi certainly is. Try again.
You want people to be able to send each other links to websites. That's what friends often do. But you want more, if they're fixing up an unreal tournament game they should be able to send each other unreal:// links. If they're going to an irc channel it's nice to let them send each other irc:// links. They might want to discuss a newsgroup, in which case they need to be able to send each other news:// links, and so on. The only logical response to this, and the one AIM adopts, is to hand off any URL to the OS and let it handle it. The problem that arises is that windows uses URLs to do local stuff, and doesn't make any distinction between them - iirc you can run arbitrary installed programs via system:// urls, meaning you might well be able to just make a link which would format someone's harddisk.
Besides that, in Windows isn't there a way to run programs (like chat) as an innocuous (nobody) user limited only to that user's home directory and with limited write capabilities?
Not really. It's getting better but for a long time it was very hard to do this in any useful way, the restricted accounts are too restricted. I'm reasonably security-conscious but gave up using a restricted account, it's just too much hassle. (For comparison I run as user under *nix but don't take the trouble to run my daemons under chroots, which seems to be a similar level of effort)