Funny you mention that... I just got a Dell catalogue in the mail and the back cover was pimping some sort of new Customer Care plan. The glossy ad has a picture of a Dell laptop with steaming hot coffee getting spilled all over it.
People, people, people... The RIAA and MPAA look to slashdot to find out which file sharing systems to target next.
I'd also like to add that nobody here should mention the fact that you can Google for nearly every single torrent listing site in existance. Nor that.torrent files can be traded on websites, email, and chat rooms. Nor that there are dozens of bittorrent clients available for free download.
That being said, the best thing about the bit torrent technology is that it's almost impossible for the RIAA to control it. The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.
This is what everyone here on Slashdot said about Napster when it was new. The biggest possible downsides to BT is that isn't fully distributed, not even close to truly anonymous, and its traffic is easily blockable. These were the problems that Gnutella was supposed to address and we see how far that went.
Yes, the link that I had posted was not the oldest because I was more concerned with keeping the parent from getting modded any higher than with digging through the mailing list archives. Now I know where to get it, though.
And, btw, I still do consider the original a troll, or at best a ill-planned hissyfit. Anonymous or not.
It is similar to Bugzilla, except it's not software bug oriented
We use bugzilla where I work as a kind of task tracker and don't find it at all "bug oriented". With a small amount of planning and the right configuration, Bugzilla works great as a general issue or task tracker. You could seriously do a global search on the source code and replace every instance of "bug" with "task", nobody would be the wiser. It was a little strange at first to be asked how you were doing on a particular "bug" when the "bug" was something like setting up a new wireless gateway.
Before I came onboard, they tried to use RequestTracker but found it unusable due to the high load it placed on the system when only a couple users were logged in. They said they didn't have the inclination to debug it, so they decided to try Bugzilla next and have been using it since. (Sometimes we use it to file actual software bugs too.;) )
We also looked at Mantis, but were horrified at how limited it was. But a bug-tracking system like Bugzilla is almost certainly overkill for a one-man todo list, which is what the submitter sounded like he wanted. For this, I tend to throw all those little tasks into a text file and then paste them into my personal wiki at the end of the day, where they never get seen again. (This is what has allowed me to post to Slashdot so frequently.)
Why are they still developing Mozilla instead of just developing Firefox, Thunderbird, and the core?
Because Mozilla is not simply a web browser. This is a misconception that a lot of people have. Before anything else, Mozilla is a technology. Other products such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and a slew of other third-party applications use Mozilla as their base platform. The fact that the technology and the application suite are both called "Mozilla" is very confusing. Although I can't find anything on this anymore, the old Mozilla web site explicitly stated that Mozilla-the-application-suite was for reference and testing and that external parties were responsible for making complete software packages. For a quite a while, they even refused to make binaries available. Bottom line: end users shouldn't be using the Mozilla suite unless they are testing or developing the underlying technology. Well, in theory.
Firefox, Thunderbird are still pet projects.
They are hardly pet projects. The big push began over a year ago to make Firefox (then "Phoenix") and Thunderbird the main focus of future development. The main difference between Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird is that the latter were specifically designed to be fit for use by the general public. The Mozilla suite will still probably be around forever as it's the implementation of the technology that the developers hack upon.
Firefox has been in development for a lot of time.
Are you mad? According to this MozillaZine article the first Phoenix nightlies became available on or around September 5, 2002. If you generously estimate that they had been working on the pre-0.1 code behind closed doors for a few months prior, that means that Firefox has been in development for almost two years. You call THAT a long time? To have a piece of software--let alone something as complex as a web browser--almost ready for 1.0 in two years is nothing short of astonishing.
That is why their development is so slow.
I have no evidence of whether or not Firefox and Thuderbird development is "slow" (or what you would compare it to in order to arrive at that descision), but based on what I have presented above, I think it's fair to say that "slow" probably isn't an apt term in this case.
I noticed this behavior after a bunch of modifications to Slashdot happened. The problem went away when I stopped going through my junkbuster proxy, so I assume that it was slashdot's ad stuff that was mucking up the browser. Either that or a new subversive plot by CmdrTaco to FORCE me to view slashdot ads. Kinda funny that this is the one website on the whole net where I can't filter out ads without disasterous results.
You may not realize it, but this makes firefox render a zillion times faster even on the fastest of systems.
Okay, but I'm a bit skeptical: if it makes things so much faster, why isn't it enabled by default since speed is one of Firefox's main marketed features?
Our University Bookstore was outrageous; if you can buy elsewhere, do it!
After spending nearly $400 on two semesters' worth of books at a community college, I got fed up and went online to see what I could find. I found that buying used books online almost *always* saved you money as compared to the exame same books (even used) at a college bookstore.
Although I hate to promote eBay and its ilk, sellers on half.com came in as the best bargain. You just have to order the books well in advance and well before the semester starts to both save money and return the book to the seller if he or she wasn't completely honest about the condition of the book.
As a side note, after the semester was over, I turned around the resold the books and came quite close to getting all of my money back on them.
You do not choose an OS based on whether it has been ported to wristwatches and mainframes, unless of course, you want one for your wristwatch or mainframe.
Of course not, I was just trying to make a point about Linux being more flexible and picked scalability as one example. Another example could be hardware support. FreeBSD supports a lot of hardware, but not nearly as large a variety as Linux, especially in the multimedia realm. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that either, as FreeBSD is designed to be an outstanding network server before anything else.
I bought a brand-new laptop recently and would have loved to put FreeBSD on it if for no other reason than it would have been much easier to keep updated than any Linux distro. But FreeBSD just doesn't support all the weird chipsets they pack inside otherwise normal laptops like this. Fedora Core 1, on the other hand, worked great with every piece of hardware on it except for the winmodem. Later on, I eventually got that working too.
Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD. I put it on every machine I can where it makes sense to. I hang out on a few of the mailing lists and contribute to FreeBSD development and documentation wherever I can. But I'm not going to be a zealot about it, because there are other operating systems out there that I rely on too.
This sounds similar in spirit to what emulator and video game fans have been doing for years, only the video game translations are legal.
In the post-Atari era (but before the PSX started making it big), an American-made video game was a rare and often horrible occurance. The only way the video games got translated for release over here was if the company thought that it would make a profit on the game and if it fit an "American" audience, which excluded almost all role-playing games.
Once emulation of the SNES became feasible, dedicated bi-lingual fans began translating the games by themselves or in teams and provided binary patches against the non-translated versions of the ROMs. This can't be compared in any way to open source, as another poster compared the translated manga, because almost none of the translators ever released any of the tools or documents that they used in the translation.
Video game translation is still a thriving community today and is one of the best ways to experience some of the greatest games that never saw the light of day on these shores.
1) I haven't seen any Linux wristwatches. While I'm sure there may be some out there, I seriously doubt they're anything more than cheap toys.
Here is one and here's another. Both were built around 5 years ago, back when people were still actually surprised by such a feat.
While they aren't in production, they aren't exactly cheap toys either. The IBM Linux wristwatch aimed to have the same capabilities as a Palmpilot. The other is a videophone developed by a wearable-computer inventor.
But as for other small embedded devices, I have seen Free/NetBSD on consumer routers and bridges.
Yes, FreeBSD exists on routers and bridges and rightly so; it's got stellar networking performance and stability. But there are many more embedded Linux systems simply because it is a far more flexible code base with support for a LOT more architectures than FreeBSD. And you tend to see Linux in a wider variety of devices, such as the myriad of set top box devices and the like.
There is no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be put on a big-iron mainframe.
Yes there is: because it would be a lot more work porting Linux. There's no one (or at least not many) currently working on putting FreeBSD on big iron whereas every few months you hear about some company or university adding enterprise and mainframe features to Linux.
But as far as I can tell, only IBM ever bothered to put Linux on a mainframe anyway.
They're possibly the only ones to put it on a mainframe and sell it commercially, but this is IBM we're talking about. They're not exactly tiny in the mainframe market. And they aren't the only ones working on getting Linux to scale to the mainframe level by any means.
So it's a pointless argument.
No, it is a perfectly valid argument.
I like and appreciate FreeBSD as much as anyone else, but I'm not a very good system administrator if I don't evaluate and acknowledge a product's weaknesses as much as its strengths.
The answer is not history, it's that they are different kinds of "products" with different strengths and weaknesses.
Agreed 100%. I half expected all of these comments to center around the old BSD vs. GPL dead horse, but thankfully haven't run across one yet.
Now, in regards to the plethora of comments regarding either Linux or FreeBSD as being superior... take a hike, guys. Neither is superior. The main differences between FreeBSD and Linux can be summarized like this:
- Linux: Flexibility - FreeBSD: Stability
Example: Linux makes a darn good high-traffic web server, but FreeBSD makes an even better one. However, you won't see too many (or any) companies working on porting FreeBSD to wristwatches or big-iron supercomputers like you do with Linux because the FreeBSD kernel doesn't scale well in either direction. It isn't even the best performer, but it's impossible to beat for reliability on its target platforms.
I prefer FreeBSD on my systems, but won't hesitate to use Linux where applicable. I also believe that FreeBSD development is lightyears ahead of any other open-source project in terms of organization. It's simply beautiful. And as a system administrator, I really appreciate how brain-dead simple it is to upgrade FreeBSD.
I've always thought that the perfect cheap, low-level computer to teach Computer Science students assembly was with the one that most of them already have: A TI calculator.
There's an entire subculture devoted to programming these things and it's amazing what some have done. I've been tempted so many times to take up assembly on my calculator, but for some reason my TI-86 was just never all that popular and TI no longer makes cables for it.
Right now I'm using pekwm, which has no eye candy (can't even seem to get many of the themes to work), but is stable and fast, and gives me tabbed windows which I do see as a major benefit for the type of work I do (and yes, I am a software developer). It also gives me flexible and powerful key bindings, which I find more efficient than a toolbar/panel what have you.
It's not all about just moving windows around and launching new programs. The single solitary reason that I use KDE on my laptop is because if someone hands me a CD, there's an extremely good chance that KDE will allow me to view whatever's on that disc by automatically launching the appropriate program. Graphics, web pages, PDFs, word documents, whatever. Konqueror also doubles as a superior web browser.
Standalone window managers don't typically offer this kind of slick integration between applications.
I also like having a plethora of smaller utilities on hand without having to install them all myself. KDE provides these with KCalc, KEdit, KmPlot, KPPP, and a slew of simple games to ease the boredom on long flights.
The window and desktop management of KDE is also almost as good as any other window manager I've tried. But then, I have faily simple window management requirements.
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window?
It depends. For trivial operations like renaming a single files or moving or copying a whole directory, the command line and a GUI file manager are going to be about the same amount of effort.
However, moving a large number of files from one directory to another, when the files you want can't all be matched by a particular glob pattern, is much easier the drag-and-drop way. This is also less prone to error as you are looking at each individual file, not just silently hoping that the pattern you just wrote applies to every file you want and not to any file you don't.
Konqueror also lets you peek into tarballs of any kind to view (not just list) the files inside without making the user manually untar it into a temporary directory first. This is pretty cool, in my book.
But I still use the command line a hell of a lot, because I use it most often to run actual commands and such that can't be done with a file manager. And when I'm at a command line, I'll rarely go through the effort to switch to a file manager just to copy or otherwise fiddle with a file that's already within arm's reach.
I use my GNOME Desktop as a tool. I'm not sure why you think a full fledged desktop can't be used as a tool for getting real work done.
I have to agree with this. I actually have two desktops, a FreeBSD workstation with fvwm that I use for system administration and a Linux laptop with KDE that I use for almost everything else. Both the minimalist fvwm desktop and the full-fledged KDE desktop are my tools.
On this workstation, I browse the web and open terminal windows to administer machines on the network. Nothing ever changes and I rarely need to do anything else on it. It Just Works and make me extremely productive.
The laptop, however, goes with me to school and on the road where I need a lot more flexibility. For example, if someone passes me a CD, almost anything could be on it. Graphics, word processor documents, spreadsheets, web pages, movies, mp3s, you name it. All I have to do is pop the disc in and Konqueror can usually handle whatever's on the disc or it can pass it off to OpenOffice. Another example: I frequently have to dial up to get internet access in various locations. Without the incredibly easy-to-use KPPP, I'd have to go in and edit a bunch of configuration files manually. What a royal pain.
I wouldn't be able to function as I currently do if I didn't have both kinds of desktops at my disposal. Just this week a crisis occurred with my laptop and I was stuck trying to do everything in Windows for a week. (My modem wouldn't handshake with the other modem in Linux, but it would with Windows.) I thought, "hey, whatever, I can get used to this." Wrong. After 3 days I was ready to throw the computer out the window, but luckily I managed to get the modem working.
Why do they put a default theme that is "nowhere near finished" in a product that's "due very soon"?
First, I've seen screenshots of the new theme and it doesn't look "nowhere near finished." It looked like there was quite a bit already implemented, and since Firefox is just a browser, there's only the widgets on a few windows to implement rather than an entire suite of applications (read: Mozilla).
Second, after a quick glace of the screenshots, I don't see any huge differences between the old theme and the new one. The only obvious change, to me at least, was triangular Back and Forward arrows. I don't get why so many people called the new theme ugly and unusable when it looks so similar to the old one.
Agreed. As a system administrator, I'd be lost if I didn't have FreeBSD (and to a lesser extent, Linux) because Windows:
* Is not particularly easy to set up in any configuration beyond a simple LAN (and once you manage to set it up, the performance is highly sub-par once you've added on all your third-party network management, backup, and anti-virus software)
* Does not run well or at all on antiquated hardware (read: that discarded PC sitting next to the dumpster)
* Often does not support some old, but useful devices
* Does not come with 99% of the software that I use on a daily basis
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you mention that... I just got a Dell catalogue in the mail and the back cover was pimping some sort of new Customer Care plan. The glossy ad has a picture of a Dell laptop with steaming hot coffee getting spilled all over it.
Was this the deal your dad had?
Just don't forget to lock out the registry lock.
People, people, people... The RIAA and MPAA look to slashdot to find out which file sharing systems to target next.
I'd also like to add that nobody here should mention the fact that you can Google for nearly every single torrent listing site in existance. Nor that
Let's keep this one to ourselves, shall we?
That being said, the best thing about the bit torrent technology is that it's almost impossible for the RIAA to control it. The cat is out of the bag and theres no way it will be pushed back in.
This is what everyone here on Slashdot said about Napster when it was new. The biggest possible downsides to BT is that isn't fully distributed, not even close to truly anonymous, and its traffic is easily blockable. These were the problems that Gnutella was supposed to address and we see how far that went.
Yes, the link that I had posted was not the oldest because I was more concerned with keeping the parent from getting modded any higher than with digging through the mailing list archives. Now I know where to get it, though.
And, btw, I still do consider the original a troll, or at best a ill-planned hissyfit. Anonymous or not.
Attention moderators:
This is a very old troll. Don't fall for it. It's already scored at 4.
How can the application assume there is a "close" provided by the WM.
Because if a window manager can't actually manage its windows, it's just a lost cause altogether.
Hey, they invented the semicolon for a reason.
It is similar to Bugzilla, except it's not software bug oriented
We use bugzilla where I work as a kind of task tracker and don't find it at all "bug oriented". With a small amount of planning and the right configuration, Bugzilla works great as a general issue or task tracker. You could seriously do a global search on the source code and replace every instance of "bug" with "task", nobody would be the wiser. It was a little strange at first to be asked how you were doing on a particular "bug" when the "bug" was something like setting up a new wireless gateway.
Before I came onboard, they tried to use RequestTracker but found it unusable due to the high load it placed on the system when only a couple users were logged in. They said they didn't have the inclination to debug it, so they decided to try Bugzilla next and have been using it since. (Sometimes we use it to file actual software bugs too.
We also looked at Mantis, but were horrified at how limited it was. But a bug-tracking system like Bugzilla is almost certainly overkill for a one-man todo list, which is what the submitter sounded like he wanted. For this, I tend to throw all those little tasks into a text file and then paste them into my personal wiki at the end of the day, where they never get seen again. (This is what has allowed me to post to Slashdot so frequently.)
Why are they still developing Mozilla instead of just developing Firefox, Thunderbird, and the core?
Because Mozilla is not simply a web browser. This is a misconception that a lot of people have. Before anything else, Mozilla is a technology. Other products such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and a slew of other third-party applications use Mozilla as their base platform. The fact that the technology and the application suite are both called "Mozilla" is very confusing. Although I can't find anything on this anymore, the old Mozilla web site explicitly stated that Mozilla-the-application-suite was for reference and testing and that external parties were responsible for making complete software packages. For a quite a while, they even refused to make binaries available. Bottom line: end users shouldn't be using the Mozilla suite unless they are testing or developing the underlying technology. Well, in theory.
Firefox, Thunderbird are still pet projects.
They are hardly pet projects. The big push began over a year ago to make Firefox (then "Phoenix") and Thunderbird the main focus of future development. The main difference between Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird is that the latter were specifically designed to be fit for use by the general public. The Mozilla suite will still probably be around forever as it's the implementation of the technology that the developers hack upon.
Firefox has been in development for a lot of time.
Are you mad? According to this MozillaZine article the first Phoenix nightlies became available on or around September 5, 2002. If you generously estimate that they had been working on the pre-0.1 code behind closed doors for a few months prior, that means that Firefox has been in development for almost two years. You call THAT a long time? To have a piece of software--let alone something as complex as a web browser--almost ready for 1.0 in two years is nothing short of astonishing.
That is why their development is so slow.
I have no evidence of whether or not Firefox and Thuderbird development is "slow" (or what you would compare it to in order to arrive at that descision), but based on what I have presented above, I think it's fair to say that "slow" probably isn't an apt term in this case.
I noticed this behavior after a bunch of modifications to Slashdot happened. The problem went away when I stopped going through my junkbuster proxy, so I assume that it was slashdot's ad stuff that was mucking up the browser. Either that or a new subversive plot by CmdrTaco to FORCE me to view slashdot ads. Kinda funny that this is the one website on the whole net where I can't filter out ads without disasterous results.
For those who read their comments newest-first, allow me to summarize 99% of the comments for this article:
1) "The new default theme sucks."
2) "It trashed my profile, crashed my computer, and lewd gestures at my wife."
3) "It seems 149x faster than 0.8."
You may not realize it, but this makes firefox render a zillion times faster even on the fastest of systems.
Okay, but I'm a bit skeptical: if it makes things so much faster, why isn't it enabled by default since speed is one of Firefox's main marketed features?
Our University Bookstore was outrageous; if you can buy elsewhere, do it!
After spending nearly $400 on two semesters' worth of books at a community college, I got fed up and went online to see what I could find. I found that buying used books online almost *always* saved you money as compared to the exame same books (even used) at a college bookstore.
Although I hate to promote eBay and its ilk, sellers on half.com came in as the best bargain. You just have to order the books well in advance and well before the semester starts to both save money and return the book to the seller if he or she wasn't completely honest about the condition of the book.
As a side note, after the semester was over, I turned around the resold the books and came quite close to getting all of my money back on them.
You do not choose an OS based on whether it has been ported to wristwatches and mainframes, unless of course, you want one for your wristwatch or mainframe.
Of course not, I was just trying to make a point about Linux being more flexible and picked scalability as one example. Another example could be hardware support. FreeBSD supports a lot of hardware, but not nearly as large a variety as Linux, especially in the multimedia realm. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that either, as FreeBSD is designed to be an outstanding network server before anything else.
I bought a brand-new laptop recently and would have loved to put FreeBSD on it if for no other reason than it would have been much easier to keep updated than any Linux distro. But FreeBSD just doesn't support all the weird chipsets they pack inside otherwise normal laptops like this. Fedora Core 1, on the other hand, worked great with every piece of hardware on it except for the winmodem. Later on, I eventually got that working too.
Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD. I put it on every machine I can where it makes sense to. I hang out on a few of the mailing lists and contribute to FreeBSD development and documentation wherever I can. But I'm not going to be a zealot about it, because there are other operating systems out there that I rely on too.
This sounds similar in spirit to what emulator and video game fans have been doing for years, only the video game translations are legal.
In the post-Atari era (but before the PSX started making it big), an American-made video game was a rare and often horrible occurance. The only way the video games got translated for release over here was if the company thought that it would make a profit on the game and if it fit an "American" audience, which excluded almost all role-playing games.
Once emulation of the SNES became feasible, dedicated bi-lingual fans began translating the games by themselves or in teams and provided binary patches against the non-translated versions of the ROMs. This can't be compared in any way to open source, as another poster compared the translated manga, because almost none of the translators ever released any of the tools or documents that they used in the translation.
Video game translation is still a thriving community today and is one of the best ways to experience some of the greatest games that never saw the light of day on these shores.
1) I haven't seen any Linux wristwatches. While I'm sure there may be some out there, I seriously doubt they're anything more than cheap toys.
Here is one and here's another. Both were built around 5 years ago, back when people were still actually surprised by such a feat.
While they aren't in production, they aren't exactly cheap toys either. The IBM Linux wristwatch aimed to have the same capabilities as a Palmpilot. The other is a videophone developed by a wearable-computer inventor.
But as for other small embedded devices, I have seen Free/NetBSD on consumer routers and bridges.
Yes, FreeBSD exists on routers and bridges and rightly so; it's got stellar networking performance and stability. But there are many more embedded Linux systems simply because it is a far more flexible code base with support for a LOT more architectures than FreeBSD. And you tend to see Linux in a wider variety of devices, such as the myriad of set top box devices and the like.
There is no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be put on a big-iron mainframe.
Yes there is: because it would be a lot more work porting Linux. There's no one (or at least not many) currently working on putting FreeBSD on big iron whereas every few months you hear about some company or university adding enterprise and mainframe features to Linux.
But as far as I can tell, only IBM ever bothered to put Linux on a mainframe anyway.
They're possibly the only ones to put it on a mainframe and sell it commercially, but this is IBM we're talking about. They're not exactly tiny in the mainframe market. And they aren't the only ones working on getting Linux to scale to the mainframe level by any means.
So it's a pointless argument.
No, it is a perfectly valid argument.
I like and appreciate FreeBSD as much as anyone else, but I'm not a very good system administrator if I don't evaluate and acknowledge a product's weaknesses as much as its strengths.
The answer is not history, it's that they are different kinds of "products" with different strengths and weaknesses.
Agreed 100%. I half expected all of these comments to center around the old BSD vs. GPL dead horse, but thankfully haven't run across one yet.
Now, in regards to the plethora of comments regarding either Linux or FreeBSD as being superior... take a hike, guys. Neither is superior. The main differences between FreeBSD and Linux can be summarized like this:
- Linux: Flexibility
- FreeBSD: Stability
Example: Linux makes a darn good high-traffic web server, but FreeBSD makes an even better one. However, you won't see too many (or any) companies working on porting FreeBSD to wristwatches or big-iron supercomputers like you do with Linux because the FreeBSD kernel doesn't scale well in either direction. It isn't even the best performer, but it's impossible to beat for reliability on its target platforms.
I prefer FreeBSD on my systems, but won't hesitate to use Linux where applicable. I also believe that FreeBSD development is lightyears ahead of any other open-source project in terms of organization. It's simply beautiful. And as a system administrator, I really appreciate how brain-dead simple it is to upgrade FreeBSD.
But you're not bitter or anything, right?
Or, in English, even dumb people want to be smarter than they are.
I've always thought that the perfect cheap, low-level computer to teach Computer Science students assembly was with the one that most of them already have: A TI calculator.
There's an entire subculture devoted to programming these things and it's amazing what some have done. I've been tempted so many times to take up assembly on my calculator, but for some reason my TI-86 was just never all that popular and TI no longer makes cables for it.
Right now I'm using pekwm, which has no eye candy (can't even seem to get many of the themes to work), but is stable and fast, and gives me tabbed windows which I do see as a major benefit for the type of work I do (and yes, I am a software developer). It also gives me flexible and powerful key bindings, which I find more efficient than a toolbar/panel what have you.
It's not all about just moving windows around and launching new programs. The single solitary reason that I use KDE on my laptop is because if someone hands me a CD, there's an extremely good chance that KDE will allow me to view whatever's on that disc by automatically launching the appropriate program. Graphics, web pages, PDFs, word documents, whatever. Konqueror also doubles as a superior web browser.
Standalone window managers don't typically offer this kind of slick integration between applications.
I also like having a plethora of smaller utilities on hand without having to install them all myself. KDE provides these with KCalc, KEdit, KmPlot, KPPP, and a slew of simple games to ease the boredom on long flights.
The window and desktop management of KDE is also almost as good as any other window manager I've tried. But then, I have faily simple window management requirements.
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window?
It depends. For trivial operations like renaming a single files or moving or copying a whole directory, the command line and a GUI file manager are going to be about the same amount of effort.
However, moving a large number of files from one directory to another, when the files you want can't all be matched by a particular glob pattern, is much easier the drag-and-drop way. This is also less prone to error as you are looking at each individual file, not just silently hoping that the pattern you just wrote applies to every file you want and not to any file you don't.
Konqueror also lets you peek into tarballs of any kind to view (not just list) the files inside without making the user manually untar it into a temporary directory first. This is pretty cool, in my book.
But I still use the command line a hell of a lot, because I use it most often to run actual commands and such that can't be done with a file manager. And when I'm at a command line, I'll rarely go through the effort to switch to a file manager just to copy or otherwise fiddle with a file that's already within arm's reach.
I use my GNOME Desktop as a tool. I'm not sure why you think a full fledged desktop can't be used as a tool for getting real work done.
I have to agree with this. I actually have two desktops, a FreeBSD workstation with fvwm that I use for system administration and a Linux laptop with KDE that I use for almost everything else. Both the minimalist fvwm desktop and the full-fledged KDE desktop are my tools.
On this workstation, I browse the web and open terminal windows to administer machines on the network. Nothing ever changes and I rarely need to do anything else on it. It Just Works and make me extremely productive.
The laptop, however, goes with me to school and on the road where I need a lot more flexibility. For example, if someone passes me a CD, almost anything could be on it. Graphics, word processor documents, spreadsheets, web pages, movies, mp3s, you name it. All I have to do is pop the disc in and Konqueror can usually handle whatever's on the disc or it can pass it off to OpenOffice. Another example: I frequently have to dial up to get internet access in various locations. Without the incredibly easy-to-use KPPP, I'd have to go in and edit a bunch of configuration files manually. What a royal pain.
I wouldn't be able to function as I currently do if I didn't have both kinds of desktops at my disposal. Just this week a crisis occurred with my laptop and I was stuck trying to do everything in Windows for a week. (My modem wouldn't handshake with the other modem in Linux, but it would with Windows.) I thought, "hey, whatever, I can get used to this." Wrong. After 3 days I was ready to throw the computer out the window, but luckily I managed to get the modem working.
Why do they put a default theme that is "nowhere near finished" in a product that's "due very soon"?
First, I've seen screenshots of the new theme and it doesn't look "nowhere near finished." It looked like there was quite a bit already implemented, and since Firefox is just a browser, there's only the widgets on a few windows to implement rather than an entire suite of applications (read: Mozilla).
Second, after a quick glace of the screenshots, I don't see any huge differences between the old theme and the new one. The only obvious change, to me at least, was triangular Back and Forward arrows. I don't get why so many people called the new theme ugly and unusable when it looks so similar to the old one.
For many of us, Windows can't do what's required.
Agreed. As a system administrator, I'd be lost if I didn't have FreeBSD (and to a lesser extent, Linux) because Windows:
* Is not particularly easy to set up in any configuration beyond a simple LAN (and once you manage to set it up, the performance is highly sub-par once you've added on all your third-party network management, backup, and anti-virus software)
* Does not run well or at all on antiquated hardware (read: that discarded PC sitting next to the dumpster)
* Often does not support some old, but useful devices
* Does not come with 99% of the software that I use on a daily basis