Things I'd like to see from GNOME.
on
Gnome 2.10 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Less feature churn.
Less feature-creeping bloat.
More consolidation of dependencies.
More fixing of the long-standing bugs.
More delivery of long-standing promises.
Every release seems to have a lot of superficial changes that don't seem to buy anything, but don't really address the issues that everyone seems to complain about. Example: you'd think that the gnome-panel would be pretty ironed out after a few years, but there are still at least a dozen "critical" unresolved bugs for it, where the panel just decides to crash or hang.
It's not as glamorous as mating a couple of Bonobos and getting a new SVG Pango baby, but please, for the sake of your users, focus on the fit and finish. What good is a HIG if the average user is put off by all the splinters?
It was the first paragraph that rubbed me the wrong way:...
So, click on the 'Edit' button which was just a few inches away from the text. Insert a phrase that makes the statement more neutral, without removing details others have added.
American wire gauge (AWG) is a way of specifying wire sizes, where each gauge represents a different wire diameter. It was originally applied to non-ferrous, conducting wire, but lately is commonly used
in diverse related applications, such as a standard to specify body piercing jewelry sizes in the United States.
If you know why it rubs you the wrong way, what have you got to lose in improving the content?
There are also different editing styles in the sense of how bold people are willing to be:
* Generally, most of us think we should be bold in updating pages. * Virtually no one behaves as though previous authors need to be consulted before making changes; if we thought that, we'd make little progress. * Quite the contrary: some Wikipedians think you should not beat around the bush at all--simply change a page immediately if you see a problem, rather than waiting to discuss changes that you believe need to be made. Discussion becomes the last resort. * An intermediate viewpoint accords that dialogue should be respected, but at the same time a minor tweak should be accepted. In this view, to edit radically or not will often depend on the context--which seems reasonable enough. * There is a place for all of these attitudes on Wikipedia.
With large proposed deletions or replacements, it may be best to suggest changes in a discussion, lest the original author is discouraged from posting again. One person's improvement is another's desecration, and nobody likes to see their work destroyed without warning.
So, whatever you do, try to preserve information. Reasons for removing bits of an article include:
* duplication * irrelevancy * patent nonsense * copyright violations * inaccuracy, or where the accuracy of the information cannot be established
Alternatives include:
* rephrasing while keeping the content * moving text within an article or to another article (existing or new) * adding more of what you think is important to make an article more balanced
I saw this yesterday, and wondered when we're finally going to see these things advertised in architectural sizes. You walk into a store. "We only sell them in the standard 4'x8', just like sheetrock and plywood. Go to a custom house to get a trimmed down version." When? I doubt 2010. 2020? 2030?
Painters have long been trained that the best way to control curves is to paint with their shoulders, not their wrists.
Long strokes, where the curve is important, should be drawn with the body or arms; short strokes, where the endpoints are important, should be done with the hand or fingers. Which is more applicable to selecting items from a menu onscreen? The curve doesn't matter. The endpoints matter.
A co-worker has to use that piece of junk. It's not a joystick, it slides around the desktop just like a mouse. Except you have to hold your hand vertically. And the buttons suck. This takes all the fine control out of your hand (where it causes problems for some people) and into your elbow and shoulder. If you want to know what it's like to pick small menu items with this poor excuse for an electronic dildo, try doing calligraphy with your shoulders.
Diplomacy takes a lot more talking and a lot less board-play. On every round, an adjudicator would listen to all the move orders, and move all the pieces simultaneously. The game was in how you lie to whom, not particularly about moving the pieces around on the board.
There used to be an automatic Diplomacy adjudicator by email -- this would let folks take hours or days to run each round. This worked out well for a group of friends at work at lunch time. We'd get the new board layout from the adjudicator daemon at 10am, we'd do all our deal-making during lunch (and just afterwards in private offices if we were feeling sneaky), and we'd email our moves by 2pm at the latest.
The adjudicator we used was at the University of Washington, but I think there were others. Maybe some still exist. It's been years.
I think it would be more appropriate to send your comments to CmdrTaco's bosses. It reflects poorly on all of the OSTG sites, to allow it to be run with such a cavalier attitude toward fairness, accuracy, and craftsmanship. CmdrTaco may have started the site as a "whatever I want" blog, but now it's got a life of its own, a responsibility to the community, and he's got a boss to whom he answers.
I agree...the more we "police" the internet ourselves, the less the government will need to regulate it.
An' if we take 'em out o'the holdin' cell afore their trial, an' string 'em up inna tree, then the liberal activist judges cain't set 'em free! Who's wit' me? Grab yer hoods an' meet me by the libary at half past midnight. We're gonna do some justice.
I like his visual style, and even many of the storylines. But it seems like half the time he's apologizing for not keeping up with the strip... I doubt he'd go far in a 5x/wk commitment.
Hm, I've been mulling over some ideas and characters for something like this. If I had heard about this pool a month or a week ago, I could have given it a shot. Who knows. I doubt it would be fair to join late. But telling us after the contest is under way... well...
The server's slashdotted. Can someone post a mirror of the rules?
Is it just a coincidence that he is frustrated by the progress of a new open BIOS project because his Free kernel project has languished in obscurity and incompleteness for a decade?
Come on. Intel only started their project in the past couple years. If you can't finish Hurd on your own, don't gripe about other projects which aren't moving fast enough for you. Or, hey, maybe you could look in the other kernels... you know, the Open Source kernels which aren't owned by the FSF. They seem to be able to do the job. They've been running all this time, while Hurd hasn't.
Sure, you're going to say Hurd runs. Well, where's the GNU/GNU Distro?
I'd like to see some high-profile news articles about MPAA suing the producers, the screeners, the guild members who leak out all those freebie discs. That'd be good for the debate, but I'm not gonna see CNN (a division of Time Warner) covering this sort of thing.
The writeup had no link to Rasterman's response. Unless the writeup WAS Rasterman's response, but that seems a bit weak to me. I'd like to know more about what Rasterman felt on these topics. A blog entry with some meat on it, some details about WHAT is "the right direction" and "what we've been saying." If this is all there is, well, (yawn).
Honestly. I haven't had a TV/Cable connection for the past seven years. I haven't missed it at all. All my friends drone on and on about the latest episode of "Star Trek: the Berman Tragedy" or "Friends II: Las Vegas," but I honestly don't envy their ability to keep track of the latest shows. So-called news regarding ideas like "Survivor: Soyuz," Martha Stewart's version of "The Apprentice," and sequels to "The Simple Life" just enforce my resolve to not care about television at all.
Apparently, this list is ranking the popularity of "gadgets," not seminal or influential technologies. I read the word "gadget" as an indication that you get it and use it because you like it, not because it's somehow a world-changing concept.
I mean, come on, #100 is the rhinestone-on-bluejeans-affixing Bedazzler?! Of course this isn't serious list of technologies.
If you consult Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's omnibus reference, Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations, you would consider other ways of phrasing that, such as "more states that wioll haven passed bills." Hope this helps.
All this about letters from "Wozniak" to a company named "Apple."
Credibility requires context. Someone unfamiliar with any of those proper nouns will have zero context, so there will be zero credibility. Add context, and things start to fall into place. Not every business needs to have a respectable name like "Federated Usable Computational Devices, Inc." and not every person must be a Smith or a Jones.
A 5x5 go board is not a quarter of a full scale board. It is only roughly a quarter in each dimension. A full go board, if I recall, at the size most people play, is 19 by 19 intersections. That's 361 positions. A 5x5 only has 25 positions. Each intersection can theoretically contain three states.
In the past couple days, people have been talking about "cracking" an 80 bit hash with a 69 bit effort. It's logarithmic, people. 69 bits is not three-quarters of 80 bits, it's a factor of 0.000488 in terms of the workload to crack it.
SHA-1 is now 0.000488 (4.88*10-4) as strong as it was. And by my calculator, 5x5 go is 4.866*10-161 as hard as a brute-force solution as a 19x19 board would be.
Sorry, can't trademark "being an asshat." Trademarks cover a design or a word which accompanies a series of the owner's publications. Trademarks are only in force as long as they are vigorously enforced by the owner.
"Being an asshat" would be a patent. Patents cover a process, and have a mostly fixed timespan. Scott McNealy's patent on being an asshat has finally expired, and now the process of being an asshat has been added to the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
- Less feature churn.
- Less feature-creeping bloat.
- More consolidation of dependencies.
- More fixing of the long-standing bugs.
- More delivery of long-standing promises.
Every release seems to have a lot of superficial changes that don't seem to buy anything, but don't really address the issues that everyone seems to complain about. Example: you'd think that the gnome-panel would be pretty ironed out after a few years, but there are still at least a dozen "critical" unresolved bugs for it, where the panel just decides to crash or hang.It's not as glamorous as mating a couple of Bonobos and getting a new SVG Pango baby, but please, for the sake of your users, focus on the fit and finish. What good is a HIG if the average user is put off by all the splinters?
It was the first paragraph that rubbed me the wrong way: ...
So, click on the 'Edit' button which was just a few inches away from the text. Insert a phrase that makes the statement more neutral, without removing details others have added.
If you know why it rubs you the wrong way, what have you got to lose in improving the content?
There's room for many types of editors.
I saw this yesterday, and wondered when we're finally going to see these things advertised in architectural sizes. You walk into a store. "We only sell them in the standard 4'x8', just like sheetrock and plywood. Go to a custom house to get a trimmed down version." When? I doubt 2010. 2020? 2030?
Did you really mean to ask how many got "tossed" to make an 82-incher? Oh, wrong interpretation of "tossed." Sorry.
Long strokes, where the curve is important, should be drawn with the body or arms; short strokes, where the endpoints are important, should be done with the hand or fingers. Which is more applicable to selecting items from a menu onscreen? The curve doesn't matter. The endpoints matter.
[tinfoil] But that's just what they want us to believe... [/tinfoil]
A co-worker has to use that piece of junk. It's not a joystick, it slides around the desktop just like a mouse. Except you have to hold your hand vertically. And the buttons suck. This takes all the fine control out of your hand (where it causes problems for some people) and into your elbow and shoulder. If you want to know what it's like to pick small menu items with this poor excuse for an electronic dildo, try doing calligraphy with your shoulders.
There used to be an automatic Diplomacy adjudicator by email -- this would let folks take hours or days to run each round. This worked out well for a group of friends at work at lunch time. We'd get the new board layout from the adjudicator daemon at 10am, we'd do all our deal-making during lunch (and just afterwards in private offices if we were feeling sneaky), and we'd email our moves by 2pm at the latest.
The adjudicator we used was at the University of Washington, but I think there were others. Maybe some still exist. It's been years.
I think it would be more appropriate to send your comments to CmdrTaco's bosses. It reflects poorly on all of the OSTG sites, to allow it to be run with such a cavalier attitude toward fairness, accuracy, and craftsmanship. CmdrTaco may have started the site as a "whatever I want" blog, but now it's got a life of its own, a responsibility to the community, and he's got a boss to whom he answers.
I agree...the more we "police" the internet ourselves, the less the government will need to regulate it.
An' if we take 'em out o'the holdin' cell afore their trial, an' string 'em up inna tree, then the liberal activist judges cain't set 'em free! Who's wit' me? Grab yer hoods an' meet me by the libary at half past midnight. We're gonna do some justice.
I like his visual style, and even many of the storylines. But it seems like half the time he's apologizing for not keeping up with the strip... I doubt he'd go far in a 5x/wk commitment.
The server's slashdotted. Can someone post a mirror of the rules?
Come on. Intel only started their project in the past couple years. If you can't finish Hurd on your own, don't gripe about other projects which aren't moving fast enough for you. Or, hey, maybe you could look in the other kernels... you know, the Open Source kernels which aren't owned by the FSF. They seem to be able to do the job. They've been running all this time, while Hurd hasn't.
Sure, you're going to say Hurd runs. Well, where's the GNU/GNU Distro?
I'd like to see some high-profile news articles about MPAA suing the producers, the screeners, the guild members who leak out all those freebie discs. That'd be good for the debate, but I'm not gonna see CNN (a division of Time Warner) covering this sort of thing.
The writeup had no link to Rasterman's response. Unless the writeup WAS Rasterman's response, but that seems a bit weak to me. I'd like to know more about what Rasterman felt on these topics. A blog entry with some meat on it, some details about WHAT is "the right direction" and "what we've been saying." If this is all there is, well, (yawn).
Honestly. I haven't had a TV/Cable connection for the past seven years. I haven't missed it at all. All my friends drone on and on about the latest episode of "Star Trek: the Berman Tragedy" or "Friends II: Las Vegas," but I honestly don't envy their ability to keep track of the latest shows. So-called news regarding ideas like "Survivor: Soyuz," Martha Stewart's version of "The Apprentice," and sequels to "The Simple Life" just enforce my resolve to not care about television at all.
I mean, come on, #100 is the rhinestone-on-bluejeans-affixing Bedazzler?! Of course this isn't serious list of technologies.
If you consult Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's omnibus reference, Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations, you would consider other ways of phrasing that, such as "more states that wioll haven passed bills." Hope this helps.
I haven't heard of even one of these "super hits." I think that should have been punctuated,
with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other less-known gems,
Credibility requires context. Someone unfamiliar with any of those proper nouns will have zero context, so there will be zero credibility. Add context, and things start to fall into place. Not every business needs to have a respectable name like "Federated Usable Computational Devices, Inc." and not every person must be a Smith or a Jones.
In the past couple days, people have been talking about "cracking" an 80 bit hash with a 69 bit effort. It's logarithmic, people. 69 bits is not three-quarters of 80 bits, it's a factor of 0.000488 in terms of the workload to crack it.
SHA-1 is now 0.000488 (4.88*10-4) as strong as it was. And by my calculator, 5x5 go is 4.866*10-161 as hard as a brute-force solution as a 19x19 board would be.
"Being an asshat" would be a patent. Patents cover a process, and have a mostly fixed timespan. Scott McNealy's patent on being an asshat has finally expired, and now the process of being an asshat has been added to the public domain.
Well, the left one is 'sinister', by definition.
What's the NASDAQ rule for appending an E? What does it stand for? What does it indicate? Are other poorly-managed stocks similarly stigmatized?