1) I rather not deal with and learn the tools Microsoft has provided to accomplish tasks in the same fashion as I'm used to in unix/linux ?
this is not at all the case: i would switch in one day, if i would find something on the microsoft windows side that would provide the flexibility and power that the combination of opensource tools provide.
i do not suggest to reinvent all this tools that already exist... or force people to use them. the approach would be more integrative and not a replacement. cmd.exe can stay - to make all this longterm developers happy - but in addition there should be a completely integrative way to add other things natively.
sure, there is visual studio... there is also a gcc-like compiler for win32, but that's not the point. it's like giving a person some tools and saying that he is in theory now able to build a house to sleep tonight. a user is at a loss... most linux users are using packages nowadays and do not know/care about compiling the bits together.
they simply type some command like "my-favourite-pkg-manager -install this-cool-tool" and it will download and install it. it will also update it whenever the user types "my-favourite-pkg-manager -update-my-system".
exactly like microsoft and apple now also implemented the idea. but they are lacking the extensibility by the communities. you cannot simply "add" yet another tool to windows update... it will only check windows related things and all the other buyed software have to provide their own (what they do nowadays - quite a mess - my windowsXP installation runs 13 processes from different companies to look for updates). and here comes the difference of apples osx and microsofts vista (in regard of *nix opensource projects): apples osx has the ability to let the user compile/add upon an already existing *nix environement a package manager and enjoy the avialability of all the pieces that apple is not packaging but a community is packaging. in vista, you cannot build upon something that does not exist. of course you can try to use cygwin - if you have lots of time:)
[QUOTE] "Heck, wake me up when Linux distros ever decide on just one packaging subsystem and a well-supported (that means: actually used) common desktop API, and I'll look back into linux development. "
every distro has its own packaging system - diversity! (with all the advantages and disavantages diversity has - i mean biologically spoken) you choose your distribution and you are happy with what you have. no need to try other packaging system;)
there exist different window manager and desktop environements - again diversity! luckily we are that they can be installed all side by side. GTK and QT and others - they have well defined API's that keep changing, but this is progress. about standards, as far you can introduce standards in an environement where evolution works and things get favoured or extinct, they do develop - like the freedesktop ideas about.desktop files and mime-entries. these are "standards" because they are accepted by most opensource projects. if you are interested in some text, have a look here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fdeskto p_2dentry_2dspec http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshared _2dmime_2dinfo_2dspec
about your vista experience: removing the menubar is a feature you can do in KDE with CTRL-M... only that you can make it reappear with pressing this key combinations again;)
i really hope that microsoft is taking it seriously what it claims to do soon - to have a look at "compatiblity with linux" - all this milions of windows users need to grow up once:)
a cmd.exe is a quite old and outdated piece of code - nobody really likes to use it, maybe some sadomasochists disagree... it was inspired from the old DOS time and never got updated to something more user-friendly (and i mean here the user-friendlyness that is not scared of adding features and extending the manual to hundereds of pages). every time i have to use a console in a windows (3.11 to xp) i feel handicapped for not being able to type my commands in a lazy (autocompletion, aliases, reverse completion, history,...) way.
bash is simply one scripting language and shell and i do not say they should go for exactly this way... but all this advetisements and announcements every time a new windows version comes out are in my eyes completely "consumer" oriented and not "user" oriented - i'm not against making a nice GUI and having features easy understandable (without manual, competence in the field and the motivation to learn it).
vista does not need bash, but it needs a more powerfull terminal. instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can simply take bash or tcsh or whatever they feel like and either just pack it or modify it for distribution in their software.
the same way "it needs bash", it needs to support freedesktop standards (.desktop files, mime settings, libextract support instead of file endings for filetype...) and offer a compiler like gcc... a packaging system like pacman (archlinux) or ebuild-like (gentoo) from microsoft for opensource things would even offer all this without having the vista-user to meddle with any source code compiling and microsoft will catch lots of good news from every side for such a step. compatibility with the *nix world AND great new features for the microsofties.
i'm only saying that several studies have shown that the code that is open source now does this much better and that if you want to sell your product, you should at least offer this features and some more (the way apple is doing it with osx - only that their strategy was this way from the beginning of osx). they would have drown to the abyss of the desktop environements with a classic successor of os9 if they would have kept their original strategy to invent everything anew... but they changed it and now mac users tell me that it is cool to have a terminal in osx.
i hope that the interest of microsoft in linux will bring this missing parts to vista sooner or later.
comparing osx with vista has to include also the level of usability for an a liettle bit more experienced user. can you open a terminal with bash in vista? compile and run code for Xorg? or is that oging to come when microsoft figures out how to implement this?
i never tried vista running, but from what i see from all the screenshots all oover the internet is basically: it has a new widget-style, some of the GUI elements are inspired form osx and diverse opensource apps but there is nothing "new" and really unique to vista.
the first step in "making it easier" to run MS windows and linux would include native support of more file system formats on windows. the source is open, so please, developers of microsoft, feel free to add them to the windows kernel, so that we can access nonFAT nonNTFS partitions natively in windows.
what idea is to have a browser that deletes cookies and other _usefull_ things on the client side? cache is made so that less data has to be transfered. cookies are usefull for websites to let you remember request(parts).
the real footprints are not left locally in the browser but on servers that keep their transmission logs for some time and providers that cache your IP's. therefore you do not have any influence on privacy on the net. but like in real life, what's the matter about privacy, if you do things with a good conscience and don't mind if others see what you do?
if you are interested to see the surface of such a storage media before even somebody have build it, have a look here:
http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore.do?structureId=1QM8
and just imagine not seeing only one protein but a whole lot in one surface:)
greetings from a molecular biologist!
for subjects like this, you should consider using other resources of discussion than slashdot... especially because the original news is more detailed, has references and is earlier announced than on slashdot... have a look here:
things change... that's the way of life! the only ecosystem that is at equlibrium is a climax. every other system is NOT at equilibrium and therefore living... generating new species and dying out on some other parts.
if you save seeds, you did do a snapshot of available species at a certain time under certain conditions. sure plants can grow under a lot of conditions but don't rest on the fact that now we will have a global seed-bank in a stable cold place and now we can destruct the whole ecosystems of this planet just becasue we have the seeds to re-establish it back. this is NOT the case. plants are highly dependend on animals, bacteria, virii,... they do not exist at their own. everything is linked. you cannot restore a whole such system by simply bringing back the plants. for a start: how would they fix nitrogen from atmosphere? this is done by bacteria in most cases that grow in plants.
better let's keep the ecosystems we have now more or less stable and try not to destroy them completely than relating on seed-banks for conservation.
don't get me wrong: seed-banks are very valuable tools for research and agriculture, but not for longterm conservation!... want yet another illustrating example: imagine this: lets assume, we have put a dinosaur, a raptor, in cryo some milion years ago and now we decide to restore its population. we thaw it up again, make it mate with another dino of other sex and let them have children. now try to find a place in our modern world, where they would be able to reestablish a population... maybe a city like new york or tokyo? or london or paris or kolkata? 18milion humans and 150 raptor dinosaurs in same habitat... would this be possible? probably not. the time has passed and things changed. the raptor has no chance to exist in our world. this will be probably the most frequent fate of such imaginary experiments, because of the fact that life cannot be preserved but only prolonged and even that has its limits...;-)... think about that!
[...]If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.
if i'm watching a movie in cinema and there appears to be a road sign, i hardly miss some main content.
common sense (human logic) decides, if something is important or not... if the person speaking is so boring, of course the audience tries to do something else in the meanwhile... like trying to read signs or playing tetris. this author was never in an university lecture!
remember the good old days: railroad: it was slow, it had breakdowns and a horse could bring you faster from point a to point b, if you have to pass some mountains or rivers that failed to have tracks. still nobody announced that it sucks. (besides the fact that the steam engine may blow but hardly ever suck)
it takes 10 to 100 years for a new technology to become daily tool by people. maybe in the first years, things may be mis-used or some limiting factors may make it look not very solid... however, time will show if a technology is useful or not and if it is worth the effort or not. one example is SMS (for the people living in countries that do not know it: sending short notes from mobile phone to mobile phone). the whole SMS techonology was never intended to be so popular. the companies (IIRC) used this for status messages for internal communication. however, if there is usefullness around, somebody will find a way to make it usefull. now it's main business of the companies offering mobile phone networks... money goes where people are because money comes from people.
video blog... everybody can start one buying a webcam and playing around for a short time... but what is the message? if somebody uses it to tell the world "what i did on my last holidays" (have a look at Terry Pratchett's "Interesting Times" for whole context), then the audience will also be limited to this content. however, if somebody is an adventurer and is not staying at home in the holidays but is going diving and takes some nice short movies from a coral reef, then i would rather listen to him commenting this movies in an video-interview than reading a text on the internet containing some pictures of it... it makes the whole thing more true, more real...... more real???... why you would ask... the point is: once everybody uses video-phones over internet to communicate (for free) with each other, then the human mind would also change the acceptance of such media would grow. you would accept a video-blog more than a podcast or a text-blog... not thinking of a classical letter or an article in a printed newspaper. how primitive we were the last 200 years, you may say, when i say to you that some years ago, people did write to newspapers to print their stories. kind of classic blogs... and the people could not imagine, how you can send images and text over a telegraph cable across the world. they meant that this telegraphing sucks. later, they meant that telephone sucks... then television sucked (and it still does)...
so what are video blogs, if not simply television on demand (no, i'm not doing IBM-advertisements here)... imagine that it is not a company deciding what you look at but it's you who chooses what content to look at. and even better: this content was created by private people like you are... not a company...
first, this "names" this article speaks about is about names that are given to open source projects and not to linux! linux is the kernel and the startup/shutdown scripts... and maybe some other pieces, but that's it... besides the kernel and userspace apps (udev,...) there is nothing exclusively linux-like with this "names".
this XYZ computing (maybe this company tries to compensate something with this article... their name for example) article however raises something else speaking of usability and this things...
in X (http://www.freedesktop.org/), there exists a mime-database and a desktop-file-database. every application comes with.desktop files that provide info what this app is for. if your window manager or desktop environement is able to use this info, you do not need to remember any names of apps.
for example/usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop
the Category says, in what submenu this entry should to. the GenericName specifies a name (in the locale the user works in) that explains what this is (Image Editor) and the Comment explains it more detailled.... and guess what: the MimeType even specifies, what MIME this app can work with.
in most situations you do not need to care what app is opening a file... and if you try to open a file in a file manager that is aware of the mime-db and.desktop files, then it will offer you already all installed image editors / image viewers available... after once trying them, you know their names... voilà!
... and once you learn what the names mean, you start to like this logical naming. for example:
gimp: general image manipulation programm
this is probably the best and most logical name for such kind of application *g*
the time to build would not be affected (much), because automake tools and./configure can cache lots of things and then simply resolve them fastly while doing./configure.
besides you do not have to build everything at once (well... once you or your package maintainers do, when you now the first time install 7.x), because later, only single pieces would be compiled and this takes only minutes for most stuff.
also don't forget that if you are building it yourself, you don't need to build a lot of drivers that you don't need. this saves a lot of time (or do you own 30 different graphic cards?)
the xorg as it is now is about 110MB (binary for i686) in size. it comes out about 2 times a year. means that you have to download every year around 230MB of data to keep your X up-to-date.
BUT (!) actually, you are only 2 weeks of the whole time really up to date, because most of the libraries and drivers are outdated, just a week after the release came out. this means, that you download 230MB and are waiting the whole time for new releases hating the whole system it is organised.
new, the modularised organisation gives the developers and package maintainers the ability to update just one library at a time - to release it immediately it is known to work fine with the rest and the user has the binary of this small library (e.g. 2MB) ready for download in about a week after its release. this means you still download over the year about 200MB of updates, but you are not waiting for relases to fix your problem, because every week or month, a new release of the PARTS of xorg come out and fix problems and add features. this way, the user profits faster from the whole lot of features that come out and fixes that solve problems. (of course, in the old system, you were always able to get the whole sources (hundreds of MB) and compile them yourself (hours to days of compiling, can fail if you use wrong compiler or wrong checkout-time when getting sources))
in the modular organisaiton, also a newbie can then recompile only one part of X, because of the less time it takes and a more transperent process
==> end user gets updates more frequently, has to wait less and has much less pain updating only parts of X
very little CO_2 dissolves, but if CO_2 is side-by-side with H_2O, it will react (no matter in what speed) and in the end, the oceans will be acidified.... the fact that you try to make 2 layers of liquids is not that stable if seen from chemistry: there is no barrier!
the CO_2 from atmosphere already is adsorbed by the sea creating HCO_3- that is then dissolved. the process happens naturally and at a speed that does not hurt anybody in this equilibrated ecosystems.... have a reading here: http://www.ghgonline.org/co2sinkocean.htm
what we ignore completely in this discussion are some other facts like:
- liquid CO_2 under the oceans would mean automatically a complete distruction of all lifeforms in the abyssopelagic and hadopelagic zones that cannot exist in liquid CO_2 --- a horrible scenario to me as biology student: the abyssopelagic zone is the only one that was completely unaffected by ice-ages and other changes on this planet since life
- how much does it cost to bind CO_2 and liquify it? (it obviously needs energy)... it's like some small children try to cleanup their room: put everything under the carpet and hope that nobody will find out...
1) Easier Support - your computer breaks, you know who to go to
if you are part of a linux community, you get help faster, friendlier and for free. and you after giving advice to others have even a good conscience of being helpful!... but for the average "i-do-not-want-to-learn-but-it-must-just-work" user, you are perfectly right!
2) Less of a learning curve.
true, but longer learning curve. depending on where you want to get, this may be advantagous or not. also depends on the mentality of the user.
3) Less confusing in terms of options (there are a lot of types and kinds of Linux, or so it seems).
that's true. but on the other hand, that's an advantage for the people who are in search for their individual: linux has a lot of diversity in choosing distributions. (also here, this may be of a disadvantage, if you are completely new and do not know some basic resources where to search/compare this huge diversity)
4) Media acceptance. Macs are more well known than Linux, which isn't Linux's fault, it's just the fact that OS X has Apple behind it.
as a linux user, actually, i like to be unknown. of course, you need to be a narcistic, individualistic egoist with a strong character to be like me, so my opinion does not count here.... the apple is nice, but penguins are cool!;-)
5) Application Support - Things are ported to Mac quicker than to Linux usually. Apple also stands to get more software compatibility when they go to Intel computers.
"ported quicker"? everything taht is ported to mac that is/was opensource, already worked on linux. win32 apps run on linux too, if you are drunk enough (wine) and they are not written too much exotical that wine do not understands them. porting to mac os x is very similar to porting to linux/Xorg and it only depends on resources how quick it is ported. and resourced depend on demand for mac and ideas for linux, as in linux, the mayority of coders are also users who mainly do this work for themselves but let also others profit (not monetary meant) from their work.
in general, i think that it's not the meaning that ways of living should compete each other or fight. challenging each other is - on the other hand - very useful for movement and developement. a mac has a more interesting cpu (powerpc) but as it will not have a future, they (in my opinion) did a very wrong decision on that. using intel cpu's is maybe a nice marketing or financial/globalisation move, but in the long term it will not be very successfull. i like white computers because of style and design, but if i would own a powerbook/ibook, i would install linux on it anyway.
let's face the future together challenging each other but not fighting against each other!
primitive cheap player with a funny name - no OGG Vorbis support. i guess a lot of people will buy it... because the majority of the people have no taste, no interest in knowledge about things they use daily... but this is a normal phenomena of our civilisation, so dell is only trying to earn money. --- i don't blame dell, i blame the users;-P
i stay with my iRiveriFP-390T... it has "only" 256mb but it can record directly to mp3, it supports ogg, has equilizers, 3,5" in and out plugs, plays radio and works on a standard NiMH rechargable AA battery (only 9 hours, but you can take 4 of them in your pocket, and this gives you 36h:D) - this is what i call smart design and it was not yet beaten by everybody else (except iRiver;-) ).
ok, as it is running linux, it will not crash every 10 minutes or so... but are there some applications out already? any cooking or cleaning rooms programmes around? this is not a lot of money, if this is a usefull part of furniture, but it is not really usefull if it just stands around or walks around doing nothing. this i can do myself much better than any robot:D
dell makes nice TFT screens but horribly low quality notebooks
what i want to see is the Acer Ferrari 4005 with preinstalled linux (or at least without windows with it) - THIS would be really cool!
i really like this new project... but let me explain before you interpret this wrongly:
i'm semi-professional photographer and my need for an image processing application are not the same as for an artist in digital arts. i do not play with filters and all the cool features that are available.
in the last ~5 years, i tried almost every software for image processing around. at university i have access to photoshop. with ms windows i used to use corel photopaint and i'm gimp user since the early days.
an easy UI helps doing things more quickly saving you time for the creative parts of photography and image processing. on the other hand, i found out that you can get used to different UI's quickly, if you really have to use the app as an essential tool in some creative work you do at the moment. of course, if you try working for days with photopaint and then want to do the same tasks in gimp, you are lost in the first 10 minutes searching for menus where features are.
depending on HOW you use the image processing applications, you can like/dislike it's UI or not. if you are a newbie in image processing or you were restricted to only ms windows or only mac UI's, you have some deficits and switching UI's is not easy for you. the others from you, who are faced from time to time with other widgets and UI's (qt, gtk, swing,...) have it easier to switch.
sooner or later, you even learn to use all this different UI's without problem switching from one to the other... like knowing to type dvorak and qwerty with same speed;-)... the reason lies in the plasticity of our brain and the capacity of learning - we are more intelligent than computers, right?
of course, people may come with the argument that they hate different UI's and only like . my reply to this is easy: if you are serious with image processing, you do not spend hours playing with UI's but after using the one you have atm installed for some work you do, believe me, you will automatically learn where the features and options are hidden of this app. once you are forced to work with photoshop after working with gimp a long time, if you are just someone who wants to play with some photos taken on last holidays, you may argue about UI's and hate the one or other UI. if you want to do image processing, you do not care what UI you use if the process and result are the same.
i really like the gimp UI, because every image has it's own menu, the widgets are gtk2 and can be teared appart. you can have separate menus in separate windows and so on...
on the other hand, i use nip2 for tasks that are not possible with gimp. it has a completely different UI but also this UI has its advantages.
for converting or resizing images, i would suggest all of you to use the command line, as it is much easier than any UI available (imagemagick)
am i telling that photoshop or photopaint have a bad UI? no, not at all. their UI's are also very much usable. so what is it i want to explain here? for subject i have choosen "i like gimpshop", so that's what i want to explain.
photoshop, photopaint and other closed source image processing apps you have to pay for to have them. if you want to use them, you have to learn their UI. paying for it, you are also motivated to get along with the UI to use also all their features. as newbie in image processing, you spent some money and now you want to get a long with it. you begin to like the UI. - you write history in your mind in this field learning this UI.
gimp, nips2, imagemagick and others that are opensource, have the advantage, that their UI can be addapted to the person who knows how to modify them. gimpshop is exactly one such approach. the community of photoshop users who wants to use gimp has now a nice approach to have photoshop behaviour in gimp.
i myself will probably never use gimpshop. as told, i like gimp as it i
i just read this "story" and want to exchange some remarks with the world about it:
GIS (geographical information systems) are using satellite pictures now for decades to monitor and work with them. from farming (how much water is in my soil), geology, archeology and so on, people already use this technologies in daily use.
the great thing google provides is that everybody - no matter if professor in geology or not - can now have a look at the data and do something with it. a region that never was of much interest to experts can become of interest by the people living there and doing the first step of discovery they themselves.
google did not re-invent gis and its application. but what google did was to offer parts of the data satellites collect daily to the "people" with a simple user interface.
everybody can have a look at our planet from space and do something with the data.
ok, but what if after 20 years it would be too late to do anything against the change? what would your children say when they ask you?
the studies in the 70s were the beginning of the understanding of the meteorological chemistry. nowadays, we know much more and the models are much more accurate regarding things.
Slashdot Mirror
thank you for such a detailed reply :)
:)
;)
.desktop files and mime-entries. these are "standards" because they are accepted by most opensource projects. if you are interested in some text, have a look here:o p_2dentry_2dspecd _2dmime_2dinfo_2dspec
;)
:)
1) I rather not deal with and learn the tools Microsoft has provided to accomplish tasks in the same fashion as I'm used to in unix/linux ?
this is not at all the case: i would switch in one day, if i would find something on the microsoft windows side that would provide the flexibility and power that the combination of opensource tools provide.
i do not suggest to reinvent all this tools that already exist... or force people to use them. the approach would be more integrative and not a replacement. cmd.exe can stay - to make all this longterm developers happy - but in addition there should be a completely integrative way to add other things natively.
sure, there is visual studio... there is also a gcc-like compiler for win32, but that's not the point. it's like giving a person some tools and saying that he is in theory now able to build a house to sleep tonight. a user is at a loss... most linux users are using packages nowadays and do not know/care about compiling the bits together.
they simply type some command like "my-favourite-pkg-manager -install this-cool-tool" and it will download and install it.
it will also update it whenever the user types "my-favourite-pkg-manager -update-my-system".
exactly like microsoft and apple now also implemented the idea. but they are lacking the extensibility by the communities. you cannot simply "add" yet another tool to windows update... it will only check windows related things and all the other buyed software have to provide their own (what they do nowadays - quite a mess - my windowsXP installation runs 13 processes from different companies to look for updates).
and here comes the difference of apples osx and microsofts vista (in regard of *nix opensource projects):
apples osx has the ability to let the user compile/add upon an already existing *nix environement a package manager and enjoy the avialability of all the pieces that apple is not packaging but a community is packaging.
in vista, you cannot build upon something that does not exist. of course you can try to use cygwin - if you have lots of time
[QUOTE]
"Heck, wake me up when Linux distros ever decide on just one packaging subsystem and a well-supported (that means: actually used) common desktop API, and I'll look back into linux development. "
every distro has its own packaging system - diversity! (with all the advantages and disavantages diversity has - i mean biologically spoken)
you choose your distribution and you are happy with what you have. no need to try other packaging system
there exist different window manager and desktop environements - again diversity!
luckily we are that they can be installed all side by side. GTK and QT and others - they have well defined API's that keep changing, but this is progress.
about standards, as far you can introduce standards in an environement where evolution works and things get favoured or extinct, they do develop - like the freedesktop ideas about
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fdeskt
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshare
about your vista experience: removing the menubar is a feature you can do in KDE with CTRL-M... only that you can make it reappear with pressing this key combinations again
i really hope that microsoft is taking it seriously what it claims to do soon - to have a look at "compatiblity with linux" - all this milions of windows users need to grow up once
a cmd.exe is a quite old and outdated piece of code - nobody really likes to use it, maybe some sadomasochists disagree... it was inspired from the old DOS time and never got updated to something more user-friendly (and i mean here the user-friendlyness that is not scared of adding features and extending the manual to hundereds of pages). every time i have to use a console in a windows (3.11 to xp) i feel handicapped for not being able to type my commands in a lazy (autocompletion, aliases, reverse completion, history, ...) way.
... but they changed it and now mac users tell me that it is cool to have a terminal in osx.
bash is simply one scripting language and shell and i do not say they should go for exactly this way... but all this advetisements and announcements every time a new windows version comes out are in my eyes completely "consumer" oriented and not "user" oriented - i'm not against making a nice GUI and having features easy understandable (without manual, competence in the field and the motivation to learn it).
vista does not need bash, but it needs a more powerfull terminal. instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can simply take bash or tcsh or whatever they feel like and either just pack it or modify it for distribution in their software.
the same way "it needs bash", it needs to support freedesktop standards (.desktop files, mime settings, libextract support instead of file endings for filetype...) and offer a compiler like gcc... a packaging system like pacman (archlinux) or ebuild-like (gentoo) from microsoft for opensource things would even offer all this without having the vista-user to meddle with any source code compiling and microsoft will catch lots of good news from every side for such a step. compatibility with the *nix world AND great new features for the microsofties.
i'm only saying that several studies have shown that the code that is open source now does this much better and that if you want to sell your product, you should at least offer this features and some more (the way apple is doing it with osx - only that their strategy was this way from the beginning of osx). they would have drown to the abyss of the desktop environements with a classic successor of os9 if they would have kept their original strategy to invent everything anew
i hope that the interest of microsoft in linux will bring this missing parts to vista sooner or later.
comparing osx with vista has to include also the level of usability for an a liettle bit more experienced user. can you open a terminal with bash in vista? compile and run code for Xorg? or is that oging to come when microsoft figures out how to implement this?
i never tried vista running, but from what i see from all the screenshots all oover the internet is basically: it has a new widget-style, some of the GUI elements are inspired form osx and diverse opensource apps but there is nothing "new" and really unique to vista.
the first step in "making it easier" to run MS windows and linux would include native support of more file system formats on windows. the source is open, so please, developers of microsoft, feel free to add them to the windows kernel, so that we can access nonFAT nonNTFS partitions natively in windows.
- D
what idea is to have a browser that deletes cookies and other _usefull_ things on the client side? cache is made so that less data has to be transfered. cookies are usefull for websites to let you remember request(parts). the real footprints are not left locally in the browser but on servers that keep their transmission logs for some time and providers that cache your IP's. therefore you do not have any influence on privacy on the net. but like in real life, what's the matter about privacy, if you do things with a good conscience and don't mind if others see what you do?
if you are interested to see the surface of such a storage media before even somebody have build it, have a look here: http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore.do?structureId=1QM8
and just imagine not seeing only one protein but a whole lot in one surface :)
greetings from a molecular biologist!
for subjects like this, you should consider using other resources of discussion than slashdot... especially because the original news is more detailed, has references and is earlier announced than on slashdot ... have a look here:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004608.html
things change... that's the way of life! the only ecosystem that is at equlibrium is a climax. every other system is NOT at equilibrium and therefore living... generating new species and dying out on some other parts.
... they do not exist at their own. everything is linked. you cannot restore a whole such system by simply bringing back the plants. for a start: how would they fix nitrogen from atmosphere? this is done by bacteria in most cases that grow in plants.
... want yet another illustrating example: imagine this: lets assume, we have put a dinosaur, a raptor, in cryo some milion years ago and now we decide to restore its population. we thaw it up again, make it mate with another dino of other sex and let them have children. now try to find a place in our modern world, where they would be able to reestablish a population... maybe a city like new york or tokyo? or london or paris or kolkata? 18milion humans and 150 raptor dinosaurs in same habitat... would this be possible? probably not. the time has passed and things changed. the raptor has no chance to exist in our world. this will be probably the most frequent fate of such imaginary experiments, because of the fact that life cannot be preserved but only prolonged and even that has its limits... ;-) ... think about that!
if you save seeds, you did do a snapshot of available species at a certain time under certain conditions. sure plants can grow under a lot of conditions but don't rest on the fact that now we will have a global seed-bank in a stable cold place and now we can destruct the whole ecosystems of this planet just becasue we have the seeds to re-establish it back. this is NOT the case. plants are highly dependend on animals, bacteria, virii,
better let's keep the ecosystems we have now more or less stable and try not to destroy them completely than relating on seed-banks for conservation.
don't get me wrong: seed-banks are very valuable tools for research and agriculture, but not for longterm conservation!
The Internet is Dead!
-- Spam
to all:
please visit the link here to tell us, if you are an internet user or not.
significant, eh? ;-)
[...]If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content. if i'm watching a movie in cinema and there appears to be a road sign, i hardly miss some main content. common sense (human logic) decides, if something is important or not... if the person speaking is so boring, of course the audience tries to do something else in the meanwhile... like trying to read signs or playing tetris. this author was never in an university lecture!
remember the good old days: railroad: it was slow, it had breakdowns and a horse could bring you faster from point a to point b, if you have to pass some mountains or rivers that failed to have tracks. still nobody announced that it sucks. (besides the fact that the steam engine may blow but hardly ever suck)
... more real???... why you would ask... the point is: once everybody uses video-phones over internet to communicate (for free) with each other, then the human mind would also change the acceptance of such media would grow. you would accept a video-blog more than a podcast or a text-blog... not thinking of a classical letter or an article in a printed newspaper. how primitive we were the last 200 years, you may say, when i say to you that some years ago, people did write to newspapers to print their stories. kind of classic blogs... and the people could not imagine, how you can send images and text over a telegraph cable across the world. they meant that this telegraphing sucks. later, they meant that telephone sucks... then television sucked (and it still does)...
it takes 10 to 100 years for a new technology to become daily tool by people. maybe in the first years, things may be mis-used or some limiting factors may make it look not very solid... however, time will show if a technology is useful or not and if it is worth the effort or not. one example is SMS (for the people living in countries that do not know it: sending short notes from mobile phone to mobile phone). the whole SMS techonology was never intended to be so popular. the companies (IIRC) used this for status messages for internal communication. however, if there is usefullness around, somebody will find a way to make it usefull. now it's main business of the companies offering mobile phone networks... money goes where people are because money comes from people.
video blog... everybody can start one buying a webcam and playing around for a short time... but what is the message? if somebody uses it to tell the world "what i did on my last holidays" (have a look at Terry Pratchett's "Interesting Times" for whole context), then the audience will also be limited to this content. however, if somebody is an adventurer and is not staying at home in the holidays but is going diving and takes some nice short movies from a coral reef, then i would rather listen to him commenting this movies in an video-interview than reading a text on the internet containing some pictures of it... it makes the whole thing more true, more real...
so what are video blogs, if not simply television on demand (no, i'm not doing IBM-advertisements here)... imagine that it is not a company deciding what you look at but it's you who chooses what content to look at. and even better: this content was created by private people like you are... not a company...
do you still think, video blogs suck?
first, this "names" this article speaks about is about names that are given to open source projects and not to linux! linux is the kernel and the startup/shutdown scripts... and maybe some other pieces, but that's it... besides the kernel and userspace apps (udev,...) there is nothing exclusively linux-like with this "names".
this XYZ computing (maybe this company tries to compensate something with this article... their name for example) article however raises something else speaking of usability and this things...
in X (http://www.freedesktop.org/), there exists a mime-database and a desktop-file-database. every application comes with .desktop files that provide info what this app is for. if your window manager or desktop environement is able to use this info, you do not need to remember any names of apps.
for example /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop
the Category says, in what submenu this entry should to. the GenericName specifies a name (in the locale the user works in) that explains what this is (Image Editor) and the Comment explains it more detailled. ... and guess what: the MimeType even specifies, what MIME this app can work with.
in most situations you do not need to care what app is opening a file... and if you try to open a file in a file manager that is aware of the mime-db and .desktop files, then it will offer you already all installed image editors / image viewers available... after once trying them, you know their names... voilà!
... and once you learn what the names mean, you start to like this logical naming. for example:
gimp: general image manipulation programm
this is probably the best and most logical name for such kind of application *g*
the time to build would not be affected (much), because automake tools and ./configure can cache lots of things and then simply resolve them fastly while doing ./configure.
besides you do not have to build everything at once (well... once you or your package maintainers do, when you now the first time install 7.x), because later, only single pieces would be compiled and this takes only minutes for most stuff.
also don't forget that if you are building it yourself, you don't need to build a lot of drivers that you don't need. this saves a lot of time (or do you own 30 different graphic cards?)
the xorg as it is now is about 110MB (binary for i686) in size. it comes out about 2 times a year. means that you have to download every year around 230MB of data to keep your X up-to-date.
BUT (!) actually, you are only 2 weeks of the whole time really up to date, because most of the libraries and drivers are outdated, just a week after the release came out. this means, that you download 230MB and are waiting the whole time for new releases hating the whole system it is organised.
new, the modularised organisation gives the developers and package maintainers the ability to update just one library at a time - to release it immediately it is known to work fine with the rest and the user has the binary of this small library (e.g. 2MB) ready for download in about a week after its release. this means you still download over the year about 200MB of updates, but you are not waiting for relases to fix your problem, because every week or month, a new release of the PARTS of xorg come out and fix problems and add features. this way, the user profits faster from the whole lot of features that come out and fixes that solve problems. (of course, in the old system, you were always able to get the whole sources (hundreds of MB) and compile them yourself (hours to days of compiling, can fail if you use wrong compiler or wrong checkout-time when getting sources))
in the modular organisaiton, also a newbie can then recompile only one part of X, because of the less time it takes and a more transperent process
==> end user gets updates more frequently, has to wait less and has much less pain updating only parts of X
very little CO_2 dissolves, but if CO_2 is side-by-side with H_2O, it will react (no matter in what speed) and in the end, the oceans will be acidified. ... the fact that you try to make 2 layers of liquids is not that stable if seen from chemistry: there is no barrier!
... have a reading here:
... it's like some small children try to cleanup their room: put everything under the carpet and hope that nobody will find out...
the CO_2 from atmosphere already is adsorbed by the sea creating HCO_3- that is then dissolved. the process happens naturally and at a speed that does not hurt anybody in this equilibrated ecosystems.
http://www.ghgonline.org/co2sinkocean.htm
what we ignore completely in this discussion are some other facts like:
- liquid CO_2 under the oceans would mean automatically a complete distruction of all lifeforms in the abyssopelagic and hadopelagic zones that cannot exist in liquid CO_2 --- a horrible scenario to me as biology student: the abyssopelagic zone is the only one that was completely unaffected by ice-ages and other changes on this planet since life
- how much does it cost to bind CO_2 and liquify it? (it obviously needs energy)
somehow, the arrow dissappeared... the formula should be this:
./ does not like my way to type the arrow with two heads)
CO_2 (gas, very little dissolved in liquid) + 2(H_2O) (liquid) ==> HCO_3- (better dissolved in liquid) + H_3O+ (liquid)
note that this IS a reversible process (but
that was exactly what i wanted to write in reply to this article - thanx!
N /LIQUIFA/CD2R1.HTM
;-)
here a nice website on the process of "liquefaction of co_2":
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CCA/CCA2/MAI
in fact CO_2 is not as CO_2 in water, but as HCO3- (about 95% at 1atm i think)
CO_2 (gas, very little dissolved in liquid) + 2(H_2O) (liquid) HCO_3- (better dissolved in liquid) + H_3O+ (liquid)
but the result is a shift of pH (because of the H_3O+ instead of H_2O): -> water becomes "acid"
biological systems depend highly (!!!) on a stable pH. playing with the pH of the oceans can be more dangerous than extincting ourselves
1) Easier Support - your computer breaks, you know who to go to
if you are part of a linux community, you get help faster, friendlier and for free. and you after giving advice to others have even a good conscience of being helpful! ... but for the average "i-do-not-want-to-learn-but-it-must-just-work" user, you are perfectly right!
2) Less of a learning curve.
true, but longer learning curve. depending on where you want to get, this may be advantagous or not. also depends on the mentality of the user.
3) Less confusing in terms of options (there are a lot of types and kinds of Linux, or so it seems).
that's true. but on the other hand, that's an advantage for the people who are in search for their individual: linux has a lot of diversity in choosing distributions. (also here, this may be of a disadvantage, if you are completely new and do not know some basic resources where to search/compare this huge diversity)
4) Media acceptance. Macs are more well known than Linux, which isn't Linux's fault, it's just the fact that OS X has Apple behind it.
as a linux user, actually, i like to be unknown. of course, you need to be a narcistic, individualistic egoist with a strong character to be like me, so my opinion does not count here. ... the apple is nice, but penguins are cool! ;-)
5) Application Support - Things are ported to Mac quicker than to Linux usually. Apple also stands to get more software compatibility when they go to Intel computers.
"ported quicker"? everything taht is ported to mac that is/was opensource, already worked on linux. win32 apps run on linux too, if you are drunk enough (wine) and they are not written too much exotical that wine do not understands them. porting to mac os x is very similar to porting to linux/Xorg and it only depends on resources how quick it is ported. and resourced depend on demand for mac and ideas for linux, as in linux, the mayority of coders are also users who mainly do this work for themselves but let also others profit (not monetary meant) from their work.
in general, i think that it's not the meaning that ways of living should compete each other or fight. challenging each other is - on the other hand - very useful for movement and developement. a mac has a more interesting cpu (powerpc) but as it will not have a future, they (in my opinion) did a very wrong decision on that. using intel cpu's is maybe a nice marketing or financial/globalisation move, but in the long term it will not be very successfull. i like white computers because of style and design, but if i would own a powerbook/ibook, i would install linux on it anyway.
let's face the future together challenging each other but not fighting against each other!
primitive cheap player with a funny name - no OGG Vorbis support. i guess a lot of people will buy it ... because the majority of the people have no taste, no interest in knowledge about things they use daily ... but this is a normal phenomena of our civilisation, so dell is only trying to earn money. --- i don't blame dell, i blame the users ;-P
... it has "only" 256mb but it can record directly to mp3, it supports ogg, has equilizers, 3,5" in and out plugs, plays radio and works on a standard NiMH rechargable AA battery (only 9 hours, but you can take 4 of them in your pocket, and this gives you 36h :D) - this is what i call smart design and it was not yet beaten by everybody else (except iRiver ;-) ).
i stay with my iRiveriFP-390T
ok, as it is running linux, it will not crash every 10 minutes or so ... but are there some applications out already? any cooking or cleaning rooms programmes around? this is not a lot of money, if this is a usefull part of furniture, but it is not really usefull if it just stands around or walks around doing nothing. this i can do myself much better than any robot :D
dell makes nice TFT screens but horribly low quality notebooks what i want to see is the Acer Ferrari 4005 with preinstalled linux (or at least without windows with it) - THIS would be really cool!
i really like this new project ... but let me explain before you interpret this wrongly:
i'm semi-professional photographer and my need for an image processing application are not the same as for an artist in digital arts. i do not play with filters and all the cool features that are available.
in the last ~5 years, i tried almost every software for image processing around. at university i have access to photoshop. with ms windows i used to use corel photopaint and i'm gimp user since the early days.
an easy UI helps doing things more quickly saving you time for the creative parts of photography and image processing. on the other hand, i found out that you can get used to different UI's quickly, if you really have to use the app as an essential tool in some creative work you do at the moment. of course, if you try working for days with photopaint and then want to do the same tasks in gimp, you are lost in the first 10 minutes searching for menus where features are.
depending on HOW you use the image processing applications, you can like/dislike it's UI or not. if you are a newbie in image processing or you were restricted to only ms windows or only mac UI's, you have some deficits and switching UI's is not easy for you. the others from you, who are faced from time to time with other widgets and UI's (qt, gtk, swing, ...) have it easier to switch.
sooner or later, you even learn to use all this different UI's without problem switching from one to the other... like knowing to type dvorak and qwerty with same speed ;-) ... the reason lies in the plasticity of our brain and the capacity of learning - we are more intelligent than computers, right?
of course, people may come with the argument that they hate different UI's and only like . my reply to this is easy: if you are serious with image processing, you do not spend hours playing with UI's but after using the one you have atm installed for some work you do, believe me, you will automatically learn where the features and options are hidden of this app. once you are forced to work with photoshop after working with gimp a long time, if you are just someone who wants to play with some photos taken on last holidays, you may argue about UI's and hate the one or other UI. if you want to do image processing, you do not care what UI you use if the process and result are the same.
i really like the gimp UI, because every image has it's own menu, the widgets are gtk2 and can be teared appart. you can have separate menus in separate windows and so on...
on the other hand, i use nip2 for tasks that are not possible with gimp. it has a completely different UI but also this UI has its advantages.
for converting or resizing images, i would suggest all of you to use the command line, as it is much easier than any UI available (imagemagick)
am i telling that photoshop or photopaint have a bad UI? no, not at all. their UI's are also very much usable. so what is it i want to explain here? for subject i have choosen "i like gimpshop", so that's what i want to explain.
photoshop, photopaint and other closed source image processing apps you have to pay for to have them. if you want to use them, you have to learn their UI. paying for it, you are also motivated to get along with the UI to use also all their features. as newbie in image processing, you spent some money and now you want to get a long with it. you begin to like the UI. - you write history in your mind in this field learning this UI.
gimp, nips2, imagemagick and others that are opensource, have the advantage, that their UI can be addapted to the person who knows how to modify them. gimpshop is exactly one such approach. the community of photoshop users who wants to use gimp has now a nice approach to have photoshop behaviour in gimp.
i myself will probably never use gimpshop. as told, i like gimp as it i
i just read this "story" and want to exchange some remarks with the world about it:
d ex.php
GIS (geographical information systems) are using satellite pictures now for decades to monitor and work with them. from farming (how much water is in my soil), geology, archeology and so on, people already use this technologies in daily use.
for example see here:
http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/remote_sensing/in
also wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis
the great thing google provides is that everybody - no matter if professor in geology or not - can now have a look at the data and do something with it. a region that never was of much interest to experts can become of interest by the people living there and doing the first step of discovery they themselves.
google did not re-invent gis and its application. but what google did was to offer parts of the data satellites collect daily to the "people" with a simple user interface.
everybody can have a look at our planet from space and do something with the data.
ok, but what if after 20 years it would be too late to do anything against the change? what would your children say when they ask you? the studies in the 70s were the beginning of the understanding of the meteorological chemistry. nowadays, we know much more and the models are much more accurate regarding things.