"Whats *good* for you, might not be good for me. I rock in nvi, suck in emacs. Taking your magical "The One Program" and making it the only thing available is bound to be disasterous...."
I don't think so. The people that get screwed by only including one version of each type of app are the power users who already know exactly what they want to use and are capable of installing it if they want to. I'm sure you could easily download and install a copy of 'vi' if your Linux distribution didn't include it, or the system belonged to your university or employer, you could just ask your sysadmin to install it for you.
Why was the grad student whose thesis you proofread stuck with MS Word? There are freely available TeX implementations for Windows, I believe. Unfortunately, nothing like LyX seems to exist for Windows....
"Why is it that whenever you elect a dumbass gov't into power, you guys come crying to Canada for protection from the very gov't you elected?"
The people that move to Canada didn't vote for Bush, and therefore aren't personally responsible for what he's done in office. So, as annoying as it is for your country to be invaded by American "vacationers," they really aren't hypocrites. They go to Canada because it's very similar to the US in most respects, so they don't have to learn a new language or adapt to a radically different culture.
I wouldn't leave the USA to move to Canada unless things over here got really bad, and I wouldn't violate Canadian immigration laws to do it. But there are some really nice areas in Canada, especially in Quebec....
Linux has more problems than just MS Office compatibility. The obvious choice for an Office suite is OpenOffice but, in all honesty, OpenOffice sucks. On my machine, a 1GHz Athlon with 256Mb of memory, it takes for freakin' ever to start up, and once it's running, it's as slow as molasses, and crashes sporadically. It's GUI uses its own widget toolkit (probably for portability?), so it doesn't look or behave like the other apps that I use (which use either GTK or Qt).
Linux has a *long* way to go before it can compete with Windows on the desktop, and there's already been so much fragmentation that I fear it's too late. Frankly, I think that other projects, like OpenBeOS, offer a greater opportunity for free software developers to dethrone Microsoft.
I agree -- now that I'm 24, I really regret not taking advantage of what high school had to offer. I definitely should have gone to more wild parties -- I was afraid of getting in trouble at the time, but in retrospect, I could have gotten away with it, and if I had been caught, I wouldn't have gotten in serious trouble.
In high school, be sure to do the things that only high school students can do. Once you're older, you'll regret missing those opportunities.
Yeah, but Mozilla always shows the last part of URLs in the browser's status bar, so goatse.cx redirectors now only work with MSIE-using dorks. Though I guess that's still a lot of people, and they do have it coming for not using Mozilla....
Dude -- that's awesome! I've wondered off and on about what I'd need to do to make a little CNC machine to cut inlays and fret slots into guitar fingerboards, and this might help out....
I run FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux, and aside from the fact that FreeBSD is better documented, I haven't noticed that one is really any better than the other. But then again, I don't put much strain on my machines. Why do people think that BSD is technically superior to Linux? I'm not trolling or arguing -- I really want to know what people think....
I imagine that it would have interesting police applications. Every police shooting could be documented so that, if challenged, the cops could show that it was necessary. Also, in a country that favors aggressive gun control laws, this technology might make the difference between being allowed to have a gun and not being allowed to have a gun.
I do think it's pretty worthless as a military weapon -- when the M16 was released the first ones were notoriously unreliable and it took some time (and a lot of dead American soliders) to work out the bugs. I would imagine that, for military equipment, you'd want to keep rifles and handguns as simple as possible, and to stick with a proven design for as long as possible. It seems that this gun adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.
"I've yet to see a CSS-based layout that didn't fall on it's ass as soon as you set your fonts to "Largest" (200% in Mozilla)."
I've seen very few table-based layouts that look good in Lynx. Even in IE or Mozilla, if I make the browser window really narrow (~300 pixels), just about any layout will break down. Everything is a tradeoff.
I think Jamie Zawinski said that all operating systems suck, but that UNIX sucks less. Any web page can be broken by the user, so you have to go with the layout that's the least breakable.
I think that using tables for layout is a dirty, evil hack from hell, but my grandmother uses Netscape 4, and I want my personal pages to be viewable by my family. So I use the tables anyway because, of all my options, they suck the least.
"thought he was only a mythical figure featured prominently in Slashdot polls since the beginning of Slashtime?"
If it makes you feel better, remember that CowboyNeal doesn't need to post stories in order for them to appear on Slashdot. Instead, he uses his godlike mastery of time and space to directly control the cathode rays that paint Slashdot.org on your screen. To say that he posts stories in the traditional sense is to say that CowboyNeal has a job and therefore needs money to live -- a bad thing to say since CowboyNeal has been known to strike down with bolts of lightning the heretics that question his omnipotence.
All of my friends talk to me through e-mail, so I know that if the phone rings, it's definitely someone that I don't want to talk to. I just let the answering machine get it -- if it turns out to be someone worth talking to, I'll call them back.
Yeah, but porn filters also block a lot of legitimate content, and makers of the porn filtering software won't give you a list of sites that they block. I used to be a substitute teacher at a private school. They had porn filters that blocked all free webhosting services (like tripod and geocities) and all free webmail services. But it didn't do a very good job of actually blocking pornography.
I support filtering content when its necessary to do so, but I don't think it's appropriate for the Federal government to make it mandatory. Rather, I think that the individual libraries and school boards should be free to handle the issue in accordance with their own needs and values.
Actually, it occurred to me that if Iraq really is developing weapons of mass destruction, they must be using computers in their research projects. They wouldn't want anyone to know that the computers exist, so it's a good bet that they're running unlicensed software. We wouldn't need to invade Iraq: the thugs at Business Software Alliance could do it for us, and then make Iraq pay for the price of the audits. Unlike the UN inspectors, who are bound by laws, ethics, and plitical considerations, the BSA would send in their secret, high tech commandos to brutally execute key government leaders and then lay waste to the countryside, burning and pillaging every village in sight in search of unlicensed copies of Winzip. We'd bring our enemies to their knees in no time at all. And since we've farmed this out to the private sector, it won't cost the hard-working American taxpayers a dime!
SDF has been the victim of DDoS attacks before, and NWLink was able to survive them every time in the past. I find it hard to believe that this attack was any different from the others.
They were required by their contract to give SDF 15 days, come hell or high water. Even 24 hours would have been enough for most of SDF's users. You can't just ignore a contract simply because it's inconvenient.
If the DDoS attack against SDF was really costing them money, then it is within NWLink's moral and legal rights to cancel the contract. The problem is that NWLink canceled SDF's contract immediately with no advance notice whatsoever.
Even 48 hours of advance notice would have made a huge difference, as people would have been able to log in to download their important files and take care of any last minute correspondance with important contacts. Hell, even six hours of advance notice would have difference.
I'm told that NWLink was required by their own contract to give SDF fifteen days of advance notice in writing before pulling the plug. If that's correct, then NWLink legally violated their contract and ought to have its bottom spanked in court. But even if NWLink did have the legal right to do what it did, they've nonetheless demonstrated that they are untrustworthy and unprofessional business partners.
"Nonsense. The vast majority of people who happen to be running either KDE or GNOME are neither football hooligans nor jingoists about it."
I should have chosen my words better -- I didn't say what I meant to say. I wasn't concerned about KDE and GNOME zealotry, and I do know that GNOME and KDE apps can run on the same desktop at the same time. That said, you can't run Galeon from KDE without first installing the GNOME libraries, and even after you do that, it doesn't have the same look and feel as the rest of your KDE apps. GNOME applications run on KDE, but they don't run as well as KDE applications run on KDE. And the same can be said for KDE applications on GNOME. Developers are still in a bind because if they choose one platform, their application will appear to be less efficient and not as good looking to users of the other. The whole "Linux on the Desktop" thing is a big sprawling mess.
The problem isn't that there are two competing desktop envrionments, it's that there are two competing APIs for interfacing with a desktop environment. I think it's totally reasonable to fault the GNOME and KDE developers for not working this out when they had the chance. As it stands, a GNOME user needs to install 200 MB of KDE libraries just to use KMail.
In your journal, you liken those of us who want to see more consolidation and cooperation in the free software community to Soviet economic planners. I think that's a bit far-fetched. Standardization doesn't have to limit freedom of choice at all. SMTP, for instance, is a standard protocol and your MTA has to adhere to it, but because SMTP is a standard, you can run any MTA you want, depending upon your needs and tastes. Likewise, because HTML is standardized, you're free to use whichever web browser you want. Standards actually encourage freedom of choice and promote the creation of different alternatives to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of course, real men edit movies using text editors under the command console!"
:-)
Actually, real men edit movies the same way they write software -- by manipulating the bits directly with a hex editor.
Steve
"Whats *good* for you, might not be good for me. I rock in nvi, suck in emacs. Taking your magical "The One Program" and making it the only thing available is bound to be disasterous...."
I don't think so. The people that get screwed by only including one version of each type of app are the power users who already know exactly what they want to use and are capable of installing it if they want to. I'm sure you could easily download and install a copy of 'vi' if your Linux distribution didn't include it, or the system belonged to your university or employer, you could just ask your sysadmin to install it for you.
Why was the grad student whose thesis you proofread stuck with MS Word? There are freely available TeX implementations for Windows, I believe. Unfortunately, nothing like LyX seems to exist for Windows....
Steve
"Why is it that whenever you elect a dumbass gov't into power, you guys come crying to Canada for protection from the very gov't you elected?"
The people that move to Canada didn't vote for Bush, and therefore aren't personally responsible for what he's done in office. So, as annoying as it is for your country to be invaded by American "vacationers," they really aren't hypocrites. They go to Canada because it's very similar to the US in most respects, so they don't have to learn a new language or adapt to a radically different culture.
I wouldn't leave the USA to move to Canada unless things over here got really bad, and I wouldn't violate Canadian immigration laws to do it. But there are some really nice areas in Canada, especially in Quebec....
"Times like this, I'm glad I'm Canadian ..."
Times like this, I wish I were Canadian....
Linux has more problems than just MS Office compatibility. The obvious choice for an Office suite is OpenOffice but, in all honesty, OpenOffice sucks. On my machine, a 1GHz Athlon with 256Mb of memory, it takes for freakin' ever to start up, and once it's running, it's as slow as molasses, and crashes sporadically. It's GUI uses its own widget toolkit (probably for portability?), so it doesn't look or behave like the other apps that I use (which use either GTK or Qt).
Linux has a *long* way to go before it can compete with Windows on the desktop, and there's already been so much fragmentation that I fear it's too late. Frankly, I think that other projects, like OpenBeOS, offer a greater opportunity for free software developers to dethrone Microsoft.
Steve
I agree -- now that I'm 24, I really regret not taking advantage of what high school had to offer. I definitely should have gone to more wild parties -- I was afraid of getting in trouble at the time, but in retrospect, I could have gotten away with it, and if I had been caught, I wouldn't have gotten in serious trouble.
In high school, be sure to do the things that only high school students can do. Once you're older, you'll regret missing those opportunities.
Steve
"Look's like theres a security hole!"
Yeah, but Mozilla always shows the last part of URLs in the browser's status bar, so goatse.cx redirectors now only work with MSIE-using dorks. Though I guess that's still a lot of people, and they do have it coming for not using Mozilla....
Dude -- that's awesome! I've wondered off and on about what I'd need to do to make a little CNC machine to cut inlays and fret slots into guitar fingerboards, and this might help out....
Steve
I run FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux, and aside from the fact that FreeBSD is better documented, I haven't noticed that one is really any better than the other. But then again, I don't put much strain on my machines. Why do people think that BSD is technically superior to Linux? I'm not trolling or arguing -- I really want to know what people think....
Steve
I imagine that it would have interesting police applications. Every police shooting could be documented so that, if challenged, the cops could show that it was necessary. Also, in a country that favors aggressive gun control laws, this technology might make the difference between being allowed to have a gun and not being allowed to have a gun.
I do think it's pretty worthless as a military weapon -- when the M16 was released the first ones were notoriously unreliable and it took some time (and a lot of dead American soliders) to work out the bugs. I would imagine that, for military equipment, you'd want to keep rifles and handguns as simple as possible, and to stick with a proven design for as long as possible. It seems that this gun adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.
"(note: i use windowmaker, and haven't touched KDE in a couple years. i may be wrong as to the location of the run command)"
You got it right....
"I've yet to see a CSS-based layout that didn't fall on it's ass as soon as you set your fonts to "Largest" (200% in Mozilla)."
I've seen very few table-based layouts that look good in Lynx. Even in IE or Mozilla, if I make the browser window really narrow (~300 pixels), just about any layout will break down. Everything is a tradeoff.
I think Jamie Zawinski said that all operating systems suck, but that UNIX sucks less. Any web page can be broken by the user, so you have to go with the layout that's the least breakable.
I think that using tables for layout is a dirty, evil hack from hell, but my grandmother uses Netscape 4, and I want my personal pages to be viewable by my family. So I use the tables anyway because, of all my options, they suck the least.
Steve
This is probably the best +5 Funny post that I've ever read on Slashdot. Thought you should know....
Steve
# This is an important part of every .procmailrc
# file
:0:
* ^From.*aol\.com
/dev/null
I'm using Mozilla 1.2.1 on Linux and I can see it fine....
Steve
On a serious note, I think it's fascinating that all it takes is one JPEG to ruin an entire TLD forever.
Steve
"thought he was only a mythical figure featured prominently in Slashdot polls since the beginning of Slashtime?"
If it makes you feel better, remember that CowboyNeal doesn't need to post stories in order for them to appear on Slashdot. Instead, he uses his godlike mastery of time and space to directly control the cathode rays that paint Slashdot.org on your screen. To say that he posts stories in the traditional sense is to say that CowboyNeal has a job and therefore needs money to live -- a bad thing to say since CowboyNeal has been known to strike down with bolts of lightning the heretics that question his omnipotence.
All of my friends talk to me through e-mail, so I know that if the phone rings, it's definitely someone that I don't want to talk to. I just let the answering machine get it -- if it turns out to be someone worth talking to, I'll call them back.
Steve
Yeah, but porn filters also block a lot of legitimate content, and makers of the porn filtering software won't give you a list of sites that they block. I used to be a substitute teacher at a private school. They had porn filters that blocked all free webhosting services (like tripod and geocities) and all free webmail services. But it didn't do a very good job of actually blocking pornography.
I support filtering content when its necessary to do so, but I don't think it's appropriate for the Federal government to make it mandatory. Rather, I think that the individual libraries and school boards should be free to handle the issue in accordance with their own needs and values.
Steve
Actually, it occurred to me that if Iraq really is developing weapons of mass destruction, they must be using computers in their research projects. They wouldn't want anyone to know that the computers exist, so it's a good bet that they're running unlicensed software. We wouldn't need to invade Iraq: the thugs at Business Software Alliance could do it for us, and then make Iraq pay for the price of the audits. Unlike the UN inspectors, who are bound by laws, ethics, and plitical considerations, the BSA would send in their secret, high tech commandos to brutally execute key government leaders and then lay waste to the countryside, burning and pillaging every village in sight in search of unlicensed copies of Winzip. We'd bring our enemies to their knees in no time at all. And since we've farmed this out to the private sector, it won't cost the hard-working American taxpayers a dime!
Why is Plan 9 cool? I don't know much about it am really curious. What does it do that UNIX does not?
Steve
SDF has been the victim of DDoS attacks before, and NWLink was able to survive them every time in the past. I find it hard to believe that this attack was any different from the others.
They were required by their contract to give SDF 15 days, come hell or high water. Even 24 hours would have been enough for most of SDF's users. You can't just ignore a contract simply because it's inconvenient.
Steve
If the DDoS attack against SDF was really costing them money, then it is within NWLink's moral and legal rights to cancel the contract. The problem is that NWLink canceled SDF's contract immediately with no advance notice whatsoever.
Even 48 hours of advance notice would have made a huge difference, as people would have been able to log in to download their important files and take care of any last minute correspondance with important contacts. Hell, even six hours of advance notice would have difference.
I'm told that NWLink was required by their own contract to give SDF fifteen days of advance notice in writing before pulling the plug. If that's correct, then NWLink legally violated their contract and ought to have its bottom spanked in court. But even if NWLink did have the legal right to do what it did, they've nonetheless demonstrated that they are untrustworthy and unprofessional business partners.
Steve
Dude, I think your missing the point....
"Nonsense. The vast majority of people who happen to be running either KDE or GNOME are neither football hooligans nor jingoists about it."
I should have chosen my words better -- I didn't say what I meant to say. I wasn't concerned about KDE and GNOME zealotry, and I do know that GNOME and KDE apps can run on the same desktop at the same time. That said, you can't run Galeon from KDE without first installing the GNOME libraries, and even after you do that, it doesn't have the same look and feel as the rest of your KDE apps. GNOME applications run on KDE, but they don't run as well as KDE applications run on KDE. And the same can be said for KDE applications on GNOME. Developers are still in a bind because if they choose one platform, their application will appear to be less efficient and not as good looking to users of the other. The whole "Linux on the Desktop" thing is a big sprawling mess.
The problem isn't that there are two competing desktop envrionments, it's that there are two competing APIs for interfacing with a desktop environment. I think it's totally reasonable to fault the GNOME and KDE developers for not working this out when they had the chance. As it stands, a GNOME user needs to install 200 MB of KDE libraries just to use KMail.
In your journal, you liken those of us who want to see more consolidation and cooperation in the free software community to Soviet economic planners. I think that's a bit far-fetched. Standardization doesn't have to limit freedom of choice at all. SMTP, for instance, is a standard protocol and your MTA has to adhere to it, but because SMTP is a standard, you can run any MTA you want, depending upon your needs and tastes. Likewise, because HTML is standardized, you're free to use whichever web browser you want. Standards actually encourage freedom of choice and promote the creation of different alternatives to choose from.
Steve