Last I looked (9 months ago) you had to add ~30 EUR/mon for a fixed network phone to Deutsche Telekom's price of ~55 p. month for flat rate ADSL (768 up IIRC, may be 1024 now), because they only sold it together with that. Ping times in Telekom's network have been notoriously bad, though that may get better. Service is terrible. QSC has ADSL (1024 up) for ~80 EUR/mon (flat rate) with fast pings. This includes no news server and only 1 email address though. Then there is Arcor and lots of local network providers, prices don't differ much I think, service may
what is it about Gnome's file dialog that everybody hates so? [...] the fact that the TAB key works properly is a big point
The reason everybody complains is that nobody knows that normal shell tab completion is possible in the dialog. I don't know if that works in KDE at all. People clickety-click their ways through it. Of course the gtk dialog sucks then. I once filed a bug that the selector should have a text saying "Use tab completion here" over the text enter area, but was turned down (rightly so:)
I'm a CS Major, not the average user, and need to learn the terminal. By using such windows-like GUI, I think it's hindering how fast I'll progress
So what you are saying is, RH should change their desktop configuration so that you are kicked from your lazy ass? For chrissakes, just fire up a terminal in KDE or Gnome and learn it. What keeps you from doing that? And, being a CS major, it should be not too hard for you to just start a a small window manager instead of either Gnome or KDE. Otherwise, consider a switch to a marketing major
No, only those options the user USES OFTEN are there. This doesn't mean that the user doesn't want the other options, just that he accesses them less often. First thing I do when I configure Office is to turn off this feature. Because, it's very important to me that the stuff I seldom use is easy to find.
Actually koans work because there is no such thing as the right answer. What is important is more the way you react to the challenge and present your answer and not so much what the answer you come up with is. And an experienced teacher will be able to differentiate between immediate and learned answers
Would I be in violation of a patent just for building on my past expierences to formulate a solution to a problem?
IANAL, but this was my understanding so far: Patents cover the idea. And it doesn't matter if you got the same idea independently, not knowing that a patent exists. Or patent law exists. You are infringing if you have the same idea. This is different than, say, trade secrets. Boy, is this stupid
but ignoring patents is just handing M$, SGI, Sun, etc. very effective weapons
The point is, there is no other way. One of the biggest stupidities in the patent business seems to be that it is not possible to find out if an idea is patented. The patent can be pending for years, and nowhere to be found. Then when you think it's clean and use it, bam! it gets granted. And other issues. There were threads on/. on this. (No really:)
Lots has been said about Eugenia's errors. I've found other ones, plus some omissions I don't want to go completely unnoticed. Some may repeat what others have said here but make me so angry I have to dissect them.
Eugenia says: The big question on any new release is 'Whats New?' or 'What does it do more?'. In the case of Gnome 2, it does less, not more
Well, if you omit the new stuff from the review, it's easy to present that conclusion. Here are the omissions, so numerous and noteworthy in what is supposed to be a review that I find it hard to not see intention. All of those and more stuff can be easily found in the press release and in the release notes. I'd expect that a reviewer reads those docs.
No mentioning of atk, the accessibility toolkit. atk makes gtk+ accessable to , e.g., screen readers and gives it full keyboard navigability. This is a major improvement, since it makes Gnome usable by users with certain disabilities, and it makes it possible to be used in certain organizations like governmental agencies that are required by law to only use software that has this feature. And keyboard nav is good for everybody
Only a brief mentioning of pango, the internalization library, in context of not finding a config option. This is unfortunate, but isn't doing justice to the importance of pango. It furthers internationalization, e.g., by giving gtk the ability to use right-to-left languages, languages with ligatures and those with reordering. You can now mix different languages and scripts in documents. This opens up Gnome to hosts of new users, e.g., in arabic speaking countries. I'm rather surprised that Eugenia, being Greek, presents herself ignorant to pango's importance like one has come to expect from lots of americans.
Then there's the factual errors and stuff I just found stupid. I'm too lazy to separate those here, I'll just list them as I go through the article:
The Gnome menu panel now resembles a bit of MacOS. It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can't change its position.
IIRC one can't change it's position in MacOs either (and neither could one in Gnome 1.4), so I fail to see how's that surprising. Moreover, on rightclick (known from Win) it's easy to see how to remove it, given that there is a very clean context menu. She can't figure it out even so, but still manages to complain earlier that the memu panel, merely includes 3 options.
Then she finds a reason to bash the default panels because they are rather empty and in the next paragraph says People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so [change the defaults] but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop. So, why then complain earlier that she can't change the menu panel's position? I thought nobody tries or wants to do that anyway? I also wonder how long she played with Gnome 2 at all, for if she had actually opened some apps, she would have noticed that the bottom panel populates quickly with buttons controlling the open windows, like in those other OSes people will supposedly return to because the G2 panel setup is so terrible: If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it. Or they will switch to KDE. Or go back to Windows or MacOS. Hm, what exactly can be found on the Win task bar after a fresh install?
Overall, Gnome 2 feels slower
A clear indication that something is seriously wrong with her installation. Nautilus is so much faster that it's not even funny anymore, and the rest is certainly not slower, except maybe for the slow initial loading of the main menu icons.
On Gnome 1.x if you needed some speed, you were just telling Nautilus to not draw the desktop and everything was fine. But if I turn off this option on the new Gnome, there are no icons drawing on the desktop anymore and I have no desktop context menu.
Please, did she even use Gnome 1.4 as she claims? This has been so forever. Or maybe she f****d up her gnome 1.4 install as much as she did this one and had both nautilus and gmc running, so that after killing nautilus she got the see the gmc icons on the desktop.
My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy.
True in a way, but what were the options? Writing a non-sucking html widget for sure, but failing that, what? Another indication that she had no experience with Gnome 1.4, because the fully featured mozilla renderer used in the old nautilus was awfully slow. The compromise is ok as I see it: a quick loading basic html widget for the occasional *.html file on the HD with the option to launch the fully-featured one via context click or by the (painfully big and ugly) sidebar buttons that appear when a html file is viewed in nautilus.
And where are the system tools for networking
Applications->Preferences->Network contains some simple ones. Ximian Setup Tools, which were present in earlier Garnome releases seem to have been removed from the release. I think Ximians plans are rather unclear on what they plan with them. They realized that most distros have their own config apps (drake tools of mandrake, e.g.) and have some time ago announced that Debian is their new reference platform, since it is most in need of such tools. Maybe, when and if (they've been aleady a looong time in the making) they are ready, they will be added by the distros that need them by the time the distros ship with G2. Most probably won't because they will place their own tools in the Preferences menu. So again something of no concern to the users she supposedly writes for.
or maybe a universal media player
This seems to me to be an app and responsibility of the distro. BTW, Garnome includes the Gstreamer Media Player that's meant to be exactly this
Both her probs with the text editor, gedit, When I just place my cursor on the text, and then move my mouse away in order to type there, the program seems to think that I still have my button pressed and it keeps selecting my text. and scrolling this very document with Gedit is shamelessly slow I can't reproduce and IMO point again to a borked compile (remember, she used gcc 3.1.1-CVS) or install
All in all, she does have lots of valid points I won't repeat here, but intermingled with so much either ignorantly or maliciously false information and based on a seriously incompetent review procedure that the piece is IMO completely worthless as a basis for discussion or further work. If one wanted to be unfriendly one could maybe even call it a rather well constructed troll, and a rather successful one given the 503 responses on slashdot in this topic at the time of writing.
I just hope that it goes away soon and we can concentrate on the work and discussion needed to move G2 further and fulfill its, as I see it, big potential
Because the reviewer fucked up to a point that some people, paranoid or not, begin to suspect hidden agendas. I'll sum up for now what others have criticized above. I'll add additional stuff in another posting
1) Compiled from source (which no general user would ever do. They wait for releases from Ximian or their distro, which will certainly have the quirks worked out) but refused to read the docs. Then goes on to say it's not ready for general users 2) Used buggy (in development) compiler on a unstable (in development) distro and complained about unstableness 3) Installed obviously over ancient betas with fucked up menus and then complained about fucked up menus 4) Made factual errors: says that in Gnome 1.4 one could turn off the file manager and still have icons on the desktop, when this is plainly wrong There was other stuff in this category which I can't remember now. I'll read the article again and post those in another posting.
The prob is that this is not valid criticism. I've used G2 since before the earliest betas (and contributed my little share by reporting bugs and hanging out on IRC teaching newcomers what I had learned). I know well that there are issues with G2. But they are clouded by this "review". It takes time away from making G2 better, because instead of discussing areas for improvement, we are more or less forced do talk about totally irrelevant stuff. This "criticism" is neither necessary or healthy. It can't be reviewed or considered, and won't result in changes to the better. If you want all this, you can see it, and have been able for years, on the gnome developer and user mailing lists and on irc/www/bugzilla/developer/news.gnome.org
According to kmaraas on #gnome, the gnome screensaver pref is now part of xscreensaver 4.0, i.e., the new xscreensver-demo. It was decided that maintaining a special one for gnome was duplication of effort. A good decision IMO. Also, I seem to remember that exactly this duplication was the target of harsh criticism by jwz in gnome 1.0.55 days, especially since the gnome pref got it wrong in many respects
Crap, crap, crap, when the argument is given in so broad a scope. I concede that it may be so when doing, e.g., pix editing, where the mouse is essential and one hand is on the mouse anyways. But when editing text, with fingers on keys at all times, moving to the mouse is slower, 50 m spent or not. One of many examples: writing text with bullet lists in powerpoint. Alt+Shift+Arrow to demote and promote is way faster than fiddling with the mouse. I know that cause I see that all day long. Also, though this is a little bit offtopic here, reaching for the mouse all the time is hard on my shoulder, keyboarding is not. I work in a presentation graphics center, our 150 powerpoint operators all start to use keyboard shortcuts after they've mastered the basics. And practically all of them are your normal run-of-the-mill windows users. Nobody forces them to do that
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 1
nice to insult someones age as a rebuttal
Ooops, sorry if it came across like that. First, I don't know if my assumption that the poster is young is right. It sounds that way, though. (Or he/she may be very old, but this is/.)
I wanted to express that I know (from personal experience) that young people often tend to believe that our (as a culture) perceptions are static. That, e.g., people in the middle ages just lived different lives, but their fundamental perception of the world was more or less the same as ours. It's an interesting journey to educate oneself on history and to realize that this is not so at all. In the case of Warhol (or modern art generally), people tend to forget that the way they perceive the world was in large parts shaped by those artists. I must admit that I was angry that someone dismissed the work of a genius without any trial to back it up. It's like saying, "That Einstein guy, I don't know what people see in him. Everybody knows that e = m * c^2
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 1
I don't know if it's trademark infringement, but it sure as hell isn't art. )
You have no idea whatsoever about the significance of Warhol's work. I guess it's because you are 14 yrs old and believe that our perception of art and related phenomena (i.e., the world) have always been what they are today. You are wrong. Educate yourself on art history
experts, who say that for consumer-level users, simply configuring Linux to dial into an ISP (Internet service provider) is a challenge.
I don't necessarily say that GNU/Linux has a chance on the Desktop, although me and my wive have used it for years and never missed anything (playing takes place on consoles). But this is utter bull. Earth to experts: you should try a recent dist, really
Slashdot Mirror
Last I looked (9 months ago) you had to add ~30 EUR/mon for a fixed network phone to Deutsche Telekom's price of ~55 p. month for flat rate ADSL (768 up IIRC, may be 1024 now), because they only sold it together with that.
Ping times in Telekom's network have been notoriously bad, though that may get better. Service is terrible.
QSC has ADSL (1024 up) for ~80 EUR/mon (flat rate) with fast pings. This includes no news server and only 1 email address though. Then there is Arcor and lots of local network providers, prices don't differ much I think, service may
what is it about Gnome's file dialog that everybody hates so? [...] the fact that the TAB key works properly is a big point
:)
The reason everybody complains is that nobody knows that normal shell tab completion is possible in the dialog. I don't know if that works in KDE at all. People clickety-click their ways through it. Of course the gtk dialog sucks then. I once filed a bug that the selector should have a text saying "Use tab completion here" over the text enter area, but was turned down (rightly so
I'm a CS Major, not the average user, and need to learn the terminal. By using such windows-like GUI, I think it's hindering how fast I'll progress
So what you are saying is, RH should change their desktop configuration so that you are kicked from your lazy ass? For chrissakes, just fire up a terminal in KDE or Gnome and learn it. What keeps you from doing that? And, being a CS major, it should be not too hard for you to just start a a small window manager instead of either Gnome or KDE. Otherwise, consider a switch to a marketing major
only those options which the user WANTS are there
No, only those options the user USES OFTEN are there. This doesn't mean that the user doesn't want the other options, just that he accesses them less often. First thing I do when I configure Office is to turn off this feature. Because, it's very important to me that the stuff I seldom use is easy to find.
Actually koans work because there is no such thing as the right answer. What is important is more the way you react to the challenge and present your answer and not so much what the answer you come up with is. And an experienced teacher will be able to differentiate between immediate and learned answers
You are wrong. I won't hand you the URLs on a plate, though
Yeah, well, whatever. I'm sure you know from personal experience how being a leader of a worldwide revolutionary phenomenon feels and works.
rather then fight to get a law you dont like changed, you should just ignore it? Sorry but in the real world that wont work
Works for me every day
Would I be in violation of a patent just for building on my past expierences to formulate a solution to a problem?
IANAL, but this was my understanding so far: Patents cover the idea. And it doesn't matter if you got the same idea independently, not knowing that a patent exists. Or patent law exists. You are infringing if you have the same idea. This is different than, say, trade secrets. Boy, is this stupid
but ignoring patents is just handing M$, SGI, Sun, etc. very effective weapons
/. on this. (No really :)
The point is, there is no other way. One of the biggest stupidities in the patent business seems to be that it is not possible to find out if an idea is patented. The patent can be pending for years, and nowhere to be found. Then when you think it's clean and use it, bam! it gets granted. And other issues. There were threads on
isnt this the same attitude that got Open Source / Linux advocates isolated from the rest of the world ?
What are you talking about?
It certainly doesn't do anything to make me respect Linus
Maybe his starting and maintaining Linux does
pieces like XFree86 4.2.0 (out since January) failed to make this release, yet candy like Gnome 1.4 made it.
You are confused. Gnome 1.4 has been out since around April 2001. See this message to the gnome list
Everything is GPL so far, except Ximian Connector. IANAL, but I'd think you are right that RH can't call it "Ximian Gnome" if they use it.
It's not freely available to be packaged without the consent of Ximian.
/nice move/ to do it without consent
It's all GPL, 'nuff said. OTOH, it wouldn't be a
Lots has been said about Eugenia's errors. I've found other ones, plus some omissions I don't want to go completely unnoticed. Some may repeat what others have said here but make me so angry I have to dissect them.
Eugenia says: The big question on any new release is 'Whats New?' or 'What does it do more?'. In the case of Gnome 2, it does less, not more
Well, if you omit the new stuff from the review, it's easy to present that conclusion. Here are the omissions, so numerous and noteworthy in what is supposed to be a review that I find it hard to not see intention. All of those and more stuff can be easily found in the press release and in the release notes. I'd expect that a reviewer reads those docs.
No mentioning of atk, the accessibility toolkit. atk makes gtk+ accessable to , e.g., screen readers and gives it full keyboard navigability. This is a major improvement, since it makes Gnome usable by users with certain disabilities, and it makes it possible to be used in certain organizations like governmental agencies that are required by law to only use software that has this feature. And keyboard nav is good for everybody
Only a brief mentioning of pango, the internalization library, in context of not finding a config option. This is unfortunate, but isn't doing justice to the importance of pango. It furthers internationalization, e.g., by giving gtk the ability to use right-to-left languages, languages with ligatures and those with reordering. You can now mix different languages and scripts in documents. This opens up Gnome to hosts of new users, e.g., in arabic speaking countries. I'm rather surprised that Eugenia, being Greek, presents herself ignorant to pango's importance like one has come to expect from lots of americans.
Then there's the factual errors and stuff I just found stupid. I'm too lazy to separate those here, I'll just list them as I go through the article:
The Gnome menu panel now resembles a bit of MacOS. It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can't change its position.
IIRC one can't change it's position in MacOs either (and neither could one in Gnome 1.4), so I fail to see how's that surprising. Moreover, on rightclick (known from Win) it's easy to see how to remove it, given that there is a very clean context menu. She can't figure it out even so, but still manages to complain earlier that the memu panel, merely includes 3 options.
Then she finds a reason to bash the default panels because they are rather empty and in the next paragraph says People will always argue that we are lucky that there is an option to do so [change the defaults] but the main point is, that the default configuration is what most people use. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of users actually change (or have the right to change, in a business environment) their desktop. So, why then complain earlier that she can't change the menu panel's position? I thought nobody tries or wants to do that anyway?
I also wonder how long she played with Gnome 2 at all, for if she had actually opened some apps, she would have noticed that the bottom panel populates
quickly with buttons controlling the open windows, like in those other OSes people will supposedly return to because the G2 panel setup is so terrible: If the default configuration is not intuitive, most people will still live with it. Or they will switch to KDE. Or go back to Windows or MacOS. Hm, what exactly can be found on the Win task bar after a fresh install?
Overall, Gnome 2 feels slower
A clear indication that something is seriously wrong with her installation. Nautilus is so much faster that it's not even funny anymore, and the rest is certainly not slower, except maybe for the slow initial loading of the main menu icons.
On Gnome 1.x if you needed some speed, you were just telling Nautilus to not draw the desktop and everything was fine. But if I turn off this option on the new Gnome, there are no icons drawing on the desktop anymore and I have no desktop context menu.
Please, did she even use Gnome 1.4 as she claims? This has been so forever. Or maybe she f****d up her gnome 1.4 install as much as she did this one and had both nautilus and gmc running, so that after killing nautilus she got the see the gmc icons on the desktop.
My only problem with Nautilus was the inclusion of GTKhtml 2 as the main HTML renderer. GTKHtml is still extremely buggy.
True in a way, but what were the options? Writing a non-sucking html widget for sure, but failing that, what? Another indication that she had no experience with Gnome 1.4, because the fully featured mozilla renderer used in the old nautilus was awfully slow. The compromise is ok as I see it: a quick loading basic html widget for the occasional *.html file on the HD with the option to launch the fully-featured one via context click or by the (painfully big and ugly) sidebar buttons that appear when a html file is viewed in nautilus.
And where are the system tools for networking
Applications->Preferences->Network contains some simple ones. Ximian Setup Tools, which were present in earlier Garnome releases seem to have been removed from the release. I think Ximians plans are rather unclear on what they plan with them. They realized that most distros have their own config apps (drake tools of mandrake, e.g.) and have some time ago announced that Debian is their new reference platform, since it is most in need of such tools. Maybe, when and if (they've been aleady a looong time in the making) they are ready, they will be added by the distros that need them by the time the distros ship with G2. Most probably won't because they will place their own tools in the Preferences menu. So again something of no concern to the users she supposedly writes for.
or maybe a universal media player
This seems to me to be an app and responsibility of the distro. BTW, Garnome includes the Gstreamer Media Player that's meant to be exactly this
Both her probs with the text editor, gedit, When I just place my cursor on the text, and then move my mouse away in order to type there, the program seems to think that I still have my button pressed and it keeps selecting my text. and scrolling this very document with Gedit is shamelessly slow I can't reproduce and IMO point again to a borked compile (remember, she used gcc 3.1.1-CVS) or install
All in all, she does have lots of valid points I won't repeat here, but intermingled with so much either ignorantly or maliciously false information and based on a seriously incompetent review procedure that the piece is IMO completely worthless as a basis for discussion or further work. If one wanted to be unfriendly one could maybe even call it a rather well constructed troll, and a rather successful one given the 503 responses on slashdot in this topic at the time of writing.
I just hope that it goes away soon and we can concentrate on the work and discussion needed to move G2 further and fulfill its, as I see it, big potential
Why be so quick to debunk criticism
Because the reviewer fucked up to a point that some people, paranoid or not, begin to suspect hidden agendas. I'll sum up for now what others have criticized above. I'll add additional stuff in another posting
1) Compiled from source (which no general user would ever do. They wait for releases from Ximian or their distro, which will certainly have the quirks worked out) but refused to read the docs. Then goes on to say it's not ready for general users
2) Used buggy (in development) compiler on a unstable (in development) distro and complained about unstableness
3) Installed obviously over ancient betas with fucked up menus and then complained about fucked up menus
4) Made factual errors: says that in Gnome 1.4 one could turn off the file manager and still have icons on the desktop, when this is plainly wrong
There was other stuff in this category which I can't remember now. I'll read the article again and post those in another posting.
The prob is that this is not valid criticism. I've used G2 since before the earliest betas (and contributed my little share by reporting bugs and hanging out on IRC teaching newcomers what I had learned). I know well that there are issues with G2. But they are clouded by this "review". It takes time away from making G2 better, because instead of discussing areas for improvement, we are more or less forced do talk about totally irrelevant stuff. This "criticism" is neither necessary or healthy. It can't be reviewed or considered, and won't result in changes to the better. If you want all this, you can see it, and have been able for years, on the gnome developer and user mailing lists and on irc/www/bugzilla/developer/news.gnome.org
and wm + rox provides, e.g., the infrastructure to embed docs of one type in another how exactly?
the extra "functionality" of one (Gnome) is of no value whatsoever
Right, nobody needs the ability to embed spreadsheets in text documents. Not
According to kmaraas on #gnome, the gnome screensaver pref is now part of xscreensaver 4.0, i.e., the new xscreensver-demo. It was decided that maintaining a special one for gnome was duplication of effort. A good decision IMO. Also, I seem to remember that exactly this duplication was the target of harsh criticism by jwz in gnome 1.0.55 days, especially since the gnome pref got it wrong in many respects
Crap, crap, crap, when the argument is given in so broad a scope. I concede that it may be so when doing, e.g., pix editing, where the mouse is essential and one hand is on the mouse anyways. But when editing text, with fingers on keys at all times, moving to the mouse is slower, 50 m spent or not. One of many examples: writing text with bullet lists in powerpoint. Alt+Shift+Arrow to demote and promote is way faster than fiddling with the mouse. I know that cause I see that all day long.
Also, though this is a little bit offtopic here, reaching for the mouse all the time is hard on my shoulder, keyboarding is not.
I work in a presentation graphics center, our 150 powerpoint operators all start to use keyboard shortcuts after they've mastered the basics. And practically all of them are your normal run-of-the-mill windows users. Nobody forces them to do that
nice to insult someones age as a rebuttal
/.)
Ooops, sorry if it came across like that. First, I don't know if my assumption that the poster is young is right. It sounds that way, though. (Or he/she may be very old, but this is
I wanted to express that I know (from personal experience) that young people often tend to believe that our (as a culture) perceptions are static. That, e.g., people in the middle ages just lived different lives, but their fundamental perception of the world was more or less the same as ours. It's an interesting journey to educate oneself on history and to realize that this is not so at all.
In the case of Warhol (or modern art generally), people tend to forget that the way they perceive the world was in large parts shaped by those artists.
I must admit that I was angry that someone dismissed the work of a genius without any trial to back it up. It's like saying, "That Einstein guy, I don't know what people see in him. Everybody knows that e = m * c^2
I don't know if it's trademark infringement, but it sure as hell isn't art. )
You have no idea whatsoever about the significance of Warhol's work. I guess it's because you are 14 yrs old and believe that our perception of art and related phenomena (i.e., the world) have always been what they are today. You are wrong. Educate yourself on art history
experts, who say that for consumer-level users, simply configuring Linux to dial into an ISP (Internet service provider) is a challenge.
I don't necessarily say that GNU/Linux has a chance on the Desktop, although me and my wive have used it for years and never missed anything (playing takes place on consoles). But this is utter bull. Earth to experts: you should try a recent dist, really
Pussy is a character in The Sopranos (mafia comedy)