> I can't stand around typing all day without some serious pain
Perhaps you haven't had your workstation set up right. I suppose I am lucky: though I do development work in an ugly gray cube-land, my company pays an ergonomist to come in and measure people and adjust their workstations (keyboard tray and countertop height, chair position, etc.), the idea being that paying disability for folks with RSI and such is way more expensive than having the ergonomist in for a visit whenever we hire someone new.
Anyway, the point: I told the ergonomist six years ago that I wanted a stand-up cubicle, with a high chair I could pop up onto if I wanted to sit. My cube's counters got raised, its shelves went down near the floor, a new chair arrived (a pretty cheap one actually, but I don't spend much time on it)... and voila. I usually stand and type comfortably for the better part of an hour; then I'll hop up on the chair for ten or fifteen minutes max. (The chair is adjusted such that I don't have to raise/lower the keyboard tray when I move from standing to sitting.)
This works really well for me. My wrists don't hurt anymore, and neither does my lower back. (True, this may have a lot more to do with good ergonomics than it does with standing versus sitting.) I feel engaged with my work when I am standing. If I sit for too long, I either wanna slouch (which makes me wanna take a nap), or I get fidgety. No thanks, I'll stand.
Heads up: You cannot "injunct" something. That ain't a word. The verb you do when you file an injunction is "enjoin." So, "Ubisoft ENJOINS Tremblay FROM Joining Vivendi."
You're absolutely right, and it's completely unfair for the author of this article to hold OOo up as some sort of typical example of an Open Source project. OpenOffice.org is hampered by (a) an enormous (and enormously-complex) codebase that was originally crafted under the "cathedral" model, and (b) the fact that Sun manages ongoing work on the project in such a way as to make the pace of change glacial. Listen to Michael Meeks talk sometime about the bug fixes made in OOo 2 years ago that didn't see the light of day until the 2.0 release. OOo has bugs, yes, and it's slow, yes, but both of these issues have far more to do with the product's history and current caretakers than with its Open Source nature.
Hey ASSHOLES... Apologies for the abrasiveness of this post, but crap like this deserves it.
Sigh. No. No it does not. The people you've called ASSHOLES are standing up for a principle they believe in. Their point is quite simple, and you're ignoring it: Java is not Free. Now, that may not be important to you. Fine! Say so! Make your argument. Maybe even try to convince someone you're right. But don't tell us that Java has been "opened up wix ways to sunday," because that's a red herring. We're not talking about the way you define freedom or open-ness. The story isn't about whether Java meets your standards. The story is about Free Software that isn't Free anymore. Some people get upset about these things. That doesn't make them ASSHOLES.
The idea that there can be no criticism of Sun because they've provided a "gift" is silly. If you make a gift of pork to someone whose beliefs say "don't eat pork," should they thank you and chow down? Granted, the analogy doesn't hold in the end, because in this case, Free Software types can try to turn the pork into chicken (Kaffe, gcj, etc.). That doesn't make them ASSHOLES either.
As for what you falsely label "abrasiveness" (it's actually something much deeper), if you have this level of intolerance for opposing views, well, there are words to describe people like you. You already seem to know one of them. Remember to turn the caps lock on.
Kinko's has gone way downhill since they got taken over by FedEx. When I needed to print a copy of the nearly 600-page Inform Designer's Manual, Kinkos said it would be an overnight job and cost ten cents a page. So I went to the print shop at Office Depot. They did the job while I waited, at 5.5 cents per page.
In Gnome 2.10, the drop-down thingy in the lower left actually looks clickable for the first time. I'll grant you that the 2.8 version sucked -- it didn't look like a button or anything.
I also agree that a nice Bookmarks menu might be a nice addition to spatial Nautilus.
As to why "it's easier" -- actually, I think that spatial is only easier for certain people. Some people have no problems at all thinking in terms of hierarchy, thinking in terms of *structures*. For others (myself included), it is far easier to think of things visually. So I like that my docs folder opens up on the left side of the screen with a certain zoom setting and a red background, while my music folder opens up elsewhere with a different view and a different background. It makes those two folders feel like two very different *places* to me, and that very simplistic visual feedback helps me keep everything straight. Again, not everyone finds this a good way to work. But since Nautilus also has a pretty good Explorer-clone mode these days, I think Gnome has covered both bases quite well.
Sigh. No, you don't get it. See my linkage. They changed the action of a double-click on a folder: It now opens a new window while closing the existing one -- in other words, they swapped the double-left-click and double-middle-click functions. But only for folders.
You may think spatial Nautilus sucks. That's why Nautilus retains its file browser mode, and every distro I've seen (Ubuntu included) provides a link to that mode in their start menu.
Believe me, spatial Nautilus does not suck for people who don't grok computers. (It's not bad for geeks, either, once you start working *with* it rather than fighting against it.) It is not perfect, but it doesn't suck, either. Ubuntu's hack, however, makes it suckier than it has been before.
...is the "Ubuntu spatial" mode hacked into Nautilus (and turned on by default) just a few days before 5.04 went gold, which makes Ubuntu's file and folder management different from every other Gnome implementation out there. Why was this done? Seems Mark Shuttleworth decided by fiat that this new way is better. Peoplearenotamused.
1. SuSE: Gone and re-branded as Novel Linux Desktop. Now it's all tailored for business.
Wrong. SuSE and NLD remain separate product lines for now. SuSE 9.3 is on the horizon.
3. Linspire: Free unless you want to use the built in package management system. Then you have to pay for it.
Untrue. There ain't nothin' free about Linspire. You have to pay for the box, then pay yearly for package management and updates. They have a LiveCD, but as far as I know, it is not installable.
Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.
Please mod parent "on crack." The rise of Web forums to replace usenet is perhaps the biggest bummer of the popularization of the Internet. (Well, okay, the second biggest bummer -- after spam.) I used to read forty or so usenet groups every day, all in one nice interface that kept track of what I'd read. Now I'm expected to click all around the Web to various forums (fora?), each of which requires me to register in order to post, each of which has a different (and crappy) interface, none of which do proper threading, etc. Feh. Web forums suck.
Bunten was a contributor during EA's magical first phase (M.U.L.E. was her masterpiece) but did not work on Archon. Archon is the creation of Jon Freeman, Paul Reiche III, and Anne Westfall.
I suppose you could also put the menu bar on top of each graphic window, but that would clutter things up an aweful lot and doesn't seem like a very good solution.
This very feature is available in Gimp 2.0, and actually it works quite well. People who are still complaining about "everything on the right button" in Gimp need to bring themselves up to date. That argument has been obsolete for quite some time.
Usually I'm pissed when someone says exactly what I wanted to say. In this case, it's pleasing as heck. I'm glad to know that others believe what I believe, and try to live by it.
You're right, that is a dumb question. Elections are governed by laws, and I very much doubt that the laws of Washington state allow anyone there to simply declare, "Fuck this mess, we're having a run-off."
There are rules in place that dictate what happens in a case like this. What what get to find out now is how good those rules are, and whether they need fixing before the next election. What we DON'T get to do is just make up new rules as we go along. (Unless, of course, we're the Supreme Court in 2000. )
PC World has long been a Microsoft yellow journalism rag. It's just Microsoft Corp.'s Department of Monopoly Security at work.
As the in-house Linux columnist for PC World, I can tell you that I'm not employed just to be a token alternative view. The publication I work for viewsMicrosoftwithaskepticaleye when appropriate. We are not a Microsoft shill. And I have come to discover over the years that the geeks who immediately dismiss us as such typically do not read our magazine, because we're not geared toward geeks -- we're geared toward folks who need more help with technology than geeks do. So we may not be your magazine. But we work hard to be impartial. We are not bought and paid for by Uncle Bill, and anyone who says we are is not paying attention to our coverage, either in print or online.
The prior decision of the Court to not balk allowing states to limit the Full Faith & Credit clause regarding marriage can be reversed by an activist court in one ruling.
Note the words "can be." That's the whole deal, right there. It *could* happen. Any attempt to head such a decision off at the pass via a constitutional amendment would be pre-emptive. And pre-emptive changes to the Constitution are about as good an idea as pre-emptive invasions of sovereign nations. [ducks]
Further, your definition of an activist court is about as biased as it could be. Not wrong, just biased. You could just as easily say that an activist court is one that is willing to apply the law -- as created by the legislature -- equally to all citizens, even when the legislature itself is too chickenshit to do so on its own. See the unfolding of the civil rights movement for plenty of examples. I don't think that courts integrating schools was a violation of separation of powers at all. I think it was the judicial branch stepping up to the plate in a historic fashion.
NO. That is NOT how it works. Throughout America's history, states have refused to recognize certain marriages allowed in other states. Some states allow cousins to marry; others don't recognize such marriages. Some states allow you to get married at a younger age than other states; if your state doesn't want to recognize the marriage of a 14-year-old, it does not have to. This is how the courts have ruled in the past, so anyone who says the Full Faith and Credit clause of the constitution necessarily applies to gay marriage is simply ignoring decades of jurisprudence. At the very least, it is an open legal question, not a fait accompli.
No. It is from the scene where THX-1138 is being reprogrammed, and one reprogrammer is teaching another reprogrammer how to work the dials. The newbie keeps messing things up, causing torturous pain for THX-1138.
Yeah -- this interview is already out of date in at least two respects. For one, cooker now includes the x.org server. For another, their distribution deal with O'Reilly is now a matter of public record.
Tonight I brought home a brand-spankin' new iRiver IHP-120. This is a device that has only been available for a couple of weeks. I plugged it into my USB port, right-clicked my Gnome desktop, chose Disks-->USB, and whammo, there I was, browsing my nifty new toy. When I was done, I right-clicked its desktop icon, chose Unmount, and that was that. (On my XP box at work, by the way, no joke, everything went all to hell when I tried to "safely remove" the device.) From a user perspective, this is not hard stuff. Elegant interface, no surprises. Everything went just as well recently when a friend showed up with a new Olympus camera he wanted to dump some pics from. Plugged and went.
Now, there are two reasons why it's become this easy: (1) I'm running Mandrake 9.2, which supports all kinda hardware that I previously had to hack together support for, and (2) I've tweaked my fstab so that any old mass-storage device that appears can be mounted at/mnt/usb. Stupid little system tweak, but a Windows convert will not put up with that bit of under-the-hood Unix fun, nor should they have to. It's there for us geeks who like it, but they shouldn't have to see it -- they want things to be three-steps-max easy, right out of the box.
Linux can be that level of easy, but none of the distros are making it happen. You see bits of excellence in different areas in each -- one has a fantastic means of adding a network printer, another has a terrific clone of the Windows Internet Sharing wizard, etc. Nobody's putting it all together in the way it could be put together. One of them will, eventually, of course; it just seems strange that it won't be Red Hat.
How is it an indication of lack of seriousness to ensure that your users have a good experience?
Look. You don't *need* to know these things to serve content, and of course you try to design a site to look good and work well in any sized browser window, but if you care about your users, you test in an environment similar to theirs, just to check up on their experience. To do that, you have to know what their environment is.
You use javascript to determine browser width and height, which are the measurements you really care about. (I forget whether js can actually get you screen res; if it can, then you can capture those values if you prefer.) Anyway, client-side javascript gets you those values, but how do you get 'em back to the server? You again use javascript to dynamically write out an image tag. Something like . You put width=1 and height=1 in the image tag as well so that the 404ed image doesn't show up on the page -- but the 404ed image call appears in your logs, and presto, you've got information about how big your users' browser windows are. It's a horrible hack, but it works, and it's done all over the Web.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is unspiked.
> I can't stand around typing all day without some serious pain
Perhaps you haven't had your workstation set up right. I suppose I am lucky: though I do development work in an ugly gray cube-land, my company pays an ergonomist to come in and measure people and adjust their workstations (keyboard tray and countertop height, chair position, etc.), the idea being that paying disability for folks with RSI and such is way more expensive than having the ergonomist in for a visit whenever we hire someone new.
Anyway, the point: I told the ergonomist six years ago that I wanted a stand-up cubicle, with a high chair I could pop up onto if I wanted to sit. My cube's counters got raised, its shelves went down near the floor, a new chair arrived (a pretty cheap one actually, but I don't spend much time on it)... and voila. I usually stand and type comfortably for the better part of an hour; then I'll hop up on the chair for ten or fifteen minutes max. (The chair is adjusted such that I don't have to raise/lower the keyboard tray when I move from standing to sitting.)
This works really well for me. My wrists don't hurt anymore, and neither does my lower back. (True, this may have a lot more to do with good ergonomics than it does with standing versus sitting.) I feel engaged with my work when I am standing. If I sit for too long, I either wanna slouch (which makes me wanna take a nap), or I get fidgety. No thanks, I'll stand.
Heads up: You cannot "injunct" something. That ain't a word. The verb you do when you file an injunction is "enjoin." So, "Ubisoft ENJOINS Tremblay FROM Joining Vivendi."
Actually, this is possible. More cumbersome than with LILO, but it is possible. I've written about the method here. (Scroll down for the GRUB goods.)
You're absolutely right, and it's completely unfair for the author of this article to hold OOo up as some sort of typical example of an Open Source project. OpenOffice.org is hampered by (a) an enormous (and enormously-complex) codebase that was originally crafted under the "cathedral" model, and (b) the fact that Sun manages ongoing work on the project in such a way as to make the pace of change glacial. Listen to Michael Meeks talk sometime about the bug fixes made in OOo 2 years ago that didn't see the light of day until the 2.0 release. OOo has bugs, yes, and it's slow, yes, but both of these issues have far more to do with the product's history and current caretakers than with its Open Source nature.
The idea that there can be no criticism of Sun because they've provided a "gift" is silly. If you make a gift of pork to someone whose beliefs say "don't eat pork," should they thank you and chow down? Granted, the analogy doesn't hold in the end, because in this case, Free Software types can try to turn the pork into chicken (Kaffe, gcj, etc.). That doesn't make them ASSHOLES either.
As for what you falsely label "abrasiveness" (it's actually something much deeper), if you have this level of intolerance for opposing views, well, there are words to describe people like you. You already seem to know one of them. Remember to turn the caps lock on.
Kinko's has gone way downhill since they got taken over by FedEx. When I needed to print a copy of the nearly 600-page Inform Designer's Manual, Kinkos said it would be an overnight job and cost ten cents a page. So I went to the print shop at Office Depot. They did the job while I waited, at 5.5 cents per page.
In Gnome 2.10, the drop-down thingy in the lower left actually looks clickable for the first time. I'll grant you that the 2.8 version sucked -- it didn't look like a button or anything.
I also agree that a nice Bookmarks menu might be a nice addition to spatial Nautilus.
As to why "it's easier" -- actually, I think that spatial is only easier for certain people. Some people have no problems at all thinking in terms of hierarchy, thinking in terms of *structures*. For others (myself included), it is far easier to think of things visually. So I like that my docs folder opens up on the left side of the screen with a certain zoom setting and a red background, while my music folder opens up elsewhere with a different view and a different background. It makes those two folders feel like two very different *places* to me, and that very simplistic visual feedback helps me keep everything straight. Again, not everyone finds this a good way to work. But since Nautilus also has a pretty good Explorer-clone mode these days, I think Gnome has covered both bases quite well.
Sigh. No, you don't get it. See my linkage. They changed the action of a double-click on a folder: It now opens a new window while closing the existing one -- in other words, they swapped the double-left-click and double-middle-click functions. But only for folders.
You may think spatial Nautilus sucks. That's why Nautilus retains its file browser mode, and every distro I've seen (Ubuntu included) provides a link to that mode in their start menu.
Believe me, spatial Nautilus does not suck for people who don't grok computers. (It's not bad for geeks, either, once you start working *with* it rather than fighting against it.) It is not perfect, but it doesn't suck, either. Ubuntu's hack, however, makes it suckier than it has been before.
...is the "Ubuntu spatial" mode hacked into Nautilus (and turned on by default) just a few days before 5.04 went gold, which makes Ubuntu's file and folder management different from every other Gnome implementation out there. Why was this done? Seems Mark Shuttleworth decided by fiat that this new way is better. People are not amused.
Bunten was a contributor during EA's magical first phase (M.U.L.E. was her masterpiece) but did not work on Archon. Archon is the creation of Jon Freeman, Paul Reiche III, and Anne Westfall.
Usually I'm pissed when someone says exactly what I wanted to say. In this case, it's pleasing as heck. I'm glad to know that others believe what I believe, and try to live by it.
You're right, that is a dumb question. Elections are governed by laws, and I very much doubt that the laws of Washington state allow anyone there to simply declare, "Fuck this mess, we're having a run-off." There are rules in place that dictate what happens in a case like this. What what get to find out now is how good those rules are, and whether they need fixing before the next election. What we DON'T get to do is just make up new rules as we go along. (Unless, of course, we're the Supreme Court in 2000. )
Further, your definition of an activist court is about as biased as it could be. Not wrong, just biased. You could just as easily say that an activist court is one that is willing to apply the law -- as created by the legislature -- equally to all citizens, even when the legislature itself is too chickenshit to do so on its own. See the unfolding of the civil rights movement for plenty of examples. I don't think that courts integrating schools was a violation of separation of powers at all. I think it was the judicial branch stepping up to the plate in a historic fashion.
NO. That is NOT how it works. Throughout America's history, states have refused to recognize certain marriages allowed in other states. Some states allow cousins to marry; others don't recognize such marriages. Some states allow you to get married at a younger age than other states; if your state doesn't want to recognize the marriage of a 14-year-old, it does not have to. This is how the courts have ruled in the past, so anyone who says the Full Faith and Credit clause of the constitution necessarily applies to gay marriage is simply ignoring decades of jurisprudence. At the very least, it is an open legal question, not a fait accompli.
No. It is from the scene where THX-1138 is being reprogrammed, and one reprogrammer is teaching another reprogrammer how to work the dials. The newbie keeps messing things up, causing torturous pain for THX-1138.
Yeah -- this interview is already out of date in at least two respects. For one, cooker now includes the x.org server. For another, their distribution deal with O'Reilly is now a matter of public record.
Now, there are two reasons why it's become this easy: (1) I'm running Mandrake 9.2, which supports all kinda hardware that I previously had to hack together support for, and (2) I've tweaked my fstab so that any old mass-storage device that appears can be mounted at /mnt/usb. Stupid little system tweak, but a Windows convert will not put up with that bit of under-the-hood Unix fun, nor should they have to. It's there for us geeks who like it, but they shouldn't have to see it -- they want things to be three-steps-max easy, right out of the box.
Linux can be that level of easy, but none of the distros are making it happen. You see bits of excellence in different areas in each -- one has a fantastic means of adding a network printer, another has a terrific clone of the Windows Internet Sharing wizard, etc. Nobody's putting it all together in the way it could be put together. One of them will, eventually, of course; it just seems strange that it won't be Red Hat.
Look. You don't *need* to know these things to serve content, and of course you try to design a site to look good and work well in any sized browser window, but if you care about your users, you test in an environment similar to theirs, just to check up on their experience. To do that, you have to know what their environment is.
Should anybody fret about this? I don't think so.