I've been trying to figure out a decent gift for my Dad, and I was thinking the new O'reilly Knoppix Hacks book would be a good choice. He used to love computers, but he feels like they've gotten too complex for him, and he's totally frustrated from dealing with Windows virus and spyware issues. The book looks like it's got some good info on dealing with those, plus knoppix might be a fun little toy for him to play with that'd make computers simple again. It'd also let him know a bit about what I've been babbling on and off to them about for years now:-)
The idea of giving them just a CD though? Lame. The CD with some decent instructions tailored to their needs, if they actually have them then maybe you've got something there. I'm personally going to go check the book out in the store before I order it for him.
I hear the "where's the line tool?" question for the Gimp quite often. I've asked it myself even (I don't claim to be anything graphics program-wise other than a novice) so I'd imagine the tutorial was written for all the many people who asked that very question. It might be written in a way that doesn't pander to the audience, but if you actually feel personally offended by this then you need to grow a skin.
What a waste. Yeah, I can compile my own kernel (I did it for years) but I gave up doing it myself and left it for my distro's kernel team to handle because I don't need the hassle. There's no way in hell that I'm going to go back to custom-compiling a kernel with no DRI just to get 3D acceleration when my old ATI 128 worked great with the old DRI drivers.
ATI! Get a clue! Release your specs again or cooperate with the X and DRI teams to make sure your drivers work properly with stock distro kernels. Your chips aren't that good that they shouldn't work according to the standards.
Crick was amazing, and a true genius, and acknowledged as such by just about anyone in the field of molecular biology. He and Watson basically invented the science of molecular biology, and it was really Crick who envisioned it whole and pushed the field in the direction that it still moves today. He was The Theorist, and one of the few who can claim the title of theoretical biologist with any sort of legitimacy (the other early molecular biology theorist was Jaques Monod) and his numerous papers pushed the field forward in many ways.
The central dogma of molecular biology was his. He was one of the few people present who came up with the idea of how DNA sends a messenger (RNA) to ribosomes, which act as dumb machines to translate the message to a functional protein. This seems obvious now, but for a long time it wasn't, and we owe Crick, in no small part, for coming up with this.
The man was a true genius and visionary, and he's long been one of my personal heroes. He deserves to be mourned the world over for all he helped build and give to it.
I don't read it that way, but it's not as clear to me that it was meant to be insulting now as it was earlier when I posted my last response. In other words, you've helped me reconsider my view a bit.
Good, I appreciate that you're listening. That's way more than I expect from slashdot these days.
Bullshit. People play games and watch movies made from 3D techniques. They know what polygons are. Just like IE users know what browsers are, but they don't know much past that for lack of interest.
You're stretching it. Watching a movie doesn't mean you should know the technical details of cameras and lighting, but you should at least have some idea of what the differences between DVD and VHS are.
This is all moot anyway since you completely avoided the elitist part of my comment. Simply put, if I were a nice 3D artist, I would not use the word 'ignorant' to describe people that are unaware of what normal mapping is. It's not often you do hear the word ignorant in a nice way.
Hmm... I think I agree that you don't hear the word ignorant used in a nice way all the time, but I honestly think that it depends on the crowd. I usually use it in a benign way, and people I know tend to do the same. Maybe we're weird? I agree that on slashdot it'll be used more condescendingly on the whole.
It seems like we're ultimately trying to make the same point, but from different angles. We both seem to agree that being ignorant of things like the deep details of securing your web browser is nothing to be ashamed of. Your issue seems to be more with using the term "ignorant" in general, while mine is with the criticism of people for that ignorance. It leads to the same point in the end, as far as I can see.
I think you overestimate Microsoft's sway over the community. Microsoft already tried this trick with kerberos, embrace and extend, and while it's caused headaches it hasn't brought down kerberos on UNIX by any means. Ultimately, Free Software people will keep coding along because they can and they don't have to answer to Microsoft or anyone else. It's always worked up until now.
Microsoft is using SFU as its foothold to write a POSIX compliant OS and keep it under a proprietary license.
I only see this as a good thing. Sure, it'd be better if it was Free Software, but I'll take it.
Microsoft will happily take all of BSD, piece by piece, over the course of several years, and use it to create a POSIX compliant OS to compete with Linux and remain proprietary.
You mean *GASP* linux might have to compete!?!?! Heaven forbid!
However, it is the general opinion here that people that use IE are stupid. You can't honestly tell me you think that the post I replied to meant that in a nice way.
I agree that the general opinion is that IE users are stupid (and it's the stupid people who hold that opinion) but what surprised me is that I really don't think the post you replied to was meant in a bad way. The grandparent post said that they used IE out of habit and ignorance, and the parent post to yours said that billions of people did the same. There wasn't any statement of condemnation in those posts.
Furthermore, the post you quoted simply stated that IE's horrible security record is demonstrable by evidence, also a fact without any real condemnation. None of these posts had any sort of condemnation of IE users, which is what you seem to have inferred. Perhaps you saw something in them that wasn't really there?
I agree. If my analogy had anything to do with 3D artists using web browsers, it would be crap.
It's still crap. Your analogy expects someone who doesn't use anything related to 3D modelling to know something about it, but this has no relation to the subject at hand. Instead, try asking someone for some basic knowledge about something they do use, like asking a 3D modeller using IE about Mozilla, since they obviously know and use a web browser. This actually applies, and as such it would make a better analogy than your own.
If they start altering code that is under the GPL it must remain under the GPL, including their contributions. They have to give up patent rights as well, according to the license. They may have copyright, and as such they are free to withdraw their code from subsequent releases at their discretion, but previous releases will remain licensed under the GPL and are thus useable. They could always begin writing totally new libraries using some proprietary license, but I doubt they would be adopted (they would more likely be cloned as with mono). With BSD type licenses, your scenario is more plausible, but since the majority of the core components of a Linux system are under the GPL I don't see a need to worry.
Yeah, everybody's ignorant because they don't know of an obscure browser they weren't looking for because IE's doing its job satisfactorally for them.
Ignorance is not neccessarily meant to be taken as an insult. Simply not knowing something is not so bad a thing. It's definitely not the same as being called stupid. Yes, these people are ignorant because they don't know about Mozilla. Whether or not this is an insult is another matter.
I think you're ignorant because you don't know what normal mapping is, even though all of use 3D artists out there consider that beginner's knowledge.
I'm sure every single 3D artist out there uses a web browser, but how many web browser users are 3D artists? Your analogy is crap. It's more like driving a car and not knowing that there are a number of models out there to choose from. I admit my ignorance in the realm of 3D modeling, but I'm also not insulted by this in the slightest.
My impression is that the growth of novels was driven by the availability of affordable mass printing, rather than an inability of readers to handle poetry.
This is true. It used to be that people could not afford much in the way of the printed word, so they would buy one copy of something and read it out loud together. Poetry was perfectly suited for this in a lot of ways, and if you take a look at poetry by someone like Byron, you can read it out loud in a very dramatic fashion and have a good time with it. Poetry was a social form of entertainment, and these days it lives on as such in things like poetry readings and slams in coffee houses.
I agree with your analysis. It felt like the concluding paragraph of the article was somewhat tacked on at the end, because it felt out of place given the entire preceeding article. Many of the works mentioned, including those the author praises such as Sandman, Maus, and David Boring have evoked some real emotion in me, and I was stunned that after all those praises the author had claimed the opposite. Maybe this was an editorial decision from on high? NYT Book Review does some serious business, so this wouldn't surprise me. The conclusion of the article just didn't seem to fit with the rest of it.
Debian has a policy that ties everything together. Packagers have to follow this policy, and because it is codified, it leads to a high level of consistency across the distro. That, combined with the vast amount of testing from users of the development branches of Debian, creates the overall illusion that.deb's and apt are far superior to everything else.
It's the Debian project that makes Debian great, not the software itself.
Awesome recommendation. I'd just stumbled upon wxpython earlier today, after I'd posted my comments. It looks like easily the best option for what I need. I'm glad to hear a positive recommendation on it too. Thank you.
Speed is a big issue. Every app I've used that uses Swing is slow as hell and AWT is not nearly rich enough. The Eclipse toolkit is an interesting option though, but I haven't investigated it.
Another speed related issue is loading time for the JRE. They're not installed everywhere and even if they are, they're very rarely running already in my experience. Mozilla is a better choice for this particular project because it is deployed as a standard throughout my university, so it is guaranteed to be installed and almost guaranteed to already be loaded.
Finally, and most importantly, is the Free Software issue. The Java Trap that RMS wrote about is very much on my mind, and the fact that mono with Gtk bindings is 100% Free Software is very appealing. Granted, there are very likely java bindings for Gtk, and along with gcj this could be appealing, but afaik gcj doesn't compile windows or mac executables where mono does. I refuse to be trapped by a proprietary platform, and java just simply isn't there yet.
Oh, and do you really believe that the gtk is an immature GUI platform with serious shortcomings? Especially when compared with Java's native offerings?
I've been looking for a good way to write a crossplatform GUI for an app I'm working on. Java is not a good choice for a variety of reasons, so Mono is looking pretty tempting right now. Since Mozilla-The-Platform hasn't taken off as well as it could, Mono may wind up being the best option for a totally Free Software approach to cross-platform work. On the other hand, wxWidgits is a great toolset as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get C# language bindings for the library.
Be fair and RTFA. Linux Journal didn't claim the one third number, that was the story submitter. Most of the absurdly pro-Linux/anti-MS type stuff that hits Slashdot is from the story submitter, not the source articles. Linux Journal simply notes that this is a significant deployment, which is true.
You're very right about the total number of Federal employees, as well as desktop installations, but that doesn't eliminate this story's significance, especially when you consider, as the article's author has, the SCO case.
While I fully applaud what MS is doing, it seems like the wrong time to be breaking legacy apps. Put out an actual new Windows release, rather than just a point update. People will be far less surprised when old software breaks with a full release, but with an update to the old system you shouldn't be breaking compatibility.
This isn't a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation in reality, it just needs to be managed properly. By jumping the gun on this, they'll likely piss off users, but if it were longhorn or some interim release then some breakages are simply to be expected.
That said, since I don't run Windows on my own machines, I get to be one of those that benefits by not having as much email or log spam due to 0wn3d winboxes (less spam please indeed!) so I can't complain. This is a distinct advantage of the Free software model, since Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc can be updated for no cost if this release happens to break them.
100% agreement here, and my experiences mirror your own. I've been waiting for something like Nautilus 2.6 to come of age so I can mix it with the command line. I hate using nautilus to manage my source trees too, but on the other hand I love using it to browse and manage my media (my doc folder in my home directory isn't very deep) which is a pain in the ass in a lot of ways on the command line. It's sad that people seem to think the different approaches don't compliment each other.
That's fair, but on the other hand, where do you keep those piles? I'm sure they're organized spatially at that level. Beyond that, you're free to sort your folders alphabetically in the spatial metaphor, so long as the file browser is decent (nautilus allows this). I've found that mixing the two is very useful. My music folder is arranged alphabetically because it's just too much information to process spatially, but I get to that folder by using the spatial metaphor. The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
Ok, apparently no one knows how to properly use spatial nautlius. If you've got deep heirarchy, as I do too, spatial still helps immensely. Spatial is about using people's innate knowledge of space in order to help them navigate, and this spatial knowledge does not disappear as you drill down a heirarhcy. Indeed, it becomes more and more important because a deep heirarchy adds complexity, and using your subconscious spatial awareness instead of scanning every directory name as you go down speeds things up (or at least creates a placebo effect towards it).
The benefits of having deep heirarchies over shallow broad ones applies to spatial metaphors as well. You don't have to remember where a thousand pieces of the puzzle are placed individually in a single directory, but instead have to remember a few discreet pieces of information per group, which is easier for most people to handle. This article is amazingly flawed in ignoring this, and totally ignores the benefits of organizational division.
Spatial isn't perfect by any means. I've found that adding custom icons to folders helps quite a bit as well (on Debian/usr/share/pixmaps/other has a slew of them if you're interested) in conjunction with spatial. You can actually drag a an icon pixmap directly on to the icon in the properties window to quickly apply it to a folder in Nautilus. What Nautlius badly needs is an "align to grid" function to clean up slightly misplaced icons. Overall though, you have to double-click on every folder you want to open up anyway, and holding down shift or using the middle mouse button to close previous windows is absolutely not an issue once you start doing it. If you give it a fair try for a little while, you may be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's my damn cape then?
Heh, my friends and I can get pretty childish when we play it though.
I've been trying to figure out a decent gift for my Dad, and I was thinking the new O'reilly Knoppix Hacks book would be a good choice. He used to love computers, but he feels like they've gotten too complex for him, and he's totally frustrated from dealing with Windows virus and spyware issues. The book looks like it's got some good info on dealing with those, plus knoppix might be a fun little toy for him to play with that'd make computers simple again. It'd also let him know a bit about what I've been babbling on and off to them about for years now :-)
The idea of giving them just a CD though? Lame. The CD with some decent instructions tailored to their needs, if they actually have them then maybe you've got something there. I'm personally going to go check the book out in the store before I order it for him.
I hear the "where's the line tool?" question for the Gimp quite often. I've asked it myself even (I don't claim to be anything graphics program-wise other than a novice) so I'd imagine the tutorial was written for all the many people who asked that very question. It might be written in a way that doesn't pander to the audience, but if you actually feel personally offended by this then you need to grow a skin.
What a waste. Yeah, I can compile my own kernel (I did it for years) but I gave up doing it myself and left it for my distro's kernel team to handle because I don't need the hassle. There's no way in hell that I'm going to go back to custom-compiling a kernel with no DRI just to get 3D acceleration when my old ATI 128 worked great with the old DRI drivers.
ATI! Get a clue! Release your specs again or cooperate with the X and DRI teams to make sure your drivers work properly with stock distro kernels. Your chips aren't that good that they shouldn't work according to the standards.
Crick was amazing, and a true genius, and acknowledged as such by just about anyone in the field of molecular biology. He and Watson basically invented the science of molecular biology, and it was really Crick who envisioned it whole and pushed the field in the direction that it still moves today. He was The Theorist, and one of the few who can claim the title of theoretical biologist with any sort of legitimacy (the other early molecular biology theorist was Jaques Monod) and his numerous papers pushed the field forward in many ways. The central dogma of molecular biology was his. He was one of the few people present who came up with the idea of how DNA sends a messenger (RNA) to ribosomes, which act as dumb machines to translate the message to a functional protein. This seems obvious now, but for a long time it wasn't, and we owe Crick, in no small part, for coming up with this. The man was a true genius and visionary, and he's long been one of my personal heroes. He deserves to be mourned the world over for all he helped build and give to it.
How do the Progeny components differ from the standard Debian metapackages?
You're stretching it. Watching a movie doesn't mean you should know the technical details of cameras and lighting, but you should at least have some idea of what the differences between DVD and VHS are.
Hmm... I think I agree that you don't hear the word ignorant used in a nice way all the time, but I honestly think that it depends on the crowd. I usually use it in a benign way, and people I know tend to do the same. Maybe we're weird? I agree that on slashdot it'll be used more condescendingly on the whole.
It seems like we're ultimately trying to make the same point, but from different angles. We both seem to agree that being ignorant of things like the deep details of securing your web browser is nothing to be ashamed of. Your issue seems to be more with using the term "ignorant" in general, while mine is with the criticism of people for that ignorance. It leads to the same point in the end, as far as I can see.
I only see this as a good thing. Sure, it'd be better if it was Free Software, but I'll take it.
You mean *GASP* linux might have to compete!?!?! Heaven forbid!
Furthermore, the post you quoted simply stated that IE's horrible security record is demonstrable by evidence, also a fact without any real condemnation. None of these posts had any sort of condemnation of IE users, which is what you seem to have inferred. Perhaps you saw something in them that wasn't really there? It's still crap. Your analogy expects someone who doesn't use anything related to 3D modelling to know something about it, but this has no relation to the subject at hand. Instead, try asking someone for some basic knowledge about something they do use, like asking a 3D modeller using IE about Mozilla, since they obviously know and use a web browser. This actually applies, and as such it would make a better analogy than your own.
If they start altering code that is under the GPL it must remain under the GPL, including their contributions. They have to give up patent rights as well, according to the license. They may have copyright, and as such they are free to withdraw their code from subsequent releases at their discretion, but previous releases will remain licensed under the GPL and are thus useable. They could always begin writing totally new libraries using some proprietary license, but I doubt they would be adopted (they would more likely be cloned as with mono). With BSD type licenses, your scenario is more plausible, but since the majority of the core components of a Linux system are under the GPL I don't see a need to worry.
I'm sure every single 3D artist out there uses a web browser, but how many web browser users are 3D artists? Your analogy is crap. It's more like driving a car and not knowing that there are a number of models out there to choose from. I admit my ignorance in the realm of 3D modeling, but I'm also not insulted by this in the slightest.
Great, so everyone is just reinventing Debian then?
I agree with your analysis. It felt like the concluding paragraph of the article was somewhat tacked on at the end, because it felt out of place given the entire preceeding article. Many of the works mentioned, including those the author praises such as Sandman, Maus, and David Boring have evoked some real emotion in me, and I was stunned that after all those praises the author had claimed the opposite. Maybe this was an editorial decision from on high? NYT Book Review does some serious business, so this wouldn't surprise me. The conclusion of the article just didn't seem to fit with the rest of it.
Debian has a policy that ties everything together. Packagers have to follow this policy, and because it is codified, it leads to a high level of consistency across the distro. That, combined with the vast amount of testing from users of the development branches of Debian, creates the overall illusion that .deb's and apt are far superior to everything else.
It's the Debian project that makes Debian great, not the software itself.
Awesome recommendation. I'd just stumbled upon wxpython earlier today, after I'd posted my comments. It looks like easily the best option for what I need. I'm glad to hear a positive recommendation on it too. Thank you.
Speed is a big issue. Every app I've used that uses Swing is slow as hell and AWT is not nearly rich enough. The Eclipse toolkit is an interesting option though, but I haven't investigated it.
Another speed related issue is loading time for the JRE. They're not installed everywhere and even if they are, they're very rarely running already in my experience. Mozilla is a better choice for this particular project because it is deployed as a standard throughout my university, so it is guaranteed to be installed and almost guaranteed to already be loaded.
Finally, and most importantly, is the Free Software issue. The Java Trap that RMS wrote about is very much on my mind, and the fact that mono with Gtk bindings is 100% Free Software is very appealing. Granted, there are very likely java bindings for Gtk, and along with gcj this could be appealing, but afaik gcj doesn't compile windows or mac executables where mono does. I refuse to be trapped by a proprietary platform, and java just simply isn't there yet.
Oh, and do you really believe that the gtk is an immature GUI platform with serious shortcomings? Especially when compared with Java's native offerings?
I've been looking for a good way to write a crossplatform GUI for an app I'm working on. Java is not a good choice for a variety of reasons, so Mono is looking pretty tempting right now. Since Mozilla-The-Platform hasn't taken off as well as it could, Mono may wind up being the best option for a totally Free Software approach to cross-platform work. On the other hand, wxWidgits is a great toolset as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get C# language bindings for the library.
Be fair and RTFA. Linux Journal didn't claim the one third number, that was the story submitter. Most of the absurdly pro-Linux/anti-MS type stuff that hits Slashdot is from the story submitter, not the source articles. Linux Journal simply notes that this is a significant deployment, which is true.
You're very right about the total number of Federal employees, as well as desktop installations, but that doesn't eliminate this story's significance, especially when you consider, as the article's author has, the SCO case.
While I fully applaud what MS is doing, it seems like the wrong time to be breaking legacy apps. Put out an actual new Windows release, rather than just a point update. People will be far less surprised when old software breaks with a full release, but with an update to the old system you shouldn't be breaking compatibility.
This isn't a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation in reality, it just needs to be managed properly. By jumping the gun on this, they'll likely piss off users, but if it were longhorn or some interim release then some breakages are simply to be expected.
That said, since I don't run Windows on my own machines, I get to be one of those that benefits by not having as much email or log spam due to 0wn3d winboxes (less spam please indeed!) so I can't complain. This is a distinct advantage of the Free software model, since Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc can be updated for no cost if this release happens to break them.
But it's really cool. Fun to play with too.
100% agreement here, and my experiences mirror your own. I've been waiting for something like Nautilus 2.6 to come of age so I can mix it with the command line. I hate using nautilus to manage my source trees too, but on the other hand I love using it to browse and manage my media (my doc folder in my home directory isn't very deep) which is a pain in the ass in a lot of ways on the command line. It's sad that people seem to think the different approaches don't compliment each other.
That's fair, but on the other hand, where do you keep those piles? I'm sure they're organized spatially at that level. Beyond that, you're free to sort your folders alphabetically in the spatial metaphor, so long as the file browser is decent (nautilus allows this). I've found that mixing the two is very useful. My music folder is arranged alphabetically because it's just too much information to process spatially, but I get to that folder by using the spatial metaphor. The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
Ok, apparently no one knows how to properly use spatial nautlius. If you've got deep heirarchy, as I do too, spatial still helps immensely. Spatial is about using people's innate knowledge of space in order to help them navigate, and this spatial knowledge does not disappear as you drill down a heirarhcy. Indeed, it becomes more and more important because a deep heirarchy adds complexity, and using your subconscious spatial awareness instead of scanning every directory name as you go down speeds things up (or at least creates a placebo effect towards it).
/usr/share/pixmaps/other has a slew of them if you're interested) in conjunction with spatial. You can actually drag a an icon pixmap directly on to the icon in the properties window to quickly apply it to a folder in Nautilus. What Nautlius badly needs is an "align to grid" function to clean up slightly misplaced icons. Overall though, you have to double-click on every folder you want to open up anyway, and holding down shift or using the middle mouse button to close previous windows is absolutely not an issue once you start doing it. If you give it a fair try for a little while, you may be surprised.
The benefits of having deep heirarchies over shallow broad ones applies to spatial metaphors as well. You don't have to remember where a thousand pieces of the puzzle are placed individually in a single directory, but instead have to remember a few discreet pieces of information per group, which is easier for most people to handle. This article is amazingly flawed in ignoring this, and totally ignores the benefits of organizational division.
Spatial isn't perfect by any means. I've found that adding custom icons to folders helps quite a bit as well (on Debian