Except that Switzerland is a small country with racial, ethnic, and geographic homogeneity. In other words, direct democracy works in places where everyone naturally thinks in similar ways. Where you have serious conflict between population blocs, direct democracy doesn't work as well.
You can use compiz (or compiz-fusion which I recommend) on top of KDE 3 or 4. fusion-icon is a great app to handle configuring compiz, switching Emerald themes, switching window managers, etc.
Errr, yeah. Meant Compiz Fusion, sorry. Best coupling of eye-candy to usability improvements I've ever seen from a humble window manager.
Amarok is the crown jewel of music players.
Really? I'm used to Rhythmbox on Linux, iTunes on Mac, and mplayer back when I stored my music collection right on the HDD instead of having an iPod.
Kate is getting "vi type" input support which should make lots of people happy. Actually my favorite text editor is windows only (notepad++).
How's the syntax highlighting and auto-indentation? I'm working with Python code at the moment.
And for some reason I never really took to Portato. I like handling emerge from a command line.
Oh, I used to love watching an emerge begin. Then I tried Synaptic. All of a sudden I didn't have to Google anymore to find a package with a funny name for common functionality! And I could explore the lists of packages in all the categories, just looking around without having to go poking through my/etc/ directory, and installing packages without worrying whether they're masked or not! Just awesome!
Actually, the thing that really made me switch to Ubuntu in the end was that, at the time, I had a new machine and Gentoo, it appeared, had reached its all-time low. Scandals among its developers plagued the front-page of Slashdot, and various little packages I used hadn't seen their ebuilds updated to the latest version in a couple of years. The latter problem wouldn't be too bad if I didn't have to hand-code the ebuilds myself for software versions that weren't exactly bleeding-edge (usually a most-recent stable release that was at least a year old). I'll give it to Debian-based distros, letting the developers run a repository of packages for me that will update itself (and therefore my machine) as releases come out instead of as I or the official Gentoo team write ebuilds is a damn good setup.
It's not that I'm partial to GNOME either. I use fairly standard Linux applications when I run Linux*: OO.o, Firefox, Thunderbird, Wine, VLC or Totem (depending on which will make DVDs work at the moment)... I'm not really partial to a particular music or video player... GVim... I could use a replacement for iCal.
But yeah, let me check what the distros offer. Particularly, can I replace KWin with Compiz Fusion if I want to? I've really gotten used to Compiz.
And by the Lord, if Portato makes a release this month I'm wiping my Ubuntu system and replacing it with my old friend Gentoo Linux, albeit configured for booting to a graphical login.
* -- I originally switched to OS X after Linux to be sure that I'd have a Unix system with things like wireless, DVD playback, and an iTunes Store membership working. But I must admit, after even a single year (particularly as I learn to customize), Linux is getting better and better at winning my loyalty. Though I *STILL* have to use ndiswrapper and have my wireless network at home forgotten every time I reboot, I'm really finding that I only need OS X for a small number of mostly multimedia applications (that tend to take up large amounts of HDD space, eg: iTunes, Spore, Veoh Player). Though perfect import/export compatibility with Microsoft Office *is* pretty nice.
Question on KDE 4.1: When it comes out, will I still be forced to install all those K* applications (like K3B, Konqueror, et al) in order to use the KDE desktop-environment? I'm currently using a somewhat-customized GNOME with the Compiz window manager and whatever apps I please (except that GNOME Ubuntu seems to need Evolution somehow, GRRR!), and I'm wondering if I'll be able to keep that kind of custom setup if I move to KDE for the features.
I really, really prefer to select my own applications, and the requirement that I install KEverything even if I don't want it made me ditch KDE for Fluxbox in the first place (before coming to GNOME for eye-candy's sake).
Which still doesn't justify the assertion atheists make, which is that (to once again use my metaphor) there is no sky and taking positions on what color it has is meaningless because it doesn't exist and anyone who thinks there's a sky is wrong at best and an insane fool at worst.
I'm not asserting that everyone should convert to a random religion, I'm asserting that religion as a whole cannot be dismissed out of hand as a source of truth simply because no religion has scientific proof of its own correctness.
Ummmm... DBus? You can open up a text editor and write a program that scripts your desktop (ie: GUI-based) applications in C++, Python, C, Java, or basically any other language. Then you can run that script from the command line.
And finally, there's the group that says "if we've never seen the sky, why are people claiming with such certainty what colour it is?" Which of these many diverse groups would you consider the most rational?
You've misused the metaphor. What the atheists are claiming is effectively, "If we've never seen the sky ('cuz we're on Slashdot all the time), and those people with written accounts of seeing the sky can't agree on what color it is, there must not actually be a sky. There is nothing above the roof of our mothers' basements but the cold of outer space."
People hate Intelligent Design because it is untestable. Also, this is the Internet, where atheists come to make their claim that anything not scientifically sound must be untrue.
Science class is for teaching science not "facts about reality". Science is a method for probabilistically determining how reality will react when we act upon it. So yes, some people make the mistake of believing that scientific "laws" and theories act prescriptively upon reality instead of describing how it acts on its own, but their mistake does not entitle religious believers to make a counter-mistake of teaching an untestable hypothesis as "science".
Science doesn't need to measure the unmeasurable, science finds it domain only in the measurable.
The GP tried to explain that so-called "scientific facts" should not be used to rule out the existence of anything. People shouldn't treat all things scientifically unprovable as, ipso facto, untrue. After all, where's the scientific proof of what I had for breakfast this morning? I believe I had a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee with cinnamon in it, but I have no scientific proof for this hypothesis, just my own memories.
And what is religion but memories that have been passed down for a very, very long time?
The more choice of religion people have, the less religious they will be, since it's obvious that if a bunch of different religious groups all claim to the the One True Faith, none of them are.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If I claim the sky is blue, and five other people claim it's a different color each, and we're talking to someone (say... a Slashdotter) who has never seen the sky, that doesn't stop the sky being blue.
I can go ahead and claim it didn't happen if I want. It's the old "brain in a jar" or "world popped into existence 5 minutes ago" argument. I just can't, factually, state that evidence does not point to evolution.
Just being the most likely scientific conclusion doesn't make something definitively true, or we'd all be walking around forced to obey Newton's laws of motion by government order (which would also have led to Einstein's execution for heresy).
Ah, I see the full-of-it religion hater has come crawling out of the woodwork. Please, keep on explaining the benefits of an amoral (also known as "evil") lifestyle to us. Go on. Asmodeus won't pay you for a single Slashdot comment.
Well most afterlife ideas come in the form of religions, and many religions (particularly the widespread monotheistic faiths) actually tell of people living for far, far longer than our primitive ancestors in the ancient Godly days. Particularly, the Torah caps the human lifespan allowed by God at 120 years.
Ummm... actually.... he has a point. Given the kind of software available for Linux now (ie: almost anything under the sun), why doesn't Ubuntu or some other.deb or.rpm distro have some kind of theme engine that lets me bundle up certain packages and configurations of my desktop environment into a bundle that I can move machine-to-machine (preferably even with custom install CDs)?
I'd like the ability to hand my friends a CD and say, "Here, this is my Ubuntu Gaming Edition (+Wine,+Emulators,+FOSS games)." or "This CD will install a Mac-style Ubuntu with a Dock and Frontrow.". It would be one of the best ways to show off just how flexible Linux really is to people who've stepped outside the Windows box, and therefore honestly don't understand how a single operating system can let the user decide what kind of desktop environment they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this is the year I got my Mom to switch to Linux. She loves it.
Except that Switzerland is a small country with racial, ethnic, and geographic homogeneity. In other words, direct democracy works in places where everyone naturally thinks in similar ways. Where you have serious conflict between population blocs, direct democracy doesn't work as well.
You can use compiz (or compiz-fusion which I recommend) on top of KDE 3 or 4. fusion-icon is a great app to handle configuring compiz, switching Emerald themes, switching window managers, etc.
Errr, yeah. Meant Compiz Fusion, sorry. Best coupling of eye-candy to usability improvements I've ever seen from a humble window manager.
Amarok is the crown jewel of music players.
Really? I'm used to Rhythmbox on Linux, iTunes on Mac, and mplayer back when I stored my music collection right on the HDD instead of having an iPod.
Kate is getting "vi type" input support which should make lots of people happy. Actually my favorite text editor is windows only (notepad++).
How's the syntax highlighting and auto-indentation? I'm working with Python code at the moment.
And for some reason I never really took to Portato. I like handling emerge from a command line.
Oh, I used to love watching an emerge begin. Then I tried Synaptic. All of a sudden I didn't have to Google anymore to find a package with a funny name for common functionality! And I could explore the lists of packages in all the categories, just looking around without having to go poking through my /etc/ directory, and installing packages without worrying whether they're masked or not! Just awesome!
Actually, the thing that really made me switch to Ubuntu in the end was that, at the time, I had a new machine and Gentoo, it appeared, had reached its all-time low. Scandals among its developers plagued the front-page of Slashdot, and various little packages I used hadn't seen their ebuilds updated to the latest version in a couple of years. The latter problem wouldn't be too bad if I didn't have to hand-code the ebuilds myself for software versions that weren't exactly bleeding-edge (usually a most-recent stable release that was at least a year old). I'll give it to Debian-based distros, letting the developers run a repository of packages for me that will update itself (and therefore my machine) as releases come out instead of as I or the official Gentoo team write ebuilds is a damn good setup.
It's not that I'm partial to GNOME either. I use fairly standard Linux applications when I run Linux*: OO.o, Firefox, Thunderbird, Wine, VLC or Totem (depending on which will make DVDs work at the moment)... I'm not really partial to a particular music or video player... GVim... I could use a replacement for iCal.
But yeah, let me check what the distros offer. Particularly, can I replace KWin with Compiz Fusion if I want to? I've really gotten used to Compiz.
And by the Lord, if Portato makes a release this month I'm wiping my Ubuntu system and replacing it with my old friend Gentoo Linux, albeit configured for booting to a graphical login.
* -- I originally switched to OS X after Linux to be sure that I'd have a Unix system with things like wireless, DVD playback, and an iTunes Store membership working. But I must admit, after even a single year (particularly as I learn to customize), Linux is getting better and better at winning my loyalty. Though I *STILL* have to use ndiswrapper and have my wireless network at home forgotten every time I reboot, I'm really finding that I only need OS X for a small number of mostly multimedia applications (that tend to take up large amounts of HDD space, eg: iTunes, Spore, Veoh Player). Though perfect import/export compatibility with Microsoft Office *is* pretty nice.
So... same as ever?
Question on KDE 4.1: When it comes out, will I still be forced to install all those K* applications (like K3B, Konqueror, et al) in order to use the KDE desktop-environment? I'm currently using a somewhat-customized GNOME with the Compiz window manager and whatever apps I please (except that GNOME Ubuntu seems to need Evolution somehow, GRRR!), and I'm wondering if I'll be able to keep that kind of custom setup if I move to KDE for the features.
I really, really prefer to select my own applications, and the requirement that I install KEverything even if I don't want it made me ditch KDE for Fluxbox in the first place (before coming to GNOME for eye-candy's sake).
Which still doesn't justify the assertion atheists make, which is that (to once again use my metaphor) there is no sky and taking positions on what color it has is meaningless because it doesn't exist and anyone who thinks there's a sky is wrong at best and an insane fool at worst.
I'm not asserting that everyone should convert to a random religion, I'm asserting that religion as a whole cannot be dismissed out of hand as a source of truth simply because no religion has scientific proof of its own correctness.
Ummmm... DBus? You can open up a text editor and write a program that scripts your desktop (ie: GUI-based) applications in C++, Python, C, Java, or basically any other language. Then you can run that script from the command line.
And finally, there's the group that says "if we've never seen the sky, why are people claiming with such certainty what colour it is?" Which of these many diverse groups would you consider the most rational?
You've misused the metaphor. What the atheists are claiming is effectively, "If we've never seen the sky ('cuz we're on Slashdot all the time), and those people with written accounts of seeing the sky can't agree on what color it is, there must not actually be a sky. There is nothing above the roof of our mothers' basements but the cold of outer space."
People hate Intelligent Design because it is untestable. Also, this is the Internet, where atheists come to make their claim that anything not scientifically sound must be untrue.
Science class is for teaching science not "facts about reality". Science is a method for probabilistically determining how reality will react when we act upon it. So yes, some people make the mistake of believing that scientific "laws" and theories act prescriptively upon reality instead of describing how it acts on its own, but their mistake does not entitle religious believers to make a counter-mistake of teaching an untestable hypothesis as "science".
Science doesn't need to measure the unmeasurable, science finds it domain only in the measurable.
The GP tried to explain that so-called "scientific facts" should not be used to rule out the existence of anything. People shouldn't treat all things scientifically unprovable as, ipso facto, untrue. After all, where's the scientific proof of what I had for breakfast this morning? I believe I had a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee with cinnamon in it, but I have no scientific proof for this hypothesis, just my own memories.
And what is religion but memories that have been passed down for a very, very long time?
The more choice of religion people have, the less religious they will be, since it's obvious that if a bunch of different religious groups all claim to the the One True Faith, none of them are.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If I claim the sky is blue, and five other people claim it's a different color each, and we're talking to someone (say... a Slashdotter) who has never seen the sky, that doesn't stop the sky being blue.
If the coming century was a movie, I would title it "21st Century: Revenge of the Middle East". Have a good time with the fall of your civilization.
Oh, and before I get any crap about 'Then why don't you just move?', ask yourself the same question whenever the USA does anything you don't like.
I thought about exactly that. Come the end of college, I'm leaving this country. Lehitraot.
I can go ahead and claim it didn't happen if I want. It's the old "brain in a jar" or "world popped into existence 5 minutes ago" argument. I just can't, factually, state that evidence does not point to evolution.
conscious, confident, self-sufficient, intelligent, knowledgeable, open-minded, free-thinking little people
Ummm... you don't get any of those things from teaching a kid science. You get the same kid as before, but now they know science.
Deal. We'll send the kids over, and you give them the comedy show.
Just being the most likely scientific conclusion doesn't make something definitively true, or we'd all be walking around forced to obey Newton's laws of motion by government order (which would also have led to Einstein's execution for heresy).
There's nothing wrong with their brains. They made a wrong, nay, evil choice.
Ah, I see the full-of-it religion hater has come crawling out of the woodwork. Please, keep on explaining the benefits of an amoral (also known as "evil") lifestyle to us. Go on. Asmodeus won't pay you for a single Slashdot comment.
Damn, that Remastersys thing is exactly what I was thinking about. Thanks!
If there is something after life.. why live at all?
Because the afterlife is different from this life.
Well most afterlife ideas come in the form of religions, and many religions (particularly the widespread monotheistic faiths) actually tell of people living for far, far longer than our primitive ancestors in the ancient Godly days. Particularly, the Torah caps the human lifespan allowed by God at 120 years.
Disturbing scenes? Which disturbing scenes? And unless I've forgotten a whole lot of the book, they don't exactly have graphic sex.
Ummm... actually.... he has a point. Given the kind of software available for Linux now (ie: almost anything under the sun), why doesn't Ubuntu or some other .deb or .rpm distro have some kind of theme engine that lets me bundle up certain packages and configurations of my desktop environment into a bundle that I can move machine-to-machine (preferably even with custom install CDs)?
I'd like the ability to hand my friends a CD and say, "Here, this is my Ubuntu Gaming Edition (+Wine,+Emulators,+FOSS games)." or "This CD will install a Mac-style Ubuntu with a Dock and Frontrow.". It would be one of the best ways to show off just how flexible Linux really is to people who've stepped outside the Windows box, and therefore honestly don't understand how a single operating system can let the user decide what kind of desktop environment they want.