One of the limitations that the linux GUI is suffering right now is that there are too many aesthetes, actually, who mistake skinning and customization with actual GUI style.
I have karma to burn, so here goes. How does it feel to be so wrong? It is this very customization that has given life to the Linux GUI. Don't like a Windowsesque desktop? Try Enlightenment. Like a tighter look? Go fetch KDE. These choices empower Linux users.
Because Linux users have these choices and are often adept at skinning, no company needs to waste its time reinventing. Just leave that to the end-users. The Linux users at least. Most folks enslaved by Windows don't know their mouse from their modem.
This leads me to this: assuming that very few people even bother to look at the ads, there must exist some portion that do, or else they wouldn't still be around.
I disagree. Think about it. It's trivial to write some JS code that opens a pop-up in somebody elses browser. The bandwidth hit to deliver that little extra code is neglible. Webmasters and their minions can serve this junk without regards to who is looking at it, and the more the better. I think this is simply a dinosaur that is perpetuated by the glut of technically inept decision makers in our line of work.
I empathize for those who need to make a $ from whatever content they offer on their web sites (I work for a state government agency; We just do things to make the govt. look good, cost be damned). But "HEY LOOK OVER HERE!" advertising just isn't gonna cut it no matter how many hits you get.
I do think layout similar to that of print magazines and newspapers could be effective. Make the advertising a more soothing part of the content. It doesn't hurt to make it relevant to your audience either. Not everybody wants a X10 camera to violate someone's Fourth Amendment rights.
Futhermore, said aluminum bat is likely 33 inches, 29 ounces. This excellent weight to size ratio maximizes the bat's ability to propel baseballs at unsafe velocities, typically reducing teenaged pitchers to vegetables.
If I'm wrong about your bat, congratulations! You are in possession of a rare bat. Perhaps you meant to post on Ebay?
Let's not forget that programmers are writers of sorts. We need a muse like any other with a creative endeavor. I find these books that stay away from the low-level syntax and raise up what it is, the essence, of what we as programmers do to be much more uplifting and inspiring. After all, if I can't pick up on syntax, there's little use for me to drink caffeinated beverages well into the night.
First, thank you for posting the article here so I don't have to log into the NYT.
Second, what's with the author's name, Jennifer 8. Lee. Numeral eight? Was her dad a Yogi Berra fan?
Third, what's with the subject's name, Camberley Crick? I'm at a loss for words on this one.
Fourth, DUH! You put something on a web site, your very own web site, and you alone bear responsibility for its dissemination through the public domain. Somebody send Ms. Crick a cluebat. I'm sure you can find her address on her web site.
Conclusion: another example of how ineffectual and misguided journalism has become. Nothing to see here. Please disperse.
Bake cornbread per its instructions. Crumble in a bowl. Pour maple syrup over cornbread. Serve lukewarm.
Total Tuna
4 oz. chunk light tuna 2-4 oz. spaghetti sauce
Scrape every last morsel of tuna from its can into a bowl. Pour agreeable portion of spaghetti sauce over tuna. Microwave. Garnish with lettuce leaf.
I lived on these two delicacies *alone* for two months after getting laid off back in 1999. I went nine months between paychecks while attending college classes full time (finishing degree I started on back in 1991). Worst time of my life. Enjoy!
I've been a loyal Redhat user for a few years after getting started with Slackware, and I'm by and large satisfied with Redhat's efforts. But RPM dependancy hell has me thinking about rolling my own distro or taking Linux From Scratch for a spin.
Case in point. I love and use Perl for much of my work. I want and will build it from source. But if I want X-Windows, GNOME, and much, much more installed via RPMS from my Redhat CDs, I have to install the Perl RPMS. This is unacceptable to me. I recognize that RPMS make some things easy for Joe User, but they often make the basics impossible for me.
Tarballs are dead they say. Long live tarballs!
The more common people try to make common sense, the less sense it makes.
My grandfather suffered from Alzheimer's despite being a high school teacher and coach for many, many years. I would have to say his occupation would have kept him pretty sharp. This isn't empirical evidence enough to refute a claim that crosswords, etc. don't help, but I would take such an assertion with a grain of salt just the same.
I'll bite and disagree to some extent. I agree that Linux is fun and appeals to the noble hacker in all of us, but certain things in an operating system/distro should be simple. For example, I agree with the printing problem he outlines. After getting my IBM Network Printer 24 working with LPRng built from source, I decided to shave my head for fear of pulling the rest of it out.
I think file sharing is the next step to making Linux a more viable desktop solution. I only have one box at home, but I'm looking to add a couple more in a month or two. I am not looking forward to setting up NFS, code, or some other method of networking for these boxen.
Who knows. It's a bugger of a Catch-22. I'm not as concerned about my parental units taking up Linux as I am my manager at work. The days when Linux really displaces Windows in IT departments for system and ASP solutions will be a major step forward for technology (in the US of A where I'm saddled with corporate philos).
My parents, fed up with how their PC had been brought to its knees by AOL and Windows Me (I know, I know), asked me if I could come up with something easier. I had been singing of Linux to them for some time, and I decided I'd try to set up their box with a Linux distro in such a way that they could do what they typically do with a PC. E-mail, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheet stuff, and personal finance. It was a snap.
I brought my Redhat 7.3 CDs with me (burnt from ISOs) and went to work installing as minimal a workstation setup as I could. These baby boomers aren't going to break out gcc and go to hacking on CVS source any time soon. I left off as much as I could without running into RPM hell with dependencies. An hour later, we were up and running.
We subscribe to a local DSL provider, a telco, and the Internet is just a/usr/sbin/netconfig away.
Went online and downloaded OpenOffice 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0. All that was left was a decent personal finance package. Off we went to grab GnuCash.
Acclamating my folks to OpenOffice and Mozilla was easy, because after all, a web browser is a web browser and a office suite is an office suite (licensing aside, of course). GnuCash was a little tougher to sell to my dad who is a MS Money fanatic. Time will tell if he'll stick with GnuCash long enough for this experiment to pass muster, but I'm optimistic.
So the weekend over, I leave satisfied that I've freed two more human beings, my parents no less, from the confines of proprietary software. The drive home is a beautiful thing.
Then my mom calls. She wants to know if I can reinstall Monopoly (by Infogrames for Windows 95/98). And dad wants me to reinstall SimCity. These are their two favorite things to do with the PC. They've probably etched a couple of deep grooves in their hard drive where these these two programs reside. In short, we're fucked in full.
To make a long story short, I was able to satisfy my mom's Monopoly jones by installing Kapitalist, a free Monopoly type game. She missed the animations that the Infrogrames game provided, but she got by. My dad however was SOL. I was hoping to find a copy of SimCity 3000 Unlimited by Loki, but as most of you know Loki is no more. My dad took it in stride, and explained that he'll just find another game to get hooked on. As you can see my parents are gamers, and I do love them so for that.
Problem. Finding and installing a quality game for Linux that a Linux neophyte or general non-hacker can install is difficult. Remember, my folks were running with AOL before all of this. They don't want to worry about glibc versions and the like.
So my folks were happy that they could get online with one click to Mozilla, happy they could read and compose documents and spreadsheets, and curious about GnuCash's abilities, but they seriously doubted they could have any fun in between.
I would say that a Linux distro, if properly tamed, can be a quality desktop solution provided you're willing to bite the gaming bullet. How many of us dual-boot for this alone? Sorry to hear we lost one to the dark side, especially after 3.5 years of grinding it out.
I don't know about Accords, but Civics have about the same half life as plutonium. Unless you're doing stunt work or competing on a racing circuit with a Civic, they'll run seemingly forever. I've had two, an '85 and a '96, and I loved driving them except for traffic jams. Lines of sight past the monster SUVs that litter the highways are poor and make for a boring, risky drive.
Actually, the actors are talented. I presume you're familiar with Samuel L. Jackson. Ewan McGregor was very good in Moulin Rouge and Black Hawk Down among other roles. Natalie Portman has good range (e.g. Heat, Beautiful Girls).Granted Jake Lloyd (young Anakin) weighed down E1, but there's still plenty of acting talent in these movies.
Clearly Lucas' direction is to blame. I think he's a genius digital effects guy, but his failure to bring out the human elements that we savored in Harrison Ford's Han Solo or Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia illustrate how difficult it is to do both things at the same time.
I do think a separation of effects and people directing duties would really help deliver what we're looking for, but Spielberg is not the guy for the job. Look at AI. Look at Minority Report. Again, good talent (Jude Law, Tom Cruise to name a few), but I didn't get either picture.
Spielberg falls into that category of directors that invariably set sci-fi pictures in bleak, greyscale worlds that try to sell us on how fucked we are in fifty or so years. I think you can have troubling elements in sci-fi movies, but how about a sci-fi flick that reaches for the better qualities of human nature. This is what I think has made Star Trek attractive to its fans for so long.
However, doing something like simply mandating a truth in advertiseing plan, so that CDs that are copy protected are labled as such, and ones that aren't are the only ones that can carry the Compact Disk logo would be a fine comprimise. And would also I think let the market police itself.
Astute observation, Slashdot poster, and I agree. We need to advocate for consumer rights, not crippling regulation. No matter now much we would like to see it. In order to defeat the panderings of legislators like Fritz Hollings, we have to shift the vernacular to our way of thinking. This issue needs to be addressed as a consumer rights issue, not a digital rights management issue.
And simply put, copy protected CDs are quite different products from standard issue CDs without copy protection, because they suppress our fair rights as consumers. Identifying those CDs which are copy protected with labels is half the battle. Informing the public of the pitfalls of purchasing such items is the other. Then the market goes to work. We WIN! For capitalism is a jolly good fellow...
With no verbage outlining how something is "certified," I'm left to wonder how I would go about getting my project in compliance, you know, here in Brainerd. I just want to be in compliance.
More to the point, why do I need this? If this is the last line of defense, if the text in my license isn't descriptive enough, and if I need another group/consortium to put their stamp of approval on my work, then how is my software supposed to qualify as soft. I mean isn't that what software is supposed to be? Soft?
Man, this is getting out of hand. Why don't we all wear color coded uniforms based on whether we're trying to get something out of software development or contribute something back to it.
The last thing I think software developers need, especially those of the open source ilk, are certifications. Standards, sure. We have a hard enough time selling folks on the quality of our stuff. Why hamstring development more with yet another hurdle? I doubt developers will curry this certification's favor.
I don't know about this one. Yes, it is an excellent validator as far as catching everything. I built a validation and publishing system around the SGMLS tool that it uses and the HTML::Validator Perl module. It works, but...
The error messages are extremely cryptic. It's tough to run down problems when you get messages like "general entity." OTOH, if your familiar with CSE Validator, then you get good, comprehensible messages. And 9 out of 10 pages that validate in CSE Validator will validate with the W3C/SGMLS validator. Alas, CSE Validator is GUI only for Windows. Sigh.
Is there a print newspaper in existence whose online content isn't wrapped, shrouded, boxed, and wadded up in advertising and other unrelated nonsense? Print media has never understood the Internet, so we owe it to ourselves to deep link to their sites when possible.
NO! This is not a solution! This would only increase the problem by making it "okay" for telemarketers to call you, because you're not paying by the minute for them to call you. Some assmuncher politician would use this as an excuse to alter the TCPA to allow marketroids to dial you on your cell phones. NO!
Statically linking is not a waste when you consider the cheapness and size of today's storage solutions. Unless you install everything under the sun, this is not a problem. Additionally, you get a performance increase with statically linked libraries. Dynamic linking might have been *the* way of life when storage capacities were in the tens or hundreds of MB, but by no means is it the only viable solution these days.
That said, you are probably right about the expediency of bug fixes through libraries. Still, when you consider the rapid pace of development of some projects, I think this isn't as much of an issue as you might think it is.
Worse than DLL or.so hell is RPM hell. I am sure all of you who have been exposed to this technological travesty agree. When a distribution's installation hinges on the installation of the Perl RPM, for example, you are virtually guaranteeing that you will break something and potentially assfuck your system if you remove or don't install the Perl package in favor of compiling from a tarball.
Missed opportunity for Ogg Vorbis
on
MP3 for Gameboy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Besides playing songs in the standard MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats, the SongPro device will also play a proprietary SongPro Audio, or SPA, format that will use the Game Boy's screen to display lyrics and pictures.
I see two and a half proprietary file formats in there and zero non-proprietary (read: Ogg Vorbis) formats there. Not to carp on xiph.org or any other developers or marketers for Ogg Vorbis, but this is the kind of platform and opportunity that could help to make a free-as-in-beer, open source audio codec like Ogg Vorbis a player in the portable audio world.
Hey, it's not like it isn't possible. This thing can do multiple file formats. Why not another with Ogg Vorbis?
Slashdot Mirror
I have karma to burn, so here goes. How does it feel to be so wrong? It is this very customization that has given life to the Linux GUI. Don't like a Windowsesque desktop? Try Enlightenment. Like a tighter look? Go fetch KDE. These choices empower Linux users.
Because Linux users have these choices and are often adept at skinning, no company needs to waste its time reinventing. Just leave that to the end-users. The Linux users at least. Most folks enslaved by Windows don't know their mouse from their modem.
YES! I WIN!
I disagree. Think about it. It's trivial to write some JS code that opens a pop-up in somebody elses browser. The bandwidth hit to deliver that little extra code is neglible. Webmasters and their minions can serve this junk without regards to who is looking at it, and the more the better. I think this is simply a dinosaur that is perpetuated by the glut of technically inept decision makers in our line of work.
I empathize for those who need to make a $ from whatever content they offer on their web sites (I work for a state government agency; We just do things to make the govt. look good, cost be damned). But "HEY LOOK OVER HERE!" advertising just isn't gonna cut it no matter how many hits you get.
I do think layout similar to that of print magazines and newspapers could be effective. Make the advertising a more soothing part of the content. It doesn't hurt to make it relevant to your audience either. Not everybody wants a X10 camera to violate someone's Fourth Amendment rights.
If I'm wrong about your bat, congratulations! You are in possession of a rare bat. Perhaps you meant to post on Ebay?
Let's not forget that programmers are writers of sorts. We need a muse like any other with a creative endeavor. I find these books that stay away from the low-level syntax and raise up what it is, the essence, of what we as programmers do to be much more uplifting and inspiring. After all, if I can't pick up on syntax, there's little use for me to drink caffeinated beverages well into the night.
Second, what's with the author's name, Jennifer 8. Lee. Numeral eight? Was her dad a Yogi Berra fan?
Third, what's with the subject's name, Camberley Crick? I'm at a loss for words on this one.
Fourth, DUH! You put something on a web site, your very own web site, and you alone bear responsibility for its dissemination through the public domain. Somebody send Ms. Crick a cluebat. I'm sure you can find her address on her web site.
Conclusion: another example of how ineffectual and misguided journalism has become. Nothing to see here. Please disperse.
Cornbread Surprise:
1 cornbread mix package
4 oz. maple syrup
Bake cornbread per its instructions. Crumble in a bowl. Pour maple syrup over cornbread. Serve lukewarm.
Total Tuna
4 oz. chunk light tuna
2-4 oz. spaghetti sauce
Scrape every last morsel of tuna from its can into a bowl. Pour agreeable portion of spaghetti sauce over tuna. Microwave. Garnish with lettuce leaf.
I lived on these two delicacies *alone* for two months after getting laid off back in 1999. I went nine months between paychecks while attending college classes full time (finishing degree I started on back in 1991). Worst time of my life. Enjoy!
Compatible with what? Features like rune checking and search and engrave?
1) Hire Linus.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Case in point. I love and use Perl for much of my work. I want and will build it from source. But if I want X-Windows, GNOME, and much, much more installed via RPMS from my Redhat CDs, I have to install the Perl RPMS. This is unacceptable to me. I recognize that RPMS make some things easy for Joe User, but they often make the basics impossible for me.
Tarballs are dead they say. Long live tarballs!
The more common people try to make common sense, the less sense it makes.
My grandfather suffered from Alzheimer's despite being a high school teacher and coach for many, many years. I would have to say his occupation would have kept him pretty sharp. This isn't empirical evidence enough to refute a claim that crosswords, etc. don't help, but I would take such an assertion with a grain of salt just the same.
user_pref("capability.policy.default.TVOwner.pissO ff", "noAccess");
If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.
I think file sharing is the next step to making Linux a more viable desktop solution. I only have one box at home, but I'm looking to add a couple more in a month or two. I am not looking forward to setting up NFS, code, or some other method of networking for these boxen.
Who knows. It's a bugger of a Catch-22. I'm not as concerned about my parental units taking up Linux as I am my manager at work. The days when Linux really displaces Windows in IT departments for system and ASP solutions will be a major step forward for technology (in the US of A where I'm saddled with corporate philos).
I brought my Redhat 7.3 CDs with me (burnt from ISOs) and went to work installing as minimal a workstation setup as I could. These baby boomers aren't going to break out gcc and go to hacking on CVS source any time soon. I left off as much as I could without running into RPM hell with dependencies. An hour later, we were up and running.
We subscribe to a local DSL provider, a telco, and the Internet is just a /usr/sbin/netconfig away.
Went online and downloaded OpenOffice 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0. All that was left was a decent personal finance package. Off we went to grab GnuCash.
Acclamating my folks to OpenOffice and Mozilla was easy, because after all, a web browser is a web browser and a office suite is an office suite (licensing aside, of course). GnuCash was a little tougher to sell to my dad who is a MS Money fanatic. Time will tell if he'll stick with GnuCash long enough for this experiment to pass muster, but I'm optimistic.
So the weekend over, I leave satisfied that I've freed two more human beings, my parents no less, from the confines of proprietary software. The drive home is a beautiful thing.
Then my mom calls. She wants to know if I can reinstall Monopoly (by Infogrames for Windows 95/98). And dad wants me to reinstall SimCity. These are their two favorite things to do with the PC. They've probably etched a couple of deep grooves in their hard drive where these these two programs reside. In short, we're fucked in full.
To make a long story short, I was able to satisfy my mom's Monopoly jones by installing Kapitalist, a free Monopoly type game. She missed the animations that the Infrogrames game provided, but she got by. My dad however was SOL. I was hoping to find a copy of SimCity 3000 Unlimited by Loki, but as most of you know Loki is no more. My dad took it in stride, and explained that he'll just find another game to get hooked on. As you can see my parents are gamers, and I do love them so for that.
Problem. Finding and installing a quality game for Linux that a Linux neophyte or general non-hacker can install is difficult. Remember, my folks were running with AOL before all of this. They don't want to worry about glibc versions and the like.
So my folks were happy that they could get online with one click to Mozilla, happy they could read and compose documents and spreadsheets, and curious about GnuCash's abilities, but they seriously doubted they could have any fun in between.
I would say that a Linux distro, if properly tamed, can be a quality desktop solution provided you're willing to bite the gaming bullet. How many of us dual-boot for this alone? Sorry to hear we lost one to the dark side, especially after 3.5 years of grinding it out.
Good for you.
Sincerely,
Happy Gnome User
I don't know about Accords, but Civics have about the same half life as plutonium. Unless you're doing stunt work or competing on a racing circuit with a Civic, they'll run seemingly forever. I've had two, an '85 and a '96, and I loved driving them except for traffic jams. Lines of sight past the monster SUVs that litter the highways are poor and make for a boring, risky drive.
Clearly Lucas' direction is to blame. I think he's a genius digital effects guy, but his failure to bring out the human elements that we savored in Harrison Ford's Han Solo or Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia illustrate how difficult it is to do both things at the same time.
I do think a separation of effects and people directing duties would really help deliver what we're looking for, but Spielberg is not the guy for the job. Look at AI. Look at Minority Report. Again, good talent (Jude Law, Tom Cruise to name a few), but I didn't get either picture.
Spielberg falls into that category of directors that invariably set sci-fi pictures in bleak, greyscale worlds that try to sell us on how fucked we are in fifty or so years. I think you can have troubling elements in sci-fi movies, but how about a sci-fi flick that reaches for the better qualities of human nature. This is what I think has made Star Trek attractive to its fans for so long.
Astute observation, Slashdot poster, and I agree. We need to advocate for consumer rights, not crippling regulation. No matter now much we would like to see it. In order to defeat the panderings of legislators like Fritz Hollings, we have to shift the vernacular to our way of thinking. This issue needs to be addressed as a consumer rights issue, not a digital rights management issue.
And simply put, copy protected CDs are quite different products from standard issue CDs without copy protection, because they suppress our fair rights as consumers. Identifying those CDs which are copy protected with labels is half the battle. Informing the public of the pitfalls of purchasing such items is the other. Then the market goes to work. We WIN! For capitalism is a jolly good fellow...
More to the point, why do I need this? If this is the last line of defense, if the text in my license isn't descriptive enough, and if I need another group/consortium to put their stamp of approval on my work, then how is my software supposed to qualify as soft. I mean isn't that what software is supposed to be? Soft?
Man, this is getting out of hand. Why don't we all wear color coded uniforms based on whether we're trying to get something out of software development or contribute something back to it.
The last thing I think software developers need, especially those of the open source ilk, are certifications. Standards, sure. We have a hard enough time selling folks on the quality of our stuff. Why hamstring development more with yet another hurdle? I doubt developers will curry this certification's favor.
The error messages are extremely cryptic. It's tough to run down problems when you get messages like "general entity." OTOH, if your familiar with CSE Validator, then you get good, comprehensible messages. And 9 out of 10 pages that validate in CSE Validator will validate with the W3C/SGMLS validator. Alas, CSE Validator is GUI only for Windows. Sigh.
Is there a print newspaper in existence whose online content isn't wrapped, shrouded, boxed, and wadded up in advertising and other unrelated nonsense? Print media has never understood the Internet, so we owe it to ourselves to deep link to their sites when possible.
NO! This is not a solution! This would only increase the problem by making it "okay" for telemarketers to call you, because you're not paying by the minute for them to call you. Some assmuncher politician would use this as an excuse to alter the TCPA to allow marketroids to dial you on your cell phones. NO!
Let's hunt telemarketers! Who's with me?
That said, you are probably right about the expediency of bug fixes through libraries. Still, when you consider the rapid pace of development of some projects, I think this isn't as much of an issue as you might think it is.
Worse than DLL or .so hell is RPM hell. I am sure all of you who have been exposed to this technological travesty agree. When a distribution's installation hinges on the installation of the Perl RPM, for example, you are virtually guaranteeing that you will break something and potentially assfuck your system if you remove or don't install the Perl package in favor of compiling from a tarball.
I see two and a half proprietary file formats in there and zero non-proprietary (read: Ogg Vorbis) formats there. Not to carp on xiph.org or any other developers or marketers for Ogg Vorbis, but this is the kind of platform and opportunity that could help to make a free-as-in-beer, open source audio codec like Ogg Vorbis a player in the portable audio world.
Hey, it's not like it isn't possible. This thing can do multiple file formats. Why not another with Ogg Vorbis?