My mom runs RedHat and KDE...
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
[1] This auto-login, auto-shutdown required two minor customizations: a script to 'su' to her userid, run 'startx', wait for it to exit, then run 'shutdown -h now'; and a change to/etc/inittab to launch this script automatically.
On Redhat at least, runlevel 5 will start up with XDM on console 5 and switch to it, so you get a nice graphical login prompt and a "shutdown" button. I gather you could probably just symlink xdm to kdm to get kde's login screen. XDM usually gives you a "shutdown" option and the ability to let anyone on the console use it.
> This idea is complete bs. It's just going to create added work for authors and violates freedom of the press.
I bet you're imagining HTML-cops policing every website and didn't bother to even read the summary to see that it's a government standard. As in government pages and government business. Believe it or not, there are other specs you have to follow when you do business with the government too.
But I guess it wouldn't be slashdot if people actually read and comprehended, would it?
Linus has personally granted permission for proprietary kernel modules. As Linus is the copyright holder, he can override any provision in the GPL as he pleases.
Yep, sermonizing sure is going to help people understand that giant mass of code. Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
Actually it's terrific. Microsoft has Actively (groan) resisted commoditization of Windows with strategies of lock-in and presenting the API as a moving target. But now that IE is a component, it's a commodity, and a replaceable one. Windows can be taken over piece by piece, much like the GNU project has been doing to commercial Unix.
Ahhh Esperanto... German has a fairly short list of grammatical rules as well, which is why you end up with some fairly ridiculously convoluted sentences unless you deliberately break those rules. Try translating "The dog that chased the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built." into German. All the verbs pile up on the end. Computer languages: perl is adored (and reviled) by many because it has *so many* grammatical rules. No one wants to have to use a spoken language that feels like a computer language.
And people DO make money from selling Dvorak keyboards. Considering the exhorbitant price for some of these "ergo" keyboards they sell, one would think they make a killing for just moving the keys around and popping a different keymap into the controller.
unix in general needs a good browser. oh and there's BeOS and MacOS too, though Cyberdog still has a big fanbase on the latter.
right now my job pretty much revolves around using a three-tier app (problem tracking db), using java servlets to access a db backend, and the front-end is web-based and HEAVILY javascripted. Despite that, it still feels like loading web pages, taking around 3-5 seconds to flip between summary, problem description, ticket lists, open filters/queries, and so on. It really sucks. If we had a browser that supported DOM, we could just rewrite the HTML in the page on the fly and it would redisplay itself without having to do all this load/refresh/redraw crap. Perhaps it can be done now with layers, but last I looked at the code to write and display them dynamically like that, I ran screaming.
And I DON'T want to do it in JavaScript, which has become a crawling horror and the best (or worst) language joke this side of INTERCAL. This language has astonishing concepts like having THREE equality operators that use = signs. There's =, ==, and now ===, the last being an operator like `eq' in lisp. Can you say unreadable? To top off this insanity, a literal false is false in an identity test as in "if (x)"), but an object declared Boolean and given a false value has a TRUE value in identity tests, meaning "if (x)" and "if (x == true)" return DIFFERENT RESULTS. Changing the version attribute in the script tag changes this behavior. God forbid you'd ever mix them.
IE at least allows one to escape from this monstrous insanity by using other languages to manipulate its object model, INCLUDING perl and python. With Netscape, I'm stuck with this phenomenal idiocy.
What does this have to do with IPC? Macros are scripting, scripting is good. Unsandboxed bytecode not good, but all it takes is a language that can narrow its namespaces to secure it (something both Perl and Python use to sandbox their code). The CONCEPT of macros in documents is not at all bad, the implementation of the scripting interface is what sucks. I don't get it, IE will warn you about scripts and can even check script signatures. Why can't the same be done for VB and VBA?
The parallel with cell phones is Microsoft's future strategy: pay nothing for the product, pay a yearly fee for use, and extra for premium features. You REALLY want software to follow the pricing models of telecommunications companies?
Oh, God forbid that we can't just "cut'n paste all interesting source code from Netscape into our own software projects". God forbid that we don't make Netscape do all the work so we can create our own competitor to reward them for their hard work by putting them out of business. God forbid Sun or Troll Tech collect a one-time royalty if you sell work that builds off of theirs.
Would you rather go back to no source at all? Commercial software houses are neither hobbyists nor humanitarians.
Being sued? No. Lawsuit filings are a matter of public record, and the RIAA is being watched pretty closely by the tech news outlets. Sent threatening letters? Quite possible.
Uh no, the THEORY is out there. The actual IMPLEMENTATION is a quite different matter. This is why without very advanced guidance systems tightly integrated to the subtleties of your physical design, your medium or long range missile will be off by many miles.
Absolutely nothing prevents you from setting your root nameservers to AlterNIC. The juvenile antics of AlterNIC's owner turned me off to it, but NIS has no TECHNICAL power to enforce its domain name monopoly. Legal power is another thing of course. It's also just not workable to have overlapping namespaces.
NSI is just desperate. The government won't slap them hard for this, they just aren't likely to cut NSI any more slack now.
Is there a standard address for RFE's (Requests For Enhancement), or do you just read 'em in your inbox along with bug reports, flames, and fanmail, Rob?
Well here's one: Considering you don't seem scared of really hairy HTML, I'd like to see a reading mode of "tree", using mucho javascript and DHTML to visually expand/collapse threads. Maybe a layer showing the article you're reading, clicking on a node in the tree would zoom to that article (using a name=blahblah url's if you don't want to get hammered with a hit for every article). Sure javascript, layers, dhtml, anything that isn't pure XML/DOMscript/RDF/ivory-tower-whatnot is evil evil evil, but it sure would be nifty to use.
Things just need to settle down.
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Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
A TOTAL MARKET of 100,000... That is really really small. Not every single one of them is going to buy every game made for linux.
Windows happens to be "good enough" for most people. Some games are constantly crashing under windows. Switch windows in KQ:MOE and bye-bye game. But alpha centauri OTOH is damn near bulletproof. Games are the ultimate example of making the underlying OS irrelevant. I despise windows, but when I'm immersed in my game, I really don't care that it's there underneath.
The Marketplace: the new God of the new religion.
on
Miscellaneous GNU News
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· Score: 1
I would tend to agree with all your points except slavery. Slavery is employment (involuntary), which is itself an economic system (macro), but it removes the free choice of those who are forced into the system. Thus it's command economy at its ugliest.
Slashdot Mirror
On Redhat at least, runlevel 5 will start up with XDM on console 5 and switch to it, so you get a nice graphical login prompt and a "shutdown" button. I gather you could probably just symlink xdm to kdm to get kde's login screen. XDM usually gives you a "shutdown" option and the ability to let anyone on the console use it.
> This idea is complete bs. It's just going to create added work for authors and violates freedom of the press.
I bet you're imagining HTML-cops policing every website and didn't bother to even read the summary to see that it's a government standard. As in government pages and government business. Believe it or not, there are other specs you have to follow when you do business with the government too.
But I guess it wouldn't be slashdot if people actually read and comprehended, would it?
A linux site for newbies, and they throw linus's email address on the introduction. Linus is gonna be pissed.
Linus has personally granted permission for proprietary kernel modules. As Linus is the copyright holder, he can override any provision in the GPL as he pleases.
This should be a FAQ.
"My car gets 40 furlongs to the cord and THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT!"
Yep, sermonizing sure is going to help people understand that giant mass of code. Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
> you don't have to "run a program" to make it happen..
Then what's a codec? Executeable main(), entry point in a dll, what's the difference?
> Now, the codecs... Why would you want those?
Call me crazy, but some of us like to have players that, well, actually play movies and stuff.
Actually it's terrific. Microsoft has Actively (groan) resisted commoditization of Windows with strategies of lock-in and presenting the API as a moving target. But now that IE is a component, it's a commodity, and a replaceable one. Windows can be taken over piece by piece, much like the GNU project has been doing to commercial Unix.
Ahhh Esperanto ... German has a fairly short list of grammatical rules as well, which is why you end up with some fairly ridiculously convoluted sentences unless you deliberately break those rules. Try translating "The dog that chased the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built." into German. All the verbs pile up on the end. Computer languages: perl is adored (and reviled) by many because it has *so many* grammatical rules. No one wants to have to use a spoken language that feels like a computer language.
And people DO make money from selling Dvorak keyboards. Considering the exhorbitant price for some of these "ergo" keyboards they sell, one would think they make a killing for just moving the keys around and popping a different keymap into the controller.
For an explanation of this phenomenom, try reading:
http://www.jwz.org/worse-is-better.html
unix in general needs a good browser. oh and there's BeOS and MacOS too, though Cyberdog still has a big fanbase on the latter.
right now my job pretty much revolves around using a three-tier app (problem tracking db), using java servlets to access a db backend, and the front-end is web-based and HEAVILY javascripted. Despite that, it still feels like loading web pages, taking around 3-5 seconds to flip between summary, problem description, ticket lists, open filters/queries, and so on. It really sucks. If we had a browser that supported DOM, we could just rewrite the HTML in the page on the fly and it would redisplay itself without having to do all this load/refresh/redraw crap. Perhaps it can be done now with layers, but last I looked at the code to write and display them dynamically like that, I ran screaming.
And I DON'T want to do it in JavaScript, which has become a crawling horror and the best (or worst) language joke this side of INTERCAL. This language has astonishing concepts like having THREE equality operators that use = signs. There's =, ==, and now ===, the last being an operator like `eq' in lisp. Can you say unreadable? To top off this insanity, a literal false is false in an identity test as in "if (x)"), but an object declared Boolean and given a false value has a TRUE value in identity tests, meaning "if (x)" and "if (x == true)" return DIFFERENT RESULTS. Changing the version attribute in the script tag changes this behavior. God forbid you'd ever mix them.
IE at least allows one to escape from this monstrous insanity by using other languages to manipulate its object model, INCLUDING perl and python. With Netscape, I'm stuck with this phenomenal idiocy.
They've been dead since Solaris 2.5 I think. Solaris uses only type1 fonts now, so the only tool you need is cp.
Ironic that you ask that, because I wouldn't mind making the fonts on my solaris box look as nice as the ones I have on my linux box.
One word: QMail. You don't have to like the author, but it's a damn solid product.
What does this have to do with IPC? Macros are scripting, scripting is good. Unsandboxed bytecode not good, but all it takes is a language that can narrow its namespaces to secure it (something both Perl and Python use to sandbox their code). The CONCEPT of macros in documents is not at all bad, the implementation of the scripting interface is what sucks. I don't get it, IE will warn you about scripts and can even check script signatures. Why can't the same be done for VB and VBA?
The parallel with cell phones is Microsoft's future strategy: pay nothing for the product, pay a yearly fee for use, and extra for premium features. You REALLY want software to follow the pricing models of telecommunications companies?
Oh, God forbid that we can't just "cut'n paste all interesting source code from Netscape into our own software projects". God forbid that we don't make Netscape do all the work so we can create our own competitor to reward them for their hard work by putting them out of business. God forbid Sun or Troll Tech collect a one-time royalty if you sell work that builds off of theirs.
Would you rather go back to no source at all? Commercial software houses are neither hobbyists nor humanitarians.
Being sued? No. Lawsuit filings are a matter of public record, and the RIAA is being watched pretty closely by the tech news outlets. Sent threatening letters? Quite possible.
why don't we just go back to calling it Freax?
Uh no, the THEORY is out there. The actual IMPLEMENTATION is a quite different matter. This is why without very advanced guidance systems tightly integrated to the subtleties of your physical design, your medium or long range missile will be off by many miles.
Absolutely nothing prevents you from setting your root nameservers to AlterNIC. The juvenile antics of AlterNIC's owner turned me off to it, but NIS has no TECHNICAL power to enforce its domain name monopoly. Legal power is another thing of course. It's also just not workable to have overlapping namespaces.
NSI is just desperate. The government won't slap them hard for this, they just aren't likely to cut NSI any more slack now.
This is state-sponsored expropriation, plain and simple. It's horrifying that it's even being considered.
Is there a standard address for RFE's (Requests For Enhancement), or do you just read 'em in your inbox along with bug reports, flames, and fanmail, Rob?
Well here's one:
Considering you don't seem scared of really hairy HTML, I'd like to see a reading mode of "tree", using mucho javascript and DHTML to visually expand/collapse threads. Maybe a layer showing the article you're reading, clicking on a node in the tree would zoom to that article (using a name=blahblah url's if you don't want to get hammered with a hit for every article). Sure javascript, layers, dhtml, anything that isn't pure XML/DOMscript/RDF/ivory-tower-whatnot is evil evil evil, but it sure would be nifty to use.
A TOTAL MARKET of 100,000... That is really really small. Not every single one of them is going to buy every game made for linux.
Windows happens to be "good enough" for most people. Some games are constantly crashing under windows. Switch windows in KQ:MOE and bye-bye game. But alpha centauri OTOH is damn near bulletproof. Games are the ultimate example of making the underlying OS irrelevant. I despise windows, but when I'm immersed in my game, I really don't care that it's there underneath.
I would tend to agree with all your points except slavery. Slavery is employment (involuntary), which is itself an economic system (macro), but it removes the free choice of those who are forced into the system. Thus it's command economy at its ugliest.