I want a file manager that inserts the file I click on into the command line. I want a file manager that opens a command line in the directory I'm working in
KFM will do this as of KDE 2.0 Dragging a file to the file manager's built-in term window pastes the name of the file onto the command line. It even cd's whever you open a new folder in the file manager.
B.S. I don't want to have to open two windows and drag between them. I want to be able to drag a file to a folder icon and have the file manager be smart enough to put that file into the selected folder. Windoze does this. KDE does this. GNOME still makes me open two windows to do a job that should require one.
there's a half-decent pixel app but no vector app for Linux Try sketch. It's no Freehand(tm), but it's good enough for a lot of things. And never listen to the zealots.
Now go work on your troll-fu. You aren't nearly annoying enough yet to warrant a real flame.
This all sounds to me like an extreme case of "not invented here syndrome". If *NIX had introduced HTML in email before MS did, all the Linux bigots here would be calling it a feature, and lambasting the poor microserfs who still had to use text email.
[excessive flamage]
If you stupid OS zealots would stop using a mail client that's older than your mothers *cough* mutt *cough* and drag yourselves kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or at least past 1991), there would be no problem with using HTML in email. Believe it or not, there are reasons for using X other than getting 12 terminal windows on the same screen.
[/flamage]
There's no real reason to keep the software proprietary if your business plan is to make money off sales of the hardware and internet service. Besides, it looks like most of the hardware in this thing is off-the-shelf stuff, meaning the drivers are already available. Maybe Nokia intends to make it's money from sales, rather than lawsuits.
BTW, I'd be interested to hear who the "competition" for this device is.
I see two options for distributing content without assistance from banner ads.
Web sites can go to a subscription or micropayment model, where readers have to kick in a few cents every time they read an article or post a comment. Slashdot may have enough die-hard fans that it could survive this way.
The other option is for people who want their content to be seen, and don't care about making money from it. Peer-to-peer was made for this. Upload that day's article, essay, comic, or whatever to a few gnutella or freenet servers, and use your fans' bandwidth to distribute your content.
Either way, a lot of the hype, rampant commercialism, and get-rich-quick mentality will die. Sites that people care enough about, science sites, political sites, and everything in.edu will survive. The sites with no clear mission exept to get rich off the IPO will fail. The EFF and GNU.org will go on, VA Linux will bite the dust and probably drag slashdot down with it.
Do linux zealots have any room to talk?
My opinion is no.
Re-implementing UNIX because you're too fsckin' cheap to spring for a legal copy of minix, rebuilding the entire desktop interface because of a license flamewar, and sub-par hardware support are hardly advancing personal computing to a new level either.
Linux kernel 0.1
"This is sort of a joke, just a fun side project"
Linux kernel 1.0
"This is cool, the next version will have plun-n-play and better hardware support"
Linux 2.0.0
"The next version will have USB, plug-n-play, run on any system with a 32-bit processor and more hardware support"
Linux 2.0.2
"We fixed all the glaringly obvious bugs in 2.0!"
(kernel 2.0.0 was the infamous paper-bag release)
Linux 2.2.0
"It's new and improved, and sorta has USB, and a little bit of plug-n-play, but 2.4 will have full USB, all the plug-n-play toys, and it we'll port it to anything with a microchip in it."
Linux 2.4.0
"It'll be out any day now..."
World domination? Linux on every desktop?
Yeah right...
There haven't been any new products that Micros~1 has been able to sell, since the advent of the internet.
Windows 2000 advanced server: $1199
Office 2000 professional: $599
MS Visual Studio 6.0 $1619
The look on an ignorant OS zealot's face when he realizes just how far into his mouth he stuck his foot: Priceless
This is exactly the mentality that creates the suck-ass GUIs that are the root cause of the desire to skin apps. An interface that doesn't make the user want to puke is NOT fluff.
I agree about all-in-one clients though. I already have a mailreader, IM client, newsreader, and HTML editor. Why can't my web browser just be a browser.
What resolution is your monitor, how good is your vision, and how far do you sit from the monitor?
If your eyes can't resolve individual pixels on the screen, antialiased fonts aren't going to do much for you. On my monitor, antialiased fonts are much more readable than bitmapped fonts at 640x480, but at 1280x1024 I can't tell the difference without a magnifying glass or Xmag. If you want to see some antialiased fonts right now (without installing the CVS version of X), all the text rendered by enlightenment (window titles, menus, and the Dox help browser) is antialiased.
long ago it was realized that menus on individual windows was bad design
I always heard that it was because the first Macs had such tiny screens that they couldn't afford to waste space on multiple menubars. By the time monitors got big enough to have menus for each window, the "One Menu uber alles" mentality was too entrenched to change. It just goes to show a feature is just a kludge with seniority.
put the following in/etc/hosts (most unices) or c:\windows\hosts.txt (Win9x)
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
127.0.0.1 slashmirror.tripod.com
127.0.0.1 slashtroll.org
Never again will you see anything from those servers.
I use linux with WindowMaker and Enlightenment, both GUIs function just like I described.
The point I was trying to make is that the start -> shutdown -> log out sequence is hardly intuitive. It's not even logical; a win9x box is the only machine I know of where you push the "start" button to turn it off, and slipping the logoff function under "shut down" just adds a further level of ridiculously confusing cruft.
If you want a thorough explanation of the elements of the windows GUI that suck (and a lot of other apps too), look at the interface hall of shame (not a goatse.cx link, I promise).
If a 90% market share is the best reason you can think of to use windows... BAAAA, you're a sheep. If 90% of people drove a Yugo, I still wouldn't want one.
Logging out: a comparison MS Intuitive Interface(tm):
*click* "Start"
*click* "Shut Down"
*click* "Close all programs and log in as new user"
*click* OK
Linux:
*click* (anywhere on the desktop, not just a 16x64 box in one corner of the screen)
*click* "log out"
thats 86,400 DVD's of data a day, 31,536,000 DVDs per year, 220,752,000 for the intended archive period...
Extrapolating your calculations well into the range of the ridiculous; if the hypothetical DVD archive is kept in CD style jewel cases (15cm x 12cm x 1cm or 180cm^3 or.018 m^3) then the entire archive of 220,752,000 discs would take up 3,973,536 m^3. Assuming about half on the space in the library is given to walkways between the shelves (a guess based on paper libraries), that requires a building with a volume of at least 7,947,027 m^3. Imagine a square building 1.0 km on a side, by 7.9 m high, packed with DVDs.
Speaking of mandrake, keep in mind not all distros offer an online download of individual packages. So this may also filter out these pseudo-free distributions
Why are we speaking of Mandrake here? You can download individual mandrake RPMs from their usual ftp mirrors, or from rpmfind.net.
There's a good reason for losing that freedom if you abuse it
If you abuse it. That's a big if, and one the RIAA would like very much to bypass.
If a cop sees you reading a book, should he be able to demand to see the receipt from your bookshop, and arrest you for stealing books if you don't have a receipt?
Most people (myself included) resent being called criminals, and be taking away a person's ability to break the law before he has broken any laws is precisely that. By demanding the ablity to track and collect royalty on all digital music transfers, the RIAA is calling everyone with a net connection a criminal.
Kevin Mitnck made a lot of noise, too. It didn't get him out of jail much faster. Most people have very near zero sympathy for anyone accused of a computer crime. Uninterrupted access to eBay and yahoo is more important than constitutional principles these days.
How about your printer?
That's right, your printer. My HP laserjet has a 68030 progessor and a meg of RAM. That's as much processing power and memory as a Mac LC. A simple firmware tweak and a wireless modem in the slot used for the JetDirect network card, and your printer could broadcast encrypted copies of everything you print. If you add a BIOS patch, the computer could slowly read all the data from the hard drive, send it to the printer, and have the printer encrypt and transmit it.
I think at this point computer security becomes a moot point, if the big bad G-men want to know the password to your pr0n collection so badly that they would bug your printer, BIOS, HDD controller, or the like, they would probably just arrest you, and "persuade" you to tell them what they want to know. Cat burglars and BIOS hackers are far more expensive than two goons and a baseball bat.
Personally, I think the average Joe has no need for all this high-power computing. What it really comes down to is that the average computer illiterate only uses the computer to check email, surf the web, play games, and maybe use apps like Word
Mandrake 7.2 installs XFree 4.0.1 by default (and KDE2, and the latest GNOME, and about a dozen other windowmanagers too), and it has a nice GUI install program.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a file manager that inserts the file I click on into the command line. I want a file manager that opens a command line in the directory I'm working in
KFM will do this as of KDE 2.0 Dragging a file to the file manager's built-in term window pastes the name of the file onto the command line. It even cd's whever you open a new folder in the file manager.
Gnome supports drag and drop just fine.
B.S. I don't want to have to open two windows and drag between them. I want to be able to drag a file to a folder icon and have the file manager be smart enough to put that file into the selected folder. Windoze does this. KDE does this. GNOME still makes me open two windows to do a job that should require one.
there's a half-decent pixel app but no vector app for Linux
Try sketch. It's no Freehand(tm), but it's good enough for a lot of things. And never listen to the zealots.
Now go work on your troll-fu. You aren't nearly annoying enough yet to warrant a real flame.
This all sounds to me like an extreme case of "not invented here syndrome". If *NIX had introduced HTML in email before MS did, all the Linux bigots here would be calling it a feature, and lambasting the poor microserfs who still had to use text email.
[excessive flamage]
If you stupid OS zealots would stop using a mail client that's older than your mothers *cough* mutt *cough* and drag yourselves kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or at least past 1991), there would be no problem with using HTML in email. Believe it or not, there are reasons for using X other than getting 12 terminal windows on the same screen.
[/flamage]
There's no real reason to keep the software proprietary if your business plan is to make money off sales of the hardware and internet service. Besides, it looks like most of the hardware in this thing is off-the-shelf stuff, meaning the drivers are already available. Maybe Nokia intends to make it's money from sales, rather than lawsuits.
BTW, I'd be interested to hear who the "competition" for this device is.
I see two options for distributing content without assistance from banner ads.
.edu will survive. The sites with no clear mission exept to get rich off the IPO will fail. The EFF and GNU.org will go on, VA Linux will bite the dust and probably drag slashdot down with it.
Web sites can go to a subscription or micropayment model, where readers have to kick in a few cents every time they read an article or post a comment. Slashdot may have enough die-hard fans that it could survive this way.
The other option is for people who want their content to be seen, and don't care about making money from it. Peer-to-peer was made for this. Upload that day's article, essay, comic, or whatever to a few gnutella or freenet servers, and use your fans' bandwidth to distribute your content.
Either way, a lot of the hype, rampant commercialism, and get-rich-quick mentality will die. Sites that people care enough about, science sites, political sites, and everything in
Do linux zealots have any room to talk?
My opinion is no.
Re-implementing UNIX because you're too fsckin' cheap to spring for a legal copy of minix, rebuilding the entire desktop interface because of a license flamewar, and sub-par hardware support are hardly advancing personal computing to a new level either.
Linux kernel 0.1
"This is sort of a joke, just a fun side project"
Linux kernel 1.0
"This is cool, the next version will have plun-n-play and better hardware support"
Linux 2.0.0
"The next version will have USB, plug-n-play, run on any system with a 32-bit processor and more hardware support"
Linux 2.0.2
"We fixed all the glaringly obvious bugs in 2.0!"
(kernel 2.0.0 was the infamous paper-bag release)
Linux 2.2.0
"It's new and improved, and sorta has USB, and a little bit of plug-n-play, but 2.4 will have full USB, all the plug-n-play toys, and it we'll port it to anything with a microchip in it."
Linux 2.4.0
"It'll be out any day now..."
World domination? Linux on every desktop?
Yeah right...
There haven't been any new products that Micros~1 has been able to sell, since the advent of the internet.
Windows 2000 advanced server: $1199
Office 2000 professional: $599
MS Visual Studio 6.0 $1619
The look on an ignorant OS zealot's face when he realizes just how far into his mouth he stuck his foot: Priceless
Move freedb.org to freedb.org.jp
Stupid US software patents don't apply in Japan.
This is exactly the mentality that creates the suck-ass GUIs that are the root cause of the desire to skin apps. An interface that doesn't make the user want to puke is NOT fluff.
I agree about all-in-one clients though. I already have a mailreader, IM client, newsreader, and HTML editor. Why can't my web browser just be a browser.
What resolution is your monitor, how good is your vision, and how far do you sit from the monitor?
If your eyes can't resolve individual pixels on the screen, antialiased fonts aren't going to do much for you. On my monitor, antialiased fonts are much more readable than bitmapped fonts at 640x480, but at 1280x1024 I can't tell the difference without a magnifying glass or Xmag. If you want to see some antialiased fonts right now (without installing the CVS version of X), all the text rendered by enlightenment (window titles, menus, and the Dox help browser) is antialiased.
long ago it was realized that menus on individual windows was bad design
I always heard that it was because the first Macs had such tiny screens that they couldn't afford to waste space on multiple menubars. By the time monitors got big enough to have menus for each window, the "One Menu uber alles" mentality was too entrenched to change. It just goes to show a feature is just a kludge with seniority.
put the following in /etc/hosts (most unices) or c:\windows\hosts.txt (Win9x)
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
127.0.0.1 slashmirror.tripod.com
127.0.0.1 slashtroll.org
Never again will you see anything from those servers.
I use linux with WindowMaker and Enlightenment, both GUIs function just like I described.
The point I was trying to make is that the start -> shutdown -> log out sequence is hardly intuitive. It's not even logical; a win9x box is the only machine I know of where you push the "start" button to turn it off, and slipping the logoff function under "shut down" just adds a further level of ridiculously confusing cruft.
If you want a thorough explanation of the elements of the windows GUI that suck (and a lot of other apps too), look at the interface hall of shame (not a goatse.cx link, I promise).
If a 90% market share is the best reason you can think of to use windows... BAAAA, you're a sheep. If 90% of people drove a Yugo, I still wouldn't want one.
Logging out: a comparison
MS Intuitive Interface(tm):
*click* "Start"
*click* "Shut Down"
*click* "Close all programs and log in as new user"
*click* OK
Linux:
*click* (anywhere on the desktop, not just a 16x64 box in one corner of the screen)
*click* "log out"
Which makes more sense to you?
thats 86,400 DVD's of data a day, 31,536,000 DVDs per year, 220,752,000 for the intended archive period...
.018 m^3) then the entire archive of 220,752,000 discs would take up 3,973,536 m^3. Assuming about half on the space in the library is given to walkways between the shelves (a guess based on paper libraries), that requires a building with a volume of at least 7,947,027 m^3. Imagine a square building 1.0 km on a side, by 7.9 m high, packed with DVDs.
Extrapolating your calculations well into the range of the ridiculous; if the hypothetical DVD archive is kept in CD style jewel cases (15cm x 12cm x 1cm or 180cm^3 or
Speaking of mandrake, keep in mind not all distros offer an online download of individual packages. So this may also filter out these pseudo-free distributions
Why are we speaking of Mandrake here? You can download individual mandrake RPMs from their usual ftp mirrors, or from rpmfind.net.
The entire program may not be a palindrome, but each line taken individually is.
The output of the program is "Able was I ere I saw elbA". Now those of you who didn't grab it before the site got slashdotted have no reason to whine.
There's a good reason for losing that freedom if you abuse it
If you abuse it. That's a big if, and one the RIAA would like very much to bypass.
If a cop sees you reading a book, should he be able to demand to see the receipt from your bookshop, and arrest you for stealing books if you don't have a receipt?
Most people (myself included) resent being called criminals, and be taking away a person's ability to break the law before he has broken any laws is precisely that. By demanding the ablity to track and collect royalty on all digital music transfers, the RIAA is calling everyone with a net connection a criminal.
Kevin Mitnck made a lot of noise, too. It didn't get him out of jail much faster. Most people have very near zero sympathy for anyone accused of a computer crime. Uninterrupted access to eBay and yahoo is more important than constitutional principles these days.
"Well I'm sorry, Sir, but I seem to have forgotten my decryption pass phrase"
"That's too bad. Here, see if this contempt charge and year in jail helps jog your memory. If you remember the passphrase, we might let you out."
How about your printer?
That's right, your printer. My HP laserjet has a 68030 progessor and a meg of RAM. That's as much processing power and memory as a Mac LC. A simple firmware tweak and a wireless modem in the slot used for the JetDirect network card, and your printer could broadcast encrypted copies of everything you print. If you add a BIOS patch, the computer could slowly read all the data from the hard drive, send it to the printer, and have the printer encrypt and transmit it.
I think at this point computer security becomes a moot point, if the big bad G-men want to know the password to your pr0n collection so badly that they would bug your printer, BIOS, HDD controller, or the like, they would probably just arrest you, and "persuade" you to tell them what they want to know. Cat burglars and BIOS hackers are far more expensive than two goons and a baseball bat.
Bugger off, I'm just pleased they aren't disguised goatse.cx links, like EVERY FRIGGIN OTHER comment with links that gets modded "informative".
Personally, I think the average Joe has no need for all this high-power computing. What it really comes down to is that the average computer illiterate only uses the computer to check email, surf the web, play games, and maybe use apps like Word
How's that old 486SX holding up?
Mandrake 7.2 installs XFree 4.0.1 by default (and KDE2, and the latest GNOME, and about a dozen other windowmanagers too), and it has a nice GUI install program.