1) That should be left to the distros and 2) The user is going to change it all around anyway. Criticizing the default UI for KDE is dumb. You're not supposed to use it.
This is the polar opposite of the Gnome policy of assuming the user is too stupid to know how they work best. To quote from Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design For Programmers:
"... Users care about a lot less things than you might think. They are using your software to accomplish a task. They care about the task. If it's a graphics program, they probably want to be able to control every pixel to the finest level of detail. If it's a tool to build a web site, you can bet that they are obsessive about getting the web site to look exactly the way they want it to look."
"They do not, however, care one whit if the program's own toolbar is on the top or the bottom of the window. They don't care how the help file is indexed. They don't care about a lot of things, and it is the designers' responsibility to make these choices for them so that they don't have to. It is the height of arrogance for a software designer to inflict a choice like this on the user simply because the designer couldn't think hard enough to decide which option is really better."
I had the same problems. Look at your video card and the drivers used. If you are using an NVIDIA card to run dual monitors, get away from the 169 drivers and go with the older ones on the NVIDIA site. Then go through your configuration in nvidia-settings and modify your xorg.conf file. Worked for me. I'm not, I'm using an ATI card. I'm currently using the open source "ati" drivers, since they at least are stable. However, there seems to be no way of getting them to run dual screens.
The only way I was able to get dual screens running in Gutsy at all was using the ATI binary drivers and their aticonfig utility, which worked, except that the cursor, which looks fine in the primary screen, looks like a large square of random noise in the secondary screen. This is fixed if you enable the SW_CURSOR flag in xorg.conf, only then you get huge artifacts whenever you try to move or click on anything. I tried enabling Compiz to see if that fixes it, only it doesn't work the the ATi proprietry drivers. Not to mention that, when running the proprietry drivers, X.org crashed about once every third time I tried to drag a window from on monitor to the other. And I mean *really* crashed -- as in froze up the system to the extent that neither ctrl-alt-backspace (restart X) nor ctrl-alt-F1 (drop back to console) did anything at all.
As a result, I'm sticking with the "ati" drivers and one monitor only for now. If I want dual monitors, I can always boot into Windows, which has worked fine with two screens with no configuration at all (besides ticking the "Extend my desktop onto this monitor" box) since Windows 98...
Xorg 7.3 - the main advantage should be easier configuration, especially in multi-monitor setups. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say. But it can only be better than what we have now. Having had a rather bad time trying to get dual monitors set up in Gutsy, I've just tried the new screen applet (using the vanilla auto-configured xorg.conf).
Looked pretty good at first; it shows the two monitors side by side, showing the one I hadn't been using with a screen resolution set to 'off'. I set that to 1152x864, and pressed 'apply': Lo and behold, it turned on and showed my desktop at that resolution -- except that the monitor I had been using before was now set to 'off'. I used the applet to turn that monitor on, it did so -- and turned my secondary monitor back off.
The old 'Screens and Graphics' manager is still installed, only it's been moved over to the 'applications' menu for some reason. It still works identically to how it worked in Gutsy. By which I mean: not at all.
And using Word 2007 wastes less time than LaTeX + emacs? What do you mean? Neither really 'waste time' much, and as you could see from my post, the markup is very comparable. Which is more efficient for an individual user would probably very much depend on what working environment they're used to; e.g. for experienced emacs users, LaTeX + emacs would almost certainly be more efficient. If you're trying to make a point, I'm afraid I don't follow it.
Actually, in my experience the Word 2007 maths editor is more than a rival for Openoffice's one (they've redone the maths engine with a syntax heavily 'influenced' by LaTeX) -- though I would still use LaTeX proper for a long project, if only because of the ability to use text-bases versioning tools.
Example quadratic equation comparison:
Word 2007: (-b+-\sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a)
Openoffice Math: {-b+-sqrt{b^2-4ac}}over{2a}
LaTeX: \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}
would all produce the same output (though LaTeX's would naturally look a bit prettier than the other two).
Not incomparable, as you can see (though the differences start getting greater when you get more complicated things). The main difference is that Office 2007's equation editing is 'in-place' -- e.g. "\alpha" is replaced as you type by the alpha unicode symbol by Word's autocorrect engine -- wheras both Openoffice and LaTeX have a much more rigid seperation of input from result.
Sort of like dual monitors... Hih. Kind of ironic that the analogy you pick happens to be the reason why I gave up on Linux for a year and a half (the frustration of trying and failing to get my dual monitors working in Ubuntu 6.06 with an ATi card)...
X and the graphical system in general is clearly the weakest point of modern-day Linux. Hear, hear! Anyone who disagrees has obviously never tried to set up dual-screens...
BTW, if anyone tells you that the "Screens and Graphics" utility in Ubuntu lets you have painless dual-screens, they're lying. In my experience, the only thing it's good for is introducing you to the "Bulletproof X" feature, which Ubuntu invariably drops into after you try and use it...
The only way I got dual screens to work was using the ATi binary drivers and their aticonfig utility, which worked, except that the cursor, which looks fine in the primary screen, looks like a large square of random noise in the secondary screen. This is fixed if you enable the SW_CURSOR flag in xorg.conf, only then you get huge artifacts whenever you try to move or click on anything. I'd try enabling Compiz to see if they fixes it, only it apparently doesn't work the the ATi proprietry drivers. Fun...
I create a new OpenOffice document, and when I rename it I dont have to deal with the extension, it doesnt write over that Ditto on recent versions of Windows.
Copy and paste without having to right click C-c C-v?
My file format does not get fragmented (NTFS- Nice Try at a File System) If someone told you that, they're lying. Ext and ext3 are not magic, and they get fragmented just as any other filesystem does -- though they're well-designed enough that there's typically no measurable performance hit from fragmentation until a disk is 75-90% full. Both ext2/3 and NTFS share a number of techniques for minimising fragmentation, though the implementations usually differ slightly. For instance, both use fairly aggressive preallocation algorithms, except that on Windows, preallocation in implemented at the file-system level through the use of NTFS Extents; on Linux, ext2/3 doesn't support file-system extents, but preallocation is done by the kernel, so the result is much the same. Certainly, ext2/3 has some advantages over NTFS, but the converse is also true (transparent compression or file-system level encryption?).
If I choose to use a shell, it has a history and real tab completion and color coding Maybe not color-coding, but cmd's always had history and tab-completion.
When a file with a simular name and type is copied in the directory I get an option to view the metadata, see the picture, or hear the song to make an informed decision about what I should do, and it offers to automatically rename the file Ditto on recent versions of Windows (example).
I can leave all my windows open and shut down the computer, and they open back up automatically Windows had hibernation *before* Linux did (before swsusp anyway, I don't know of any other implementations).
For reference, I *am* an Ubuntu fan, and in fact, am typing this on Ubuntu (though I dual boot with Vista and like and use both OSes; make of that what you will...)
Oh did I mention that out of the box it's pretty much useless without thousands of dollars of other people's software? IF you are going to use all free software (FF, Thunderbird, OO.o, etc) then why not just use Linux because that's where it's all meant to run anyway. You make some good points earlier, but that's frankly silly. To say that Linux is where applications such as Firefox are "meant to run" is to completely derogate the efforts of their developers to make them platform-neutral. For example, Gecko 1.9 (FF3's layout engine) will use Cairo as a graphics backend, which is capable out outputting to X, GDI, Quartz, the BeOS API, OS/2, etc. for greater integration into all the different environments it will run in. Platform-neutrality isn't exactly a recent thing for Firefox, either -- even the earliest versions of Netscape were famed for it. In fact, I think you'll find that this applies to most of the popular and well-known FOS software projects out there -- for example, Openoffice famously uses Java (and earlier versions of Staroffice used a cross-platform C++ library called StarView). (In fact, this is almost a tautology, since it is much easier for a FOS software project to gain developer momentum if it is cross-platform, since this gives it a much larger user-base, which gives it more public exposure, which gives a larger potential developer-base).
Re:What do you mean by unknown?
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
Indeed, pi is exactly (ln -1)/(sqrt -1). There's no way that's real. It's all a bit complex for me.
Re:What do you mean by unknown?
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
You don't have to use the circle definition; it's possible to prove that the same pi is also, say, 4*Sum_iFrom0ToInfinity((-1)^i/(2i+1)). That gives you both its definition and its value, so what's the "something unknown"?
Phi is more irrational than either pi or e.
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
it's the next most irrational number Actually, phi ((1+sqrt(5))/2) is more irrational than either exp(1) or pi, in the sense of being the hardest to get accurate rational approximations for. To be precise: Hurwitz' Theorem states that every number has infinitely many rational approximations p/q with error less than 1/(sqrt(5)q^2); if you work out the rational approximations to phi (easy enough; they're the ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers) they're as bad as you can get under the theorem. So the golden mean can never have a rational approximation as good as 22/7 was for pi, or even as good as 7/5 was for sqrt(2).
However - if you read the article's related to this issue, (and I don't mean the trashy yahoo article) try this one To quote from that article: "Beginning in the late 1990s, ZapMedia, Inc., the predecessor of ZapMedia Services, created a unique platform and vision for the enjoyment of digital media assets. In connection with this vision, ZapMedia developed a system by which it could provide hardware, software and content to consumers to allow them to gain control over their digital media assets."
Now, I don't want to sound cynical, but that seems less an 'article', more a 'press release reprinted verbatim'...
/ (Wow, a "a unique platform and vision for the enjoyment of digital media assets"? Sign me up..!)
Firefox. I could see Firefox wanting to go there, but Apple hasn't made any statement on this one way or the other. If you'd like to assume that Firefox is disallowed on the iPhone, well, I'm curious how you can assume that when there is no Mobile Firefox for any platform That's a bit disingenuous: there might not technically be a mobile version of "Firefox", but Mozilla certainly do make a mobile web browser; it's just called Minimo, rather than Firefox.
Not to mention that you're assuming that the only browser other than Safari that anyone could possibly want to run on their iPhone is be Firefox. That's a big assumption: Windows mobile has loads of competing browsers -- Pocket IE, Opera Mobile, Minimo, Picsel, NetFront, etc.
FYI: In any.NET application, you click an URL, IE is used. This is regardless if you have FF (or what have you) set as the default browser. Bollocks. Counterexample: I've just tried opening a URL from the About box in Paint.NET (the only obviously.NET program I have that I can think of at the moment), and it opened in my default browser (Opera, FYI).
Did you actually mean "One particular application I have does this, and it happens to be.NET, so I'm going to assume with little justification that it's a general feature of the programming framework rather than the particular program"?
http://opensource.org/docs/osd
also, STFU when you clearly have no clue. In fairness to the GP, there is an argument that a Californian non-profit organisation can't suddenly spring up and decree that the words "open source" suddenly have whatever meaning they say they have. The OSI is neither a standards organisation nor a dictionary. Nor are the words "open source" a trademark (or, indeed, trademarkable, since they're descriptive).
What is trademarked by the OSI is the phrase "Open Source Initiative Approved", and you (and the OSI) would have a perfect right to object to anyone describing Singularity as Open Source Initiative Approved, since it isn't. But the same, I'm afraid, does not apply to a non-trademarked, commonly used phrase such as "open source", any more than Microsoft could set up a non-profit organisation that gives its own definition of "secure" and hire people to tell anyone who describes Linux as "secure" to "STFU when you clearly have no clue"...
Insightful? If the box says it will run Vista (or if the Vista box says it will run on 512mb) it should run Vista with 512mb or it's a classic bait and switch. No-one's every claimed it won't. The complaints are that it runs slowly (and that if you don't have a DX9 graphics card, the visual effects won't be as shiny) -- and it does run slowly with 512MB, very much so; but no-one's saying it doesn't run at all.
Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista?... I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects. So, in other words, your post can be summarised as "I can make a fairly intelligent guess that, being an option that is in exactly the same place and named exactly the same as an option in XP, it does pretty much the name thing. But instead of making that tiny logical leap, I will instead randomly express indignance and incredulity"...?
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well... You must have a strange idea of "very well". I have experience of running Windows SBS 2003... Ah, but you must be wrong as well, because my copy of Windows NT 4 Server runs very well! You see how well my experience refutes your point, despite the utter irrelevence due to the different product involved?
Vista is more secure as is than XP as is ? Is there really an objective
argument to back that up or is it just that fixing discovered problems in Vista
will be easier for Microsoft than XP is because of framework/design issues. Presumably the GP was referring to the fact that, with Vista, MS decided to enforce user / adminsitrator account privilege seperation by default -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control...
"Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power"
Official Microsoft advice: please refrain from playing graphics games on Vista. You may still, however, play text adventures. Nope: text adventure games will still take up some CPU power. Not much, but some. If you're looking for games you can play without "costing CPU and GPU processing power" -- on any operating system -- , may I suggest Hangman, played with a pencil and paper?
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This is the polar opposite of the Gnome policy of assuming the user is too stupid to know how they work best. To quote from Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design For Programmers
"... Users care about a lot less things than you might think. They are using your software to accomplish a task. They care about the task. If it's a graphics program, they probably want to be able to control every pixel to the finest level of detail. If it's a tool to build a web site, you can bet that they are obsessive about getting the web site to look exactly the way they want it to look."
"They do not, however, care one whit if the program's own toolbar is on the top or the bottom of the window. They don't care how the help file is indexed. They don't care about a lot of things, and it is the designers' responsibility to make these choices for them so that they don't have to. It is the height of arrogance for a software designer to inflict a choice like this on the user simply because the designer couldn't think hard enough to decide which option is really better."
The only way I was able to get dual screens running in Gutsy at all was using the ATI binary drivers and their aticonfig utility, which worked, except that the cursor, which looks fine in the primary screen, looks like a large square of random noise in the secondary screen. This is fixed if you enable the SW_CURSOR flag in xorg.conf, only then you get huge artifacts whenever you try to move or click on anything. I tried enabling Compiz to see if that fixes it, only it doesn't work the the ATi proprietry drivers. Not to mention that, when running the proprietry drivers, X.org crashed about once every third time I tried to drag a window from on monitor to the other. And I mean *really* crashed -- as in froze up the system to the extent that neither ctrl-alt-backspace (restart X) nor ctrl-alt-F1 (drop back to console) did anything at all.
As a result, I'm sticking with the "ati" drivers and one monitor only for now. If I want dual monitors, I can always boot into Windows, which has worked fine with two screens with no configuration at all (besides ticking the "Extend my desktop onto this monitor" box) since Windows 98...
Looked pretty good at first; it shows the two monitors side by side, showing the one I hadn't been using with a screen resolution set to 'off'. I set that to 1152x864, and pressed 'apply': Lo and behold, it turned on and showed my desktop at that resolution -- except that the monitor I had been using before was now set to 'off'. I used the applet to turn that monitor on, it did so -- and turned my secondary monitor back off.
The old 'Screens and Graphics' manager is still installed, only it's been moved over to the 'applications' menu for some reason. It still works identically to how it worked in Gutsy. By which I mean: not at all.
Not impressed.
Actually, in my experience the Word 2007 maths editor is more than a rival for Openoffice's one (they've redone the maths engine with a syntax heavily 'influenced' by LaTeX) -- though I would still use LaTeX proper for a long project, if only because of the ability to use text-bases versioning tools.
Example quadratic equation comparison:
Word 2007: (-b+-\sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a)
Openoffice Math: {-b+-sqrt{b^2-4ac}}over{2a}
LaTeX: \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}
would all produce the same output (though LaTeX's would naturally look a bit prettier than the other two).
Not incomparable, as you can see (though the differences start getting greater when you get more complicated things). The main difference is that Office 2007's equation editing is 'in-place' -- e.g. "\alpha" is replaced as you type by the alpha unicode symbol by Word's autocorrect engine -- wheras both Openoffice and LaTeX have a much more rigid seperation of input from result.
BTW, if anyone tells you that the "Screens and Graphics" utility in Ubuntu lets you have painless dual-screens, they're lying. In my experience, the only thing it's good for is introducing you to the "Bulletproof X" feature, which Ubuntu invariably drops into after you try and use it...
The only way I got dual screens to work was using the ATi binary drivers and their aticonfig utility, which worked, except that the cursor, which looks fine in the primary screen, looks like a large square of random noise in the secondary screen. This is fixed if you enable the SW_CURSOR flag in xorg.conf, only then you get huge artifacts whenever you try to move or click on anything. I'd try enabling Compiz to see if they fixes it, only it apparently doesn't work the the ATi proprietry drivers. Fun...
I create a new OpenOffice document, and when I rename it I dont have to deal with the extension, it doesnt write over that Ditto on recent versions of Windows. Copy and paste without having to right click C-c C-v? My file format does not get fragmented (NTFS- Nice Try at a File System) If someone told you that, they're lying. Ext and ext3 are not magic, and they get fragmented just as any other filesystem does -- though they're well-designed enough that there's typically no measurable performance hit from fragmentation until a disk is 75-90% full. Both ext2/3 and NTFS share a number of techniques for minimising fragmentation, though the implementations usually differ slightly. For instance, both use fairly aggressive preallocation algorithms, except that on Windows, preallocation in implemented at the file-system level through the use of NTFS Extents; on Linux, ext2/3 doesn't support file-system extents, but preallocation is done by the kernel, so the result is much the same. Certainly, ext2/3 has some advantages over NTFS, but the converse is also true (transparent compression or file-system level encryption?). If I choose to use a shell, it has a history and real tab completion and color coding Maybe not color-coding, but cmd's always had history and tab-completion. When a file with a simular name and type is copied in the directory I get an option to view the metadata, see the picture, or hear the song to make an informed decision about what I should do, and it offers to automatically rename the file Ditto on recent versions of Windows (example). I can leave all my windows open and shut down the computer, and they open back up automatically Windows had hibernation *before* Linux did (before swsusp anyway, I don't know of any other implementations).
For reference, I *am* an Ubuntu fan, and in fact, am typing this on Ubuntu (though I dual boot with Vista and like and use both OSes; make of that what you will...)
(Essentially cos(1), since sin(pi) = 0, tan(0) = 0, 1/cos(0) = 1)
You don't have to use the circle definition; it's possible to prove that the same pi is also, say, 4*Sum_iFrom0ToInfinity((-1)^i/(2i+1)). That gives you both its definition and its value, so what's the "something unknown"?
Now, I don't want to sound cynical, but that seems less an 'article', more a 'press release reprinted verbatim'...
/ (Wow, a "a unique platform and vision for the enjoyment of digital media assets"? Sign me up..!)
%WINDIR%\explorer.exe is a process that encompasses both the Windows shell and Windows explorer, a file manager.
%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe is the web browser.
Don't confuse the two.
Not to mention that you're assuming that the only browser other than Safari that anyone could possibly want to run on their iPhone is be Firefox. That's a big assumption: Windows mobile has loads of competing browsers -- Pocket IE, Opera Mobile, Minimo, Picsel, NetFront, etc.
Did you actually mean "One particular application I have does this, and it happens to be
also, STFU when you clearly have no clue. In fairness to the GP, there is an argument that a Californian non-profit organisation can't suddenly spring up and decree that the words "open source" suddenly have whatever meaning they say they have. The OSI is neither a standards organisation nor a dictionary. Nor are the words "open source" a trademark (or, indeed, trademarkable, since they're descriptive).
What is trademarked by the OSI is the phrase "Open Source Initiative Approved", and you (and the OSI) would have a perfect right to object to anyone describing Singularity as Open Source Initiative Approved, since it isn't. But the same, I'm afraid, does not apply to a non-trademarked, commonly used phrase such as "open source", any more than Microsoft could set up a non-profit organisation that gives its own definition of "secure" and hire people to tell anyone who describes Linux as "secure" to "STFU when you clearly have no clue"...
Oh, come on, modders -- "Troll"? For what, pointing out that more modern operating systems doing more things takes more system resources?
Official Microsoft advice: please refrain from playing graphics games on Vista. You may still, however, play text adventures. Nope: text adventure games will still take up some CPU power. Not much, but some. If you're looking for games you can play without "costing CPU and GPU processing power" -- on any operating system -- , may I suggest Hangman, played with a pencil and paper?