It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow. It hooks into Metacity so that every time a window is exposed or does a redraw, it recalculates a thumbnail of the window.
This means dragging a window over multiple other windows will make the window manager unresponsive for quite some time! Anyway, hitting the magic button does produce a pretty thumbnail though.
This is definitely not useful in the real world, but still cute:-)
gnome-vfs is cool. A gnome-vfs method is defined by a set of standard interfaces. So any arbritrary filesystem/protocol can be represented, within limits. And it all looks the same to nautilus, which just calls these methods. Some of these methods tell Nautilus about the filesystem (local/remote, etc.)
gnome-vfs handles HTTP/WebDAV, FTP, and a whole bunch of other access methods. And if something is missing, it's quite easy to write a method and add it.
People, try testing Nautilus before you hassle it. I'd say it's main problem is being a little slow, but there are people working on it.
If Slashdot really were a key Free software community, wouldn't the comments show an enthusiasm for a cool new project, rather than derisive and misinformed comments?
I've done a little bit of development on gnome-vfs to make it support NFS (gnome-vfs handles the file-system transparency) and the Eazel people were very helpful. Perhaps if you don't like Nautilus you could contribute patches or write your own file manager:-)
It's impossible for there not to be something interesting on Pluto. We'd find out about the history of the solar system, whether Pluto was formed in the original solar system or captured, a million questions could be answered and a million new questions could be asked.
Science shouldn't always have a direct application or use. It's their because once in a while it creates something amazing, that changes everything and affects everyone. You can't always directly apply science to solve a need. Sometimes you don't know a need was there until it has been satisfied.
Minix may actually be a better choice. That's what Electrical & Electronic Engineering at The University of Western Australia uses in its operating systems course.
We also use Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (2nd edition) (Tanenbaum and Woodhull) as a textbook which includes Minix media and goes into great depth about the Minix OS.
The Linux kernel may not be as well documented for educational purposes.
At least the guy doesn't spend all of his time confirming the beliefs of the main readership of Slashdot. I may not agree with his ideas, but pointless flaming of someone that doesn't share your views is immature.
Why not consider that although Jon's views aren't necessarily the main they are new and produce interesting discussions. And maybe ideas that will lead to good things in the future.
As for the continents idea, it is interesting. A lot of people will start out life on one continent. Someone signing up on AOL may have a hard time initially realising the internet exists outside of the corporate. Older internet users will be more aware of the `underworld.'
I think it holds, although of course there is a blurring at the edges. I use corporate sites when it suits me, for example.
but if it means that people are trapped into a situation where they lose their money and their freedom then it's wrong. Otherwise, as long as they're not planning anything that will directly harm me, why should I care?
So they believe something extreme. I challenge someone to prove we aren't clone's of aliens. Or to prove that we are. It's all a matter of belief:)
What we need to do is to get out there. The term hacker has been perverted by these people from an indication of intelligence and computer skills into an implication of illegal activity.
We need to destroy this image. Most of the 'hacker' types I know are great people, who do many positive things for society.
I have a DVD player and want to use it. I'd like to use it under Linux, and I believe that having paid for it I should have the right to view it in whatever form I want.
The Linux and Open Source community needs to organise some press on this one. But not on Slashdot or the other OSS sites, where the audience is already positive to the issue. Can't we show to the world that the multinationals are acting in an immoral, 'evil', way. They've arrested a sixteen year old for being intelligent and spending his time in a productive way. That can't be right.
Debian is in my experience harder to install on flaky hardware, but the new installer that they've been talking about should fix that.
The one great thing about Debian is that even though an initial install can be hard, it is trivial to keep your Debian box up to date with the latest releases. Or you can use slink which is fairly prehistoric but is intended to be a stable, dependable release.
Debian has a much larger tree of available software than the commercial distros. And if you're having trouble with packages not being there apt-get update usually helps:)
Transasia Corporation have obviously used police as their tools in taking this action. What criminal allegations could they raise? And what did they tell the police to make them believe a raid was justified? Even more worrying is that a raid (at least under most laws) needs a search warrant. That they got this past a judge higlights the worrying problems that occur when law enforcement acts without sufficient knowledge of web based technologies. Next Google will be sued by Microsoft because "evil monopolistic empire" brings up their homepage.
It might be a good idea to better distinguish requirements from suggestions then - I almost didn't download the product because it is a large download and I wasn't sure if it would work or not! It seems really impressive though, and was well worth the wait:) Thanks.
Very odd when you consider that the distribution `requires' Red Hat Linux, yet it works perfectly under Debian GNU/Linux. Some things that you may want to check:
Did you download the latest JDK to use with it?
Are you doing the install as root? (Perhaps it reports 0Mb because it can't read/write.)
Its a development environment. Not a environment for running actual Java Applications within, although you can if you want to debug. Thus the portability of the IDE is irrelevant to the portability of the Java language.
From what I've seen there are Java virtual machines for most platforms with enough processing power to handle it.
I have just got (after two hours wrangling with hideously lagged the Sun website) JBuilder to work. My system is running Debian GNU/Linux and has no KDE packages installed.
So perhaps they are just putting it in their because their installer wants to put an icon on the KDE desktop? Its interesting to note that the README file packaged with the new JDK also mentions a need for the KDM for no apparent reason.
I've just downloaded and installed JBuilder on my Debian Potato system (PII/400, 128Mb Ram.) My system has no KDE compliance as far as I am aware. The installer has gone off without a hitch, but the `free key' is a pain. Especially when Inprise's server seems to be dying under the load. Corporations will do anything for market info, won't they? The JDK1.2.2 package also claims a requirement for KDM, although AppletViewer works without any problems. Perhaps Sun are just erring on the side of caution with their requirements?
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It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow. It hooks into Metacity so that every time a window is exposed or does a redraw, it recalculates a thumbnail of the window.
:-)
This means dragging a window over multiple other windows will make the window manager unresponsive for quite some time! Anyway, hitting the magic button does produce a pretty thumbnail though.
This is definitely not useful in the real world, but still cute
gnome-vfs handles HTTP/WebDAV, FTP, and a whole bunch of other access methods. And if something is missing, it's quite easy to write a method and add it.
Debian packages are available from: http://people.debian.org/~kitame/gnome/ I think they're going to appear on the Eazel site soon, too.
If Slashdot really were a key Free software community, wouldn't the comments show an enthusiasm for a cool new project, rather than derisive and misinformed comments?
I've done a little bit of development on gnome-vfs to make it support NFS (gnome-vfs handles the file-system transparency) and the Eazel people were very helpful. Perhaps if you don't like Nautilus you could contribute patches or write your own file manager :-)
Science shouldn't always have a direct application or use. It's their because once in a while it creates something amazing, that changes everything and affects everyone. You can't always directly apply science to solve a need. Sometimes you don't know a need was there until it has been satisfied.
We also use Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (2nd edition) (Tanenbaum and Woodhull) as a textbook which includes Minix media and goes into great depth about the Minix OS.
The Linux kernel may not be as well documented for educational purposes.
Why not consider that although Jon's views aren't necessarily the main they are new and produce interesting discussions. And maybe ideas that will lead to good things in the future.
As for the continents idea, it is interesting. A lot of people will start out life on one continent. Someone signing up on AOL may have a hard time initially realising the internet exists outside of the corporate. Older internet users will be more aware of the `underworld.'
I think it holds, although of course there is a blurring at the edges. I use corporate sites when it suits me, for example.
So they believe something extreme. I challenge someone to prove we aren't clone's of aliens. Or to prove that we are. It's all a matter of belief :)
We need to destroy this image. Most of the 'hacker' types I know are great people, who do many positive things for society.
I have a DVD player and want to use it. I'd like to use it under Linux, and I believe that having paid for it I should have the right to view it in whatever form I want.
The Linux and Open Source community needs to organise some press on this one. But not on Slashdot or the other OSS sites, where the audience is already positive to the issue. Can't we show to the world that the multinationals are acting in an immoral, 'evil', way. They've arrested a sixteen year old for being intelligent and spending his time in a productive way. That can't be right.
The one great thing about Debian is that even though an initial install can be hard, it is trivial to keep your Debian box up to date with the latest releases. Or you can use slink which is fairly prehistoric but is intended to be a stable, dependable release.
Debian has a much larger tree of available software than the commercial distros. And if you're having trouble with packages not being there apt-get update usually helps :)
Transasia Corporation have obviously used police as their tools in taking this action. What criminal allegations could they raise? And what did they tell the police to make them believe a raid was justified? Even more worrying is that a raid (at least under most laws) needs a search warrant. That they got this past a judge higlights the worrying problems that occur when law enforcement acts without sufficient knowledge of web based technologies. Next Google will be sued by Microsoft because "evil monopolistic empire" brings up their homepage.
It might be a good idea to better distinguish requirements from suggestions then - I almost didn't download the product because it is a large download and I wasn't sure if it would work or not! It seems really impressive though, and was well worth the wait :) Thanks.
From what I've seen there are Java virtual machines for most platforms with enough processing power to handle it.
So perhaps they are just putting it in their because their installer wants to put an icon on the KDE desktop? Its interesting to note that the README file packaged with the new JDK also mentions a need for the KDM for no apparent reason.
I've just downloaded and installed JBuilder on my Debian Potato system (PII/400, 128Mb Ram.) My system has no KDE compliance as far as I am aware. The installer has gone off without a hitch, but the `free key' is a pain. Especially when Inprise's server seems to be dying under the load. Corporations will do anything for market info, won't they? The JDK1.2.2 package also claims a requirement for KDM, although AppletViewer works without any problems. Perhaps Sun are just erring on the side of caution with their requirements?