Only people who don't actually use Macs figure that it's how the UI looks. (and I'll concede, I think Enlightenment 17, and certain KDE setups are allot prettier, but neither works as NextStep did, and OS X does.) These are the same people who pitch compiz as the greatest thing since the colour monitor, sure it looks pretty, but it in no way boosts functionality, and all it exists for is to look pretty.
I agree with the parent post for the most part, but hey: only people who have never used Compiz figure that it's all about how it looks. Sure it looks pretty, sure it has tons of eye-candy, sure you can see spinning cubes all over YouTube and the like. And that is beside the point.
The point with Compiz is that is is a compositing window manager platform. Compiz isn't the effects. Compiz is the platform. Even GUI people seem to miss this.
You cannot hail OS X GUI and dismiss Compiz in the same sentence. Compiz is what brings things like Exposè, window grouping, "live" thumbnail preview etc. to the OSS world. Those things are doubtless useful in the sense that they let you do your work more efficiently. If you get stuck on viewing Compiz as the "spinning cube that nerds take screenshots of", you'll be missing the point. Of course, one has to drill down through the configuration and disable all those flashy no-good effects such as flaming windows and windows that pop up on cube rotation, water, snow, etc. etc. Such things will happen when you have a bunch of talented people working on a software product that lets you do cool stuff; you can't expect everybody to focus on usability only. Still, usability is what lies at the core of Compiz.
The most important thing about Compiz, for the GUI people at least, is that it is an open architecture which you can use to design and usability-test different GUI paradigms. We shouldn't be afraid of trying out new things, even if we are aware that they may never become mainstream. Many GUI paradigms never became "mainstream"; heck, even Mac's "one-menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen" paradigm is not mainstream, if you count its occurrences in the entire population of desktop/laptop computers worldwide! And yet it is considered more usable. Therefore, GUI people should be happy that they now have a toy to try out new paradigms for themselves.
This sort of thing isn't always on purpose. Some people think "open source" means they can use the code however they please. Programmers aren't always license experts. It seems so simple to us because we are around these terms on slashdot constantly, but there have been times where I made assumptions about close source code licenses that could have gotten me into the same trouble. The legal department doesn't review every single decision in an organization and its possible legal implications. It could have been a few guys that just didn't understand the GPL and it was missed because it wasn't the largest project in the company. Not defending them, but not everyone understands "open source" isn't the same as public domain.
So I can say that copyright infringement isn't always on purpose, some people think that "sharing" means they can download music however they please, and people aren't always reading the fine print. It seems so simple to us because we're around those terms on Slashdot constantly, but there have been times when I might have downloaded a movie or two without knowing for certain that I have the right to do so. I'm not defending P2Pers, but not everyone understands that "available" isn't the same as public domain.
This sort of argument fares poorly in court, it seems.:)
...is that a holography is about to enter consumer market as a practical method to store data. It is beside the point how much data we can store on a single disc just now. Remember floppies?
Also, I am pretty sure that holographic data storage can be modified to use no moving parts at all, just a small enough reading/writing surface, strong enough laser beam and a lens or two. If you have ever made a holograph in a physics class, you will remember that nothing was moving there (at least in macro-world) except for your finger on the light switch.
I have faith in physicists who work in R&D at major data storage companies. We might even have another format war lurking in the shadows.
[...] The US still is under the impression that sanctions and trade embargoes will actually cause regime change in these countries. Even though they haven't worked at all (and in fact have only served to further entrench the regimes in question) over the more than 40 years they've been in place, we're still convinced that if we keep them around just a little bit longer, democracy will flourish.
I second that. Having lived in Serbia until two years ago, I have witnessed first-hand the effects of trade embargoes on the attempts of the international community to displace Slobodan Milosevic. Those effects were largely the exact opposite; they:
added fuel to the isolationist rhetoric;
further damaged the already dwindling industry and economy;
further reduced the standard of common people, which in turn led the organized crime to blossom;
made everybody think about getting "food on their families" instead of reinstating democracy.
What did help was sending smaller amounts of money to the opposition and student organizations, and of course the whole cultural influence from abroad. By the same token, even if many of the values that usually come for free with the modern understanding of "democracy" and "capitalism" are nothing but mere eye-candy and low-fi money-traps, they might yet prove to be the best way to impose one country's standards and views upon another. OLPC is no exception to this: give it to the kids and see what happens when they grow up.
Also the GP said that in Linux updates just mean the app is "updated" and there aren't any backwards incompatibilities... Hehe, I'd love to be that naive myself. Just consider however, we don't all run amateur home servers for our php blogs.
Yes, your PHP blog is the mission critical application that just won't do without a monolithic update process.
Apple, on the other hand, is very careful not to enter new markets unless it feels it genuinely has something to contribute. More importantly, they dislike restrictions, as evidenced by their reasonable DRM in iTunes and lack of CD key for OS X. They assume that their customers are good, honest people. Sony and Microsoft like to assume that their customers are criminals. An interesting view; however, your wording is disputable. Neither Sony nor Microsoft have reasons to complain about their customers -- i.e. people who paid money for their products. CD keys, software locks and other restrictive measures aren't there to protect the company against their customers, but against people who *aren't* their customers yet want to have that audio CD / crappy OS / what have ya.
But your point is totally valid.
I would be surprised if WGA software didn't check whether a system has tried to validate itself previously or not.
Simply counting failed attempts to validate would be a... wrong way to do it, to say the least.
Silverberg is not so naïve as to think that Santa and his reindeer can travel approximately 200 million square miles - making stops in some 80 million homes - in one night. Instead, he posits that Santa uses his knowledge of the space/time continuum to form what Silverberg calls "relativity clouds."
Ho ho ho, this Santa seems to care only about American kids.
USA != World. For the last time.
Will it come with a cleaning kit of some sort? I dread the thought of a screwdriver being pushed underneath those OLED keys and prying them loose to get to the dirt...
Oh, wait a second. It is a wireless keyboard, right? So the keys have wireless connection to the board? Cool, cleaning problem solved:)
Why does the government, esp. the DoD even use windows in the first place? I see 3 kinds of users of goverment computers:
1. The secretary level(basic Word, Excel,..). Something else would work fine.
2. The Critical Service Level. Windows should be driven far away
3. The Scientific User. They mostly use Linux anyway. The one exception is CAD.
So only the CAD'ers might need Vista, but they probably don't. So why does the gov care? And did I make a mistake in the list?
How do they get less than a 50% average that you'd get by just guessing?
How do you get that 50% is average on guessing? Their tag pool contains 332 "concepts", which means that randomly picking 15 would give you about 1/22 chance of getting a correct tag for a picture that is tagged with one word. For a two-tag image, you get 1/11. To get up to 50% you'd have to work with images tagged with four or five words. Did I miss something here?
Besides, the claim is that "in 98 per cent of tests suggests at least one correct tag in the top 15", the keywords here being "98%" and "at least". We don't know how the number of correctly identified tags is distributed, so we can't say much about that anyway.
This reminds me of Pres Eckhart and John Mauchly inviting a group of female "computers" to show them their first two blocks of tubes perform a computation of 5*1000. One of these ladies later commented that they had a whole lot of equipment for such a simple computation.
Will this speed up the development of XGL, Compiz, Beryl and likes? I assume they aren't still stable, but i haven't tested them yet.
It won't. XGL and Compiz have little to do with Aero, both on the side of who's making them (Novell) and especially on the side of what they are for. Aero is nothing more than eye candy and some minor improvements in the usability section, while XGL/Compiz|Beryl offer more of a paradigm shift in how we use our desktops. Personally I find the virtual desktop metaphor much more natural and easy to use than the cluttered single-desktop metaphor which is far more common, with mouse clicking all around the screen or Alt-Tabbing to death until you get to the window you want. This is a matter of preference, agreed, but my point here is that the cube and similar thingies which are nowadays common on Unix machines (shaded windows anyone? Apple's Expose anyone?) stand so far apart in the department of innovative user interface solutions that Microsoft is looking like something that reinvents itself over and over again.
By the way, XGL at this point works quite fine except for some minor performance glitches even on my ATi Radeon XPress 700/Turion 64.
Vast majority of people having something to say in Ubuntu Forums on the topic of upgrading to Edgy will be those who have had trouble. Therefore claiming that upgrading to Edgy is difficult, troublesome, prone to failure etc. makes sense only when compared to how other Ubuntu editions fared in the same process -- not when taken alone. I do not defend Edgy update process per se (I did a clean reinstall off a DVD, anyhow) nor do I defend Ubuntu, but still, this is a pretty basic statistical issue; the population sampled is a _very_ biased one.
Another point is that Ubuntu might have gained a lot of new users since Dapper came out. In that case, a sheer increase in the number of people/issues encountered during an upgrade might in part be a product of a larger user base, not only of the inherent instability of the process.
Thanks Blastrogath, but that's exactly the type of answer I was trying to avoid. In this context even Linux and GNU tools can be considered "third-party". I was asking what has Microsoft done to let us tell the computer which tasks should be automated and how. In my book, any software that facilitates little or no automation capabilities is to be used as rarely as possible.
As for Windows, I know of batch files and I know of a cron-equivalent (Task Scheduler, another clickety-click program); those are very rudimentary tools at best. Most Windows system administration applications are clickety-click-based with no command-line semantics whatsoever. So how does a system administrator go around that?
One thing that comes to mind is exporting a part of the registry tree, then importing it on other computer(s). Is this method good enough for most/all administration tasks?
Clickety-clickety-click. What I'm really interested in, and for some time too, is this: can you _automate_ these operations? But not using a third-party application? I mean, is there any way under Windows XP to record what you're doing and then repeat the same procedure, perhaps (if not asking too much) varying some parameters, on the a) same machine; b) multiple machines? Or even better, script it ahead instead of recording?
It pains me to even think about the wristwork this guy will have to go through.
It would be interesting to see how long before lunar missions start retrieving "authentic early lunar exploration relics" instead of those boring stones.
...when I first came to the Land of the Free, I had a strong inclination to take a photograph of the light show that two police cars were flashing for my amusement just in front of my bedroom window at 2:30AM. Some poor bloke was being stopped for drunk driving. Anyhow, I refrained from snapping the picture even from within the safety of my darkened bedroom, feeling that I should wait a little until I get better acquainted with the customs of the country.
Just for the reference: I hail from the "Land of the Slaughterers", i.e. Serbia, bombed by the U.S. and a few minions back in 1999. Good grief, I might have gotten myself into so much trouble for practicing our savage ways of taking photographs of public service officers on duty.
Slashdot Mirror
Brought peace (on the desktop)?
Acer aspires.
The point with Compiz is that is is a compositing window manager platform. Compiz isn't the effects. Compiz is the platform. Even GUI people seem to miss this.
You cannot hail OS X GUI and dismiss Compiz in the same sentence. Compiz is what brings things like Exposè, window grouping, "live" thumbnail preview etc. to the OSS world. Those things are doubtless useful in the sense that they let you do your work more efficiently. If you get stuck on viewing Compiz as the "spinning cube that nerds take screenshots of", you'll be missing the point. Of course, one has to drill down through the configuration and disable all those flashy no-good effects such as flaming windows and windows that pop up on cube rotation, water, snow, etc. etc. Such things will happen when you have a bunch of talented people working on a software product that lets you do cool stuff; you can't expect everybody to focus on usability only. Still, usability is what lies at the core of Compiz.
The most important thing about Compiz, for the GUI people at least, is that it is an open architecture which you can use to design and usability-test different GUI paradigms. We shouldn't be afraid of trying out new things, even if we are aware that they may never become mainstream. Many GUI paradigms never became "mainstream"; heck, even Mac's "one-menu-bar-at-the-top-of-the-screen" paradigm is not mainstream, if you count its occurrences in the entire population of desktop/laptop computers worldwide! And yet it is considered more usable. Therefore, GUI people should be happy that they now have a toy to try out new paradigms for themselves.
ALF, a sitcom from the eighties. His planet Melmak exploded when everybody turned on their hair dryers simultaneously.
Suddenly it doesn't seem so ridiculous, does it? A slew of hair dryers trying to download upgrade patches...
This sort of argument fares poorly in court, it seems.
...is that a holography is about to enter consumer market as a practical method to store data. It is beside the point how much data we can store on a single disc just now. Remember floppies? Also, I am pretty sure that holographic data storage can be modified to use no moving parts at all, just a small enough reading/writing surface, strong enough laser beam and a lens or two. If you have ever made a holograph in a physics class, you will remember that nothing was moving there (at least in macro-world) except for your finger on the light switch. I have faith in physicists who work in R&D at major data storage companies. We might even have another format war lurking in the shadows.
I propose we ban processed sugar from free sales since it triggers ADHD.
I second that. Having lived in Serbia until two years ago, I have witnessed first-hand the effects of trade embargoes on the attempts of the international community to displace Slobodan Milosevic. Those effects were largely the exact opposite; they:
What did help was sending smaller amounts of money to the opposition and student organizations, and of course the whole cultural influence from abroad. By the same token, even if many of the values that usually come for free with the modern understanding of "democracy" and "capitalism" are nothing but mere eye-candy and low-fi money-traps, they might yet prove to be the best way to impose one country's standards and views upon another. OLPC is no exception to this: give it to the kids and see what happens when they grow up.
Yes, your PHP blog is the mission critical application that just won't do without a monolithic update process.
So does Linux. Heard of Beagle?
Apparently, Microsoft was the last to implement something like that...
I would be surprised if WGA software didn't check whether a system has tried to validate itself previously or not. Simply counting failed attempts to validate would be a... wrong way to do it, to say the least.
You can't get a copy of Mein Kamft unless you write it yourself. Same goes for "comin sans" font; you'd have to design it first.
Will it come with a cleaning kit of some sort? I dread the thought of a screwdriver being pushed underneath those OLED keys and prying them loose to get to the dirt... Oh, wait a second. It is a wireless keyboard, right? So the keys have wireless connection to the board? Cool, cleaning problem solved :)
Vast majority of people having something to say in Ubuntu Forums on the topic of upgrading to Edgy will be those who have had trouble. Therefore claiming that upgrading to Edgy is difficult, troublesome, prone to failure etc. makes sense only when compared to how other Ubuntu editions fared in the same process -- not when taken alone. I do not defend Edgy update process per se (I did a clean reinstall off a DVD, anyhow) nor do I defend Ubuntu, but still, this is a pretty basic statistical issue; the population sampled is a _very_ biased one.
Another point is that Ubuntu might have gained a lot of new users since Dapper came out. In that case, a sheer increase in the number of people/issues encountered during an upgrade might in part be a product of a larger user base, not only of the inherent instability of the process.
Thanks Blastrogath, but that's exactly the type of answer I was trying to avoid. In this context even Linux and GNU tools can be considered "third-party". I was asking what has Microsoft done to let us tell the computer which tasks should be automated and how. In my book, any software that facilitates little or no automation capabilities is to be used as rarely as possible. As for Windows, I know of batch files and I know of a cron-equivalent (Task Scheduler, another clickety-click program); those are very rudimentary tools at best. Most Windows system administration applications are clickety-click-based with no command-line semantics whatsoever. So how does a system administrator go around that? One thing that comes to mind is exporting a part of the registry tree, then importing it on other computer(s). Is this method good enough for most/all administration tasks?
Clickety-clickety-click. What I'm really interested in, and for some time too, is this: can you _automate_ these operations? But not using a third-party application? I mean, is there any way under Windows XP to record what you're doing and then repeat the same procedure, perhaps (if not asking too much) varying some parameters, on the a) same machine; b) multiple machines? Or even better, script it ahead instead of recording?
It pains me to even think about the wristwork this guy will have to go through.
And no, I do NOT want to use Norton Ghost.
Apollo 11 and subsequent Apollo missions have left piles of trash on the surface. Apparently this eagle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apollo_11_insig nia.png was carrying a trash can instead of an olive branch.
It would be interesting to see how long before lunar missions start retrieving "authentic early lunar exploration relics" instead of those boring stones.
You still don't, but you're getting there. Vote Ratko Mladic for the Mayor of Chicago!
...when I first came to the Land of the Free, I had a strong inclination to take a photograph of the light show that two police cars were flashing for my amusement just in front of my bedroom window at 2:30AM. Some poor bloke was being stopped for drunk driving. Anyhow, I refrained from snapping the picture even from within the safety of my darkened bedroom, feeling that I should wait a little until I get better acquainted with the customs of the country. Just for the reference: I hail from the "Land of the Slaughterers", i.e. Serbia, bombed by the U.S. and a few minions back in 1999. Good grief, I might have gotten myself into so much trouble for practicing our savage ways of taking photographs of public service officers on duty.