Not trying to be condescending here, but maybe you really should read up a little to know what you are talking about. That way is how stuff the HTTP work, and DNS and other core internet protocols. Remember, X isn't limited to a local display.
My complaint: You can't paste a copied image once you've closed the app you copied it from.
Your response: X works over a network.
Wha-huh?! Think you can explain what the hell the response has anything to do with the complaint? Maybe you should be condescending, you might make a little bit more sense.
Hardware can be a strange beast, though, so you might just have been unlucky.
Not Apple hardware, which is all the same and it still didn't work. In addition, Ubuntu claims to support it yet doesn't... in addition to not supporting the networking that came built-in to my iBook, it also didn't support sleep mode on it.
E.g, I can't install windows XP on this computer... surely, working with harddisks are even more basic?
Wha-huh? Are you high? What the flying hell are you talking about?
I'm skipping most of your reply because there's no point in responding to it. But:
Woops, sorry, my bad. I thought you said you were a programmer, blame my ever-faulty memory.
I said I'm a terrible programmer. I wrote a few applications for Mac OS 7 & 8, and since then it's been nothing but Javascript and a tad of VisualBasic and RealBasic. I don't think that counts as "being a programmer." And yet, even with that experience, I can easily see how horribly flawed the Linux way of handling the clipboard is. Whoever designed that part of Linux seemed unclear on the concept of programs "exiting."
Why didn't you report it?
Because I've used Linux for less than a week, and the week I used it I didn't have any internet access because Linux developers won't bother to fix the *basics* of the OS (like networking) and instead add "type-ahead" clipboards.
All I want is things to work. If I was a Linux user, and somebody pointed out to me that a feature that Macintosh and Windows has had since the mid-90s *still doesn't work* in Linux, I'd be ashamed. Why aren't you? When Linux joins the 20th century, much less the 21st century, give me a call and maybe I'll give it another try. If networking works then.
What's the problem with proving that a change will positively impact business before making it? If the company did everything everybody wanted on a whim, they'd waste all their money and be bankrupt in a year.
If you aren't willing to create a business case for something you want, you might as well just leave the corporate world and work at a mom and pop diner.
The only dark, depressing world is inside your head. I don't have to believe unconditionally in a higher power to see the beauty in the universe, or feel love, or be motivated to do good. People who seem to think they need a god to appreciate life puzzle me.
I don't believe in a higher power, either, and I see beauty all around.
That's not my point. Re-read the original post I'm replying to.
He's saying that everybody believes what they believe *only* because that's what they were raised to believe. He's saying that it's basically impossible for somebody to change their life, beliefs, 'programming' they received as a child. That's the dark and depressing part. Thus, if you were raised to believe science is the only truth, then it's the only truth you'll ever experience.
In most European countries the comma is used as the decimal separator. Three thousand dollar and twenty-five cents would be $3.000,25 (not $3,000.25 you might be used to). In a locale that does this Excel uses the semi-colon too.
And this is relevant to the bug in OpenOffice... how?
Sorry, regardless of what your workflow is (or "should be", although I'm not an elitist jerk to tell other people how they should be doing things), bugs like that should be fixed. Also, as a good philosophy, applications should be adapted to users, not the other way around... look at how Excel killed off other spreadsheets for a perfect demo of how this should work.
So figure out how much productivity you're losing (in DOLLARS!, not just 'it bugs me'), and present your business case to your manager and/or IT department. If it's convincing, they'll buy you a Unix desktop. If not, they won't.
That's the way business works. Take some responsibility for your own environment.
The productivity hit from using a Windows desktop to maintain a Unix server is next to zero. Unix server administration is all done from SSH windows anyway, and if Mr. Summary Writer really needs an Unix environment for some reason, he can install one for Windows, or have them buy VMWare.
The real answer is:
If you can make a convincing business case for moving your desktop to Unix, then do so. If you can't, then STFU.
I was amazed when my pretztail not only installed a whiteboard in its den, but then proceeded to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. I think it's because I fed him a Doenut...
The only part I understand is that copying and pasting images in Linux doesn't work if you close the application you copied from. Everybody here on Slashdot who posts "copy and paste doesn't work in Linux" is barraged by a avalanche of comments reading, "yes it does! yes it does!" and none of those replies are willing to admit that it works... in ONE circumstance with ONE type of data. That's like saying (to use another crappy car analogy) that a car works because the brakes are good, and ignoring that the starter motor is shot.
The feature (if you can even call it a feature, it's so basic!) has existed in every other OS since the mid-90s.
(What's the point of adding all kinds of features to "Klipper" before it even supports the most basic operations everybody expects to work? Crazy. The fact that there are no feature requests for it only shows that Linux is just a self-selecting group of geeks who want to maintain the "high priesthood of technology" and don't give even the slightest crap whether normal people can use software or not. Not a community I want to be a part of.)
So as an exercise, try to work out how an application started together with X could emulate the mac/windows way perfectly. Then explain why the opposite is not possible via. the clipboard in mac.
Huh? That's entirely beside the point.
The point is, in Mac OS and Windows, it WORKS and in Linux it DOES NOT WORK.
If Linux was really "emulating" the Mac/Windows way of doing something, it'd work just as well... right? Isn't that what "emulate" means? Your argument seems to basically boil down to: "It could theoretically work in Linux, but it doesn't." Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
BTW, KDE provides a program that does emulate the windows way (and does a lot more).
Does a lot more? Two posts ago, you typed (and I quote):
An application (like Klipper) could and does intercept this and store the clipboard data "in the last minute", but as outlined below this has it's drawback. It currently works for text only, but if you feel brave, you can enable the code I wrote to have limited support for images.
So you just admitted a few posts ago that an app in KDE specifically designed to address this shortcoming doesn't even work correctly with *images!* much less any other type of data. And now you're trying to convince me that not even working correctly with images somehow "does a lot more" than the clipboard in OS X and Windows do?
I took your last post as an honest admission of the limitations of the copy and paste system in Linux, but now I see you're doing the same old "everything in Linux is perfect!" BS you see so often around here. Frankly, I'm disappointed for two reasons: 1) That you've dropped the honesty for zealotism in only a few hours 2) You think I'm so stupid that you can convince me that a clipboard that doesn't even work with images does "a lot more" than the clipboard in OS X and Windows. How short do you think my memory is?!
You could do this in Mac OS 8.0 with Office 98, and probably earlier also. It has nothing to do with bloat. Copy and paste should just plain work... the computer shouldn't second-guess whether I "really want" to paste, it should just do it.
On the other hand, this lets applications make data available in many formats. So even if application A only understands a limited number of formats, application B can let the data be available in many formats without wasting a ton of memory and bandwidth. A good example is images... a given application might offer the selected (or copied) image in GIF, PNG, SVG, RAW, BMP, JPG, TIFF, MMG and maybe a custom one meant for internal copying with some extra, application specific data. If this was to work without application B being online, the clipboard would have to store all these formats, or only offer limited conversions.
That's basically the way Mac OS does it. (Or at least *did* it back in the Classic API days.) The "clipboard" was basically a resource fork you could add resources to, and you could easily add a PICT, a TEXT, a MOV or whatever else all at the same time. Since resource data was standardized, applications could pick and choose which one it wanted. The clipboard was "owned" by the OS, so this scheme worked regardless of which application was running.
(Of course, applications could also define their own resource types. So Photoshop might add a PSD resource containing all the appropriate Photoshop meta-data that other apps don't care about, but it would also include a PICT image which almost every Mac application understood.)
So Excel would, in this example, copy three pieces of data into the clipboard: 1) The cells, using whatever data representation Excel uses 2) As a backup, a tab-delimited, or comma-delimited list of the content of the cells as a TEXT resource 3) For apps that don't understand text, like bitmap editors, a PICT containing the screenshot of the cells.
Presumably Windows does something similar.
While I understand the point of the negotiation copy and paste process in Linux, the drawbacks seem to greatly over weigh the benefits to me. I'm going to keep a bookmark of your post for the next time some Linux zealot tries to tell me that copy and paste works in Linux. Thank you for being honest about the drawbacks.
I haven't done it in awhile, but it worked fine when copying Quicktime movie clips into Microsoft Word 98 for Mac OS 9. Using Quicktime Player, you can select part of a clip's timeline by (IIRC) shift-clicking on the timeline to set the start and end points. The highlighted area of the timeline represents the amount of the movie that's selected. This is very handy for doing quick and dirty edits to movies... i.e. removing commercials. I have no clue how to do this in Windows, as I've never worked with video in Windows.
if not, how do you decide the details of rasterizing the spreadsheet? IMHO straight copy-paste in such a case is nonsense - print to a graphics backend with specified resolution, color depth, etc., then import the resulting bitmap. Happily doable in KDE via print to pdf.
That's great if you're a computer geek who knows what "rasterize" means. And the average person who just wants to get a chart into their flyer? Why *shouldn't* they be able to copy and paste? Normal people want to use computers, too.
(And as you've said, the techie still has the option to "rasterize". Being able to also copy and paste doesn't remove that option. So adding copy and paste support would be a win-win to make everybody happy.)
The second example is bull. A word processing document doesn't just play a raw video stream - it embeds the output of a program that does that. So pasting raw streams is a stupid requirement.
Wha-huh? The word processor doesn't play video, it embed the output of a program that plays video? What the hell is the difference between the two, and what does it have to do with copy and paste?
And unless you're in the happy monoculture world of Windows or OSX where you know exactly what codecs you want to use, pasting an encoded video is not guaranteed to work.
Of course it's not "guaranteed" to work. What in computers is?
I'm saying it *should* work. The ideal is that paste always results in either the original copied data, or a reasonable interpretation of it. Notice that that's ideal with an L.
I'd like my documents in manageable sizes, thank you very much.
So don't use the feature. Your personal preference isn't a very good argument for removing power from the UI. That's like saying, "I don't like to see colorful web sites, therefore all web browsers should over-ride color settings with greys." A ridiculous claim.
I'd say you never used KDE from what you've been saying so far.
I'm not talking about KDE specifically in that reply. The poster seemed confused about what "standardization" meant, so I was trying to clarify. I've used KDE, but only a little bit and it was many years ago.
Umm, kpersonalizer? Admittedly, this is an open-ended issue, so there will be always room for improvement, no matter the DE - but the basic idea of easily providing good basic templates is in place. Refining those requires more options, which are available in the heavy-lifting configurator (kcontrol)
Again, I'm not talking about KDE. I'm just correcting the parent's reply, which really had nothing to do with the original complaint.
It looks to me like you want everything and the kitchen sink with sugar and a cherry on top, preferably paying you to use it and intelligent enough to anticipate you at every step (read: more intelligent than you).
Before it gets decreed the "holy grail", it better damned do everything and the kitchen sink. That's, you know, kind of the entire point of this article.
This isn't true, X supports any mine types, and support negotiation between apps. Goes like this, if I recall correctly
1. App A gets the clipboard owner (app B)
2. App A request from app B which mine types it can provide the clipboard contents in
3. App A chooses one, and request the data
4. App B sends the data
Not very many apps supports much of this, and a lot does it in very crazy manners. But KDE is hardly to blame for that:)
This makes no sense. I mean, I'm a crummy-ass computer programmer, and I can see tons of problems with it just from that outline.
What if I copy the cells from OO.net Calc, then close Calc, then paste into GIMP? Does the OS actually boot up a new copy of Calc specifically to ask it how to paste the data in? What about if the file that was opened in Calc was on a network drive that's no longer available? What about if I copied the cells, then deleted Calc from my HD?
Whoever designed that part of X didn't think it through very well. OS X and Windows work in all these cases, as far as I can determine.
(Although Excel does ask a very stupid question about "you have a lot of data on the clipboard, do you want to save it or remove it?" By the time I've read and processed this message, my 2.8 ghz computer could have saved the data 20 times over. I assume that dialog is left over from like Excel 95 and just never got removed.)
Er, no. The KDE folks can't be expected to foresee any menu entry any program might ever have and provide appropriate shortcuts for each and every localization. A graphics editor might have "Paste", "Paste as new shape", "Paste as new layer" and "Paste merged". Should KDE provide meaningful keyboard shortcuts for those entries? What about other programs with stuff like "Create new partition table", "Crack network encryption", "Generate new UGObject" or "Enable HID profile"?
That's all kind of beside the point. To use the horrible car analogy, you're saying that it's impossible to standardize the position of the steering wheel without also standardizing the buttons on the car stereo and amount of trunk space.
The point of standardization is that when I hit control-Z I *always* get Undo, regardless of what application I'm in. Obviously it's impossible for the OS maker to anticipate every single menu item ever created, and nobody would argue with you. But they can and should define the most basic few dozen of them. If some application over-rode control-V to make it print a page instead of paste, you'd be confused and upset (and waste a lot of paper until you figured it out!) That's what you want to avoid.
A graphics program can have as many variations of Paste as it wants, as long as the most sensible default one is set to control-P. The rest can have shortcuts like control-shift-P, or any other unused key. This is well-established in every GUI system I've used, but I don't have a ton of KDE experience.
Yet another impossible requirement. KDE isn't exactly able to just completely reverse-engineer Windows and OS X - and even if they were, various patents would mean a soon end to it.
I didn't say the requirements were possible. I'm just saying that anything labeled the "holy grail" ought to meet those requirements... which basically amounts to "no, KDE is not the holy grail, nor will there ever be one."
Pasting spreadsheet cells into Paint? That's absolute lunacy. Taking a screenshot is a MUCH better method in so many ways.
Try it before you knock it. Seriously.
If you copy some cells from Excel (2003, for my trial just now) and paste it into Paint.NET 3.01, you get a screenshot of the cells in question. So copying from a spreadsheet into a bitmap application in Windows (and OS X for that matter) already does exactly what you recommend people do, only quicker and easier and requiring less technical knowledge.
As for absolute "lunacy"... just because some Linux gearhead can't see the point to doing something means it should be impossible to do? BS. In an ideal computing world, you'd be able to copy any kind of data into any kind of application and get a reasonable interpretation of that data. If you copy 3d points from a CAD program into Word, you should get a screenshot. If you copy a Quicktime movie into Paint.NET you should get a still image of a preview frame. OS X and Windows are already 95% there. Linux only works with text, and that sucks.
To all the impossible features listed, NO environment is "even remotely close." It doesn't need to have all or any of these, just be enough better than Windows to make users prefer working with it.
Intel Apple computers are getting pretty close close, except for the price mark.
So you're saying that merely doing everything Windows does it not enough, it's got to be MUCH better.
1) Nobody said anything about Windows. Why are Linux users so unable to let Linux stand on its own? You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Have you ever seen those cartoons with the bulldog who's constantly being circled by the annoying yipping puppy sucking up to him? Linux is like the puppy. It's irritating.
2) If Linux wants to gain users, yes, it has to be much better than Windows. I would think that obvious.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications. KDE does this. See a thread above.
Only for text. Try copying (say) spreadsheet cells and pasting them in a bitmap graphics program. Or try copying a few seconds of a video file and pasting it in a word processing document.
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions.. I assume you mean dialog boxes. Windows doesn't guarantee it, and neither does KDE. It provides the same (and more) functionality that Windows does, though.
Not just dialog boxes, but also: * Keyboard shortcuts * Menu items * Contents and ordering of contextual menus * Open and Print dialogs (which you mentioned) * Button labels * What the "Home" and "End" button do in text fields etc.
5. Easily customizable.. You might have something here... Too bad KDE is MUCH more customizeable than Windows, especially straight out of the box.
He didn't say "more customizable" he said easily customizable. If you don't know the difference between those two statements, you really have no business critiquing a UI.
But why KDE would rule the market by only beating Apple, which doesn't rule the market, is byond me.
It would only rule the market if it: 1) Beat Apple's OS X 2) Beat Microsoft's Windows 3) Was compatible with, or had feature-complete equivalents to, all software that runs on OS X or Windows, including custom-developed programs 4) Ran on affordable hardware and was itself affordable (both in monetary cost, and in support costs)
Right now, no Linux environment (KDE included) is even remotely close.
You can on Xbox Live. What's the point of this entire thread? The parent posts that he doesn't like listening to 12-year-olds but apparently doesn't realize that Live has pretty powerful muting and feedback options. If the 12-year-old is annoying, mute him. If he says something offensive, leave feedback. What's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Not trying to be condescending here, but maybe you really should read up a little to know what you are talking about. That way is how stuff the HTTP work, and DNS and other core internet protocols. Remember, X isn't limited to a local display.
My complaint: You can't paste a copied image once you've closed the app you copied it from.
Your response: X works over a network.
Wha-huh?! Think you can explain what the hell the response has anything to do with the complaint? Maybe you should be condescending, you might make a little bit more sense.
Hardware can be a strange beast, though, so you might just have been unlucky.
Not Apple hardware, which is all the same and it still didn't work. In addition, Ubuntu claims to support it yet doesn't... in addition to not supporting the networking that came built-in to my iBook, it also didn't support sleep mode on it.
E.g, I can't install windows XP on this computer... surely, working with harddisks are even more basic?
Wha-huh? Are you high? What the flying hell are you talking about?
It's designed to ignore the language setting of the computer? ... that sounds like a bug to me.
I'm skipping most of your reply because there's no point in responding to it. But:
Woops, sorry, my bad. I thought you said you were a programmer, blame my ever-faulty memory.
I said I'm a terrible programmer. I wrote a few applications for Mac OS 7 & 8, and since then it's been nothing but Javascript and a tad of VisualBasic and RealBasic. I don't think that counts as "being a programmer." And yet, even with that experience, I can easily see how horribly flawed the Linux way of handling the clipboard is. Whoever designed that part of Linux seemed unclear on the concept of programs "exiting."
Why didn't you report it?
Because I've used Linux for less than a week, and the week I used it I didn't have any internet access because Linux developers won't bother to fix the *basics* of the OS (like networking) and instead add "type-ahead" clipboards.
All I want is things to work. If I was a Linux user, and somebody pointed out to me that a feature that Macintosh and Windows has had since the mid-90s *still doesn't work* in Linux, I'd be ashamed. Why aren't you? When Linux joins the 20th century, much less the 21st century, give me a call and maybe I'll give it another try. If networking works then.
What's the problem with proving that a change will positively impact business before making it? If the company did everything everybody wanted on a whim, they'd waste all their money and be bankrupt in a year.
If you aren't willing to create a business case for something you want, you might as well just leave the corporate world and work at a mom and pop diner.
The only dark, depressing world is inside your head. I don't have to believe unconditionally in a higher power to see the beauty in the universe, or feel love, or be motivated to do good. People who seem to think they need a god to appreciate life puzzle me.
I don't believe in a higher power, either, and I see beauty all around.
That's not my point. Re-read the original post I'm replying to.
He's saying that everybody believes what they believe *only* because that's what they were raised to believe. He's saying that it's basically impossible for somebody to change their life, beliefs, 'programming' they received as a child. That's the dark and depressing part. Thus, if you were raised to believe science is the only truth, then it's the only truth you'll ever experience.
Wow. You live in a dark, dark, depressing world if that's all you think there is to the world.
In most European countries the comma is used as the decimal separator. Three thousand dollar and twenty-five cents would be $3.000,25 (not $3,000.25 you might be used to). In a locale that does this Excel uses the semi-colon too.
And this is relevant to the bug in OpenOffice... how?
Sorry, regardless of what your workflow is (or "should be", although I'm not an elitist jerk to tell other people how they should be doing things), bugs like that should be fixed. Also, as a good philosophy, applications should be adapted to users, not the other way around... look at how Excel killed off other spreadsheets for a perfect demo of how this should work.
So figure out how much productivity you're losing (in DOLLARS!, not just 'it bugs me'), and present your business case to your manager and/or IT department. If it's convincing, they'll buy you a Unix desktop. If not, they won't.
That's the way business works. Take some responsibility for your own environment.
The productivity hit from using a Windows desktop to maintain a Unix server is next to zero. Unix server administration is all done from SSH windows anyway, and if Mr. Summary Writer really needs an Unix environment for some reason, he can install one for Windows, or have them buy VMWare.
The real answer is:
If you can make a convincing business case for moving your desktop to Unix, then do so. If you can't, then STFU.
It has what plants need!
I was amazed when my pretztail not only installed a whiteboard in its den, but then proceeded to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. I think it's because I fed him a Doenut...
Look. I'm not a technical person.
The only part I understand is that copying and pasting images in Linux doesn't work if you close the application you copied from. Everybody here on Slashdot who posts "copy and paste doesn't work in Linux" is barraged by a avalanche of comments reading, "yes it does! yes it does!" and none of those replies are willing to admit that it works... in ONE circumstance with ONE type of data. That's like saying (to use another crappy car analogy) that a car works because the brakes are good, and ignoring that the starter motor is shot.
The feature (if you can even call it a feature, it's so basic!) has existed in every other OS since the mid-90s.
(What's the point of adding all kinds of features to "Klipper" before it even supports the most basic operations everybody expects to work? Crazy. The fact that there are no feature requests for it only shows that Linux is just a self-selecting group of geeks who want to maintain the "high priesthood of technology" and don't give even the slightest crap whether normal people can use software or not. Not a community I want to be a part of.)
Date and an easy to access calendar. Don't forget the calendar :)... If only I could find one at my Windows computer at work...
http://www.crispybytes.com/dateintray/?abt
"Date In Tray". Does pretty much exactly what it claims. Works well, and is free.
So as an exercise, try to work out how an application started together with X could emulate the mac/windows way perfectly. Then explain why the opposite is not possible via. the clipboard in mac.
Huh? That's entirely beside the point.
The point is, in Mac OS and Windows, it WORKS and in Linux it DOES NOT WORK.
If Linux was really "emulating" the Mac/Windows way of doing something, it'd work just as well... right? Isn't that what "emulate" means? Your argument seems to basically boil down to: "It could theoretically work in Linux, but it doesn't." Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
BTW, KDE provides a program that does emulate the windows way (and does a lot more).
Does a lot more? Two posts ago, you typed (and I quote):
An application (like Klipper) could and does intercept this and store the clipboard data "in the last minute", but as outlined below this has it's drawback. It currently works for text only, but if you feel brave, you can enable the code I wrote to have limited support for images.
So you just admitted a few posts ago that an app in KDE specifically designed to address this shortcoming doesn't even work correctly with *images!* much less any other type of data. And now you're trying to convince me that not even working correctly with images somehow "does a lot more" than the clipboard in OS X and Windows do?
I took your last post as an honest admission of the limitations of the copy and paste system in Linux, but now I see you're doing the same old "everything in Linux is perfect!" BS you see so often around here. Frankly, I'm disappointed for two reasons:
1) That you've dropped the honesty for zealotism in only a few hours
2) You think I'm so stupid that you can convince me that a clipboard that doesn't even work with images does "a lot more" than the clipboard in OS X and Windows. How short do you think my memory is?!
Every time I post "holy crap, Finder sucks ass" on this forum I get high moderation, so I'll have to disagree with you.
.Mac sync software is horrible.
And for the record, Finder *does* suck ass, as does the Dock, as does OS X's printer handling. And Apple's
You could do this in Mac OS 8.0 with Office 98, and probably earlier also. It has nothing to do with bloat. Copy and paste should just plain work... the computer shouldn't second-guess whether I "really want" to paste, it should just do it.
On the other hand, this lets applications make data available in many formats. So even if application A only understands a limited number of formats, application B can let the data be available in many formats without wasting a ton of memory and bandwidth. A good example is images... a given application might offer the selected (or copied) image in GIF, PNG, SVG, RAW, BMP, JPG, TIFF, MMG and maybe a custom one meant for internal copying with some extra, application specific data. If this was to work without application B being online, the clipboard would have to store all these formats, or only offer limited conversions.
That's basically the way Mac OS does it. (Or at least *did* it back in the Classic API days.) The "clipboard" was basically a resource fork you could add resources to, and you could easily add a PICT, a TEXT, a MOV or whatever else all at the same time. Since resource data was standardized, applications could pick and choose which one it wanted. The clipboard was "owned" by the OS, so this scheme worked regardless of which application was running.
(Of course, applications could also define their own resource types. So Photoshop might add a PSD resource containing all the appropriate Photoshop meta-data that other apps don't care about, but it would also include a PICT image which almost every Mac application understood.)
So Excel would, in this example, copy three pieces of data into the clipboard:
1) The cells, using whatever data representation Excel uses
2) As a backup, a tab-delimited, or comma-delimited list of the content of the cells as a TEXT resource
3) For apps that don't understand text, like bitmap editors, a PICT containing the screenshot of the cells.
Presumably Windows does something similar.
While I understand the point of the negotiation copy and paste process in Linux, the drawbacks seem to greatly over weigh the benefits to me. I'm going to keep a bookmark of your post for the next time some Linux zealot tries to tell me that copy and paste works in Linux. Thank you for being honest about the drawbacks.
I haven't done it in awhile, but it worked fine when copying Quicktime movie clips into Microsoft Word 98 for Mac OS 9. Using Quicktime Player, you can select part of a clip's timeline by (IIRC) shift-clicking on the timeline to set the start and end points. The highlighted area of the timeline represents the amount of the movie that's selected. This is very handy for doing quick and dirty edits to movies... i.e. removing commercials. I have no clue how to do this in Windows, as I've never worked with video in Windows.
if not, how do you decide the details of rasterizing the spreadsheet? IMHO straight copy-paste in such a case is nonsense - print to a graphics backend with specified resolution, color depth, etc., then import the resulting bitmap. Happily doable in KDE via print to pdf.
That's great if you're a computer geek who knows what "rasterize" means. And the average person who just wants to get a chart into their flyer? Why *shouldn't* they be able to copy and paste? Normal people want to use computers, too.
(And as you've said, the techie still has the option to "rasterize". Being able to also copy and paste doesn't remove that option. So adding copy and paste support would be a win-win to make everybody happy.)
The second example is bull. A word processing document doesn't just play a raw video stream - it embeds the output of a program that does that. So pasting raw streams is a stupid requirement.
Wha-huh? The word processor doesn't play video, it embed the output of a program that plays video? What the hell is the difference between the two, and what does it have to do with copy and paste?
And unless you're in the happy monoculture world of Windows or OSX where you know exactly what codecs you want to use, pasting an encoded video is not guaranteed to work.
Of course it's not "guaranteed" to work. What in computers is?
I'm saying it *should* work. The ideal is that paste always results in either the original copied data, or a reasonable interpretation of it. Notice that that's ideal with an L.
I'd like my documents in manageable sizes, thank you very much.
So don't use the feature. Your personal preference isn't a very good argument for removing power from the UI. That's like saying, "I don't like to see colorful web sites, therefore all web browsers should over-ride color settings with greys." A ridiculous claim.
I'd say you never used KDE from what you've been saying so far.
I'm not talking about KDE specifically in that reply. The poster seemed confused about what "standardization" meant, so I was trying to clarify. I've used KDE, but only a little bit and it was many years ago.
Umm, kpersonalizer? Admittedly, this is an open-ended issue, so there will be always room for improvement, no matter the DE - but the basic idea of easily providing good basic templates is in place. Refining those requires more options, which are available in the heavy-lifting configurator (kcontrol)
Again, I'm not talking about KDE. I'm just correcting the parent's reply, which really had nothing to do with the original complaint.
It looks to me like you want everything and the kitchen sink with sugar and a cherry on top, preferably paying you to use it and intelligent enough to anticipate you at every step (read: more intelligent than you).
Before it gets decreed the "holy grail", it better damned do everything and the kitchen sink. That's, you know, kind of the entire point of this article.
This isn't true, X supports any mine types, and support negotiation between apps. Goes like this, if I recall correctly
:)
1. App A gets the clipboard owner (app B)
2. App A request from app B which mine types it can provide the clipboard contents in
3. App A chooses one, and request the data
4. App B sends the data
Not very many apps supports much of this, and a lot does it in very crazy manners. But KDE is hardly to blame for that
This makes no sense. I mean, I'm a crummy-ass computer programmer, and I can see tons of problems with it just from that outline.
What if I copy the cells from OO.net Calc, then close Calc, then paste into GIMP? Does the OS actually boot up a new copy of Calc specifically to ask it how to paste the data in? What about if the file that was opened in Calc was on a network drive that's no longer available? What about if I copied the cells, then deleted Calc from my HD?
Whoever designed that part of X didn't think it through very well. OS X and Windows work in all these cases, as far as I can determine.
(Although Excel does ask a very stupid question about "you have a lot of data on the clipboard, do you want to save it or remove it?" By the time I've read and processed this message, my 2.8 ghz computer could have saved the data 20 times over. I assume that dialog is left over from like Excel 95 and just never got removed.)
Er, no. The KDE folks can't be expected to foresee any menu entry any program might ever have and provide appropriate shortcuts for each and every localization. A graphics editor might have "Paste", "Paste as new shape", "Paste as new layer" and "Paste merged". Should KDE provide meaningful keyboard shortcuts for those entries? What about other programs with stuff like "Create new partition table", "Crack network encryption", "Generate new UGObject" or "Enable HID profile"?
That's all kind of beside the point. To use the horrible car analogy, you're saying that it's impossible to standardize the position of the steering wheel without also standardizing the buttons on the car stereo and amount of trunk space.
The point of standardization is that when I hit control-Z I *always* get Undo, regardless of what application I'm in. Obviously it's impossible for the OS maker to anticipate every single menu item ever created, and nobody would argue with you. But they can and should define the most basic few dozen of them. If some application over-rode control-V to make it print a page instead of paste, you'd be confused and upset (and waste a lot of paper until you figured it out!) That's what you want to avoid.
A graphics program can have as many variations of Paste as it wants, as long as the most sensible default one is set to control-P. The rest can have shortcuts like control-shift-P, or any other unused key. This is well-established in every GUI system I've used, but I don't have a ton of KDE experience.
Yet another impossible requirement. KDE isn't exactly able to just completely reverse-engineer Windows and OS X - and even if they were, various patents would mean a soon end to it.
I didn't say the requirements were possible. I'm just saying that anything labeled the "holy grail" ought to meet those requirements... which basically amounts to "no, KDE is not the holy grail, nor will there ever be one."
Pasting spreadsheet cells into Paint? That's absolute lunacy. Taking a screenshot is a MUCH better method in so many ways.
Try it before you knock it. Seriously.
If you copy some cells from Excel (2003, for my trial just now) and paste it into Paint.NET 3.01, you get a screenshot of the cells in question. So copying from a spreadsheet into a bitmap application in Windows (and OS X for that matter) already does exactly what you recommend people do, only quicker and easier and requiring less technical knowledge.
As for absolute "lunacy"... just because some Linux gearhead can't see the point to doing something means it should be impossible to do? BS. In an ideal computing world, you'd be able to copy any kind of data into any kind of application and get a reasonable interpretation of that data. If you copy 3d points from a CAD program into Word, you should get a screenshot. If you copy a Quicktime movie into Paint.NET you should get a still image of a preview frame. OS X and Windows are already 95% there. Linux only works with text, and that sucks.
To all the impossible features listed, NO environment is "even remotely close." It doesn't need to have all or any of these, just be enough better than Windows to make users prefer working with it.
Intel Apple computers are getting pretty close close, except for the price mark.
So you're saying that merely doing everything Windows does it not enough, it's got to be MUCH better.
1) Nobody said anything about Windows. Why are Linux users so unable to let Linux stand on its own? You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Have you ever seen those cartoons with the bulldog who's constantly being circled by the annoying yipping puppy sucking up to him? Linux is like the puppy. It's irritating.
2) If Linux wants to gain users, yes, it has to be much better than Windows. I would think that obvious.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications.
KDE does this. See a thread above.
Only for text. Try copying (say) spreadsheet cells and pasting them in a bitmap graphics program. Or try copying a few seconds of a video file and pasting it in a word processing document.
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
I assume you mean dialog boxes. Windows doesn't guarantee it, and neither does KDE. It provides the same (and more) functionality that Windows does, though.
Not just dialog boxes, but also:
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Menu items
* Contents and ordering of contextual menus
* Open and Print dialogs (which you mentioned)
* Button labels
* What the "Home" and "End" button do in text fields
etc.
5. Easily customizable..
You might have something here... Too bad KDE is MUCH more customizeable than Windows, especially straight out of the box.
He didn't say "more customizable" he said easily customizable. If you don't know the difference between those two statements, you really have no business critiquing a UI.
But why KDE would rule the market by only beating Apple, which doesn't rule the market, is byond me.
It would only rule the market if it:
1) Beat Apple's OS X
2) Beat Microsoft's Windows
3) Was compatible with, or had feature-complete equivalents to, all software that runs on OS X or Windows, including custom-developed programs
4) Ran on affordable hardware and was itself affordable (both in monetary cost, and in support costs)
Right now, no Linux environment (KDE included) is even remotely close.
You can on Xbox Live. What's the point of this entire thread? The parent posts that he doesn't like listening to 12-year-olds but apparently doesn't realize that Live has pretty powerful muting and feedback options. If the 12-year-old is annoying, mute him. If he says something offensive, leave feedback. What's the problem?