Posts by AdamWill

Sanity saver: Fedora 15 answers Ubuntu's Unity

Again, whut?

You, er, know that Miguel hasn't had an active role in GNOME development for years, right?

Er, whut?

"The company, who actually sells "user experience" with 50% profit doesn't touch the basics of its UI. Time travel a 1984 Mac user today and watch him use his amazingly fast mac without problems."

Erm. Really? You're saying OS X was just a little makeover? I'm not seeing a dock in https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png .

Kind of the point

"No close/minimize buttons, no "classic" theme (gnome2 like), gnome 3 guys are really gambling with already struggling desktop popularity."

Well, that's kind of the point. Nearly a decade of GNOME 2.0 has resulted in the 'already struggling desktop popularity' you identify. Doing the same thing for another decade didn't seem like a great plan to turn things around. (Another odd thing about the GNOME 2 / GNOME 3 debate, if you stand back and look at it for a bit, is that a lot of it seems based on the assumption that GNOME 2 is a roaring success...)

Seriously?

I dunno how you can live without keyboard shortcuts, at least basic ones: start key and alt-tab? I'd stab my eye out with a rusty fork without those.

Another odd meme

Hey, another odd meme: Shell is 'touch-optimized'. It really isn't. There's been some vague consideration of touch screen use cases in the design, but I can't see how you can use it for ten seconds and call it 'touch optimized' with a straight face. Hell, look at the top right hand corner of any given Shell screenshot; does that look 'touch optimized' to you? Maybe with a stylus...

One more for the crazy meme bonfire!

'You can't multitask on GNOME 3'

Rubbish. It would be utterly useless to any of the developers if this were true. What's been hopelessly garbled here is that GNOME 3 tries to help you focus on whatever you're working on at any given time by avoiding unnecessary distractions from other things that are running. Note: this is not the same as there not _being_ anything else running, and it certainly doesn't preclude the idea of switching - possibly rapidly - between different tasks, which is what we really mean when we say multitasking.

To put it another way: very few people can truly 'multitask', which is doing more than one thing *simultaneously*. What we actually do is task switch, and GNOME 3 is certainly designed with this in mind. Viz the overview. Hell, viz alt-tab.

Answers!

1) no, GNOME 3 does not use this system. There are plans for something vaguely similar in future, where some apps will lose the 'menu bar' paradigm entirely and instead have a smaller list of options available from their application icon (the currently fairly useless bit of the top panel next to Activities, where you see the name and icon of the app). But not in 3.0.

2) The alt-tab dialog shows icons and the app names; if you have more than one window open for a given app, you get a little drop-down from the app's icon which shows a preview of each window.

3) There is not, by default, anything which shows you a list of all open apps. The Overview (shortcut: start key) does the Expose-type 'zoom out windows' thing for the current workspace and shows thumbnails of all workspaces in the workspace switcher.

One of the currently available third-party extensions for GNOME 3 implements an always-visible dock on the right-hand side of the screen; I'm not sure exactly how this behaves (and if it would fulfil the function you want) as I haven't used it. Another thing I've seen people doing is running avant-window-navigator on top of Shell to satisfy their panel/window list desires, though that's not in any way a 'supported' configuration, I hasten to add.

4) GNOME 3 doesn't do anything odd with scrollbars, they look and work like they always have.

Also

"My desktop should about how I choose to work, not what somebody else imposes on me."

This is also a bizarre meme, because your desktop is not in any way about how you choose to work. It's _always_ been about some arbitrary design concept some guy in Silicon Valley came up with, you just get to choose the concept from those available.

Again, there's nothing inevitable about the Windows 95 paradigm, and you didn't choose it (or if you did, you chose it from a range of extremely limited options). As long as you're not writing your own desktop interface, you're _always_ using one that someone else 'imposed' on you (or, to look at another way, did all the work of writing so you can actually use a computer with something other than a command line interface). This whole little craze of using the dramatic language of freedom, rights and democracy to refer to frickin' desktop interfaces just seems bizarre. As long as you're using code other people wrote, of course you're letting them make choices for you. Unless you actually get involved in development, the only choice you get is which one of the various projects - none of which you have much/any power over - you choose to go with, and it can't realistically be any different.

Indeed

We're kinda notorious for it.

Very cool thing (though not strictly an F15 feature): run Firefox in an SELinux sandbox - a protected environment where it is completely prevented from having the privileges to do anything evil. See http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/31146.html

Well.

One of the major reasons behind a ground-up rewrite of the GNOME shell was performance: taking advantage of the way modern graphics cards work, rather than those from 1992, which is roughly what GNOME 2 does. At the same time, the GNOME team figured they may as well implement a design which wasn't a clone of Windows 95 any more.

It's kind of odd; throughout the history of computing we've mostly been entirely used to encountering different interfaces all the time. Different phones work differently, different pre-PC computers worked differently, consoles have completely different interfaces. Few people complain about that. Yet nowadays it seems like if you have the absolute *temerity* to come up with a desktop interface which isn't what Microsoft pulled out of their ass in 1994, suddenly you're the antichrist. There's nothing about a panel with a start button, a window list, a clock, some quick launchers and some notification icons that makes it the end stage of user interface evolution, so I really don't know why some people seem so stuck on it.

No

See title. That train has sailed and that ship has left the station. Fedora stays close to upstream projects, and GNOME 3 is where upstream GNOME is going.

If someone did make a GNOME 2 fork that was actively maintained, and there were no legal problems with it, it'd be open for inclusion into Fedora, of course. But there is no such beast at present, and as far as I'm aware, no-one has any serious plans to make one (EXDE was the closest, and it never got far).

Minimizing

"especially if you're a big fan of minimizing windows, since that isn't possible in GNOME 3"

This isn't actually true. You can minimize windows; the operation hasn't been removed, just one of the interfaces for achieving it. (But yes, the overall thrust is that minimizing isn't something you're expected to really need to do much of.)

You can right-click on the window title and select 'Minimize' to achieve it. For maximizing, drag to the top of a screen, double click the title bar, or right click and hit 'Maximize'.

"Even Fedora seems taken by the simplicity of GNOME 3's interface; the Fedora 15 theme has been toned down considerably. The characteristic blue icons are now gray (though this may be do to GNOME 3's lack of theming tools) and the new wallpaper is nicely understated."

There is, um, a story behind this. =) The GNOME team (and particularly those bits of it who are also Fedora developers) asked Fedora to stay close to the upstream GNOME 3 design for the Fedora 15 release, to act as a showcase for the GNOME 3 release. There was something of a debate about this among other teams - particularly, naturally, the design team - and we wound up with something of a compromise. If you use Fedora with GNOME you get the upstream window manager theme and GTK+ theme (which was also the case previously), icon theme (not sure if that's changed), and a background which is something of a compromise between the upstream stripes background and Fedora 15's bird-y theme (hence, well, the birds).

(Personally I really like the 'official' F15 background - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_Artwork#Wallpaper_.28non-GNOME.29 - which you can easily switch to, if you like).

"Themes are one place that small cracks begin to show in Fedora 15. For example, Firefox has been updated to version 4, but the scrollbars are noticeably blue because they still use the old Fedora Firefox theme. Similarly apps like Google's Chrome browser also look a bit out of place. It's a minor point, and not one the Fedora has much control over, but it does hint at a few areas GNOME 3 still needs to work on."

Not quite; they're GTK+ 2 apps and they're using a GTK+ 2 theme (there is no 'Fedora Firefox theme'). I'm not really sure why it hasn't been made to look more closely like the GTK+ 3 default theme, though, there may be technical limitations.

Thanks for the review!

(for anyone who doesn't know, I work for Red Hat on Fedora QA. Yes, blame me for any bugs...)

Fedora's Lovelock Linux is beta ready

What?

Er...what the hell are you talking about?

Unfindable bugs...if they're unfindable, how do you know about them? Hell, if they're unfindable, how are they a problem?

"strange interoperability issues with common apps and protocols"

I have no idea at all what you mean by this.

"and a jungle of homegrown libraries that provide nothing the reference versions don't"

ditto. Fedora has an entire policy about staying close to upstream: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream . It certainly doesn't have a 'jungle of homegrown libraries'.

No very good reason?

Erm...hardly.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDeviceNaming

the point is for the naming to be consistent, predictable, and consistent with features of the hardware. It's an upstream kernel change and is backed by Dell, HIP and other major hardware manufacturers.

Slightly garbled on the differences between Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15

"Users of Ubuntu 11.04, due next week, will still get the GNOME shell, but it'll be available as a secondary boot option based on a user's own personal choice and whether their PC can deliver the necessary hardware acceleration that Unity needs."

This is a bit confused.

Here's the Cliff Notes version.

GNOME is a desktop, including a shell - roughly speaking, the code that renders some kind of interface to the desktop to let you launch applications and control windows - and lots of other bits.

GNOME 2's default 'shell' was provided by gnome-panel (a panel) and metacity (a window manager).

GNOME 3's official shell is GNOME Shell, incorporating the Mutter window manager. There is also a 'fallback mode' for hardware incapable of running GNOME Shell, which uses revised versions of gnome-panel and metacity. To re-emphasize, there's a whole lot of other stuff that's part of the GNOME desktop - the GTK+ widget library, various other convenience libraries, a ton of applications, the gdm login manager, etc etc - which are separate frm this whole shell thing.

Unity is an alternative desktop shell, an alternative to both GNOME Shell and gnome-panel+metacity.

Fedora 15 includes the entire official GNOME 3 platform: the GNOME Shell and the fallback mode, and all the other bits of GNOME 3.

Ubuntu 11.04's official repositories contain GNOME 2.32, and the Unity desktop shell to replace the default gnome-panel+metacity 'shell' of GNOME 2.

Ubuntu 11.04's official repositories do *not* contain GNOME Shell.

Ubuntu 11.04's official repositories do *not* contain any other GNOME 3 components: Ubuntu 11.04 uses GNOME 2, which is a point many outlets seem to be missing.

There is a semi-official PPA for Ubuntu 11.04 which contains a full set of GNOME 3 packages, including the GNOME Shell. If you use this PPA, you get a full GNOME 3 desktop including the Shell, not Unity. But this is not an official part of Ubuntu 11.04.

The Cliff's Notes of the Cliff's Notes:

Fedora 15 = full-fat GNOME 3.0.

Ubuntu 11.04 = GNOME 2.32 plus Unity.

The best sci-fi film never made: Also-rans take a bow

+1 use of weapons

Best book in the series, and eminently filmable. The structure would work perfectly.

Hamilton

Hamilton's stuff would work much better as a US-style 26-episode series, though the budget would have to be ridiculous. Something like what they're doing with A Game Of Thrones at the moment. If it were done right for any of his big series it could work really, really well.

Though the length is slightly misleading as the way he writes lends itself extremely well to editing: there are always tons and tons of sub-plots that aren't strictly vital to the central story, and you can cut out as many as you need while the overall flavour and thrust of the story remains the same.

HP price tag could nix Marrickville council's 'Israel boycott'

How do you know they didn't?

See title.

(Also, I'm not sure an Australian local council would be buying anything from Iranian companies in the first place.)

STONERS are DESTROYING the PLANET

Puritan angle

Some illuminating quotations from the source on the 'puritan angle' Andrew pulled out of thin air for this one:

"Does this study support the case for criminalization? No."

"What is the purpose of this study?

This study simply aims to quantify a previously undocumented component of energy demand in the United States, to understand the underlying technical drivers, and to establish baseline impacts in terms of energy use, costs, and greenhouse-gas emissions. This study does not pass judgement on the merits of Cannabis cultivation or make recommendations for how to reduce this energy use, but observes that many reversible inefficiencies are embedded in current practices."

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

Non-story, eh?

"The total non-story of the Fukushima nuclear powerplant "disaster" – which has seen and will see no deaths or measurable health consequences for anyone anywhere"

It *has* seen a mass evacuation of major cities within a 60km radius, though. Which is...y'know...a story?

Red Dwarf to blast off on new adventure

Nitpick

Nitpick - BBC3 didn't exist when the original Red Dwarf series were airing. It aired on BBC2. I think the later seasons were BBC2's top-rated regularly-scheduled (i.e. not sport or something) show ever, or something like that.

agree with all the other naysayers, this will likely not be good. I'm one of the few willing to stand up for some bits of series 7, but overall agree that the general trajectory was downwards from series 5 or so onwards, with a giant drop when Rob left. The funny thing is both Rob and Doug can write well alone, check out their novels, but Doug just doesn't seem able to write Red Dwarf TV scripts alone and make it stick.

GNOME 3: Shocking changes for Linux lovers

Ubuntu?

It seems odd that this article is tagged 'Ubuntu' (a distribution whose next official release will contain exactly no GNOME 3 components), but not 'SUSE' or 'Fedora' (the major distributions whose next official releases will contain all the GNOME 3 components, and which have been working closely with the GNOME project to integrate and stabilize GNOME 3). Sigh.

Natty Narwhal with Unity: Worst Ubuntu beta ever

One of each

See topic. Each one has a shit ton of *tabs*, though.

(Also, see the bit about how that can be managed from within the app itself? All web browser and terminal apps I've ever seen have a 'New Window' entry in the File menu. Which does what you actually want - a new window owned by the same process, saving resources - than what you don't really want - a new process, wasting twice the memory.)

April Fools alert

"Unity is a radical departure, but no less so than GNOME 3.0, which has wisely been pushed back until later this year."

Erm, no it hasn't. That was an April Fool.

Whut?

"that people are still single-taskers (Gnome Shell makes you jump through a few hoops to open more than one discreet instance of the same application)"

Your evidence doesn't match your accusation. Opening multiple instances of a single application is not the normal 'multitasking' case, after all. This behaviour is made less accessible in GNOME 3 because it's unusual, rarely necessary, and often accidentally invoked, not because of anything to do with multitasking. The idea is that, for most applications, one instance is enough, and you can manage multiple documents / images / whatever from within the application.

"that smart tags and behind-the-scenes indexing should essentially completely replace hierarchical application/document organisation"

You provide precisely no data to support this accusation, and it's especially baffling considering that GNOME 3 doesn't *have* any smart tags or behind-the-scenes indexing.

"and that second, third, etc. monitors are superfluous (Gnome Shell is at present almost completely unusable on multi-monitor rigs)"

You might want to try the *actual* latest version, and revise that opinion; the multi-monitor support was heavily revised this week.

The Register Guide to London's Silicon Roundabout Tech Startups

One missing...

Great article, but there's one key scenester mssing - Reg, the tireless (he's been seen before 3pm at least twice) journalist who shows up to every single TechCrunch-branded digital event and cleans out the free bar, then writes up one faux hard-hitting expose on all the other characters for every ten criticism-free puff pieces. (And takes all their advertising, of course.)

Microsoft cofounder Allen unloads on Gates

*snort*

"Gates was always reputed to be a tough and driven boss, demanding of his employees and unforgiving of bad code"

Surely you jest!

Game stocks shops with Tesco 3DS consoles

I doubt it...

...as a UKP175 games console would be a _terrible_ loss leader for a grocery store. The idea of a loss leader is that it's something popular but reasonably cheap that you use to get people in the front door to buy other stuff.

Milk?

Right, because Mario Galaxy is just a dull retread of Super Mario 3.

Seriously, you might want to play the games in question before making a tit of yourself.

Going rate?

The going rate is whatever anyone's willing to pay for 'em. If people are willing to buy the cigarettes at a price that gives her a reasonable profit over her cost at Tesco's, what's the problem? No-one's forcing you to buy from her. Right now you can choose to buy expensive cigs at a convenient location, or travel somewhere else to buy cheap ones. If she stopped doing it, your choice would be...travel somewhere else to buy cheap ones, or no cigs. How would your situation have improved?

Giant pink unicorns sound more impressive as well...

...and they're equally non-existent.

Aside from the 3D gimmick, the 3DS is a perfectly decent rev of the DS with significantly more powerful hardware, aside from the rather awkward drawback of appalling battery life. But it's certainly not terrible. Build feels rather more solid than the DSi, too.

I'd wait for the second or third model, though, at which point they'll probably figure out the battery life issue somehow.

Vote compass unmasks Canadian political opinion

Fails...

...the noscript test. Allow votecompass.ca, try and start it, sends me right back to the start page. Sigh.

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

Hmm.

"As the Institute of Physics pointed out:"...

"and, in my view, his actions must be seen in this light"

unless the Institute of Physics regularly refers to itself in the first person, you would appear to be quoting the _personal_ opinion of one of its members, yet claiming that it is the official opinion of the institute itself. Which would be...exactly the kind of journalistic sharp practice you claim to be bemoaning.

Pot, kettle...

Nokia talks Pure typographic cobblers

Well, not exactly

Nokia's trying to reinvent itself, and that's hard to do if you're using a font which is one of the most instantly recognizable around, and which is hardwired to the word 'Nokia' in your brain. No, really - the instant you see Nokia Sans you _know_ it's Nokia Sans, and you think about Nokia, and you probably think about Series 60, and you probably think about how crappy Series 60 is these days. Nokia's problem is a bit of an odd one - their existing font design is just too memorable and well-known - but it is still a problem, when that font is tied so innately into the image of a company and an OS that has significant image problems.

Changing the font is both a smart move and an important one, if you stop and think about it for a bit.

Open sourcers urged to adopt dancing poultry license

Fedora?

Well, we only hate you because the license doesn't state the dance should be performed in a giant hot dog costume.

http://beefymiracle.org/

Out of shape? Not had sex for years? Watch out

hmm.

it's a weirdly inaccurate stereotype, really. A significant number of hackers that I know are obsessive about some form of exercise or other; running and cycling are pretty popular choices. If you go to any random F/OSS-related conference you'd probably find that overall attendees are in average or better physical shape, I think. Sure, there's a few couch-dwellers, but then there's a few couch-dwellers in just about any given group.

Fans face freezing Apple MacBook Pros

Me2

Had a Lenovo once which did the same thing. When I asked them about it, they told me not to run compiles on the system as it wasn't designed for prolonged CPU use. Here's me thinking they put a CPU in it in order for me to actually _use_ the smegging thing. If all I'm allowed to do is run a browser I may as well buy a netbook...

Saab-spotter blogger poached by the company

Impressed...ish

"has since become one the highest-trafficked dedicated Saab sites."

Erm...how impressive is that, in Reg standard units? How many 'dedicated Saab sites' are there, exactly, and how epoch-making is it to be 'one of the highest-trafficked' of them?

AT&T ends illicit handset tethering

Hmm.

...and yet they're also sending this message to people on capped plans. How is it not then a simple money grab?

There's absolutely no good reason to charge someone for 'tethering', on a capped plan. It costs the provider exactly the same however those bytes are consumed. It's a money grab, pure and simple. Legal? Sure. Bullshit? Also yes.

In summary: be dumb pipes, already. Which, sadly, in most markets, will never happen due to the usual fear mongering about regulation.

Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

it's actually in there...

...but you have to look quite hard:

"The Linux team, beavering away on the long-term replacement for Symbian, devised one based on Gtk. This didn't use Qt either, and was also abandoned."

This seems to be a reference to Maemo, to me. Of course, the implied timeline is I believe incorrect; Maemo with its GTK+ interface existed before Nokia bought out Trolltech and announced it was throwing all its eggs in the Qt basket, so it's not the case that the 'Linux team' was writing a GTK+-based interface at the same time as (and in internal competition with) the Qt side of things. The Qt switch essentially undermined Maemo, in fact, by forcing a perfectly decent Gtk+-based UI to be entirely redesigned and redeveloped with Qt, which was one of the major sources of delays in getting a Meego device out.

(I run an N900 too, and with the current Community SSU I pretty much love it. The only thing that really annoys me is the lack of a decent native Google Maps app, using the mobile website kinda sucks. Let's hope that running-Android-apps-on-Maemo thing that's been in the news lately shows up soon.)

Ex-UK spy boss says WikiLeaks sparked Egyptian revolution

Exactly

Exactly right. Nothing of what he says draws any kind of causal link between the two. Instead he talks about them both as being specific examples of a particular trend, the trend being the ease of access to (and the ease of dissemination of) information acting to reduce central power.

Bad reading, Reg.

IT job seekers can't smell spell

Well, that's no problem, is it?

They can just get a job writing for The Reg.

Ads overseer told to bring down 'up to' broadband speeds

erm, no.

Car manufacturers don't quote 'ideal' MPG figures, they quote the figures achieved in independent testing, which is mandated by law and standardized across the industry. These figures don't usually quite exactly *match* real world results, but importantly, they are not biased towards any particular manufacturer and they do generally *reflect* real world results; if one car has a better government-tested efficiency rating than another, you are almost certainly going to find the same thing, even if your _numbers_ don't exactly match. So the system enables consumers to make an informed decision, and hence achieves its goal.

This is nothing at all like the 'up to X MB/s' deal.

Microsoft bans open source license trio from WinPhone

sigh.

"Open source people are militant to a fault when it comes to their licensing"

You mean, not like those closed source people?

http://www.bsa.org/

"Welcome to the world of software patents"

What, there's some magic that ensures closed source code never infringes on patents?

Five Reasons to be cheerful about Nokia-Microsoft

hey...

...at least maemo apps generally do what they're supposed to do and don't come stuffed with obnoxious advertising. I really don't know what the hell phone to buy now.

UK Border Agency: Good at making cash, crap at making decisions

well yeah, but...

sure, but how is that insane? People who make lots of money are people you want; they're a net benefit to the country (or, at least, the government) in economic terms. so of course they get nicer treatment. It may not seem particularly fair, but it's a long way from insane.

One-third of Aussies 'are pirates'

so...

...Australians should now show notably reduced household debt and increased savings, right? After all, they've saved all that money on digital media and apparently somehow also spent less on apparently utterly unrelated things.

What's that? They don't? People will still find crap to spend all their disposable income, and more, on, whether or not they use it to buy movies? And hence the net impact of piracy on the overall economy (as opposed to that bit of it that makes movies) can best be described as 'negligible'? Ah.

Sat-spotters find secret payload launched by giant US rocket

yup

Dunno why El Reg say it means 'roughly' better the devil you know, though. There's no 'roughly' about it, it's a word-for-word rendition.

Fanboi king hails Apple 'love affair with open web'

Started WebKit? Erm.

"Gruber went on to point out that Apple started the open source WebKit project"

Erm. Well, if by 'started' you mean 'cloned the KHTML repository', then yeah, I guess.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WebKit (I know, I know, but Wikipedia happens to be right in this instance): "WebKit was originally created as a fork of KHTML as the layout engine for Apple's Safari"

Fedora servers breached after external compromise

bad description

Suggesting that 'servers were breached' is really pushing it a bit. Someone compromised a contributer's FAS account - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/ - logged into the user's account, and changed the SSH key associated with the account. This was immediately noticed (because ssh key changes are tracked), and the account locked down. The hacker never at any point had any admin access to any Fedora server; they only had the privileges of the account they compromised. These included pushing changes to some Fedora packages, sure, but all changes are tracked and notified to public lists, so the chances of them making any malicious change which wouldn't be immediately noticed are fairly minimal. And thanks to the logs and filesystem snapshot comparisons Fedora pretty much knows (the word 'believe' is just used for ass-covering purposes) they didn't actually push any changes. Probably couldn't figure out how to use git. =)

It's a bit like saying 'GMail's servers were breached' when some GMail user's password was compromised; in a sense it's technically accurate, but it's not a very good picture of what actually happened.