Slashback: Cooperation, Gravity, Petite

Slashback with more (below) on KDE/GNOME cooperation (hint -- they're not renaming it "GNOMKDE"); the desert parachute nuts, a tiny P4 machine, and another chance to Ask Kevin Mitnick, at least if you're near Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

This is only making my biggest case look even bigger. Andrew Pakula of StealthPC writes: "A little while ago you posted about our Pentium 3 little pc, the size of a CD-ROM. ... Many of emails people sent us however were for people looking for a Pentium 4 little pc but at the time we didn't have anything to offer them with that power.

Well now we do have a Pentium 4 version, slightly taller than the Pentium 3 version it is still very, very small. You can take a look a look at it here. There are several pictures of it there as well as on the images page."

Just don't tell him your full real name. If your question didn't rise to the top of the recent Kevin Mitnick interview, here's your chance: Arvonn Tully points to this site (an activities listing for Carnegie Mellon University) writes "If you look at the bottom of the page you will see that Kevin Mitnick will be coming to Carnegie Mellon and lecturing on March 18th."

Those two are really joined at the XML! JP Schnapper-Casteras of the Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group writes about the post last week titled "KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines," to clarify the extent of that cooperation: "We're going to co-locate, NOT combine the documents. This means that means there will be separate guidelines for GNOME and KDE in different chapters / sections of the same document. The current overview implies that KDE and GNOME will become stylistically similar, which is not the case. We're simply creating one site and mailing list where HIGs for all desktops can reside."

Lucy in the sky with a junker that's just begging to be dropped. Last September, we mentioned the fellows who like to abuse technology by dropping unusual things (manned automobiles, for one) from the backs of cargo planes for skydiving thrills. If that interested you, you will enjoy (and boggle at) the group's DVD documentary/video montage Good Stuff. I watched it with jaw unhinged; if this doesn't make you want to skydive, nothing will.

KDE and GNOME, combined documents??

[Cokelee]

WTF, IMHO a common HIG would be great. Geez, talk about getting my hopes up.

Same document, different sections. Why the same document, compare and contrast???
What is wrong with a streamlined HIG- why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?
The approach doesn't have to be exactly the same, just the ideology behind the approach, that's what matters - SOME consistency.

Re:Why KDE or GNOME anyway?

[WIAKywbfatw]

If you think that Linux doesn't need a stable WIMP interface and desktop environment and that a CLI will suffice for all Linux users then you are sadly mistaken.

A CLI and a CLI alone might be fine for you but it won't work for 99 percent of Linux users. How do you expect to browse the web in Mozilla, edit a picture in Gimp, type and format a letter in OpenOffice or play a game with a CLI alone?

At a time when the Linux community is pushing open source software as a viable alternative to Microsoft-dominated solutions how will forcing every new adopter to learn a non-intuitive set of commands help promote Linux as the way forward?

I'm sorry if you see both GNOME and KDE as a waste of time. Please accept the fact that the overwhelming majority don't and that the future growth of the Linux community is dependent on an easy-to-use desktop that delivers as much as (if not more than) Windows does.

Re:Why KDE or GNOME anyway?

[ddimas]

Actually the command line and the GUI both have their uses. After all, you don't use a hammer to drive a screw do you?

Well, the power of linux is in its command line, I believe there should all the work go. I feel linux is going in a totally wrong direction.

One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[rsidd]

is the rearrangement of the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, so that "Cancel" is now on the left and "OK" is on the right, in contrast to GNOME 1.x, KDE (all versions) and Windows. Whose bright idea was this? Perhaps someone who's used to answering questions like "Do you want to do this, no or yes"?

This is my single biggest peeve with GNOME 2.x, which is otherwise looking very nice. Well, if they're cohosting their Human Interface Guide with the KDE folks, hopefully someone will get a clue (the clue being: stay compatible with the rest of the world).

If the GNOME folks ever built a car, very likely they'd put the brake to the right of the accelerator, because that's the way it "should be" for some theoretical reason of their own.

Re:One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[Fluffy the Cat]

1) It standardises the position of "OK". There are significantly more boxes that only have a single "OK" gadget than there are only having a single "Cancel" gadget.

2) People tend to leave the mouse in the bottom corner of dialog boxes while they're reading them. Dialog boxes should ideally be designed that most of the time the user wishes to choose "OK". Having the "OK" button on the right reduces the time taken to respond to the dialog.

I find it significantly nicer with this arrangement. I'm unconvinced by the "Do it the same as the rest of the world" argument - doing it right is more important.

Re:how about this little mini-itx sized p4 mobo?

[EverDense]

That looks good, thank you very much. If only they'd ditch the printer port, it is
getting pretty hard to buy a printer these days that isn't USB. Might save a little
space on the M/B into the bargain.

Noise ? Wireless ?

[IanBevan]

Does anybody know how noisy (or not) these little PCs are ?

It also seems to me that they would be a lot more useful to many folks if they had 802.11 wireless networking. Their two featured models (p3 and p4) don't have spare PCI slots, nor do they have a PCMCIA slot (as far as I can see anyway) although I guess you could add it using the usb port. Perhaps an IRDA port would be good also ?

Re:One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[Spyky]

The Apple Macintosh has prefered this configuration of Cancel and OK since it was first created in 1984. It is incorrect to say that GNOME is going against the grain of companies that have spent millions on HCI studies, because Apple is definitely one of those companies.

Aqua HIG [apple.com]

-Spyky

Re:If they can drop automobiles?

[tzanger]

Besides, the USAF does a pretty good job of hitting appropriate targets accurately and precisely.

<cough> [google.com]

Little PC = Disaster Recovery Option

[ashitaka]

OK. We've had a major earthquake. Our building is inaccessible. The off-site tapes won't be available for a couple of days. Even so, I still need to gather the requisite server hardware, tape drive, software (Arcserve - be gentle) and get it all re-installed and recovered to a point at which we can access our data and start producing documents again.

Alternatively I could have a couple of these mini-PCs pre-configured, with a weekly or monthly backup of current production documents, databases, message stores, etc.

In this case it would be one Win2K box with SQL Server, Exchange, IIS and iManage. It would be enough to get us running with a few laptops thrown together on a wireless LAN. I could have the firm running the next day.

Any flaws in this plan?

(Don't bother mentioning Linux. Our Novell servers have already been replaced with RedHat. The requirement for Win2K as the server comes from Exchange and SQL Server that cannot be replaced in our real-world environment.

Re:One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[spitzak]

I don't find the "standardize the position of OK" argument convincing. This could also be "fixed" by moving the OK on a one-button dialog box left so it is in the same position as the two-button one.

The truth of all this argument is that OK-right was the design used on Macintoshes, which most post-Mac Unix software copied. There were some theoretical arguments for why this was better and thus selected by the Mac, but they are not really strong.

Like usual it was Microsoft that ignored prevailing standards and set their own and reversed the order (they also added the yes/no/cancel type dialogs, which had the annoying effect of reversing what yes/no meant when exiting a program compared to the Mac standard).

However imho the cause is lost. Microsoft set the standard and everybody (not just Gnome, but Mac) should give up and follow it. The alternatives do not have strong enough arguments for the this standard to be ignored.