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I've moved one of these out of its place... On Sunday 26 September 2004 17:35, Neil Williams wrote:
There have been attempts to write themes for GNU/Linux that imitate Windows
I do not accept that, actually. And without regard to whether people may even think they have done that ... I would _say_ that there have been many variants of the human computer interface (HCI) which follow a tradition expressedvery well in the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC Xerox) work of the 1970s. A legal case in the US which many will recall turned on whether windows were a new idea in the HCI, or whether they had been a considerable and well-accepted part of character -mode interfaces. Now I recall writing code to draw windows on the screen of the original model of IBM PC, in 1988 or so, and the decision of the judge in that case was that apart from buildings, windows had been a standard part of programming/presentation for years before anyone thought of taking the word for their own and capitalising (upon) it. So, MS' windows (probably) not a TM (in the US) is just one example of the large train of development of such interfaces, and some of their features were strikingly similar to those used by Macintosh, half way from PARC Xerox to Berkeley and Stanford Universities and the developers of X11.
Every GNU/Linux user needs to be aware of the ethical and philosophical principles behind the free software that they use.
No. They need to be able to find it easily in a succession of depths appropriate to their need and time.
If we changed this list to Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux User Group - would you object?
Not in the slightest, nor if we changed it to D&C FLOSS U Group. ... Snip rather a good "the workers require a vanguard party until they have been reeducated" delivery<g> ...
1. The OS needs developers.
The developers need an infrastructure.
the GUI is the OS to most peopleWrong. The GUI is all eye-candy. The real OS lies behind the GUI.
A demonstration that most people are wrong, but is this news? Behind most things we see in the mundane world there are layers of detail, and yet ... The child goes out into the forest and sees trees. The schoolchild sees lignin holding up phloem and xylem. The Biologist sees electrons transferred across the folded membranes of Chloroplast to make ADP into ATP to make sugar etc etc. The PaleoBiologist sees the descendants of bacteria from the days when the three kingdoms separated and some stuck with each other as Chloroplasts and Mitochondria.... But after work, even the biologist likes to look at the forest and see trees, and sit under one with a beer. So, when a user needs something to keep the sun off and look good, a lecture on why the Xylem can maintain a column of water higher than 32 feet by pulling from the top (which I've never seen entirely satisfactorily explained) is possibly not the best answer to "which way to the picnic glade?". -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.