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Comment: Re:LOL (Score 1) 569

by djcapelis (#29004975) Attached to: What Questions Should a Prospective Employee Ask?

Yes, because we all know wanting to use a platform you're more familiar with and can work faster on or allow you to post to mailing lists you need to work with are just religious concerns.

You'd strike out if you responded like that to a candidate that cares about having the best tools for their job available. You may not agree with the person's choice of tools, but not agreeing that a person should be able to use the tools that they're most effective with is exactly the type of failure the OP's question is supposed to illuminate.

Comment: Re:USB Vendor ID (Score 1) 396

by djcapelis (#28810761) Attached to: Palm Pre iTunes Syncing Back With WebOS 1.1 Update

I think Palm's complaint to the USB IF isn't intended to get Apple to stop. I think Palm knows that the USB IF has no teeth. However, at the same time, they also want to put on record why they're breaking the guidelines by using Apple's USB vendor ID.

That way they put Apple in a position where it's harder for them to take the high ground because Palm's complaint is their way of going on record that Apple is violating the purpose and spirit of the USB spec.

Comment: Re:Singaporeans were the first to drink recycld wa (Score 1) 349

by djcapelis (#28092229) Attached to: Space Station Crew Drinks Recycled Urine

The Amazon, Yangtze and Yellow rivers would like a word with you.

I just stared at a list of the longest rivers in the world and was thoroughly unable to find a significant correlation that would indicate most rivers flow north/south. You can cite the Nile which happens to flow north/south and has some benefits from that all you want, that doesn't really have anything to do with what most rivers do.

If you were to claim wind patterns were biased in a certain direction though, that would be a claim one could support with evidence:

Happen to have any concrete reason to say that rivers tend to go north/south?

Comment: Re:Singaporeans were the first to drink recycld wa (Score 0) 349

by djcapelis (#28041287) Attached to: Space Station Crew Drinks Recycled Urine

> and this is the reason that the nice parts of
> town are more likely to be found north of the
> city, and the airports and industry are likely to
> be on the south.

Because all rivers flow north/south? Are you kidding me?

The only trend I've seen is more affluent people live *closer* to a coast which means they're further down the major rivers.

Comment: Re:and the hacker thinks.... (Score 1) 242

by djcapelis (#27884243) Attached to: Law of Armed Conflict To Apply To Cyberwar

> That said, I personally think it's long overdue
> that we started treating these botnets and
> hacking rings as criminal organizations.

I agree. However this policy treats them as foreign military which is much different.

Very few hacking incidents these days (not that we have terribly good data on this) are military operations. Criminal ones are likely to be far more common. It is important to preserve the distinction and hopefully there will be some effort to do so.

Comment: Re:Rent-a-cops (Score 1) 1079

by djcapelis (#27576391) Attached to: College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior

In the UC system the UC police are actually part of the state police. Which is a bit odd because California doesn't actually have a general state police force outside of the highway patrol and the UC Police.

So they're actually one of the more powerful police systems in the state and their jurisdiction *trumps* that of the regular police.

Comment: Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux. (Score 1) 1127

by djcapelis (#27434305) Attached to: Linux Needs Critics

Don't give up. Please, we really do need more good UI critics. (Good ones mind you, not just random users who think that because they use a piece of software they know how to design a UI for it.)

I hope you keep offering your criticism. If you want a more receptive audience you might consider getting involved with which is a recent attempt at matching people with UI skills to projects that are looking for UI criticism.

Not all projects are receptive to UI criticism, but quite a few are. Sometimes this also changes depending on the project's priorities, for instance, if they're currently working on a massive change to pieces of the core, usability issues aren't high priority, as sad as that is. Often it's a timing issue not just an issue of willingness.

The other thing you might want to consider doing is not mentioning the way other products do things as a reason to switch. I think most open-source developers are very averse to someone who says "I'm more familiar with this way because product X does it this way and I think it's better." You may be right, but do you know how often they hear the same thing from people who are dead wrong and just lack familiarity with the project? All the time.

So if you can, in the future, you may want to try and frame your request as "I'd like it behave like this because it's better than how it currently behaves because of reasons A, B, C." If someone notices that you've asked for the behavior in a different product, well, that's fine, but you've given the reasons for the new behavior. It isn't completely unfair to ask people to justify UI changes using concrete reasons instead of "I know what I'm doing and this is better" or "This other product uses it and it's better." Please understand that until you've actually built up credibility as someone who knows what they're talking about on a project, people will go ahead and argue with you. (And sometimes they will even if you have) This arguing is often a good thing and is how a lot of good development in the open-source community works. Often the resulting design ends up being something neither side envisioned and the improvement is quite good. People argue about things until someone convinces them.

Anyways, I hope you keep at it.

Comment: Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage (Score 1) 465

by djcapelis (#26969919) Attached to: Safari 4 Released, Claimed "30 Times Faster Than IE7"

> how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?

Man they'd have to like, use the Internet or something:

That's the source code to webkit, the rendering engine behind Safari. It's licensed under the LGPL.

The reason, in case you were wondering, is because it was started from an open-source rendering engine called KHTML, which was written by the KDE project. The LGPL made sure that when Apple started improving it their improvements would stay in the open.

And so you *can* in fact see all the nice things Apple has done with Safari and all the speed tricks they're working on.

Comment: Re:It makes sense... (Score 1) 869

by djcapelis (#26594979) Attached to: Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome

Wow. If that is your favorite thing to complain about, I guess Gnome must be pretty good...

Whether or not the cursor blinks is a non-trivial issue:

It *is* the small configuration options that matter in a DE. At least to some of us. They may seem trivial to you, but some of us rely on little things like this for our workflow. For me, it's KDE's active borders feature.

"Any excuse will serve a tyrant." -- Aesop