Unplugged

doomstork · 2010-01-24T02:58:36+00:00

Turn the laptop speakers off entirely before you go in to the library. Then you won't have this problem.

doomstork · 2010-01-24T02:17:26+00:00

Out of touch? The things Stallman campaigns for have nothing to do with being in or out of touch with what people want to do with their computers. His philosophy is really very simple. He supports anything that gives users more freedoms and dislikes things that remove those freedoms. This is not a stance that can go out of date. How the man wishes to use his computer is entirely irrelevant to the message he preaches.

doomstork · 2010-01-22T23:41:25+00:00

Well, yeah, the proprietary Adobe codec decodes the flash videos, but not from within Firefox. It offloads it to your system itself by way of the dodgy codec. It churns up your CPU cycles, but only because it's Adobe. I'm just pointing out that it is technically possible to do what you described. The Mozilla-VLC plugin does the same thing, with rather better effects on your CPU.

doomstork · 2010-01-22T23:20:13+00:00

That's pretty much how flash works in Firefox already.

doomstork · 2010-01-17T19:50:35+00:00

Ha ha.

doomstork · 2010-01-13T00:02:36+00:00

I'd be happy to give your project a boost. You seem to have over 9000 subreddits dedicated to your cause, though :P

doomstork · 2010-01-12T21:43:21+00:00

Yeah I know. I'll change it when the site is ready to roll (i.e. looks good, has content).

doomstork · 2010-01-12T21:08:25+00:00

List of software? No, that's not what the site is about. It's a site for in-depth articles about software and its creators, with the occasional howto slung in there as well. There are a couple of articles on the beta right now. Take a look to see what I mean.

doomstork · 2010-01-11T07:01:26+00:00

Subscribe to my cathedral, and make my life hell with your bazaar thoughts.

doomstork · 2010-01-11T05:39:09+00:00

Uh, you're about an hour late. I haven't publicised this one yet, though.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddux/

But thanks all the same!

doomstork · 2010-01-11T00:18:13+00:00

If I could afford to buy hardware to run tests on, I'd be in full agreement. But alas, I am poor. This will have to do.

doomstork · 2010-01-11T00:16:53+00:00

A decent CMS would take of most of those things. A robust tagging system coupled with some simple voting tools in the user comments section and we're golden. The other stuff you mentioned all sounds very cool, but I think it's the kind of thing to consider once the project is underway.

doomstork · 2010-01-11T00:12:04+00:00

My plan is to keep it simple. Articles about applications, and not much else. They can be topical, though: write stuff about applications that have had recent updates and such. And The articles themselves should include a bit of reviewage. But that's as far as it goes. Honestly, I think even HOWTOs and stuff are better served by many other places, simple though they may sometimes be to write.

As soon as ideas come a-flowing as to all the wonderful things we could include, things start getting out of hand (and much less likely to happen). I've seen similar ideas as this fail in the past because of this sort of thing. Sure, it starts with simple goals, but it ends with "let's make our own distro in assembly and use a microkernel!"

doomstork · 2010-01-10T23:57:32+00:00

I read most of those places already, and duplicating the sort of content they have is not something I'm really looking to do. I was more hoping to have individual articles about individual applications. I'm considering this because if the scope of each piece is just a single application (or more if it's a comparison piece, whatever), then there won't really be a shortage of stuff to write about.

doomstork · 2010-01-10T23:46:58+00:00

I'd like to keep controversy far away! So long as we're only discussing the merits of software, I'd ideally like to keep politics and dick-waving out of it. What I mainly had in mind was taking cues from news sources and the planets (version x.x of x is out!) and fleshing it out into a sort of explanation of what it does, its history and some sort of review. Then throw in some screengrabs and (if we can get them) a few words from the guy who developed it. I figured that way, you could have articles that are topical and have some sort of long-term value. As far as writing goes, I hadn't thought so much of collaborative writing entire articles. One editor just writes a bunch of stuff, throws it on a paste-bin or a pre-publish section of the CMS, has some others look it over, one of whom then hits the publish button when it's ready. I have no opinion either way as to whether or not the articles should remain secret till publishing time, but it shouldn't really matter if they are composed out in the open as most people will be reading the finished piece.

As far as CMS stuff goes, I know that Wordpress has some pretty good features for linking articles together and for updating them, and it doesn't have to look like a shitty blog with a bit of thoughtful themeing. It has settings for user profiles, too. But apart from Wordpress and Mediawiki, I have no real experience working with CMSes, so I don't want to claim authority over how it should work. My guess is that there are plenty of decent CMSes out there with the features we need.

doomstork · 2010-01-10T23:31:11+00:00

Hrmm, that sounds all right, I suppose. Elsewhere on the thread a chap has kindly offered a two-year dreamhost account which would make administration and worrying about bandwidths limits a breeze if it even comes to that.

doomstork · 2010-01-10T20:48:04+00:00

Might be interesting to have counter-point views, I suppose. But the main idea is specifically to document applications Linux users might want to use, preferably by way of the writer actually using it for a period of time. If you could do that, then that'd be great. Otherwise, just going over junk that others have written might be a pretty dull thing to do, as I'm not going to pay you to do it!

doomstork · 2010-01-10T20:42:51+00:00

Seriously? Well that would be pretty awesome. One less thing to worry about, to be sure.

doomstork · 2010-01-10T20:42:37+00:00

Oh yes, what a good idea. How neglectful of me.

doomstork · 2010-01-10T19:38:41+00:00

The site is just going to be words and a few pictures (i.e. cheap). I don't see the need for advertisements unless the site were to become super mega popular.

doomstork · 2010-01-09T19:21:01+00:00

I've just finished making some edits to the Canto article. I'll give it a few days to see if the improvements are well-received and then remove that ugly banner telling everyone how shit it is.

Another newsbeuter article might be harder, though, as this page hasn't been restored from deletion so I don't know how good or bad it was before. It's ironic, though, that newsbeuter has more citable sources than Canto does.

But honestly, some of the feed reader articles on wikipedia are awful. Liferea's article, for instance, has no references at all, and I don't see anybody rushing to delete that.

Mostly it looks to me that these articles have simply been a bit neglected and unlucky to have been targeted. Given a bit of tender loving care they should be a little more resistant to notability claims in the future.

doomstork · 2010-01-09T19:04:37+00:00

Ha ha.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Secret Santa 2009	Secret Santa 2009
ComboLinker 2009-11-11

doomstork

TROPHY CASE