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Domain: oreilly.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to oreilly.com.
Comments · 2,454
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embedded developers costs more ?
"Why run windows on these kiosks? An embedded OS would be more suitable and cheaper..."
`Because, while the embedded OS would be less expensive, the development costs would be far higher. Windows devs are a dime-a-dozen, not so much with true embedded developers-especially ones that have experience and know what they are doing'
This is a rehash of Linux-developers-cost-more FUD. The truth is an embedded Kiosk solution would be trivially easy to implement.
Building Embedded Linux Systems
Building Embedded Linux Systems shows you how to design and build your own embedded systems using Linux® as the kernel and freely available open source tools as the framework. Written by an active member of the open source community, the book is structured to gradually introduce readers to the intricacies of embedded Linux, with detailed information and examples in each chapter that culminate in describing how Linux is actually put on an embedded device.
Embedded-Linux-Distributions-Quick-Reference-Guide -
Re:"Offers one way of doing things"
Douglas Crockford of Yahoo seems a bit 'meh' about HTML5, he thinks it should have been focused on security. (starts 1m33seconds into video clip).
He published an HTML5 wish-list back in 2007.
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Re:I must be the only one
Build your own Firefox search engine plugin with the &safe=off option in the search URL template.
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Best way to teach programming to children
You might wan to check out this thread on O'Reilly Answers. One commenter is teaching kids with XNA Game Studio and included a link to their Moodle site. They also posted some comments from the 12-14 year old kids taking the class along with a link to their methodology.
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Re:The article is still fail
Since when do windowing environments include memory managers?
That was normal (practically speaking, it was required) when they ran on top of DOS.
Windows 95 was an operating system.
No it wasnt. Neither was 98 or ME. They were all shells that ran on top of and relied on DOS. They just hid that fact more thoroughly with each release.
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Re:Stupid is as stupid does...
Isn't it ironic that the company responsible for opening up the smartphone market is now offering the most closed platform?
In the US. Everyone else has been using smartphones for 10 years.
And they are not even close to being the biggest game in any town. That would be Nokia.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/mobile-operating-systems-and-b.html
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Re:It has external dependancies
I'm pretty sure the only XHTML-compliant place to put script tags is inside the <head> tag
You're mistaken. HTML5 permits scripts "Where phrasing content is expected", and phrasing content is the stuff that goes in regular old paragraphs and so forth. HTML 4.01 (thus also XHTML 1.0) also says scripts "may appear any number of times in the HEAD or BODY of an HTML document."
In fact, it's a good idea to put scripts in the body if possible, ideally at the end of the page. That way they won't block page rendering. "Put Scripts at the Bottom" is Rule 6 of High Performance Web Sites, an O'Reilly book that's worth reading if you're interested in the subject.
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Re:Monolithic Kernel = Death of Self-Teaching
It's not that bad. If you are interested in getting into it the easy way, here is a very nice book. O'Reilly has another good book about drivers, if you just want to write drivers. The kernel is also well organized so if you want to work on the USB section, for example, it is not hard to figure out where to look. I've seen projects with 20,000 lines of code that were harder to understand.
It's true that there are ~30,000 files in the Linux kernel, but 25,000 of those are either driver code or architecture specific code, so if you only care about the x86 and aren't interested in drivers, you really only have 6,000 files you need to worry about. If you are interested in a specific part of the kernel, it is even easier: for example, if you are only interested in the ext3 filesystem, that's around 160 files. Which is very manageable. -
Re:Unfortunately
Buttons on the left work on the Mac because OS/X windows don't have a menu in the window. The menus are on the top of the screen, hence aren't crammed in with the window control buttons.
Also the window title is centered, which makes for visual balance.
By contrast the weird concoction known as Lucid (aka, Opaque) has the menus, window control buttons, and title all in the top left of each window.
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Re:Also missing besides folders: file protocol
I agree that out of the box, Safari has its limits, but FYI, a lot of what you want is actually achievable, though it requires some hacking.
To create a locally-stored home page (items 1 and 3) just write an HTML page and create a data: bookmarklet. Once you're looking at a DATA: page, you can add that to your homescreen and you can even access it with no network connection. By adding JavaScript and local storage you can make a pretty damn cool app with this. References:
http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
http://www.iphonealley.com/things-we-like/glyphboard-reinvents-the-webapp-on-iphone
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guyView Source is solved with a javascript bookmarklet. Check out the #1 Google match for "iphone view source"
Basically, bookmarklets kick all kinds of ass.
http://www.lifeclever.com/17-powerful-bookmarklets-for-your-iphone/
Google for more.And "History" can be accessed (AFAIK) by going Bookmarks -> History. iPhone has had this since Day 1, I don't have an iPad but I'm pretty sure it's there.
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Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language
I agree that Javascript is quickly becoming an assembly language. GWT (the tooling Google used to get Quake running in Javascript) is exactly that. Java code is compiled to "native" Javascript.
Although, what you say about browser oddities is largely irrelevant with the usage of toolkits like jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, etc. Instead of targeting the Javascript DOM API, you target your toolkit's API. The DOM API is the part that differs between browsers, except for a few very rare cases. Targeting a toolkit's API is a thinner way to abstract the differences between browsers instead of inheriting the overhead of compiling one language to another before running against a machine. For instance, managing C++ pointers in a language with built in garbage collection is probably not the most performant process.
Additionally, there is a subset of the actual language that some consider the "good part" from which you can also target at the language level. This is a great book about how to do that:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748 -
Re:Really?
ASCII porn, here we come! (pun intended)
http://oreilly.com/pub/h/4441 -
Re:He's chanelling Stallman is why it sounds famil
You've got to be kidding that I'm channelling Stallman. He's finally waking up to an issue that I put in front of him all the way back in 1999. At the time, he said "It didn't matter." See for yourself, in the transcript of our interchange at the 1999 Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. They are a fair way through the PDF of the transcript, so read on down: http://tim.oreilly.com/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf
At the time I was talking about "infoware" rather than "Web 2.0" but the concepts I was working with were in the same direction.
But in case you don't want to go through all that, here's the relevant bit:
Richard Stallman:
I came up to the mike again because I wanted to address
the topic that Tim O'Reilly raised. Some of you might know about our major
disagreements on other issues, but that's not what he spoke about. And I think that
this distinction between hardware and software and infoware is an interesting one
and that you addressed it very well from the open source point of view. That being
a matter of looking for a development methodology of making things that work and
judging success to a large extent in the same concept of market share or number of
users that is used as a criterion by the proprietary software developers. Now,
looking at that same concept, that same situation from the Free Software point of
view, I bring to this a different idea of goals and a different idea of a criterion.
The goal in the Free Software movement is to extend our freedom. 'Ours' meaning
that of whoever wants freedom to work together so that freedom spreads over a
wider range of activities. And so our criterion isn't really about market share, ever
and it's only secondarily about 'Do we have good technology, does the program
work reliably?' Obviously if it works badly enough it won't be useful, but otherwise
we can fix it, so that's just a side issue. The important thing is: How many activities
can we do without giving up our freedom? What is the range of things that we can
do on a computer which has just free software on it, where we don't have to
compromise our freedom to do any of those things?Now when you apply this criterion to things like web servers that answer certain
kinds of questions for you, that communicate with you, you find an interesting
thing: a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits
his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't
have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software
versus proprietary arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and
run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we
allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed
to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is
running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy
the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that
program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position, the way I
would be if I were supposed to have a program on my computer and the law says I
can't give you a copy when you come visit me. That really puts me on the spot
morally. If a proprietary program is on Amazon's computer, that's Amazon's
conscience. Now I would like them to have freedom too. I hope they will want
freedom, and they will work with me so that we all get freedom, but it's not directly
an attack on you and me if Amazon has a proprietary program on their computer.
It's not crucially important to you and me whether Amazon uses a free operating
system like GNU plus Linux, or a free web server like Apache. I mean I hope they
will, I hope free software will be popular, but if they give up their freedom, that's
just a shame it's not a danger to us who want free -
Re:Not very persuasive...
It is not clear from that picture, are they books about the Java _language_? Because that is not surprising -- the language have not changed much for years. A lot of books produced however (at least my library is full of them and still growing) about frameworks, libraries, etc that use Java.
Here is the primary source, where they explain how they've measured it. Quote:
Before I begin to drill in on the languages, I thought it would be best to explain our "language dimension." Our view on languages is not just strictly about programming with a particular language, although we capture those very easily, but that the book being categorized has code examples in a particular language. So Flash Programming with Java would be in our Flash atomic category, but the language dimension would be Java. Similarly, our Head First Design Patterns book contains all examples written in Java, so it too carries the "java" tag on the language dimension. So with this language dimension information in mind, I am going to add one more grouping before we dive in.
So it seems that any book about Java-specific technology would be in the Java category, and ditto for C# (excepting
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Re:Just like Redhat
o rly?
O'Reilly is over here: ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/
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Re:Rotoscoped.
You can also do this with mplayer if compiled with the right libs.
http://oreilly.com/pub/h/4441 -
Re:Its still possible..
I don't know man, it's a lot of work. On my computer I have Ruby, Python, Perl, GCC, and who knows what else installed. There are tons of APIs that I don't know what they do, even in the languages that they do know. I also have a webserver, and FTP server, and probably several other servers. They aren't running right now, but they came with the system.
On top of that, I have postfix config files, a mach_kernel file, and a bunch of other weird files that are either quite complex (this book about Postfix is 288 pages), or I have no idea what they do, or they are binary and I have no hope of ever figuring them out. Even if I switch to my Linux partition, where I have the source code to everything, it's a lot of work to understand every single file in even just the Kernel. I'm not sure anyone even understands the Kernel itself completely. I haven't talked about hardware yet, but Intel processors do some tricky out of order operations and pipelining and such, it's not always easy to predict what is going to happen on one of those things. It is a lot of knowledge, and I am not sure anyone actually does understand it today, even if it is possible. No one I know makes that claim.
This is really different from the days of the C64, where the entire thing was only 64k (actually more with paging). You can read the entire memory contents of 64k in an afternoon, literally everything on the computer. You could definitely understand all the 'source code' (except the source code was in assembly) to the entire system. Predicting what the processor would do and how long it would take wasn't hard. You could fit everything about the system (even schematics to the hardware) in a single book. -
Re:The real funny meat of the article!
Where does Buzz or Twitter automatically generate news items based on the activities of other users and include a link so that you can also participate in those activities?
Not used Buzz yet I see...
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1069-google-buzz-5-things-you-need-to-know/
Maybe no so much for Twitter, but Buzz can generate "news items" form a variety of your other google services, and allow others to see and comment upon them.
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Re:Around the world?
Um, what? Both the first and third links have maps with little pins all over the place including Lima, Bangalore, Madrid, Nairobi, Montreal, and Cape Town. The list of events is missing at lot of them but clicking on the towns will get you local event pages. From the third link: "Ignite is coming to 60+ cities on 6 continents during the first Global Ignite Week, March 1-5, 2010."
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Re:Aren't we all supposed to be switching to Lua n
It is very interesting to see the interest and trends based on book sale volume. The state of the computer book contains this interesting chart. For more details see O'Reilley Radar. This was published mid-year 2009. Maybe this new edition might tip the scale.
Since MS is putting all their eggs in c# (and c,c++) it isn't surprising to see the interest. Of note, the impressive rise in Actionscript likely due to web based animated ads.
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Re:Aren't we all supposed to be switching to Lua n
It is very interesting to see the interest and trends based on book sale volume. The state of the computer book contains this interesting chart. For more details see O'Reilley Radar. This was published mid-year 2009. Maybe this new edition might tip the scale.
Since MS is putting all their eggs in c# (and c,c++) it isn't surprising to see the interest. Of note, the impressive rise in Actionscript likely due to web based animated ads.
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Re:Cover art
I was about to mock you by pointing out the O'Reilly Perl libary is camel-centric, but looking at http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/perl, I am amazed at the zoo of critters in the Perl book list.
What this tells me is that I need a much higher budget for books.
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Re:Quick Questions
clearly your post was a joke, but a serious answer to your question would be Linux Device Drivers: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ Understanding the linux kernel: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000028 I found both books fantastic and well worth a read, they will take you from knowing C to developing drivers for the linux kernel.
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Hit and miss, some good points
The gripes are, unfortunately, mostly off target. But you can't blame a developer for having gripes. They deserve an answer. So here goes:
1. Open Source
The heart of this gripe appears to be "What's worse is Google knows how to protect valued code; Its Maps, Gmail, and Store applications aren't open source. Figuring out when it's okay to include one of those in your own application requires a crack legal team with a hotline to the EFF. "
This is a non-issue. Google hasn't released any proprietary code. Using the capabilities of these applications, or any other FOSS or proprietary applications in Android by means of their remote method interfaces or their Intent filters is OK unless the APIs require a key, as with the maps APIs. The process of getting a Google Maps API key is described here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and most introductory Android programming books cover it, too (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596521472 in chapter 7). J2ME, BREW, and Symbian all require app signing and all support protected APIs.
2. The Tyranny of the Activity
Android has a unique programming model. It wasn't designed just to make a coder's life difficult. It was designed to prevent a small-screen UI from becoming a maze of hierarchical screen transition and enable re-use of functionality across applications. Android makes "shoveware" ports look bad, which is what Haseman seems to be griping about.
3. Device Debugging
This "gripe" is not really a gripe, but good-natured praise for the ease of debugging on Android.
4. Applications Never, Ever Quit
Android has an interesting and powerful application lifecycle. And, since Android is multi-tasking, more developers will notice that their application has a lifecycle.
5. The Developer Cooperative
This is a valid gripe: On the one hand, Android can manhandle your application's lifecycle, and on the other hand, it is fairly easy for applications to become battery-eaters. Google's developers could have done a better job of automatically detecting battery vampires. Use the "Battery use" in the "About phone" menu in "Settings" to find the applications and other system functions using the battery. That's a tip taken from this article: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/862-ten-tips-for-android-application-development/
6. Java—Thanks, But I'll Take It from Here
Haseman says: "While it might speed time to market by freeing us from chasing down heap corruptions and memory leaks (two of my least favorite tasks), it can make it nearly impossible to, say, write an anti-aliased font library that renders in a reasonable amount of time. Sure, a developer can write custom libraries in C with their NDK, but now we're debugging two languages instead of one."
Java in Android runs on the Dalvik VM, which, up to now, is a pure interpreter: No precompiler, no JIT. It relies completely on the ability to mix in libraries in C via JNIs http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/jni/spec/jniTOC.html and the NDK http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.6_r1/index.html.
Why? The short answer is it is hard to put a JIT compiler in a battery powered device. So the developer has to decide what code belongs in Java and what code belongs in C.
7. "Intents"
Here I am right with Haseman, since his gripe is having to write (http://www.amazon.com/Android-Essentials-Firstpress-Chris-Haseman/dp/1430210648/) about classes with names that lend themselves to drifting into being nouns. The Activity, Intent, and Service classes in Android twist up one's prose worse that quarks tha
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Stats
I find tfa pretty clueless when it comes a real understanding on what is needed for performance testing and tweaking. A statistical analysis is nice, especially with monte carlo type analysis, like Bungie running Halo 3 on numerious xboxs simulating load and player interactions. However, I find that what is lacking with programmers is a basic understanding on the high levels of process analysis, such as network analysis, CPM, and PERT. Knowing a process has high levels of variance is nice, but not useful for understanding the why. Where is Zed's example of multivariant linear regression or ordered probit? Discussion on hypothesis testing? Anyone, anyone?
As a side note, Statistics in a Nutshell is the only book programmers really need on stats.
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Most Facebook Users are Not in the US
At least according to Ben Lorica at O'Reilly Research. At the time of that post at least, the US made up about 35% of Facebook users, and the US and UK and Candada together made up about 61%. The US still had the most for a single country, but that's a long way from being the majority.
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Cinnamon pick-apart author
Let us tear him a new one, it is easy.
Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books.
Actually, there have long been digital books, and they have long been pirated. It doesn't stop people from making a profit selling them. Also, paper books have long been digitized, then pirated digitally. They seem to still sell. This article: (-1, Sensationalist) And, I might add, it straddles the line between ignorance and fraud. It left poetic license behind several states ago.
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."
This is based on a retarded notion of what open source means. I'm not talking about the OSI definition or anything; but in any case, it remains true that both Open Source and Free Software are powered by copyright! And even the BSD license, which retains copyright notices, explicitly retains the idea of artistic ownership. In fact, that's all it does. Wikipedia asserts that Alexie considers e-Books "elitist", but that obviously makes him some kind of asshole. Here's precisely why: computers are free. You can get a shitpile computer which can certainly handle reading an eBook for literally zero dollars. Freecycle, craigslist, places like this here Slashdot... People are giving away working computers every day. And people who can't even afford the obscene $4+ price for a used paperback, let alone the egregious $8 and up for a new one (god forbid the $20+ for a hardcover) can consume eBooks for free, both legally from sources like Project Gutenberg and illegally from... well, you know. All the usual spots.
Thus, Sherman Alexie is one of the following: Either a fucking idiot flapping his yap when he has no understanding whatsoever about the technology, i.e. a petrified luddite, or a hypocrite assaulting new media because he is afraid that if everyone (including the "disadvantaged") has free access to media, he won't be making any money any more. The simple truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of books available for free in one way or another. This quote (which I picked up from Wikipedia) should set most of you at odds with him immediately:
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Re:Old old story.
Not only that but also Jessie Vincent showed at oscon (his 5 minute speech starts at 2:13 on the video) How he already reversed engineered and installed ubuntu 9.04 on the Kindle. After watching his presentation and hearing about all the crap amazon actually does with these things, I am surprised anyone would still even consider buying one.
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Re:What a load of crap
As someone who uses both Gentoo and Ubuntu, I have to say that your reply makes for a great 30-second sound bite, but has little to do with the real world. While to some degree, Linux is Linux is Linux, there are differences between distributions that aren't always immediately obvious -- even to experienced users. I'm still learning some of the ways of getting things done in Ubuntu after 3+ years of Gentoo (and ~8 years of Slackware). For example, if I'm trying to figure out which Ubuntu package contains some program I want to install, I *don't* want to hear from an LFS or Gentoo user; I want to hear from someone who actually knows the distribution I am asking about. As the saying goes, it's not what you don't know that will bite you in the butt; it's what you *think* you know that just ain't so...and from the tone of your post, I'm guessing that's probably quite a bit.
Furthermore, before you go bashing on Fedora and Ubuntu users too much, you might want to check which distro Torvalds says he prefers. -
Re:Christ, AGAIN!?
You might want to start with this article:
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Javascript: The Good Parts
This is the book that'll make you realise Javascript is OK:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748It's not afraid to call out the bad parts, and to show you how to work around them. That's down to a rushed standardization process.
It doesn't deal with the DOM at all - after all, that's not part of JS.
It leaves you thinking JS is pretty neat, if you use it right.
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Re:Misleading Conclusion.
So it's not surprising that much of the money is not tied up in manufacturing the product. Nobody is getting rich actually making the thing. Even if you paid the factory floor worker a decent wage, it wouldn't change things all that much.
"Even if you paid the factory floor worker a decent wage"? While people in the US don't think much of what Chinese factory workers get paid those Chinese certainly do. They don't get paid as much but their costs of living is a lot lower too. Those Chinese employees can work in a factory saving their money, many employers have dorms employees live in at low cost if not free as well as provide meals, then in a few years start their own business.
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Re:Why UK?
I know your trolling, but look: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523213
That's why the UK. That and little to no language issues.
But if you want sun and good food, sure, the rest of the EU is generally better. -
You will love dear old blighty
I would recommend starting in London of course.
Natural History Museum (via the tube, you must use the tube!),
Science Museum,
British Museum,
London Tower,
HMS Belfast
But don't just stay in London!
Roman Bath's + Cheddar Gorge.
Rather than Stone Henge, perhaps my favourite ancient ruin is Grimspound in Dartmoor. Dartmoor itself as moody wind swept moorland is worth seeing (and hiking!). You will find many ancient ruins in Dartmoor.
I would also recommend Corfe Castle, it is a proper ye old castle with peasant village at it's foot. It's state will be your introduction to Cromwell.
A still running old Steam Railway, there are quite a few.
The Lake District, my favourite national park, with Helvellyn striding edge being on of my favourite walks, that and Great Gable.
Jodrell bank is quite interesting, the visit centre is tiny, but the dish itself is interesting, with it's battle ship parts and history. Not been to Bletchley Park myself, but I feel I should. In fact, sod it, look in The Geek Atlas, loads in the UK.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523213 -
Re:Cool Book!
O'Reilly's Using Drupal is pretty helpful with the basics. I'm not going to lie to you, there's definitely some opaque terminology in there, but I've noticed that seems to be true with CMSes in general. I still tend to squint a bit when I have to think about vocabularies and taxonomies, so don't feel too bad.
Once you figure out that just about everything in Drupal is a database object, it all starts to make sense. A "node" is functionally the same as a database table. A "view" is functionally the same as a database query. "Vocabularies" and "taxonomies", meanwhile, can be thought of as related tables that you can use to fine-tune your queries (erm... "Views"). Just as you can have two tables with identical data types but different names, and just as you might do that for organizational purposes (i.e. one table stores shop equipment, the other stores shop inventory), you can use "nodes" with similar data types but different names. In fact, if memory serves, a "Page", "Story", and "Blog Post" all use the same data types, but are given different names so you can treat each one differently if you're so inclined. Similarly, just as you can have a table with a column that stores related information with another table (say, a key that corresponds to a specific manufacturer), you can attach a taxonomy to a class of nodes (Page, Story, Blog, custom, whatever), and even have what amounts to sub-taxonomies ("Vocabularies").
To be honest, the data structure format isn't what drives me slightly insane about Drupal. No, in my case, it's the rather frustrating experience of finding the right combination of modules that actually does something useful. For example, let's say you want a contact form. Naturally, you would use the built-in Contact module, right? Ah, but then you're limited to only having one contact form on the entire site - that's probably not what you want. Let's see if somebody expanded it. Well, there's the Contact Forms module, which lets you split out each contact form category into a separate page. But, what if you want each contact form page to be able to handle a bunch of categories, or what if you want to control the URL it generates? Chances are, if you want a contact form that you can move around, or even have more than one contact form, you need a way to store contact forms as something that Drupal natively moves around so you can treat them like every other object in your system. So, now what? Do we try Contact Form On Node? What if I want it in a block? Shall we give Contact Form Blocks a try? Or do we try Form Block? Or, do we use the Webform module, which gives us forms as nodes? Or, do we just write our own module and be done with it? Then there's the matter of theming...
Don't get me wrong. If you know what you're doing and you have the time and patience to get through it, you can do some pretty cool stuff with Drupal. That said, if the only CMS you've ever touched in your life was something like Wordpress, you're in for a rough ride. -
Re:The hiss is where it hides
'Actually, a large number of people rating MP3 higher than FLAC suggests that they noticed a difference between the two encodings and preferred MP3.'
Which has in fact been claimed to be the case, at least with younger people:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html
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Re:Recording Bias
Most people are used to the slight hiss or static that comes with MP3's. In fact, we have lived with it so long, we believe it's normal. It's a form of bias, where most people are used to the sound of MP3's.
Speaking of which, here's a more concise article, on more readable sites, using a much broader sample of opinions than the 7 or so from TFA.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/03/11/153205/Young-People-Prefer-Sizzle-Sounds-of-MP3-Format
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.htmlAnd how long have mods been posting disclaimers about how crappy TFA is to read? Where does it end?
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Bizarre Covers
I swear, between O'Reilly's animals and Manning's depictions of people from different eras and cultures, I'd say a picture of a guy with a dead bird tucked in his belt is the most random choice for the cover of a programming book that I've ever seen.
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Re:Build-in function library
You hit the nail right on the head. I'm currently reading the book "Masterminds of Programming" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/) and this specific topic, concurrency, seems to be the biggest challenge out there according to the language creators they've interviewed. It's possible now to write code that runs across machines, but it's not so easy that it's pervasive in the industry. Maybe Languages like Go will help change that.
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Use Old Hardware
Surely you have a few old boomboxes laying around?
Check out this post, should be an... inpromptu solution.
http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2007/07/stupid-wifi-speaker-tricks.html
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Re:My gawd
Actually JavaScript is a rather good language in many ways, though it does have some flaws. Give "JavaScript, the Good Parts" a quick read some time.
That's like reading a book titled Morris Marina: The Best Parts only to discover that the best parts are:
- Because it's so slow, you'll never get a speeding ticket.
- It can be used to educate the next generation on how not to build cars.
- Other cars won't be made to feel jealous.
- If your car breaks, just grab the nearest drill and a bunch of rusted scrap metal. Your careless and forceful patchwork will be better than the original build quality.
- Loose fitting parts all around the car will help ensure that car doors, hinges and other moving parts never rust closed for eternity.
- Brakes and other safety devices overcomplicate the design of the car and make it heavier and harder to use.
- Guaranteed to be the worst car in the world no matter which country you're in, what the current year is or what colour it is.
- It's easy to rebuild and design a similar car because you don't have to worry about looking up standards, papers, textbooks, equations or any other time consuming paperwork.
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Re:My gawd
Why are people investing so much in a fundamentally flawed scripting language that has almost no use at all outside the browser and that Palm Pre thing that is basically a browser in a plastic case?
Actually JavaScript is a rather good language in many ways, though it does have some flaws. Give "JavaScript, the Good Parts" a quick read some time.
The main problem in the place where people usually see the language, in the browser, is when interacting with the Document Object Model in browsers - a model that isn't exactly my favourite environment to start with and that is before considering all the hacking you have to do to get things to work well on multiple browsers (even when only considering modern versions).
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Re:hope for the best
Well, maybe the last two books were not too good, but I thought the series got better and better and culminated in God Emperor. If you just read Dune I don't think you can get what Frank Herbert was trying to say. Dune is only setting the scene.
Recalling the origins of Dune, Herbert says: "It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheros were disastrous for humans."
For an interesting read, see Tim O'Reilly's book on Herbert: http://tim.oreilly.com/herbert/
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Re:PDF Yes, Flash No
I'd like to second the notion that presentation formatting is not irrelevant for documents that are legally binding, but point out that presentation formatting is not necessarily contrary to documents published or archived by means of a text/markup file format. A few weeks ago there was a fair amount of coverage of the GPO conversion to XML of ten years worth of their SGML content (which would certainly be less of a bear than parsing out content from hundreds of thousands of pages of text/tables/etc from PDFs), and the CIO at the GPO indicated that to some extent their documents require (I would assume) further, non-machine-added markup for their typesetting platform, because human-readable pages are the primary goal. I would also assume that to some extent these formatting directives are platform-dependent rather than based on some public standard, but they could be using FO or something.
From http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/questions-and-answers-about-th.html:
The Federal Register composition is structured in a way to support printing the publication. As such, there are a number of formatting functions in the composition code that, from a pure XML perspective, are not needed. However, formatting is at times critical to properly interpret the publication. Therefore in our transformation process, we could not eliminate all the formatting elements in the source SGML. The result is an XML rendition that still contains some formatting elements. -
Re:Monty's laboring under a misconclusion
This is a bit disingenuous. Small companies don't publish financial information because they usually aren't public. They don't have to do it, and there is no real reason to do it.
I don't know if you were thinking about Cygnus software in your examples since it was bought by Red Hat. However, I believe it is a much better example of how to make money with open source. Michael Tiemann's explanation of how they started the company on a few thousand dollars and built it without the use of dual licensing is instructive (I realize they eventually opted for dual licensing after they received VC, but I understand that was at the insistence of the VC company. After being bought out by Red Hat they immediately reverted back to single licensing). If anyone is interested they can read the description in his contribution to the book Open Sources: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html
I am personally aware of many companies that offer services on Open Source software without dual licensing. Many of these are individual people selling customized installations to large organizations like governments. They often operate similarly to consultants. While I can't guarantee that they all make a profit, the ones I know certainly don't look like they are starving to death.
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Re:Already happened
http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww -
Re:Already happened
http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww -
Re:If the legal code is too confusing
And no one is downloading or mirroring this data? No one has hard copies of the complete 2008 law? This is trivial compared to the benefits. Right now we have a situation where a page can change the law, and elected congresscritters have plausible deniability.
I haven't found the source yet, but there was one case where a wording change was discovered to have been done by an aide without anyone's knowledge. This was on slashdot a while back.
And yes, this has come up before. Lots of comments everywhere.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/federal-bill-wo/
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/why-congress-ne.html
http://tonybuser.com/post/189954813/congress-needs-a-version-control-system
http://bexhuff.com/2007/07/congress-needs-version-control-system
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Re:Prediction
Why do you assume it'll be the security council that'll get involved rather than say the International Telecommunication Union?
What's that? You didn't realise the UN already does pretty much what ICANN does in another area very successfully?
"Frankly, I don't give a damn what China, Lybia or Iran think when it comes to running the Internet. And, if it comes to that, I don't want things like the German, French, or Canadian "hate speech" laws going international either. That sort of feel-good censorship can be even worse than the jackbooted variety, as the authorities choke off dissent while insisting it's all for our own good."
But you think it's okay for a single US state to be able to impose censorship for our own good I suppose?
http://www.freepress.net/node/45158
Eventually the appeals court realised this was stupid and overturned it, but the fact is a single judge in a single state of the US whilst US has full control of ICANN could censor whatever they wanted and did so for a damaging period of time for a web based business, and they did. More than once:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/02/us-judge-censors-wikileaksorg.html
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/03/us-interferes-with-travel-to-cuba.ars
"Honestly, I can't understand how any serious observer of world affairs, whatever you may personally think of the United States, can maintain that UN control is preferable to the current system. Not by any standard."
Your answer lies above, it is because any "serious observer of world affairs" who is not ignorant to the reality of US control of ICANN realises it's been doing a really, really bad job in recent years with everything from gTLDs to censorship of foreign domain names being.
I guess you weren't aware of what ICANN has done wrong in recent years which is fair enough, but if you're going to defend an organisation and speculate on what an alternative organisation would do wrong, you should at least make sure the organisation you're defending wasn't guilty of doing exactly what you're so concerned about- censorship.
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Re:other countries too
Yes, and there's an awful lot of other countries that don't want censorship.
Changes need consensus in international organisations, this is a stupid argument, because you'd never get international consensus on this sort of thing so it wouldn't happen.
Whilst you have one country controlling it however, you get shit like this:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081020/0058002578.shtml
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/02/us-judge-censors-wikileaksorg.html
Yes that's right, judges in single US courts being able to unilaterally order the effective take down of overseas sites for which they should have no jurisdiction over whatsoever.
Don't try and pretend the countries you list would magically get their way over Western nations if control was shared, and don't try and pretend the US has never done anything wrong whilst in control of the internet.
When you have opposing views sharing power, stupid ideas get blocked indefinitely so the sort of situation in the above two articles would never happen, neither would censorship. Stuff like security issues that need urgent attention would get passed because everyone would agree they're a problem.
Effectively just as in hung or proportionally represented governments, the only stuff that gets blocked is controversal shit that half the people don't want, the only stuff that gets through is stuff that's agreeable to everyone. That's much better all round than having a single entity unilaterally imposing bad ideas on everyone else.
