Just to add to the list - I created a BASIC program on a 6502 micro (BBC Master) and convinced a friend that I had written a PC emulator. I convinced him to bring in his sytem disks so I could test it with DOS, then told him I had to have the original disks and had to have write access. He watched in horror as the machine "formatted" the 5.25" disks as part of the "autoexec.bat" script that it had loaded.
And that's the point, isn't it - MS could have its own linux distro, complete with a fancy graphical installer and partition wizard, out of the door in under 12 months if it wanted to. It wouldn't need to buy Redhat to do that.
sure, but a large corporation that relies on e.g. Firefox, can afford to take on a couple of developers - say, people that have contributed to the codebase and are familiar with it, but not part of the core team - pay them a decent salary and have whatever work they need doing done in-house. Then it's up to them whether to keep an in-house build or contribute changes back to the project.
It may sound expensive, but my experience has been that often proprietary solutions aren't ideally suited to a company's needs, so they end up either making-do, or using all sorts of different software from different sources, plug-ins for Outlook, in-house SQL Server databases etc. etc. I'm sure that, for many companies, finding the closest FOSS project to their needs and then hiring a developer to adapt and maybe contribute back works out much better in the long run.
I have to second this. I realise that that the debate on the Gimp UI has been a long running EMacs Vs vi type thing, but I do think it's all a little silly. As far as desktops go, lots of (usually non-FOSS) people equate 'user friendly' with 'like Windows' or rarely 'like Mac'. It seems that for paint programs, people equate 'user friendly' with 'like Photoshop'.
The Gimp has it's own approach to UI. It is unique. It does work - and, of course, it does have a learning curve when you switch from Photoshop. PSP and Photopaint are different to Photoshop too, but not as different as the Gimp. Having used the Gimp for a few years now, I'm very used to the interface and find it very productive. I hate having to take the pointer to the top of the screen/window now, I find it much easier to right-click inside the image I'm working on to access menu items - in fact I turned off the menu bars at the top of each image window in Gimp 2 the first time I upgraded.
I mean, have you considered how it would sound for two people to speak that interaction out loud?
I don't need to consider that - I have the DVD of the BBC TV series and it works great. The timing's good, and it's funny. OK, it's funning in a late-1970s British humour kind of way, but it's still funny.
I do agree with you in one sense - I'm not sure how funny it would be in a 21st Century Hollywood movie.
I 'grew up' on Debian, but got frustrated 18 months ago when I had to mess around for hours with dependencies - there seemed no point in using Debian stable if I had to use loads of backports and manually install some libraries just to get a working up-to-date web browser and other essentials. I then ended up getting bits from unstable, and my mixed-distribution system regularly broke.
I switched to Mandrake, but really couldn't stand urpmi: it's soooo slooow! Honestly, why does it have to download a multi-megabyte package list? It's a complete dog compared to apt-get.
Then, a couple of months ago, I got a new hard drive for my laptop, and decided to try Ubuntu. As far as I can tell, they do exactly what you describe. There's a list of standard packages needed for a desktop distribution, which are tested and work very well. (The 'main' section). There's then a 'restricted' section, that has packages that cannot be included in the main distribution (e.g. because they don't meet the strict Debian definition of 'free'). Then there's the 'universe' section, that has lots of useful packages that install cleanly, but aren't aggressively tested.
The whole thing works extremely well, has all of the Debian goodness, but with a strict 6 month release cycle.
My philosophy now is: Ubuntu on the workstation, Debian stable on the server.
If people who pay for it are not allowed to download movies and burn them on taxed media, then what is its point?
And here's one that makes the mind boggle: I live in England. No that's not makes the mind boggle, this is: what happens if I import some taxed blank media from France, then download and burn a movies onto it? What if I downloaded the files from France? Is that legal? Does the fact that they're both European countries matter?
That's nonsense - OSX users need to run some programs through an emulator if they're only available on Windows - but that doesn't mean that it's ready for the desktop.
I'm a med student. The British Medical Association has made its journal, BMJ, available for free for a number of years. This is a world-leading medical journal - up there with The Lancet and NEJM - provided completely gratis to anybody and everybody. You can search, download PDFs, do anything you want really. Doctors (and students) still pay their membership fees. If the BMA can manage it, the IEEE certainly can.
But it's quite possible that the version of Office you may be running is legitimately paid for, regardless of the host operating system
That's an interesting point. MS has been found guilty of abusing monopoly powers by insisting that OEMs don't remove MS products like Media Player. I think the general public find it hard to understand a legal process to stop a company providing 'free stuff' with their product. But here we have a case where a (hopefully - let's assume for the moment) legally purchased piece of software intentionally has features blocked when it's not used on an MS operating system.
When OSs are mutually incompatible it's not unreasonable for MS to choose which OSs to support. No-one can force them to release a Linux version of Office. But now that Linux (on i386) is becoming increasingly compatible with Windows, MS has a problem - how do they prevent Linux users from installing Office and other flagship apps? And can they do this without abusing monopoly powers? I don't think so.
It might be that MS doesn't mind abusing their powers - they pretty much get away with it every time (although the EU is having a pretty good do at stopping them). The difference here is - in a couple of years time, when Walmart are selling cheap Linux boxes that are compatible with 90% of Windows software, if the general public find out the MS is intentionally stopping it working with their computers - I think that could have some real traction.
Exactly - I write code with whatever shorthand or optimisations I want, but if I have to pick my way through a block of code a week later then I'll put comments all over it for my benefit - and anyone else who might want to look at it in the future.
Just as an aside - the example given isn't that clear, but I find that if variable names are sensible then using implicit conditional tests can make things clearer. E.g. I find if(finishedsearching) and if(!finishedsearching) clearer than if(fs==TRUE) and if(fs==FALSE). Just personal style I guess.
Well, not quite synonymous. Different countries have a different international prefix that is dialled in place of the +. It's most frequently 00, but not always. The international code is always the same. It's explained here.
remember that 75% of the people on the internet only vaguely know what a firewall or AV program does
Yeah - and this website won't help them learn. It's am absolute joke - it looks like some schoolkid's homework project. I'm a Brit and I'm ashamed. And annoyed at the waste of money.
We have this problem in the UK - in the Diane Pretty case, her husband wanted to help her committ euthanasia. The courts and Crown Prosecution refused to say, in advance, whether he was likely to be prosecuted for assisting in her suicide.
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quite dearly, my frank, I don't give a... oh...
Just to add to the list - I created a BASIC program on a 6502 micro (BBC Master) and convinced a friend that I had written a PC emulator. I convinced him to bring in his sytem disks so I could test it with DOS, then told him I had to have the original disks and had to have write access. He watched in horror as the machine "formatted" the 5.25" disks as part of the "autoexec.bat" script that it had loaded.
And that's the point, isn't it - MS could have its own linux distro, complete with a fancy graphical installer and partition wizard, out of the door in under 12 months if it wanted to. It wouldn't need to buy Redhat to do that.
It may sound expensive, but my experience has been that often proprietary solutions aren't ideally suited to a company's needs, so they end up either making-do, or using all sorts of different software from different sources, plug-ins for Outlook, in-house SQL Server databases etc. etc. I'm sure that, for many companies, finding the closest FOSS project to their needs and then hiring a developer to adapt and maybe contribute back works out much better in the long run.
yes
I tend to wait until _after_ the checker is entirely done. Otherwise there's, like, lots of crossings out when, you know, the total changes?
The Gimp has it's own approach to UI. It is unique. It does work - and, of course, it does have a learning curve when you switch from Photoshop. PSP and Photopaint are different to Photoshop too, but not as different as the Gimp. Having used the Gimp for a few years now, I'm very used to the interface and find it very productive. I hate having to take the pointer to the top of the screen/window now, I find it much easier to right-click inside the image I'm working on to access menu items - in fact I turned off the menu bars at the top of each image window in Gimp 2 the first time I upgraded.
Jet Black... do you mean Hot Black Desiato?
I don't need to consider that - I have the DVD of the BBC TV series and it works great. The timing's good, and it's funny. OK, it's funning in a late-1970s British humour kind of way, but it's still funny.
I do agree with you in one sense - I'm not sure how funny it would be in a 21st Century Hollywood movie.
You connected a harddrive up to your Dreamcast?
Did you mean: 'if they'res one thing slashdot needs more of; its' bad grammer'?
I switched to Mandrake, but really couldn't stand urpmi: it's soooo slooow! Honestly, why does it have to download a multi-megabyte package list? It's a complete dog compared to apt-get.
Then, a couple of months ago, I got a new hard drive for my laptop, and decided to try Ubuntu. As far as I can tell, they do exactly what you describe. There's a list of standard packages needed for a desktop distribution, which are tested and work very well. (The 'main' section). There's then a 'restricted' section, that has packages that cannot be included in the main distribution (e.g. because they don't meet the strict Debian definition of 'free'). Then there's the 'universe' section, that has lots of useful packages that install cleanly, but aren't aggressively tested.
The whole thing works extremely well, has all of the Debian goodness, but with a strict 6 month release cycle.
My philosophy now is: Ubuntu on the workstation, Debian stable on the server.
Apple don't need to invent a new word. The fourth ordinal is "quaternary".
And here's one that makes the mind boggle: I live in England. No that's not makes the mind boggle, this is: what happens if I import some taxed blank media from France, then download and burn a movies onto it? What if I downloaded the files from France? Is that legal? Does the fact that they're both European countries matter?
That's nonsense - OSX users need to run some programs through an emulator if they're only available on Windows - but that doesn't mean that it's ready for the desktop.
I'm a med student. The British Medical Association has made its journal, BMJ, available for free for a number of years. This is a world-leading medical journal - up there with The Lancet and NEJM - provided completely gratis to anybody and everybody. You can search, download PDFs, do anything you want really. Doctors (and students) still pay their membership fees. If the BMA can manage it, the IEEE certainly can.
Faith is alive in 2005!!
it's a shame they're no good at spelling cheques
Wine can run IE. I've got it running on my laptop (Ubuntu) without buying Crossover or anything like that. I'd hardly call it stable, but it works.
That's an interesting point. MS has been found guilty of abusing monopoly powers by insisting that OEMs don't remove MS products like Media Player. I think the general public find it hard to understand a legal process to stop a company providing 'free stuff' with their product. But here we have a case where a (hopefully - let's assume for the moment) legally purchased piece of software intentionally has features blocked when it's not used on an MS operating system.
When OSs are mutually incompatible it's not unreasonable for MS to choose which OSs to support. No-one can force them to release a Linux version of Office. But now that Linux (on i386) is becoming increasingly compatible with Windows, MS has a problem - how do they prevent Linux users from installing Office and other flagship apps? And can they do this without abusing monopoly powers? I don't think so.
It might be that MS doesn't mind abusing their powers - they pretty much get away with it every time (although the EU is having a pretty good do at stopping them). The difference here is - in a couple of years time, when Walmart are selling cheap Linux boxes that are compatible with 90% of Windows software, if the general public find out the MS is intentionally stopping it working with their computers - I think that could have some real traction.
Just as an aside - the example given isn't that clear, but I find that if variable names are sensible then using implicit conditional tests can make things clearer. E.g. I find if(finishedsearching) and if(!finishedsearching) clearer than if(fs==TRUE) and if(fs==FALSE). Just personal style I guess.
Well, not quite synonymous. Different countries have a different international prefix that is dialled in place of the +. It's most frequently 00, but not always. The international code is always the same. It's explained here.
Yeah - and this website won't help them learn. It's am absolute joke - it looks like some schoolkid's homework project. I'm a Brit and I'm ashamed. And annoyed at the waste of money.
We have this problem in the UK - in the Diane Pretty case, her husband wanted to help her committ euthanasia. The courts and Crown Prosecution refused to say, in advance, whether he was likely to be prosecuted for assisting in her suicide.