Could I submit a client that involved making a connection to my own machine's globally-addressible IP address and then write a GUI that ran on my machine to control my robot?
I have a feeling that it would be a whole lot easier to win that way...
I remember when he managed to stay ahead of me on the spodlist of a particular talker (that shall remain nameless) only by leaving himself logged in for 24 hours straight. Knowing about the shoes makes it easier to keep annoyances like that in perspective;)
I like the way your sig markets ewtoo talkers by deliberately extolling the virtues of being hard to use. Play to your strengths:)
Try reading the actual survey. The Ominous Cow Herd and the/. editor that posted this should have done the same thing, and realised that it's not so significant, but that would be asking way too much for/.:)
What it boils down to is that a couple of mega-hosting-companies that host thousands upon thousands of domains have made changes that have a disproportionate effect due to the sheer number of sites hosted on their systems.
The survey also shows results for "active domains" which are much more realistic, and while these still show a gain for Apache, it's much more modest and therefore more believable. But it doesn't make for such good headlines...
It's a matter of priorities. It may not be important to you, but it's absolutely fundamental to me. Just like Mozilla was important even though Netscape 4.x was "free" and "high quality" (ahem). And Vorbis is important even though mp3 encoders and players are "free" and "high quality".
Until we can run JBoss and Tomcat on top of Kaffe or Classpath (Kaffe was close last time I heard) and call that "production quality", those great open source tools haven't achieved anything fundamental except for making things cheaper. The price isn't really what matters, IMHO.
Sadly, Kaffe, GNU Classpath and every other Open Source Java implementation I'm aware of are all also effectively in their infancy and years away from production quality.
I'd actually say that Mono is closer to production quality than those projects, simply because it has more momentum these days. Don't get me wrong, the Free Java projects are far from dead, but Mono got working ASP.NET and ADO.NET from nothing in a matter of a couple of months, which is an astonishing rate of development.
Don't expect me to bash any of these projects (or Portable.NET which is another one that rarely gets mentioned) though - I believe that Free implementations of both Java AND.NET are valuable, if not vital, and all projects attempting to achieve that have my most enthusiastic support.
Actually, you mean the parts where Frodo is waiting around not getting any older...<pedant>
Re:Skynet, here we come
on
Robot Wars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not opposed to AI myself, but there is one major reason why we (as humans) should potentially distrust it: It's not human, and therefore its loyalty is to its own kind, not to us. Judging from our own behaviour (an "intelligent" species) towards animals, it's clear that no matter how enlightened we may be and sympathetic to the plight of poor little furry things, we don't hesitate to choose our lives over theirs on numerous occasions. It's clear (and, in fact, perfectly ethical from the A.I's point of view) that if the situation ever came up where an A.I. had to choose between the life of an A.I. and the life of a human, that it would choose the A.I.
From the human's point of view, that's "evil". From the A.I's point of view, it's a regrettable necessity. From Darwin's point of view, it's survival of the fittest.
Either way, it's inevitable: if A.I. becomes smarter than us, we'll live or die as a species at it's sole discretion. Most humans don't seem too ready to deal with that reality, but there you go...
I guess I was subconsciously assuming that, since Flash is (a) popular now, and (b) increasing in popularity over time, I'd expect that both (a) the W3C would want to make a standard in that area, and (b) MS would want to create a competing (and incompatible, of course) product.
But if that does happen, it'll be well into the future, so you're right to call me on that. I had assumed a whole bunch more hypotheticals than I stated.
Actually, the other way around is more likely, since Microsoft is a member company in the W3C.
(Aside: the W3C doesn't patent things itself - this policy is about dealing with situations where one of it's member companies holds a patent on something that will be part of a standard. Any royalties that are assessed will go to that member company, not to the W3C. I thought that was obvious, personally, but from reading the comments in this story, apparently not...)
Thus, the more likely scenario is that Microsoft patents some key part of some future web standard which the W3C then ratify, so that all implementors of it have to pay Microsoft! Can you imagine AOL, Opera, Macromedia etc all having to pay money to their primary competitor just to be allowed to compete?
I don't know many links, but I can explain why it was so difficult.
Debian consists of (at the last count that I'm aware of) 3000 packages maintained by several hundred distinct maintainers. Every one of those packages, per Debian Policy, had previously put their documentation in/usr/doc.
Debian also has a policy that upgrades from one version of the distribution to another, including partial upgrades of just a few packages, should not result in a broken system, regardless of how unusual the system's setup had been (one example of an unusual setup would be if/usr/share and/usr/doc were on different partitions). Plus, they didn't want to force users to check two different locations for documentation (is it in/usr/doc? No, then it must be in/usr/share/doc). They also didn't want to break experienced users' expectations that documentation could be found in/usr/doc. Oh, and they didn't want to break if old packages (that used/usr/doc) were installed on new systems with/usr/share/doc.
These constraints ruled out all the obvious solutions, including "mv/usr/doc/usr/share/doc; ln -s/usr/share/doc/usr/doc".
The final solution was to require that every one of the maintainers of those 3000 packages modify their packages to put the documentation in/usr/share/doc, and then add a symlink in/usr/doc to the new directory. Since these are several hundred maintainers who all have their own jobs and lives and priorities and some of whom have disappeared entirely since originally creating the package, this process took over a year. It was just about completed in time for the upcoming "woody" release. In fact, this page indicates that there are still 3 packages that haven't had this transition completed yet.
This page is the part of Debian Policy that indicates what must be done for every package.
All of that, and then in time for the next release of Debian, they'll be removing the symlink farm from/usr/doc which will involve updating Policy again and then changing every one of those 3000 packages once again.
Debian has gone through hell (ask any debian developer about/usr/share/doc) working towards LSB compliance. As I understand it they're still a way off, but they've been committed to it forever.
I'd bet money that debian has a larger market share than any of the UnitedLinux companies.
What I'm getting at is that, given/.'s propensity to post 3 year old "news" items as if they were current, is there any evidence that anything new has happened in this regard at all? Has the contest even happened since 1998?
I'm not saying that it hasn't, but I couldn't find any evidence of it at the links we were given. Hence my question.
To put it another way:
Where's the links to the timely information regarding this news item?
None of the links in the story provide any useful information at all, as far as I can see. The first is for a "Mileage marathon society" which doesn't appear to have any information about a particular recent contest. The second is for the location at which the event was held; the third links to a blank page inside Shell with some plugin that doesn't work in my Mozilla. Searching Shell for "Mileage Marathon" produces lots of results in other languages and from 1998-99, but nothing topical.
Does anyone have any actual information about this contest? Much as I trust/. as a source of unbiased and accurate information (cough) I'm interested in a few more details...
I've heard that in the UK it's possible to walk into any consumer electronics store and ask for the DVD player you buy to be modded to play all regions, and they'll do it for a nominal charge. However, unfortunately, I don't live in the UK, but in the USA - and I'd like to watch international DVDs (as a British ex-pat, my interest lies more in classic UK television than in Anime, but I figure Anime fans face the same problem).
I have a regular old cheap commodity DVD player from GE. Any/. readers know whether there's any way to get existing cheap crappy players like mine modded to be region-free, or whether I'll need to buy a new one - and if the latter, where I can get region-free DVD players at a good price?
I never understood this. Why do people come up with such complicated, convoluted solutions to getting rid of clippy, instead of just, like, not installing it? As in, go to "custom install" and like, uncheck the box?
A gnu-wielding RMS in dark glasses uses superhuman martial arts in his attempts to overturn the evils of proprietary software, emerging victorious in the end by installing Emacs on one of the Agents, and thereby crippling them with a massive outbreak of the "viral" GPL.
Meanwhile the beautiful female agent has fallen madly in love with hi... nah, let's not stretch reality too far;)
Huh. I've had antialiasing in mozilla since about 0.9.9... I don't know exactly how it was turned on because I use the debian packages, but those packages give you a nice little option at install time of whether to enable antialiased fonts.
Admittedly I needed a bit of hackery to set the font in the UI, because by default the UI font uses a non-antialiased font (it picks up the GTK setting and there's no GUI to change that). But you can even override that easily by putting the following in a file called userChrome.css in your profile directory:
That last remaining issue will go away when the port to GTK2 is completed because GTK2 will allow an antialiased font to be the default. Alternatively, you *might* be able to pick a truetype font as your default GTK font and have it work now, but I haven't tried that so I'm not sure.
Stuart.
Raise your hand if you write off-the-shelf s/w
on
Responses to ADTI Paper
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you ever get the opportunity, try asking for a show of hands at a computer convention of any kind, for all the people who work writing off-the-shelf software. Last I heard, the number was typically well below 20%.
The rest work in a variety of areas, ranging from custom embedded systems (where the license of your code matters not one iota because the code can't be changed once the device is manufactured, and it's only useful to the one device anyway) to custom software such as web application development or "enterprise" business logic (where the license of the code matters not one iota because it's never released, and only useful to the one company anyway).
So at worst, if all off-the-shelf software were eliminated, the software industry would shrink by 20%.
More likely, companies with large software requirements (like needing 100,000 installations of an office suite) will channel some of the money they're not spending on licenses and employ some programmers to answer the question of "where do we get bugfixes from if there's no company to turn to?". Once you reach a certain size, employing a few full-time programmers is actually cheaper than paying the ludicrous license costs of OTS software these days. Or they could pay a company like Red Hat or IBM or Sun for "support" (ie, to employ some programmers to prioritize this set of bugs/features over all others).
You've said that "100% open source isn't truely viable" but not backed it up in any way. David Skoll at least backed his point of view up by pointing to great software produced entirely without business models being in the picture. Who is more credible, the one who makes a (admittedly lightweight) argument to back up his point of view, or the one who simply calls the other a zealot with no argument?
It's hard to argue against someone calling for "balance". But sometimes "balance" simply isn't necessary or desirable. Just ask the Catholic Church what kind of reception their "balanced" approach to sex abuse is getting. Sure, that's a reductio-ad-absurdum. But since your whole argument seems to be "balance is necessary!", it suffices to point out a single counterexample...
Slashdot Mirror
Could I submit a client that involved making a connection to my own machine's globally-addressible IP address and then write a GUI that ran on my machine to control my robot?
I have a feeling that it would be a whole lot easier to win that way...
~yuck
</ewtoo>
I remember when he managed to stay ahead of me on the spodlist of a particular talker (that shall remain nameless) only by leaving himself logged in for 24 hours straight. Knowing about the shoes makes it easier to keep annoyances like that in perspective
I like the way your sig markets ewtoo talkers by deliberately extolling the virtues of being hard to use. Play to your strengths
Yeah well, I still find it weird to see him willing to have his real name published online. It always used to be "Grim" or nothing...
Try reading the actual survey. The Ominous Cow Herd and the /. editor that posted this should have done the same thing, and realised that it's not so significant, but that would be asking way too much for /. :)
What it boils down to is that a couple of mega-hosting-companies that host thousands upon thousands of domains have made changes that have a disproportionate effect due to the sheer number of sites hosted on their systems.
The survey also shows results for "active domains" which are much more realistic, and while these still show a gain for Apache, it's much more modest and therefore more believable. But it doesn't make for such good headlines...
Stuart.
It's a matter of priorities. It may not be important to you, but it's absolutely fundamental to me. Just like Mozilla was important even though Netscape 4.x was "free" and "high quality" (ahem). And Vorbis is important even though mp3 encoders and players are "free" and "high quality".
Until we can run JBoss and Tomcat on top of Kaffe or Classpath (Kaffe was close last time I heard) and call that "production quality", those great open source tools haven't achieved anything fundamental except for making things cheaper. The price isn't really what matters, IMHO.
Sadly, Kaffe, GNU Classpath and every other Open Source Java implementation I'm aware of are all also effectively in their infancy and years away from production quality.
.NET are valuable, if not vital, and all projects attempting to achieve that have my most enthusiastic support.
I'd actually say that Mono is closer to production quality than those projects, simply because it has more momentum these days. Don't get me wrong, the Free Java projects are far from dead, but Mono got working ASP.NET and ADO.NET from nothing in a matter of a couple of months, which is an astonishing rate of development.
Don't expect me to bash any of these projects (or Portable.NET which is another one that rarely gets mentioned) though - I believe that Free implementations of both Java AND
Ooh, nice.
Even better,
print(("Definitely yes\n","Outlook cloudy\n")[2*rand])
rand() < 0.5 and print "Definitely yes\n" or print "Outlook cloudy\n";
Actually, you mean the parts where Frodo is waiting around not getting any older...<pedant>
I'm not opposed to AI myself, but there is one major reason why we (as humans) should potentially distrust it: It's not human, and therefore its loyalty is to its own kind, not to us. Judging from our own behaviour (an "intelligent" species) towards animals, it's clear that no matter how enlightened we may be and sympathetic to the plight of poor little furry things, we don't hesitate to choose our lives over theirs on numerous occasions. It's clear (and, in fact, perfectly ethical from the A.I's point of view) that if the situation ever came up where an A.I. had to choose between the life of an A.I. and the life of a human, that it would choose the A.I.
From the human's point of view, that's "evil". From the A.I's point of view, it's a regrettable necessity. From Darwin's point of view, it's survival of the fittest.
Either way, it's inevitable: if A.I. becomes smarter than us, we'll live or die as a species at it's sole discretion. Most humans don't seem too ready to deal with that reality, but there you go...
Point.
I guess I was subconsciously assuming that, since Flash is (a) popular now, and (b) increasing in popularity over time, I'd expect that both (a) the W3C would want to make a standard in that area, and (b) MS would want to create a competing (and incompatible, of course) product.
But if that does happen, it'll be well into the future, so you're right to call me on that. I had assumed a whole bunch more hypotheticals than I stated.
Actually, the other way around is more likely, since Microsoft is a member company in the W3C.
(Aside: the W3C doesn't patent things itself - this policy is about dealing with situations where one of it's member companies holds a patent on something that will be part of a standard. Any royalties that are assessed will go to that member company, not to the W3C. I thought that was obvious, personally, but from reading the comments in this story, apparently not...)
Thus, the more likely scenario is that Microsoft patents some key part of some future web standard which the W3C then ratify, so that all implementors of it have to pay Microsoft! Can you imagine AOL, Opera, Macromedia etc all having to pay money to their primary competitor just to be allowed to compete?
I don't know many links, but I can explain why it was so difficult.
/usr/doc.
/usr/share and /usr/doc were on different partitions). Plus, they didn't want to force users to check two different locations for documentation (is it in /usr/doc? No, then it must be in /usr/share/doc). They also didn't want to break experienced users' expectations that documentation could be found in /usr/doc. Oh, and they didn't want to break if old packages (that used /usr/doc) were installed on new systems with /usr/share/doc.
/usr/doc /usr/share/doc; ln -s /usr/share/doc /usr/doc".
/usr/share/doc, and then add a symlink in /usr/doc to the new directory. Since these are several hundred maintainers who all have their own jobs and lives and priorities and some of whom have disappeared entirely since originally creating the package, this process took over a year. It was just about completed in time for the upcoming "woody" release. In fact, this page indicates that there are still 3 packages that haven't had this transition completed yet.
/usr/doc which will involve updating Policy again and then changing every one of those 3000 packages once again.
Debian consists of (at the last count that I'm aware of) 3000 packages maintained by several hundred distinct maintainers. Every one of those packages, per Debian Policy, had previously put their documentation in
Debian also has a policy that upgrades from one version of the distribution to another, including partial upgrades of just a few packages, should not result in a broken system, regardless of how unusual the system's setup had been (one example of an unusual setup would be if
These constraints ruled out all the obvious solutions, including "mv
The final solution was to require that every one of the maintainers of those 3000 packages modify their packages to put the documentation in
This page is the part of Debian Policy that indicates what must be done for every package.
All of that, and then in time for the next release of Debian, they'll be removing the symlink farm from
Nobody else cares? Excuse me?
/usr/share/doc) working towards LSB compliance. As I understand it they're still a way off, but they've been committed to it forever.
Debian has gone through hell (ask any debian developer about
I'd bet money that debian has a larger market share than any of the UnitedLinux companies.
What I'm getting at is that, given /.'s propensity to post 3 year old "news" items as if they were current, is there any evidence that anything new has happened in this regard at all? Has the contest even happened since 1998?
I'm not saying that it hasn't, but I couldn't find any evidence of it at the links we were given. Hence my question.
To put it another way:
Where's the links to the timely information regarding this news item?
That's dated 1997 - are you sure it's current?
None of the links in the story provide any useful information at all, as far as I can see. The first is for a "Mileage marathon society" which doesn't appear to have any information about a particular recent contest. The second is for the location at which the event was held; the third links to a blank page inside Shell with some plugin that doesn't work in my Mozilla. Searching Shell for "Mileage Marathon" produces lots of results in other languages and from 1998-99, but nothing topical.
/. as a source of unbiased and accurate information (cough) I'm interested in a few more details...
Does anyone have any actual information about this contest? Much as I trust
that's as much digital (pardon my analog-ies)
Classic - although probably unintentional...
I've heard that in the UK it's possible to walk into any consumer electronics store and ask for the DVD player you buy to be modded to play all regions, and they'll do it for a nominal charge. However, unfortunately, I don't live in the UK, but in the USA - and I'd like to watch international DVDs (as a British ex-pat, my interest lies more in classic UK television than in Anime, but I figure Anime fans face the same problem).
/. readers know whether there's any way to get existing cheap crappy players like mine modded to be region-free, or whether I'll need to buy a new one - and if the latter, where I can get region-free DVD players at a good price?
I have a regular old cheap commodity DVD player from GE. Any
And if I'm rambling incoherently, it's because of staying up all night only to watch England lose. Bah.
Some humor to cheer you up
I never understood this. Why do people come up with such complicated, convoluted solutions to getting rid of clippy, instead of just, like, not installing it? As in, go to "custom install" and like, uncheck the box?
Better yet, so long as you're running win2k or better on the boxes in question, rdesktop.
-- What do you need?
;)
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Man, I want to see that Matrix adaptation...
A gnu-wielding RMS in dark glasses uses superhuman martial arts in his attempts to overturn the evils of proprietary software, emerging victorious in the end by installing Emacs on one of the Agents, and thereby crippling them with a massive outbreak of the "viral" GPL.
Meanwhile the beautiful female agent has fallen madly in love with hi... nah, let's not stretch reality too far
Stuart.
Huh. I've had antialiasing in mozilla since about 0.9.9... I don't know exactly how it was turned on because I use the debian packages, but those packages give you a nice little option at install time of whether to enable antialiased fonts.
Admittedly I needed a bit of hackery to set the font in the UI, because by default the UI font uses a non-antialiased font (it picks up the GTK setting and there's no GUI to change that). But you can even override that easily by putting the following in a file called userChrome.css in your profile directory:
dialog, window, menu, menuitem {font-family: sans-serif !important}
That last remaining issue will go away when the port to GTK2 is completed because GTK2 will allow an antialiased font to be the default. Alternatively, you *might* be able to pick a truetype font as your default GTK font and have it work now, but I haven't tried that so I'm not sure.
Stuart.
If you ever get the opportunity, try asking for a show of hands at a computer convention of any kind, for all the people who work writing off-the-shelf software. Last I heard, the number was typically well below 20%.
The rest work in a variety of areas, ranging from custom embedded systems (where the license of your code matters not one iota because the code can't be changed once the device is manufactured, and it's only useful to the one device anyway) to custom software such as web application development or "enterprise" business logic (where the license of the code matters not one iota because it's never released, and only useful to the one company anyway).
So at worst, if all off-the-shelf software were eliminated, the software industry would shrink by 20%.
More likely, companies with large software requirements (like needing 100,000 installations of an office suite) will channel some of the money they're not spending on licenses and employ some programmers to answer the question of "where do we get bugfixes from if there's no company to turn to?". Once you reach a certain size, employing a few full-time programmers is actually cheaper than paying the ludicrous license costs of OTS software these days. Or they could pay a company like Red Hat or IBM or Sun for "support" (ie, to employ some programmers to prioritize this set of bugs/features over all others).
You've said that "100% open source isn't truely viable" but not backed it up in any way. David Skoll at least backed his point of view up by pointing to great software produced entirely without business models being in the picture. Who is more credible, the one who makes a (admittedly lightweight) argument to back up his point of view, or the one who simply calls the other a zealot with no argument?
It's hard to argue against someone calling for "balance". But sometimes "balance" simply isn't necessary or desirable. Just ask the Catholic Church what kind of reception their "balanced" approach to sex abuse is getting. Sure, that's a reductio-ad-absurdum. But since your whole argument seems to be "balance is necessary!", it suffices to point out a single counterexample...
Stuart.