Please keep in mind while reading the article that Intel was (and may still be) an investor in CNet. They may be hoping for a self-fulfillng prophecy with respect to Transmeta. Hopefully this is not the case and the article is fairly reported (I don't know enough about Transmeta to make that determination myself) - just be congnisant of the source.
I had an idea once to do dual licensing along the lines of what Sleepycat is doing. My biggest concern was what to do with patches to people submit to the open source licensed version. I wouldn't own the rights to the patch, so I wouldn't be able to redistribute it with the proprietary license. I would need to get their permission to dually license the patch as well. My thoughts on this were, why not pay them for ownership rights to the patch? Maybe $20 for a simple bug fix or much higher for substantial new features. Just a thought - maybe this would encourage outside improvement.
Um, that's the same article, seeing how CNet owns ZDNet.
Oops, I wouldn't have posted that had I known. When did CNet buy ZDNet? I guess my age is showing through - CNet and ZDNet were opposites in my mind until today because I remembered ZDNet running stories obviously biased towards MS while CNet was a bit more balanced. I'm glad CNet won out.
Make sure you include a "Do you believe you have a competent IT staff?" y/n option in there. If they anser no, add at least 1,000 bucks / Linux install, cause thats what they'll end up spending on some consultant gettin it all running smoothly doing exactly what they want
I must say that getting the OS to do "exactly what they want" would be much easier with Linux for the simple fact that Linux is much more customizable than Windows. I've customized my Linux machine to do exactly what I want and the same customizations in Windows would have taken much, much longer if they are even possible at all. As for running "smoothly", that's largely a matter of opinion, but I would argue that Windows is not something that even competent sysadmins can keep running smoothly when smoothly includes not crashing. Yes, XP might help to mitigate this seeing as how it is the first consumer version of Windows not built on top of the shakey foundation of DOS, but it is still a black box and if something goes wrong you simply can't fix it yourself and essentially have no real recourse unless you are a very big Microsoft customer.
Anyway, I was thinking more of targetting home users who in all liklihood don't have an IT staff. Yes, there is definitely a learning curve associated with Linux, but I think that a lot of home users will be willing to invest their time if it means they save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in software. The other thing that makes Linux so compelling is that once they have invested their time in learning it, future upgrades are truly free - there is no new learning curve to master and there are no new licensing fees sent off to Redmond.
I've been thinking awhile about making an interactive price comparison web page for my website that would allow users to see how much they could save by switching from Windows to Linux. This is just a formative idea at the moment - if people have suggestions for this, please email me. Right now I'm thinking of something along the lines of a set of "wizard" pages that ask the user a series of questions about what software they want to run (and what hardware they have available) and keeps a running tally of the savings they would get with Linux over Windows.
However, no such person appears in the LCS directory--and "Support Staff" is listed for some of the people there.
Also noteworthy is that running "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" turns up nothing (you can look up a person's info by fingering their last name at mit.edu). MIT's finger database is usually very reliable and thorough.
Mozilla is more cross platform than Gnome or KDE (i.e., it runs on Windows at least as well as Linux, from what I've seen). If OEone wants to target Windows users, then using XPCOM and the other Mozilla technologies make more sense than Gnome or KDE. Remember, they're not using the Mozilla browser, but rather the cross platform toolkit that the browser also happens to be built on top of.
I'd argue to never, ever do this. Why change your good browser to report that it's a bad browser?
I agree with this statement, but that's not what the author was suggesting. He was suggesting that you report it as the same browser, just on a different operating system. Mozilla on Linux is definitely not a "bad browser" and it's functionally equivalent to its Windows counterpart, so changing your Mozilla on Windows to say that it is Mozilla on Linux shouldn't be as big of a deal as masquerading as something like Netscape 4.x.
In practice, this may still cause problems with other braindead sites which will see your browser as Mozilla on Linux and not let you in. A great way to get around this would be to add a way to easily switch user-agent strings to this awesome little prefs toolbar. Then you could surf with the correct user-agent most of the time and when you run into an annoying site like MSN that only works with certain browsers, you could easily switch to a different user-agent string just while you're looking at that site. The toolbar already lets you very easily turn on/off Javascript, Java, Pop-Ups, Onload Popups (with a slight modification that I wrote recently), and other things that usually require a browser restart or a lengthy trip through the preferences menu. User-agent masquerading would be a great addition to the toolbar (I'd do it myself if I actually wanted to look at MSN).
The same thing actually happened with the CDA (Communications Decency Act). It was refreshing to see Microsoft on the side of good for once. Another case that comes to mind that Slashdot and Microsoft agreed on was the case where Ticketmaster sued Microsoft for linking to the Ticketmaster site (whatever happened to that case anyway?). It just goes to show that Microsoft isn't 100% pure evil (probably closer to 99.44%).
On another note, Tivo just released a software update for its stand alone recievers. It allows users to store more content on their boxes by using VBR. Cool stuff.
Could somebody out there who has already received this upgrade post a comment on how well this works? I found the following at TiVo's website, but it was very scant on details:
I have one of the original 14 hour TiVos, so anything that will give me more recording time will be greatly appreciated. I wouldn't mind buying a new box if they ever end up making an ethernet version, but until then I will continue contemplating adding a second hard drive and I will hope that the VBR recording will substantially help once I get the update.
For one thing, it means that TiVo is likely to stay in business for quite sometime. A TiVo recorder would be lot less useful if there no company providing the update service that TiVo provides. The updates give you schedule listings and software upgrades. Without the update service, a TiVo recorder is only slightly more useful than a VCR - with the update service a TiVo recorder becomes indespensible to most people who have used one.
Junkbusters has an excellent page on stopping telemarketters. Before I read the Junkbusters script I always got annoyed at how telemarketters would keep pitching their product to me after I had politely said no and the only way I could get them to stop was to be less polite and just hang up on them. After reading the Junkbusters site and trying their script I discovered that the magic words "Can you please put this number on your do-not-call list?" almost always gets the telemarketter to immediately stop pitching to you (and it has the nice side effect that some might actually put you on their do-not-call list at some point). They are legally required to maintain a do-not-call list, so they pretty much have to stop bothering you when you ask - check out the Junkbuster site for more info.
When I first looked at the title I mis-read "niche" and thought somebody had created a "Nietzsche" operating system. Now that would be a niche OS. What would such an OS do? I supposed it could complain about Jesux users.
I don't see how the Matrix lends itself at all to a sequel.
Actually, I remember reading that the Wachowski brothers said that the main point of the first Matrix was to set the stage for sequels. They wanted to have characters that possessed superpowers in a believable way (and the first Matrix did indeed set the stage for this). I'm taking it as a good omen for the sequels that even the bridge (the original Matrix) that they wrote to their central plot was so exceptionally good.
What you're really missing is a business model. AOL's model is to give away the bisks and sell the connection.
Maybe that is the business model. What if one of AOL's largest competitors, like Earthlink, started carpet bombing the US with their own CDs? Most people are at the point where they just ignore free ISP CDs, but what if a free CD set itself apart by also offering free software whose equivalent would cost over $1,000? Earthlink could say "get the equivalent of $1,000 in software free with this CD with no catch - and by the way, if you also want free notifications when new versions of this free software comes out, sign up for Earthlink."
This could be much bigger, actually... Why wouldn't any company that has a Windows service/app to sell entice people to try out their stuff by bundling it on a CD with a lot of great free software? A lot of people would actually want to get the CD in order to get the software, and the company that put it together then has their foot in the door to sell their own stuff. Once one company does it, it will only be a matter of time before every other company does it in order to keep up. This could be huge - somebody should start this snowball rolling.
Autoskip with no commericals and Quickskip with 30 seconds! I was going to pick up a tivo, but noticed they removed these features. Guess maybe I need to think about a Replay.
These were not removed - TiVo never had these features (not officially anyway - I think there may have been a hack that let you get the Quickskip functionality, but it was never officially part of the product). TiVo has kept the TV networks in mind from the start, which makes long term sense because without the networks to provide content a TiVo isn't very useful. A lot of networks have actually invested in TiVo as well, probably so that they have a voice in things when features like Autoskip or Quickskip are under consideration.
Personally, I don't think that the five seconds it takes to fast forward through commercials is such a big deal, but I could be understimating how useful Autoskip and Quickskip would be. I know I grossly understimated how useful the whole TiVo service would be when I first got it.
Dumdeedum... downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4....
Added "user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);" to prefs.js.... restart...
Better yet, check out
this prefs toolbar. It rocks! It lets you disable/enable pop-ups and many other things from a nice little toolbar rather than hand editing a file and (more importantly, in my opinion) without having to restart Mozilla any time you want to temporarily enable pop-ups. It does disable all calls window.open() which blocks pop-ups good and bad alike, but this is because it was written before the disable_open_during_load feature that you mentioned was added to Mozilla and it's pretty easy to change it to use the newer disable_open_during_load feature anyway (I actually submitted a patch to do this a few minutes ago). It's nice to be able to temporarily enable pop-ups when you come across a site where they are used for more than just ads.
The really sad part is that people think that you can write software after you "learn" a language.
On the flip side of the coin are the people who think that you are unqualified for a particular project because you haven't learned a particular language or flavor-of-the-day API. As you did an excellent job of pointing out, software engineering skills are by far the most important factor that determine the quality of a developer's work and these skills are largely language and API independent. This (among other reasons) is why MIT teaches (or used to teach anyway) their computer science courses with obscure languages like CLU and SCHEME - because it is the engineering principals that matter and not the language.
So to the original poster who chided the company for hiring somebody who didn't know Perl to write Perl, that may have actually been a very good decision if the guy had substantial software engineering skills. It takes a few days to pick up a new programming language, but years to develop good software engineering skills.
actually, they are slightly defaced, if you look at the html source of the pages that have been infected, the virus has added a window.open() to the end of the page.
Ah, that explains it. The first thing I did when I downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4 a few days ago was to activate the new pop-up blocking feature (a very nice feature, by the way). I was looking for the defacement on the page itself and didn't happen to think that it might be in a pop-up that Mozilla was kind enough to block for me.
I checked one of the IPs and it said 'Fuck USA Government, Fuck PoisonBOx' and opened a second window with what looked like a MIME buffer overflow attempt.
I tried looking at (port 80 of) 4 or 5 of the infected machines that showed up in my logs and none of them had this message. I only got through to two of the web servers, but they didn't appear to be defaced at all. Perhaps there are different strains of this worm and a more recent mutation carries the virus that the other poster in this thread mentioned.
I know about Kaffe, but I just checked www.kaffe.org and it hasn't been updated for over a year. Why has it died?
Perhaps it has something to do with Microsoft's "investment" two years ago in the company that made Kaffe. That certainly wouldn't be the first time that a company with non-Windows products mysteriously stagnated after a cash infusion by Microsoft.
Notice that no mention is made of Microsoft's "Black Ops" division (often referred to as "R&D"), whose current research documents include "Mind Control using pre-packaged Windows Sound Schemes" and "The Manchurian Candidate and You: What it All Means."
Disclaimer for those who don't get the above article: just to be entirely clear so as to distinguish my usual complaints about Microsoft from the above joke, the linked article above is a joke and is not a real complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is one step ahead of you there. Check out this article on Microsoft's Army.
Please keep in mind while reading the article that Intel was (and may still be) an investor in CNet. They may be hoping for a self-fulfillng prophecy with respect to Transmeta. Hopefully this is not the case and the article is fairly reported (I don't know enough about Transmeta to make that determination myself) - just be congnisant of the source.
I had an idea once to do dual licensing along the lines of what Sleepycat is doing. My biggest concern was what to do with patches to people submit to the open source licensed version. I wouldn't own the rights to the patch, so I wouldn't be able to redistribute it with the proprietary license. I would need to get their permission to dually license the patch as well. My thoughts on this were, why not pay them for ownership rights to the patch? Maybe $20 for a simple bug fix or much higher for substantial new features. Just a thought - maybe this would encourage outside improvement.
I know - my comment was an aside on showing others how to save money as well. Sorry for not making that clear before.
Oops, I wouldn't have posted that had I known. When did CNet buy ZDNet? I guess my age is showing through - CNet and ZDNet were opposites in my mind until today because I remembered ZDNet running stories obviously biased towards MS while CNet was a bit more balanced. I'm glad CNet won out.
I must say that getting the OS to do "exactly what they want" would be much easier with Linux for the simple fact that Linux is much more customizable than Windows. I've customized my Linux machine to do exactly what I want and the same customizations in Windows would have taken much, much longer if they are even possible at all. As for running "smoothly", that's largely a matter of opinion, but I would argue that Windows is not something that even competent sysadmins can keep running smoothly when smoothly includes not crashing. Yes, XP might help to mitigate this seeing as how it is the first consumer version of Windows not built on top of the shakey foundation of DOS, but it is still a black box and if something goes wrong you simply can't fix it yourself and essentially have no real recourse unless you are a very big Microsoft customer.
Anyway, I was thinking more of targetting home users who in all liklihood don't have an IT staff. Yes, there is definitely a learning curve associated with Linux, but I think that a lot of home users will be willing to invest their time if it means they save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in software. The other thing that makes Linux so compelling is that once they have invested their time in learning it, future upgrades are truly free - there is no new learning curve to master and there are no new licensing fees sent off to Redmond.
I've been thinking awhile about making an interactive price comparison web page for my website that would allow users to see how much they could save by switching from Windows to Linux. This is just a formative idea at the moment - if people have suggestions for this, please email me. Right now I'm thinking of something along the lines of a set of "wizard" pages that ask the user a series of questions about what software they want to run (and what hardware they have available) and keeps a running tally of the savings they would get with Linux over Windows.
Also noteworthy is that running "finger dunkirk@mit.edu" turns up nothing (you can look up a person's info by fingering their last name at mit.edu). MIT's finger database is usually very reliable and thorough.
Mozilla is more cross platform than Gnome or KDE (i.e., it runs on Windows at least as well as Linux, from what I've seen). If OEone wants to target Windows users, then using XPCOM and the other Mozilla technologies make more sense than Gnome or KDE. Remember, they're not using the Mozilla browser, but rather the cross platform toolkit that the browser also happens to be built on top of.
I agree with this statement, but that's not what the author was suggesting. He was suggesting that you report it as the same browser, just on a different operating system. Mozilla on Linux is definitely not a "bad browser" and it's functionally equivalent to its Windows counterpart, so changing your Mozilla on Windows to say that it is Mozilla on Linux shouldn't be as big of a deal as masquerading as something like Netscape 4.x.
In practice, this may still cause problems with other braindead sites which will see your browser as Mozilla on Linux and not let you in. A great way to get around this would be to add a way to easily switch user-agent strings to this awesome little prefs toolbar. Then you could surf with the correct user-agent most of the time and when you run into an annoying site like MSN that only works with certain browsers, you could easily switch to a different user-agent string just while you're looking at that site. The toolbar already lets you very easily turn on/off Javascript, Java, Pop-Ups, Onload Popups (with a slight modification that I wrote recently), and other things that usually require a browser restart or a lengthy trip through the preferences menu. User-agent masquerading would be a great addition to the toolbar (I'd do it myself if I actually wanted to look at MSN).
The same thing actually happened with the CDA (Communications Decency Act). It was refreshing to see Microsoft on the side of good for once. Another case that comes to mind that Slashdot and Microsoft agreed on was the case where Ticketmaster sued Microsoft for linking to the Ticketmaster site (whatever happened to that case anyway?). It just goes to show that Microsoft isn't 100% pure evil (probably closer to 99.44%).
Could somebody out there who has already received this upgrade post a comment on how well this works? I found the following at TiVo's website, but it was very scant on details:
I have one of the original 14 hour TiVos, so anything that will give me more recording time will be greatly appreciated. I wouldn't mind buying a new box if they ever end up making an ethernet version, but until then I will continue contemplating adding a second hard drive and I will hope that the VBR recording will substantially help once I get the update.For one thing, it means that TiVo is likely to stay in business for quite sometime. A TiVo recorder would be lot less useful if there no company providing the update service that TiVo provides. The updates give you schedule listings and software upgrades. Without the update service, a TiVo recorder is only slightly more useful than a VCR - with the update service a TiVo recorder becomes indespensible to most people who have used one.
Junkbusters has an excellent page on stopping telemarketters. Before I read the Junkbusters script I always got annoyed at how telemarketters would keep pitching their product to me after I had politely said no and the only way I could get them to stop was to be less polite and just hang up on them. After reading the Junkbusters site and trying their script I discovered that the magic words "Can you please put this number on your do-not-call list?" almost always gets the telemarketter to immediately stop pitching to you (and it has the nice side effect that some might actually put you on their do-not-call list at some point). They are legally required to maintain a do-not-call list, so they pretty much have to stop bothering you when you ask - check out the Junkbuster site for more info.
No, that would be Scientology.
When I first looked at the title I mis-read "niche" and thought somebody had created a "Nietzsche" operating system. Now that would be a niche OS. What would such an OS do? I supposed it could complain about Jesux users.
Actually, I remember reading that the Wachowski brothers said that the main point of the first Matrix was to set the stage for sequels. They wanted to have characters that possessed superpowers in a believable way (and the first Matrix did indeed set the stage for this). I'm taking it as a good omen for the sequels that even the bridge (the original Matrix) that they wrote to their central plot was so exceptionally good.
Maybe that is the business model. What if one of AOL's largest competitors, like Earthlink, started carpet bombing the US with their own CDs? Most people are at the point where they just ignore free ISP CDs, but what if a free CD set itself apart by also offering free software whose equivalent would cost over $1,000? Earthlink could say "get the equivalent of $1,000 in software free with this CD with no catch - and by the way, if you also want free notifications when new versions of this free software comes out, sign up for Earthlink."
This could be much bigger, actually... Why wouldn't any company that has a Windows service/app to sell entice people to try out their stuff by bundling it on a CD with a lot of great free software? A lot of people would actually want to get the CD in order to get the software, and the company that put it together then has their foot in the door to sell their own stuff. Once one company does it, it will only be a matter of time before every other company does it in order to keep up. This could be huge - somebody should start this snowball rolling.
These were not removed - TiVo never had these features (not officially anyway - I think there may have been a hack that let you get the Quickskip functionality, but it was never officially part of the product). TiVo has kept the TV networks in mind from the start, which makes long term sense because without the networks to provide content a TiVo isn't very useful. A lot of networks have actually invested in TiVo as well, probably so that they have a voice in things when features like Autoskip or Quickskip are under consideration.
Personally, I don't think that the five seconds it takes to fast forward through commercials is such a big deal, but I could be understimating how useful Autoskip and Quickskip would be. I know I grossly understimated how useful the whole TiVo service would be when I first got it.
Better yet, check out this prefs toolbar. It rocks! It lets you disable/enable pop-ups and many other things from a nice little toolbar rather than hand editing a file and (more importantly, in my opinion) without having to restart Mozilla any time you want to temporarily enable pop-ups. It does disable all calls window.open() which blocks pop-ups good and bad alike, but this is because it was written before the disable_open_during_load feature that you mentioned was added to Mozilla and it's pretty easy to change it to use the newer disable_open_during_load feature anyway (I actually submitted a patch to do this a few minutes ago). It's nice to be able to temporarily enable pop-ups when you come across a site where they are used for more than just ads.
On the flip side of the coin are the people who think that you are unqualified for a particular project because you haven't learned a particular language or flavor-of-the-day API. As you did an excellent job of pointing out, software engineering skills are by far the most important factor that determine the quality of a developer's work and these skills are largely language and API independent. This (among other reasons) is why MIT teaches (or used to teach anyway) their computer science courses with obscure languages like CLU and SCHEME - because it is the engineering principals that matter and not the language.
So to the original poster who chided the company for hiring somebody who didn't know Perl to write Perl, that may have actually been a very good decision if the guy had substantial software engineering skills. It takes a few days to pick up a new programming language, but years to develop good software engineering skills.
Ah, that explains it. The first thing I did when I downloaded Mozilla 0.9.4 a few days ago was to activate the new pop-up blocking feature (a very nice feature, by the way). I was looking for the defacement on the page itself and didn't happen to think that it might be in a pop-up that Mozilla was kind enough to block for me.
I tried looking at (port 80 of) 4 or 5 of the infected machines that showed up in my logs and none of them had this message. I only got through to two of the web servers, but they didn't appear to be defaced at all. Perhaps there are different strains of this worm and a more recent mutation carries the virus that the other poster in this thread mentioned.
Perhaps it has something to do with Microsoft's "investment" two years ago in the company that made Kaffe. That certainly wouldn't be the first time that a company with non-Windows products mysteriously stagnated after a cash infusion by Microsoft.
You forgot about their black ops attempts to pay for ownership of intelligent children with stock options.
Disclaimer for those who don't get the above article: just to be entirely clear so as to distinguish my usual complaints about Microsoft from the above joke, the linked article above is a joke and is not a real complaint.