Well, speaking as an author, the primary thing you want to avoid is the very real threat that some bozo will attempt to "improve" your writing, and totally screw it up. This can be something as simple as using poor grammar and bad spelling, or something as nasty as being factually wrong on something Really Important.
I had experience with this a long, long time ago. I published a manual for a piece of software. I didn't put any form of copyright on it (hey, I was innocent back then:). Some people took the document and modified it to fit their own hacked versions of the software (which was good, although I was a bit peeved that they didn't talk to me/send me the revisions). However, from then on, I got hassled by people about this or that being wrong in the manual, or got questions about how to use this or that local feature. None of which I could do anything about, since I didn't know about the revisions, and had no way of contacting whoever did.
Now that's I'm a professional writer, I'd be very reluctant to put anything out there that I'd allow to be modified without a license like this. The last thing I need is for a potential employer to go take a look at an altered version of the document, notice the crap that someone dumped into it, and attribute it to me.
Even then, I'd still be a bit leery of letting others hack my documents. I suppose that people who release code under the GPL might feel the same thing, though. They're letting "their baby" go out into the world to back used and abused by others. I haven't really seen people losing control of their creations, though, so probably my fears are overstated. I've been thinking of releasing some documents of mine someday. Perhaps I will use the Gnu license to do that. If nothing else, it saves me from having to spell out what you can and can't do with the document myself.
Boeing junks two pieces of perfectly good equipment, and NASA (and by extension you and I (assuming you're a US citizen, like me (sorry to nest parentheses))) has to foot the bill!? So Boeing can MAKE MONEY off of tossing stuff out?
I can see it now "Uh... hi, remember that space shuttle, I think it was called Atlantis? Well, funny thing, it got hauled away as garbage and we can't find it... so, will you be paying for a new one by check, or just expensing it?"
Damn, why can I ever get involved in contracts where the other guy pays for our stupidity. Oh wait, that's what for-pay tech support is for...
I don't think Certain Large Software Companies would be able to get away with adding "arbitrary transactions" to bank accounts... after all, you still have other ways to determine what's going on in your account. Assuming you mean that a penny or two of each transaction might be siphoned off to, say, a certain Very Wealthy Man's bank account (or, more likely, the bank account of some underling who just happened to write the code that carries out the transactions), I doubt that it would escape the notice of everyone using the software. Pennies do eventually add up to a small discrepancy, and that would be hard to hide in a home user's checking account. (I've heard f such scemes working in multi-billion dollar companies, but that's another kettle of fish.)
Now, if you want to be paranoid, think about the possibility of some Large Software Company's product maybe, say, leaking details of your bank transactions to their own server. Detailed banking histories of millions of people would probably be more lucrative for some company than penny-ante larceny.
Yeah, this is the killer feature as far as I am concerned. I never used to keep my checkbook balanced before, but with Quicken able to nab my transaction info right from the bank itself, I was in nirvana. For once, I knew exactly how much money I had!
For some reason, right after the 1st of January, this feature died on my in Quicken 98 (apparently, an error on the bank's side... I haven't tried calling them yet on it. I dread trying to explain an error message to some phone-based bank teller...).
I noticed, however, that my bank does offer web-based banking, with the ability to download transactions in a.QIF file... which means that maybe I could use GNUCash and import the.QIF to reconcile my bank balance... Then I could stop running Quicken under VMWare:)
I think, way back, I took a look at GNUCash right after the two preceding projects merged, and they did say something about online banking. Thing is, I'd figure that the protocols used in online banking are not a very open standard. It's something MS Money and Quicken can do, because they are Big Reputable Software Firms, and not a buncha guys writing software for the common good (in the eyes of bankers, anyhow).
Hm. I winder. Do banks use a small number of web-banking software, or does each roll their own? Seems to me that if it's the former, GNUCash could grab banking data similar to the way some scripts can rip stories out of/. and other web sites. It would just have to authenticate you in oreder to access the relevant pages.
No... it's not, to my knowledge. True, I believe it has some sort of POSIX compatibility, and it comes with loads of tools from UNIX (such as gcc, BASH, etc.) but under the hood, where it counts, it's not UNIX.
The most obvious sign of this is that BeOS (up to 4.5, at least) is single user.
Which just goes to show, if you're going to make a blanket statement, you'd best be nigh omniscient about what you're talking about.
For that matter, is QNX based on UNIX? It may not be (you might not consider it a consumer OS, however). We also have the Palm OS, which is not UNIX based...
Actually, I think the model number was Palm 1000. I've upgraded mine from 128k to 512k, then to 1MB, then to 2MB w/infrared. All along, I've been just amazed that this little Palm was keeping up with the times. Especially in these days of throw-away, non-upgradeable computers.
I am tempted to go out and at least look at the IIIc. A nice black on white screen would be nice, and since I don't have backlighting with my current model, that would also be a bonus. Sadly, I've found that I'm using my Palm less these days.... fewer meetings to keep track of in my new company, and I'm bad about entering my todo list into the thing. Ah well.
And, I guess having an upgraded Pilot 1000 shows that I'm an early adopter, and not one of those Johnny-come-lately Palm V owners;)
Wait! Are you telling me Capt'n Crunch is *not* geeky? Corn Puffs is not geeky? Lucky Charms is not geeky?
Oh man, I remember my college days. The only thing I could do in the late afternoon after rolling out of bed was to eat a bowl of one of the abovementioned cereals.
Granted, Total is very non-geek. But hey... what could be more geeky than a quick to prepare sugar-laden breakfast food?
a friend needed help doing a mail-merge on his Mac... Holy-shit did I get my butt kicked by supposedly the easiest OS to use in the world
Um... OK, you had a problem doing a certain action in a specific end-user application.
QED the OS sucks.
You know, I'm sorta having trouble following that logic. I could draw that conclusion about any operating system, given a significantly shitty application. It's like calling Linux an unstable operating system becuase one app crashes over and over. Just because the OS claims to be friendly, it doesn't ensure that every application on it is likewise.
1) They heavily relied on usability testing to gauge how well the target audience would use the product. Aside from the research done by Englebart etc. al. at Xeros, I suspect this is the first real usability sone on the computer industry. I find it hard to believe that a lot of the early PC stuff was usability tested at all.
2) Their tests showed what people have claimed all along... that multi-button mice are more productive than single button mice. But, since single-button mice made the initial learning experience for the naive user easier (no guessing as to which button to click) that's what the Lisa, and eventully the Mac used. Twenty years later, the Mac platform still defaults to a single button mouse... all so that computer virgins won't become confused.
What probably made the Lisa fail was it was too ambitous. In 1980, trying to create a high-power GUI desktop machine with a hard drive and all the trappings was simply too much to expect. Compare the specs to the first Mac that was rolled out in 84. No hard drive and a paultry amount of memory.
The thing cost an arm-and-a-leg, and simply didn't make financial sense. Who wants to shell out big bucks that makes some secretary more productive? Not the first or last time that a company has decided to address a market that simply didn't exist (yet).
that if you stay up long enough, your brain will just explode from all that activity? (it would if this were a Hollywood movie, I bet.)
What a mess.
(on the serious side, do we really know what sleep is for, anyhow? Perhaps this is similar to a hard drive thrashing when the filesystem has gotten too fragmented. More overhead required to the do same thing...)
In addition, Mandrake has not shown signs of breaking the GPL by not distributing source. Quite the opposite... my boxed Mandrake 6.0 came with two source CDs. Others have chronicled in the past that LinuxOne has seemed unwilling to part with their source.
In addtion, Mandrake has not misrepresented itself. They have openly admitted what they do, and have not tried to throw up smokescreens of having propriatary additions to Linux. In the past, LinuxOne has claimed that this Mac thing was not based on any existing Linux software, which seems to be false.
I use Mandrake. I like it. I have no problem with what they are doing. I do have major questions about LinuxOne however. They need to adhere to the GPL, and come clean about what they are doing.
One of the more amusing aspects of this is that Quattro, which is the spreadsheet portion of the Corel Wordperfect Suite, was originally a Borland product, back when they made office applications. I was acutaslly a big fan of Borland's apps, back in the DOS days. They had a kick-butt wordprocessor called Sprint that had a full-out EMACS emulation mode, and a very powerful macro language. It died, unlike Quattro,which was spun off to some other company (not sure if it was Corel directly).
Hmm... I think I may still have a copy of Borland's DOS version of Quattro... And, of course, Turbo-C totally rocked my world back in the day.
Sad how the mighty have fallen, but maybe they'll do better in the Linux market.
I personally don't care if www.somee-commersite.com figures out that customer #23423423453 clicked on ad A to get to their site and then proceeded to buy product B. I also don't care if some web site can see the path that vistitor #98323 took through their site.
What I do want to avoid, and what DoubleClick has done, is give the ability for an online retailer to know that John Doe, 24 Main St., WallaWalla WA, (876)555-1234, 31 years of age, white male, Credit card # 123-232-232-123 exp. 4/01(good credit history), recently bought prozac from some online pharmacy, has been browsing some of your competitor's site, looking at high-priced audio components.
You can imagine the nightmare browsing the web will become when you can no longer simply browse an online store without the possibility that the online retailer will take that as their cue to have some telemarketing droid call you up and annoy you, or to deluge you with e-mail or junk mail.
Having an exact record of what you've done online, with no way to see that record or correct mistakes is he threat here. What if, for example, a service company can access your profile and decide whether they want you as a customer auomatically? They can raise or lower their prices based on how desireable a customer you are. All automatically, without you knowing.
Anyhow, this particular case isn;t an issue for me, since I've already blocked out DoubleClick.
I think what the person meant was "use Perl instead of VBA as a scripting language for an application." I.e. embed Perl instead of embedding a VBAish language.
I personally think this is a BAD idea. Don't get me wrong... I like Perl, and I use it a lot. But I use it because I already know the UNIXisms that are buried in Perl. Expecting a newbie who wants to automate a few things in a document or spreadsheet to master the quirks of Perl is asking a bit much.
A scripting language should be fairly easy for a novice to pick up. At least in theory, VBA is a good candidate for this. The syntax, compared to Perl, C, etc. is much simpler. Less of an overall learning curve.
The actual implementation of VBA is, however, really lame. The State of the GNOME address pointed out one of the major failings: no security. Hence we get Melissa and other worms. Having worked with VBA, I've come across many bugs and petty limitations that get in the way of what I want to do. The core language isn't that bad, but the interface to applications (such as Word) really sucks in places.
A previous author in this thread said that GNUmeric should be compatible with VBA. I'm not sure that this is the goal of GNOME's BASIC project... for one thing, you do not want VBA's (non-existent) security architecture anywhere near one of your applications. Another is that you don't want to re-create all of the laces that VBA falls flat. They may get a system that is somewhat compatible (and maybe could use macros in an Excel spreadsheet with some sort of translation mechanism) but trying to recreate VBA enough for macros is just a waste of time, compared to the amount of time you'd put into creating a robust and useful scripting language.
Perhaps the ideal way to handle this would be to make a plugin system for scripting languages, so you can bang out a macro in whatever language you like. Perl, Python, LISP, Tcl, and this VBA-ish language could all live happily within the GNOME desktop apps. If you know a scripting language already, you can just wade right in. If not, then the VBAish thing should be easy to pick up, and its development tools would be built right into the environment.
I also wonder how many people actually use scripting languages in applications, such as wordprocessors. I've done a fair amount of it, because I know what macros can do for you. Where I used to work, I found a bunch of cases where people were doing tedious, repetative things that a macro could handle... they just didn't think that there was a better way...
Obviously not reading the full service contract...
on
AOL's Upgrade of Death
·
· Score: 1
Buried deep in the AOL service contract, subsection 20:10,
1) I AM THE LORD THY ISP. THOU SHALT HAVE NO FALSE ISPS BEFORE ME.
Seems pretty clear to me...
May be a play for developers?
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 3
After reading the news release and articles over at some Be websites I'm still a bit nebulous about the nature of this. Be's president had talked about a sort of "viral form" of Be, but it sounded more like a demo.
Overall, this still has the flavor of a demo. I mean, it is a parasitic OS... it can't install to its own partition, and you need another OS to run it. I bought Be 4.5, and I'd think about upgrading... I don't want to boot Windows in order to boot Be.
What is interesting is that they are including the development tools for Be in this free version. I wonder if they are trying to get Be out to more developers, both as an ad for their platform, and as a way of getting more developers to pitch in. With many companies using things like VMware to do cross-platform development, this may be Be's way of joining in. They might hope developers will say "Heck, we'll download it for free, and see if we can get our software to work on it."
Remember this story from last September where SCO was bashing Linux? To quote:
Linux at this moment can be considered more a play thing for IT students rather than a serious operating system in which to place the functioning, security and future of a business.
Sure... uh... just send us your name, credit card #, and expiration date and we'll take care of the rest... really.
OK, to be serious for a second, if someone charges stuff to your VISA card without your approval you will only be responsible for the first $50 of charges. (Disclaimer, this is true in the U.S., not sure about other countries.)
Now, given that VISA itself is the one who screwed the pooch here, I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't have to pay a dime. Assuming, that is, that the misuse of your card could be traced back to this breakin. I've heard that often times the issuer of the card will not even charge you the $50 in cases of fraud. They'll just eat it.
Reality-wise, you don't really need to worry. Since the breakin happened last July, any compromise to your account probably would have been exploited by now.
#include the obligatory "credit cards are really, really a stupid way to exchange funds" rant.
Err... except for the fact that there are so many releases of a Linux distribution that the "yearly" numbering scheme just wouldn't work when it comes to telling "how different" one release is from another.
For example, Mandrake '00 would be basically Mandrake '99r2 (or was it r3?) with a new installer. Then, maybe mid to late in the year, their next release (00r1) would probably have the 4.0 version of XFree, the 2.4 kernel, and who knows, possibly one of those journaling file systems. Now, that seems like a pretty major leap to relegate to a 'r' release.
Even Microsoft doesn't really follow the year scheme very well. Win95 came in a few flavors, the more recent of which (I forget the designation, something like OEM 2.0) used a new filesystem.
For some things, it does work. Quicken, for example, has yearly releases.
I think, overall, the idea behind the whole "year" numbering scheme is more marketing than anything sensible. Intuit would like me to believe that using the "old" 98 version of their product is bad. Since we're in 2000, I should be using the 2000 version! It's a way to fool people into forking over money on a regular basis. It's one step closer to that Big Corporate Software Holy Grail: software subcriptions.
I wish the author of the web page were a little less into buzzwords and a bit more into writing clearly...
I can understand what the "suggested hardware" section says when it talks about 1 Gighertz total processing power, but what the hell does "5 Gighertz per Athalon recommended" mean? You have to be the god of overclockers to run this thing?
The whole presentation is a bit stream of consciousness. Throws a lot of terms around, but if you don;t already know editing suits (which I don't) you can't really follow it, I guess. What hardware would I need to load in a movie? WHat hardware would I need to put it back out to a VCR? Does this thing have utility beyond that?
I don't buy the "recently Hollywood has been too derivative" argument. Hollywood has *always* been that way. Name some classic movies (say Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind), and more likely than not they have been adapted from novels. Nowadays, of course, there are many other media (comicbooks, TV shows, and old movies) to derive movies from. It's just that in looking back, you more often think of the movie when you mention these titles, not the book that preceded them.
Hollywood has always wanted a safe bet. That's why they have seldom produced complete original art. Fortunately, some directors manage to bring these stories to the screen in a way that adds something beyond a rote interpretation of the original or, worse, a pale imitation. Perhaps, if anything, that is what Hollywood has been lacking lately.
If you wanted meaty science discussion, you could just read his book, or some of his papers.
I actually liked the article, since it gave you insight into the man. He is a fascinating figure, for precisely the contradiction the reporter stated: the giant intellect locked in a body incapable of communicating more than a few words per minute.
In a way, the article de-romanticised Hawking. He's just a man, although incredibly gifted and incredibly infirm. You get more of a feel for his sense of humor, and at the same time a feel for the ego behind it. All people generally see of him is the wheelchair, the voice synthesizer, and the towering intellect. It's interesting that he, too, has feelings, has failings, and even acknowledges them.
It seems easy to put men like Hawking into a typecast role. Einstein, for example, was probably the root of the "absent minded professor" stereotype that's turned up in so many movies. It came as a revelation to many that he had had a child outsite of marriage, and had actually treated the mother and child fairly poorly. To understand these people, and how they came to be who they are, it's important to look at the entire person.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with just looking at a person's body of work. For most of the music I listen to, for example, I couldn't care less about the personal lives of the artist. In some cases, you want to get to know the person behind the art or science, in other cases you don't. This was an article for people who wanted to get to know a bit more about Hawking, the man, rather than Hawking's body of scientific work.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, speaking as an author, the primary thing you want to avoid is the very real threat that some bozo will attempt to "improve" your writing, and totally screw it up. This can be something as simple as using poor grammar and bad spelling, or something as nasty as being factually wrong on something Really Important.
:). Some people took the document and modified it to fit their own hacked versions of the software (which was good, although I was a bit peeved that they didn't talk to me/send me the revisions). However, from then on, I got hassled by people about this or that being wrong in the manual, or got questions about how to use this or that local feature. None of which I could do anything about, since I didn't know about the revisions, and had no way of contacting whoever did.
I had experience with this a long, long time ago. I published a manual for a piece of software. I didn't put any form of copyright on it (hey, I was innocent back then
Now that's I'm a professional writer, I'd be very reluctant to put anything out there that I'd allow to be modified without a license like this. The last thing I need is for a potential employer to go take a look at an altered version of the document, notice the crap that someone dumped into it, and attribute it to me.
Even then, I'd still be a bit leery of letting others hack my documents. I suppose that people
who release code under the GPL might feel the same thing, though. They're letting "their baby" go out into the world to back used and abused by others. I haven't really seen people losing control of their creations, though, so probably my fears are overstated. I've been thinking of releasing some documents of mine someday. Perhaps I will use the Gnu license to do that. If nothing else, it saves me from having to spell out what you can and can't do with the document myself.
Boeing junks two pieces of perfectly good equipment, and NASA (and by extension you and I (assuming you're a US citizen, like me (sorry to nest parentheses))) has to foot the bill!? So Boeing can MAKE MONEY off of tossing stuff out?
I can see it now "Uh... hi, remember that space shuttle, I think it was called Atlantis? Well, funny thing, it got hauled away as garbage and we can't find it... so, will you be paying for a new one by check, or just expensing it?"
Damn, why can I ever get involved in contracts where the other guy pays for our stupidity. Oh wait, that's what for-pay tech support is for...
I don't think Certain Large Software Companies would be able to get away with adding "arbitrary transactions" to bank accounts... after all, you still have other ways to determine what's going on in your account. Assuming you mean that a penny or two of each transaction might be siphoned off to, say, a certain Very Wealthy Man's bank account (or, more likely, the bank account of some underling who just happened to write the code that carries out the transactions), I doubt that it would escape the notice of everyone using the software. Pennies do eventually add up to a small discrepancy, and that would be hard to hide in a home user's checking account. (I've heard f such scemes working in multi-billion dollar companies, but that's another kettle of fish.)
Now, if you want to be paranoid, think about the possibility of some Large Software Company's product maybe, say, leaking details of your bank transactions to their own server. Detailed banking histories of millions of people would probably be more lucrative for some company than penny-ante larceny.
Yeah, this is the killer feature as far as I am concerned. I never used to keep my checkbook balanced before, but with Quicken able to nab my transaction info right from the bank itself, I was in nirvana. For once, I knew exactly how much money I had!
.QIF file... which means that maybe I could use GNUCash and import the .QIF to reconcile my bank balance... Then I could stop running Quicken under VMWare :)
/. and other web sites. It would just have to authenticate you in oreder to access the relevant pages.
For some reason, right after the 1st of January, this feature died on my in Quicken 98 (apparently, an error on the bank's side... I haven't tried calling them yet on it. I dread trying to explain an error message to some phone-based bank teller...).
I noticed, however, that my bank does offer web-based banking, with the ability to download transactions in a
I think, way back, I took a look at GNUCash right after the two preceding projects merged, and they did say something about online banking. Thing is, I'd figure that the protocols used in online banking are not a very open standard. It's something MS Money and Quicken can do, because they are Big Reputable Software Firms, and not a buncha guys writing software for the common good (in the eyes of bankers, anyhow).
Hm. I winder. Do banks use a small number of web-banking software, or does each roll their own? Seems to me that if it's the former, GNUCash could grab banking data similar to the way some scripts can rip stories out of
The Spice Girls claim her as a role model.
"stand down Margret stand down please, stand down Margret..."
No... it's not, to my knowledge. True, I believe it has some sort of POSIX compatibility, and it comes with loads of tools from UNIX (such as gcc, BASH, etc.) but under the hood, where it counts, it's not UNIX.
The most obvious sign of this is that BeOS (up to 4.5, at least) is single user.
Which just goes to show, if you're going to make a blanket statement, you'd best be nigh omniscient about what you're talking about.
For that matter, is QNX based on UNIX? It may not be (you might not consider it a consumer OS, however). We also have the Palm OS, which is not UNIX based...
Actually, I think the model number was Palm 1000. I've upgraded mine from 128k to 512k, then to 1MB, then to 2MB w/infrared. All along, I've been just amazed that this little Palm was keeping up with the times. Especially in these days of throw-away, non-upgradeable computers.
;)
I am tempted to go out and at least look at the IIIc. A nice black on white screen would be nice, and since I don't have backlighting with my current model, that would also be a bonus. Sadly, I've found that I'm using my Palm less these days.... fewer meetings to keep track of in my new company, and I'm bad about entering my todo list into the thing. Ah well.
And, I guess having an upgraded Pilot 1000 shows that I'm an early adopter, and not one of those Johnny-come-lately Palm V owners
I've been thinking of starting up an open recipe archive which caters to the geek population
Ah, you mean like The Geek Gourmet? I think this site was actually mentioned on Slashdot a few months back.
Wait! Are you telling me Capt'n Crunch is *not* geeky? Corn Puffs is not geeky? Lucky Charms is not geeky?
Oh man, I remember my college days. The only thing I could do in the late afternoon after rolling out of bed was to eat a bowl of one of the abovementioned cereals.
Granted, Total is very non-geek. But hey... what could be more geeky than a quick to prepare sugar-laden breakfast food?
Um... OK, you had a problem doing a certain action in a specific end-user application.
QED the OS sucks.
You know, I'm sorta having trouble following that logic. I could draw that conclusion about any operating system, given a significantly shitty application. It's like calling Linux an unstable operating system becuase one app crashes over and over. Just because the OS claims to be friendly, it doesn't ensure that every application on it is likewise.
What application was this, anyhow?
A few things that struck me about this article...
1) They heavily relied on usability testing to gauge how well the target audience would use the product. Aside from the research done by Englebart etc. al. at Xeros, I suspect this is the first real usability sone on the computer industry. I find it hard to believe that a lot of the early PC stuff was usability tested at all.
2) Their tests showed what people have claimed all along... that multi-button mice are more productive than single button mice. But, since single-button mice made the initial learning experience for the naive user easier (no guessing as to which button to click) that's what the Lisa, and eventully the Mac used. Twenty years later, the Mac platform still defaults to a single button mouse... all so that computer virgins won't become confused.
What probably made the Lisa fail was it was too ambitous. In 1980, trying to create a high-power GUI desktop machine with a hard drive and all the trappings was simply too much to expect. Compare the specs to the first Mac that was rolled out in 84. No hard drive and a paultry amount of memory.
The thing cost an arm-and-a-leg, and simply didn't make financial sense. Who wants to shell out big bucks that makes some secretary more productive? Not the first or last time that a company has decided to address a market that simply didn't exist (yet).
that if you stay up long enough, your brain will just explode from all that activity? (it would if this were a Hollywood movie, I bet.)
What a mess.
(on the serious side, do we really know what sleep is for, anyhow? Perhaps this is similar to a hard drive thrashing when the filesystem has gotten too fragmented. More overhead required to the do same thing...)
In addition, Mandrake has not shown signs of breaking the GPL by not distributing source. Quite the opposite... my boxed Mandrake 6.0 came with two source CDs. Others have chronicled in the past that LinuxOne has seemed unwilling to part with their source.
In addtion, Mandrake has not misrepresented itself. They have openly admitted what they do, and have not tried to throw up smokescreens of having propriatary additions to Linux. In the past, LinuxOne has claimed that this Mac thing was not based on any existing Linux software, which seems to be false.
I use Mandrake. I like it. I have no problem with what they are doing. I do have major questions about LinuxOne however. They need to adhere to the GPL, and come clean about what they are doing.
One of the more amusing aspects of this is that Quattro, which is the spreadsheet portion of the Corel Wordperfect Suite, was originally a Borland product, back when they made office applications.
I was acutaslly a big fan of Borland's apps, back in the DOS days. They had a kick-butt wordprocessor called Sprint that had a full-out EMACS emulation mode, and a very powerful macro language. It died, unlike Quattro,which was spun off to some other company (not sure if it was Corel directly).
Hmm... I think I may still have a copy of Borland's DOS version of Quattro... And, of course, Turbo-C totally rocked my world back in the day.
Sad how the mighty have fallen, but maybe they'll do better in the Linux market.
I personally don't care if www.somee-commersite.com figures out that customer #23423423453 clicked on ad A to get to their site and then proceeded to buy product B. I also don't care if some web site can see the path that vistitor #98323 took through their site.
What I do want to avoid, and what DoubleClick has done, is give the ability for an online retailer to know that John Doe, 24 Main St., WallaWalla WA, (876)555-1234, 31 years of age, white male, Credit card # 123-232-232-123 exp. 4/01(good credit history), recently bought prozac from some online pharmacy, has been browsing some of your competitor's site, looking at high-priced audio components.
You can imagine the nightmare browsing the web will become when you can no longer simply browse an online store without the possibility that the online retailer will take that as their cue to have some telemarketing droid call you up and annoy you, or to deluge you with e-mail or junk mail.
Having an exact record of what you've done online, with no way to see that record or correct mistakes is he threat here. What if, for example, a service company can access your profile and decide whether they want you as a customer auomatically? They can raise or lower their prices based on how desireable a customer you are. All automatically, without you knowing.
Anyhow, this particular case isn;t an issue for me, since I've already blocked out DoubleClick.
I think what the person meant was "use Perl instead of VBA as a scripting language for an application." I.e. embed Perl instead of embedding a VBAish language.
I personally think this is a BAD idea. Don't get me wrong... I like Perl, and I use it a lot. But I use it because I already know the UNIXisms that are buried in Perl. Expecting a newbie who wants to automate a few things in a document or spreadsheet to master the quirks of Perl is asking a bit much.
A scripting language should be fairly easy for a novice to pick up. At least in theory, VBA is a good candidate for this. The syntax, compared to Perl, C, etc. is much simpler. Less of an overall learning curve.
The actual implementation of VBA is, however, really lame. The State of the GNOME address pointed out one of the major failings: no security. Hence we get Melissa and other worms. Having worked with VBA, I've come across many bugs and petty limitations that get in the way of what I want to do. The core language isn't that bad, but the interface to applications (such as Word) really sucks in places.
A previous author in this thread said that GNUmeric should be compatible with VBA. I'm not sure that this is the goal of GNOME's BASIC project... for one thing, you do not want VBA's (non-existent) security architecture anywhere near one of your applications. Another is that you don't want to re-create all of the laces that VBA falls flat. They may get a system that is somewhat compatible (and maybe could use macros in an Excel spreadsheet with some sort of translation mechanism) but trying to recreate VBA enough for macros is just a waste of time, compared to the amount of time you'd put into creating a robust and useful scripting language.
Perhaps the ideal way to handle this would be to make a plugin system for scripting languages, so you can bang out a macro in whatever language you like. Perl, Python, LISP, Tcl, and this VBA-ish language could all live happily within the GNOME desktop apps. If you know a scripting language already, you can just wade right in. If not, then the VBAish thing should be easy to pick up, and its development tools would be built right into the environment.
I also wonder how many people actually use scripting languages in applications, such as wordprocessors. I've done a fair amount of it, because I know what macros can do for you. Where I used to work, I found a bunch of cases where people were doing tedious, repetative things that a macro could handle... they just didn't think that there was a better way...
Buried deep in the AOL service contract, subsection 20:10,
1) I AM THE LORD THY ISP. THOU SHALT HAVE NO FALSE
ISPS BEFORE ME.
Seems pretty clear to me...
After reading the news release and articles over at some Be websites I'm still a bit nebulous about the nature of this. Be's president had talked about a sort of "viral form" of Be, but it sounded more like a demo.
Overall, this still has the flavor of a demo. I mean, it is a parasitic OS... it can't install to its own partition, and you need another OS to run it. I bought Be 4.5, and I'd think about upgrading... I don't want to boot Windows in order to boot Be.
What is interesting is that they are including the development tools for Be in this free version. I wonder if they are trying to get Be out to more developers, both as an ad for their platform, and as a way of getting more developers to pitch in. With many companies using things like VMware to do cross-platform development, this may be Be's way of joining in. They might hope developers will say "Heck, we'll download it for free, and see if we can get our software to work on it."
I keep forgetting to hit the damn "HTML format" option. Sigh. Here's that link.
Remember this story from last September where SCO was bashing Linux? To quote:
The bandwagon is getting a mite crowded...
Sure... uh... just send us your name, credit card #, and expiration date and we'll take care of the rest... really.
OK, to be serious for a second, if someone charges stuff to your VISA card without your approval you will only be responsible for the first $50 of charges. (Disclaimer, this is true in the U.S., not sure about other countries.)
Now, given that VISA itself is the one who screwed the pooch here, I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't have to pay a dime. Assuming, that is, that the misuse of your card could be traced back to this breakin. I've heard that often times the issuer of the card will not even charge you the $50 in cases of fraud. They'll just eat it.
Reality-wise, you don't really need to worry. Since the breakin happened last July, any compromise to your account probably would have been exploited by now.
#include the obligatory "credit cards are really, really a stupid way to exchange funds" rant.
Err... except for the fact that there are so many releases of a Linux distribution that the "yearly" numbering scheme just wouldn't work when it comes to telling "how different" one release is from another.
For example, Mandrake '00 would be basically Mandrake '99r2 (or was it r3?) with a new installer. Then, maybe mid to late in the year, their next release (00r1) would probably have the 4.0 version of XFree, the 2.4 kernel, and who knows, possibly one of those journaling file systems. Now, that seems like a pretty major leap to relegate to a 'r' release.
Even Microsoft doesn't really follow the year scheme very well. Win95 came in a few flavors, the more recent of which (I forget the designation, something like OEM 2.0) used a new filesystem.
For some things, it does work. Quicken, for example, has yearly releases.
I think, overall, the idea behind the whole "year" numbering scheme is more marketing than anything sensible. Intuit would like me to believe that using the "old" 98 version of their product is bad. Since we're in 2000, I should be using the 2000 version! It's a way to fool people into forking over money on a regular basis. It's one step closer to that Big Corporate Software Holy Grail: software subcriptions.
I wish the author of the web page were a little less into buzzwords and a bit more into writing clearly...
I can understand what the "suggested hardware" section says when it talks about 1 Gighertz total processing power, but what the hell does "5 Gighertz per Athalon recommended" mean? You have to be the god of overclockers to run this thing?
The whole presentation is a bit stream of consciousness. Throws a lot of terms around, but if you don;t already know editing suits (which I don't) you can't really follow it, I guess. What hardware would I need to load in a movie? WHat hardware would I need to put it back out to a VCR? Does this thing have utility beyond that?
I don't buy the "recently Hollywood has been too derivative" argument. Hollywood has *always* been that way. Name some classic movies (say Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind), and more likely than not they have been adapted from novels. Nowadays, of course, there are many other media (comicbooks, TV shows, and old movies) to derive movies from. It's just that in looking back, you more often think of the movie when you mention these titles, not the book that preceded them.
Hollywood has always wanted a safe bet. That's why they have seldom produced complete original art. Fortunately, some directors manage to bring these stories to the screen in a way that adds something beyond a rote interpretation of the original or, worse, a pale imitation. Perhaps, if anything, that is what Hollywood has been lacking lately.
If you wanted meaty science discussion, you could just read his book, or some of his papers.
I actually liked the article, since it gave you insight into the man. He is a fascinating figure, for precisely the contradiction the reporter stated: the giant intellect locked in a body incapable of communicating more than a few words per minute.
In a way, the article de-romanticised Hawking. He's just a man, although incredibly gifted and incredibly infirm. You get more of a feel for his sense of humor, and at the same time a feel for the ego behind it. All people generally see of him is the wheelchair, the voice synthesizer, and the towering intellect. It's interesting that he, too, has feelings, has failings, and even acknowledges them.
It seems easy to put men like Hawking into a typecast role. Einstein, for example, was probably the root of the "absent minded professor" stereotype that's turned up in so many movies. It came as a revelation to many that he had had a child outsite of marriage, and had actually treated the mother and child fairly poorly. To understand these people, and how they came to be who they are, it's important to look at the entire person.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with just looking at a person's body of work. For most of the music I listen to, for example, I couldn't care less about the personal lives of the artist. In some cases, you want to get to know the person behind the art or science, in other cases you don't. This was an article for people who wanted to get to know a bit more about Hawking, the man, rather than Hawking's body of scientific work.