For me it's something like the ultimate combination of a chat and a development platform. My development interests (reputation systems, moderation) also happen to require being part of something that has a decent userbase.
It wouldn't be over an IMAP connection, since it's offline IMAP all the messages are on the local disk already, and can be searched without any internet connection.
If I needed to search that amount of data, I suppose I'd install Beagle. There, problem solved.
I use offline IMAP here. The best of both worlds, my mail is on the server and accessible anywhere, but also cached locally so I still can see what was there even if the connection fails.
There's a complete lack of points against Ruby in that article. And I don't say that as a fan, I don't know the langauge at all. It's just got a complete lack of any useful information to judge the usefulness of Ruby.
Reasons: #1: Seems a very weak criticism, all languages are interchangeable really. Except some do some things much better than others. #2: Internal management problem, not really related to Ruby specifically. #3: Applies to every language #4: Potential for real criticism here, but without any DATA it's completely useless #5: Works for whatever language the author likes, again not related to Ruby #6: Potential for more real criticism here, but again lacks any useful information #7: Again something unrelated to Ruby specifically
From the whole list, only 2 of the reasons point to Ruby in any manner, and those are so uninformative as to be useless anyway. I think most of the blame for this lies with slashdot, as the article tries to spin it into something against Ruby when the actual article is more about a failed migration than anything else.
No, what he means is that TFA has an incorrect translation from Russian, which was then picked up by Slashdot.
In Russian there's no "the" article, so "the ministry plans to install the russian OS" would be written more like "ministry plans to install russian OS". That seems to have confused the translator, who understood "russian OS" as a product name instead of "russian-made OS".
100% of Windows boxes upgraded to Vista at our home. No reason to keep 7 years old systems around.
What do you mean no reason?
After 7 years, it's very solid. Pretty much that needed being fixed has been by now.
Memory footprint is small compared to anything newer.
It doesn't have activation, big plus for imaging.
It doesn't have restrictions against running it in vmware.
It doesn't have an interface desiged by Fisher Price.
It doesn't have compatibility issues.
It's got very good performance even on less than up to date hardware. It's plain stupid to get a box with 2GB RAM for a system that will run a single application that was made to run on a P133 with 64MB RAM and still does.
From the IT perspective, Vista is a pain in the butt. Here I'm staying with Win2K so long it can run on new hardware at all. Don't expect to upgrade to even XP before 2010 the earliest. Vista, probably never. The thing to come after XP (if I upgrade to that) will most likely be Linux. Also pretty much everything that comes with the OS is completely unnecessary. If the app ran on Linux what we'd have instead on most boxes would be X + The Application, and nothing else.
That's quite correct actually, these days I've got more social life in Second Life than in the first one, although even in SL I'm not that sociable. Then I don't think I could say SL is the problem there -- I never had much social life anyway, so overall I think SL added to it rather than replacing.
I've quite comfortably run recent kernels in 32-64MB. You've got to configure it only with the needed stuff of course (like you did back when such machines were the normal anyway).
The biggest problem is not really the kernel, but the software. For example, Debian, an otherwise very light distribution consumes quite a lot of RAM (relative to what's available on a 32MB box) while generating locales. That means that upgrading glibc on a box with little memory can be painful.
But other than that, a 32MB RAM box still can run Linux as a firewall perfectly fine.
Because the distinction between server and desktop is rather fuzzy these days. What could you leave out of the desktop OS?
RAID? Doubtful with it being so affordable these days. ECC RAM? That can be had on many boards as well. Support for SCSI tape drives? Does my box suddenly turn into a server if I get a cheap drive on ebay? Ok, how about say, optimizing the desktop version for latency and the server version for throughput? Problem with that is that there exist server tasks that want low latency. Years ago you'd say "remove SMP support, nobody uses that". Not so these days.
What could you leave out of the server? Support for sound cards? What if it's a server that records audio? Support for video cards? What if the server uses it for computation (rare but possible)
Why have 2 banks when you could only have one? You just need an UPS that can accept two sources of power at once: solar and grid.
This should already exist, as AFAIK that's how solar powered houses work: charge the batteries, run from solar/battery whenever possible, use AC otherwise.
BTW, about UPS batteries: Turns out they're actually cheap. APC charges for a battery maybe $140 or so for the RBC5 (2 battery pack). I work at a distributor of various components and a lead-acid battery that fits into an UPS (I know for a fact because we used some from our store to rehabilitate some UPSes including a pretty big 1400VA APC one) costs about $15. It has somewhat lower capacity (I think I replaced a 9000 AH with a 7000AH one), but at that price, if you have an UPS that can handle an arbitrary number of additional batteries (some APC ones do) you could store a lot of power quite cheaply.
Solar laptop solutions are sold by many companies already. You can get it as a foldable panel, panels on laptop bags, panels that can be glued to the back of the screen (probably suboptimal), and even a solar jacket
They're available in all sorts, from cheap ones that can only slowly charge the battery (though they seem to be able to provide part of the required power while the laptop is on, extending the battery's life), to more expensive ones that produce enough power to keep the laptop on, assuming favorable light levels of course.
First, GPLd projects can take BSD code, but not in reverse, so a GPL licensed project has a bigger resource pool to draw from.
Second, the GPL forces even very large companies to contribute their changes. While Theo is whining on the OpenBSD mailing list about how IBM (or whoever it was) won't give them the time of the day, Linux doesn't have such a problem. A BSD project can ask nicely, but can't demand anything.
Users aren't going to care what the license is, they'll go for the most functional system.
Is there a cognitive problem here? What part of you only need that tag if you plan on supporting Office 95 did we manage to miss? Are you saying that the group of people behind Open Office are up in arms because they cannot support a proprietary application that's 12 years old?
Is there a cognitive problem here? The tag isn't needed in the first place if you write the actual formatting, not the behavior. Why is a completely new format including commands related to some arcane application, anyway? That's already a sign of bad design.
If the MS Word 95 way of formatting tables by default is say, 5 pixels margin around the table and text in 12 points Arial, then you only need to specify that information when you write the OOXML document. There's absolutely no need to add a new obscure tag for it.
Microsoft has absolutely no obligation to the "gimme the spec or die" crowd other than to specify how to read and write a document that can be created with the version of Word or Excel that exists at the time the spec is released. They do have an obligation to support their paying users. The rest is just whining for the sake of whining, because the reality is that if OOXML was indeed a superior format it would be irrelevant - that same group of people when confronted by that inconvenient reality would declare the standard "shit" for the simple reason that it comes from Microsoft.
Couldn't have found a better reason not to go with it, thanks for the explanation. Standards are supposed to work for my benefit, I don't give a damn about MS or its customers.
OOXML is doomed not because it has "OMG bit fields" or 6000 pages of documentation or funky tags or tries to be backwards compatible, it's doomed because it's trying to be a standard in an environment where people don't give a rat's ass about pesky things like compatibility, paying customers or creating commercial ecosystems around software. So it will never be good enough, even if it is.
Well, tell me why exactly does backwards compatibility need to be achieved in this way? What is so magical about Word95 table format that it needs to be specified in such a strange way that it can't be defined as a combination of table formatting attributes?
And if it's doomed, then I can only say it's a good thing. The world doesn't need standards that can't be implemented.
That's clever. Did you miss the part of the standard where that sort of thing is required for backwards compatibility? Apparently only Microsoft cares about that sort of thing, so that's why it's in the damn standard.
That's the completely wrong way to specify it. A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway? If you want to standarize a method of brewing coffee you don't say things like "The way Bill Gates makes it", you specify the exact procedure to be followed. If the behavior can't be fully determined based on the standard, then it's crap.
Things like that shouldn't be in the standard in the first place. If you're opening a Word95 document and saving in another, then to preserve the formatting you don't say it's "like in Word95", you specify the list of attributes to achieve the same effect: padding, alignment, margins, etc.
See that "medium customarily used for software interchange" bit? I'm pretty sure that a court would interpret that as "send me a CD-ROM please", not "you can get it from this URL".
I don't think it means necessarily a CD, just that you can't try to cheat by delivering the source on something like punched cards or LTO3 tape (modern, but drives are awfully expensive) to try to satisfy the letter, but not the spirit, by delivering on some medium that most people would be unable to read.
And there are places where the trees are full of squirrels, and that doesn't mean that introducing squirrels somewhere else is going to mean you'll get nibbled to death by them.
As a daemon, it has no interface unless you connect one to it, with several to choose from (commandline, gtk, qt, web, etc). Can be controlled from another computer. Very easy to integrate it with IRC clients and similar.
Really that's IMO how things should be. When you want to control it, you can easily. When you don't it stays out of the way without taking valuable resources with themes, visualization plugins and other junk.
My favourite fallacy: The concept that because what you use is crap, everything else must be automatically equivalent.
This is in effect claiming that Linux, Windows 2000, Windows 95, MS-DOS, OS X and whatever they run nuclear powerplants on are equivalent security-wise and would have exactly the same problems in the same amounts if they only reached the same level of popularity.
Allow me to politely disagree: Bullshit.
While Linux can use improvements, and can of course be hacked and turned into a zombie, the general security of a Linux box is very good, and can be made much stronger than what comes with Windows these days. To put an example, "trusted path execution" in the GRsecurity patch allows forbidding the execution of programs from directories not owned by root. Even if you download a malicious attachment, chmod +x and try to run it, it'll still not run.
There's also that Linux doesn't have the Windows culture of users downloading any junk they find in some dark corner of the net. On Windows you actually have well known applications like download managers ship with spyware, and music CDs with rootkits.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite well hooked on it.
For me it's something like the ultimate combination of a chat and a development platform. My development interests (reputation systems, moderation) also happen to require being part of something that has a decent userbase.
Click on the arrow on the left of the tags list.
It wouldn't be over an IMAP connection, since it's offline IMAP all the messages are on the local disk already, and can be searched without any internet connection.
If I needed to search that amount of data, I suppose I'd install Beagle. There, problem solved.
Gmail is really pointless with IMAP anyway.
I use offline IMAP here. The best of both worlds, my mail is on the server and accessible anywhere, but also cached locally so I still can see what was there even if the connection fails.
So this will be a beta of the new version of a service that's still in beta?
I wonder how many years more it'll take for gmail to lose the "beta" designation.
Whatever it is against, it still doesn't have any useful information.
Where are the benchmarks? Where are the code examples? Where is a specific list of deficiencies?
That's the stuff I want to see.
There's a complete lack of points against Ruby in that article. And I don't say that as a fan, I don't know the langauge at all. It's just got a complete lack of any useful information to judge the usefulness of Ruby.
Reasons:
#1: Seems a very weak criticism, all languages are interchangeable really. Except some do some things much better than others.
#2: Internal management problem, not really related to Ruby specifically.
#3: Applies to every language
#4: Potential for real criticism here, but without any DATA it's completely useless
#5: Works for whatever language the author likes, again not related to Ruby
#6: Potential for more real criticism here, but again lacks any useful information
#7: Again something unrelated to Ruby specifically
From the whole list, only 2 of the reasons point to Ruby in any manner, and those are so uninformative as to be useless anyway. I think most of the blame for this lies with slashdot, as the article tries to spin it into something against Ruby when the actual article is more about a failed migration than anything else.
No.
No, what he means is that TFA has an incorrect translation from Russian, which was then picked up by Slashdot.
In Russian there's no "the" article, so "the ministry plans to install the russian OS" would be written more like "ministry plans to install russian OS". That seems to have confused the translator, who understood "russian OS" as a product name instead of "russian-made OS".
So why not encrypt the data on the cable?
Even with the enormous amounts of data going through it, it shouldn't be difficult.
What do you mean no reason?
From the IT perspective, Vista is a pain in the butt. Here I'm staying with Win2K so long it can run on new hardware at all. Don't expect to upgrade to even XP before 2010 the earliest. Vista, probably never. The thing to come after XP (if I upgrade to that) will most likely be Linux. Also pretty much everything that comes with the OS is completely unnecessary. If the app ran on Linux what we'd have instead on most boxes would be X + The Application, and nothing else.
That's quite correct actually, these days I've got more social life in Second Life than in the first one, although even in SL I'm not that sociable. Then I don't think I could say SL is the problem there -- I never had much social life anyway, so overall I think SL added to it rather than replacing.
I've quite comfortably run recent kernels in 32-64MB. You've got to configure it only with the needed stuff of course (like you did back when such machines were the normal anyway).
The biggest problem is not really the kernel, but the software. For example, Debian, an otherwise very light distribution consumes quite a lot of RAM (relative to what's available on a 32MB box) while generating locales. That means that upgrading glibc on a box with little memory can be painful.
But other than that, a 32MB RAM box still can run Linux as a firewall perfectly fine.
Because the distinction between server and desktop is rather fuzzy these days. What could you leave out of the desktop OS?
RAID? Doubtful with it being so affordable these days.
ECC RAM? That can be had on many boards as well.
Support for SCSI tape drives? Does my box suddenly turn into a server if I get a cheap drive on ebay?
Ok, how about say, optimizing the desktop version for latency and the server version for throughput? Problem with that is that there exist server tasks that want low latency.
Years ago you'd say "remove SMP support, nobody uses that". Not so these days.
What could you leave out of the server?
Support for sound cards? What if it's a server that records audio?
Support for video cards? What if the server uses it for computation (rare but possible)
What's there to account at SCO besides the wages? Do they even still sell something?
Why have 2 banks when you could only have one? You just need an UPS that can accept two sources of power at once: solar and grid.
This should already exist, as AFAIK that's how solar powered houses work: charge the batteries, run from solar/battery whenever possible, use AC otherwise.
BTW, about UPS batteries: Turns out they're actually cheap. APC charges for a battery maybe $140 or so for the RBC5 (2 battery pack). I work at a distributor of various components and a lead-acid battery that fits into an UPS (I know for a fact because we used some from our store to rehabilitate some UPSes including a pretty big 1400VA APC one) costs about $15. It has somewhat lower capacity (I think I replaced a 9000 AH with a 7000AH one), but at that price, if you have an UPS that can handle an arbitrary number of additional batteries (some APC ones do) you could store a lot of power quite cheaply.
Solar laptop solutions are sold by many companies already. You can get it as a foldable panel, panels on laptop bags, panels that can be glued to the back of the screen (probably suboptimal), and even a solar jacket
They're available in all sorts, from cheap ones that can only slowly charge the battery (though they seem to be able to provide part of the required power while the laptop is on, extending the battery's life), to more expensive ones that produce enough power to keep the laptop on, assuming favorable light levels of course.
How do you debate that though?
I'd like to know what would it take for you to admit defeat in the argument.
If you can't find anything then it's pointless to have the argument.
The GPL is at an advantage.
First, GPLd projects can take BSD code, but not in reverse, so a GPL licensed project has a bigger resource pool to draw from.
Second, the GPL forces even very large companies to contribute their changes. While Theo is whining on the OpenBSD mailing list about how IBM (or whoever it was) won't give them the time of the day, Linux doesn't have such a problem. A BSD project can ask nicely, but can't demand anything.
Users aren't going to care what the license is, they'll go for the most functional system.
Is there a cognitive problem here? The tag isn't needed in the first place if you write the actual formatting, not the behavior. Why is a completely new format including commands related to some arcane application, anyway? That's already a sign of bad design.
If the MS Word 95 way of formatting tables by default is say, 5 pixels margin around the table and text in 12 points Arial, then you only need to specify that information when you write the OOXML document. There's absolutely no need to add a new obscure tag for it.
Couldn't have found a better reason not to go with it, thanks for the explanation. Standards are supposed to work for my benefit, I don't give a damn about MS or its customers.
Well, tell me why exactly does backwards compatibility need to be achieved in this way? What is so magical about Word95 table format that it needs to be specified in such a strange way that it can't be defined as a combination of table formatting attributes?
And if it's doomed, then I can only say it's a good thing. The world doesn't need standards that can't be implemented.
That's the completely wrong way to specify it. A "standard" that says things like "tables like Word 95" is worthless, just what's that supposed to mean anyway? If you want to standarize a method of brewing coffee you don't say things like "The way Bill Gates makes it", you specify the exact procedure to be followed. If the behavior can't be fully determined based on the standard, then it's crap.
Things like that shouldn't be in the standard in the first place. If you're opening a Word95 document and saving in another, then to preserve the formatting you don't say it's "like in Word95", you specify the list of attributes to achieve the same effect: padding, alignment, margins, etc.
I don't think it means necessarily a CD, just that you can't try to cheat by delivering the source on something like punched cards or LTO3 tape (modern, but drives are awfully expensive) to try to satisfy the letter, but not the spirit, by delivering on some medium that most people would be unable to read.
Unless they're russian squirrels.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm
Music Player Daemon. Plays music.
As a daemon, it has no interface unless you connect one to it, with several to choose from (commandline, gtk, qt, web, etc). Can be controlled from another computer. Very easy to integrate it with IRC clients and similar.
Really that's IMO how things should be. When you want to control it, you can easily. When you don't it stays out of the way without taking valuable resources with themes, visualization plugins and other junk.
My favourite fallacy: The concept that because what you use is crap, everything else must be automatically equivalent.
This is in effect claiming that Linux, Windows 2000, Windows 95, MS-DOS, OS X and whatever they run nuclear powerplants on are equivalent security-wise and would have exactly the same problems in the same amounts if they only reached the same level of popularity.
Allow me to politely disagree: Bullshit.
While Linux can use improvements, and can of course be hacked and turned into a zombie, the general security of a Linux box is very good, and can be made much stronger than what comes with Windows these days. To put an example, "trusted path execution" in the GRsecurity patch allows forbidding the execution of programs from directories not owned by root. Even if you download a malicious attachment, chmod +x and try to run it, it'll still not run.
There's also that Linux doesn't have the Windows culture of users downloading any junk they find in some dark corner of the net. On Windows you actually have well known applications like download managers ship with spyware, and music CDs with rootkits.