Sorry, but the name "Instant Messanger" is not like "Plymouth". Now, if Mitsubishi came out with a car and called it "Luxury Sedan", "Sports Utility Vehicle", or "Station Wagon"...
From the text, the bill "will allow software engineers to decompile computer software in limited circumstances so they can develop interoperable products."
It sounds to me like an Australian division of, say, Corel or StarDivision or Applix, could decompile MS Office to improve the reliability of their document import/export functions. The ability to share documents is an old, established interoperability mechanism, and Office itself contains foreign format import/export for interoperability reasons.
Could this be the practical end of proprietary document formats? I doubt it, but I sure hope so.
It looks like this could really be a good thing, in terms of standardizing access for search engines.
The Macintosh has its "sherlock" system right now, which lets you use the same UI to access a bunch of different search engines. Similarly, there's a way to provide an interface to Netscape so that typing in "? searchterm1 searchterm2" instead of a URL will work (the Google site describes how to configure Netscape to use Google for this). I'm sure there's something similar for Internet Explorer
A standardized interface for this sort of thing that all search engines and client software could agree upon would be a *very* good thing.
You could even end up with a hierarchical search engine -- if a site has a "robots" file that prevents it from being externally indexed, but *also* provides this unified interface, then some searches could transparently be forwarded to the site's own engine (eg. I could do a search on slashdot and get included up-to-date hits on freshmeat and linxutoday). This should do wonders for outdated links.
In the absence of any other information about the candidates, I take note of the fact that one of them is an amateur radio operator.
Such folks in general have a very long history of sharing information, charitable works (eg. providing communication infrastucture during emergencies), international cooperation, dealing with beaurocratic requirements (ever take a ham exam?), and contribution to free software projects. (For an example of this last one, Phil Karn's once-popular "KA9Q" software was so named because that's his ham radio call sign.)
Can anyone else make any other comments about the candidates? I don't know any of them as individuals.
Don't take this statement to imply anything other than what I say:
I just checked every file in the Linux 2.3.12 kernel source tree (including "CREDITS", which I believe *also* covers folks who's work is no longer used). Regardless of any other claims, none of their names appear. (I did a "grep -iw" of their last names and inspected the results. They were all either variable names (eg. "wRight") or other folks with the same last name.)
Remember all of the problems that will come along with any implementation that's sufficiently similar to a real immune system -- allergic reactions, arthritis, etc.
There's no perfect immune system in nature, and there won't be one online either.
Supporting the functionality of a modem in software is indeed a task for strict realtime. If you can't get realtime response, there's a chance you'll violate the neccesary protocols and you'll have a failure.
The same is true of Class 1 faxmodem support. In order to use a Class 1 faxmodem, you need realtime response characteristics (this is the big reason that Class 2 faxmodems are so much better, especially on Unix systems). None the less, people do Class 1 faxing on systems without realtime schedulers, and very often the results are "good enough". I expect it'll be similar (either that, or it'll be in the kernel, where stricter realtime is actually somewhat possible).
Don't forget that Linux boxes with PCMCIA support have been able to hot-swap a variety of devices, including hard disks, for quite a while. Even if the hot swapping *isn't* handled by the RAID controller, it's not as suprising as it might sound.
I hope the authors remember that Linux supports a bunch of different disk partitioning schemes (DOS and MacOS to name two), and provide a consistent interface regardless of what partitioning scheme is used. If this same tool can be used to manage partitions on my Linux/x86, Linux/Alpha and Linux/mac68k boxes, it becomes much more useful.
You *can* win on a look-and-feel basis, if you're talking about the look-and-feel of something material, and you've got a design patent for it. That's sorta what design patents are *for*.
They claim to support only Windows, but they don't use DHCP or anything goofy like that. All that it *really* means is that their techs will only know how to make it work for Windows.
During the install, while debugging problems, we even used Linux to debug problems that were hard to figure out under Windows (like whether a particular ethernet problem was a hardware problem or a Windows driver problem).
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the name "Instant Messanger" is not like "Plymouth". Now, if Mitsubishi came out with a car and called it "Luxury Sedan", "Sports Utility Vehicle", or "Station Wagon"...
From the text, the bill "will allow software engineers to decompile computer software in limited circumstances so they can develop interoperable products."
It sounds to me like an Australian division of, say, Corel or StarDivision or Applix, could decompile MS Office to improve the reliability of their document import/export functions. The ability to share documents is an old, established interoperability mechanism, and Office itself contains foreign format import/export for interoperability reasons.
Could this be the practical end of proprietary document formats? I doubt it, but I sure hope so.
It looks like this could really be a good thing, in terms of standardizing access for search engines.
The Macintosh has its "sherlock" system right now, which lets you use the same UI to access a bunch of different search engines. Similarly, there's a way to provide an interface to Netscape so that typing in "? searchterm1 searchterm2" instead of a URL will work (the Google site describes how to configure Netscape to use Google for this). I'm sure there's something similar for Internet Explorer
A standardized interface for this sort of thing that all search engines and client software could agree upon would be a *very* good thing.
You could even end up with a hierarchical search engine -- if a site has a "robots" file that prevents it from being externally indexed, but *also* provides this unified interface, then some searches could transparently be forwarded to the site's own engine (eg. I could do a search on slashdot and get included up-to-date hits on freshmeat and linxutoday). This should do wonders for outdated links.
In the absence of any other information about the candidates, I take note of the fact that one of them is an amateur radio operator.
Such folks in general have a very long history of sharing information, charitable works (eg. providing communication infrastucture during emergencies), international cooperation, dealing with beaurocratic requirements (ever take a ham exam?), and contribution to free software projects. (For an example of this last one, Phil Karn's once-popular "KA9Q" software was so named because that's his ham radio call sign.)
Can anyone else make any other comments about the candidates? I don't know any of them as individuals.
Don't take this statement to imply anything other than what I say:
I just checked every file in the Linux 2.3.12 kernel source tree (including "CREDITS", which I believe *also* covers folks who's work is no longer used). Regardless of any other claims, none of their names appear. (I did a "grep -iw" of their last names and inspected the results. They were all either variable names (eg. "wRight") or other folks with the same last name.)
Remember all of the problems that will come along with any implementation that's sufficiently similar to a real immune system -- allergic reactions, arthritis, etc.
There's no perfect immune system in nature, and there won't be one online either.
Supporting the functionality of a modem in software is indeed a task for strict realtime. If you can't get realtime response, there's a chance you'll violate the neccesary protocols and you'll have a failure.
The same is true of Class 1 faxmodem support. In order to use a Class 1 faxmodem, you need realtime response characteristics (this is the big reason that Class 2 faxmodems are so much better, especially on Unix systems). None the less, people do Class 1 faxing on systems without realtime schedulers, and very often the results are "good enough". I expect it'll be similar (either that, or it'll be in the kernel, where stricter realtime is actually somewhat possible).
Don't forget that Linux boxes with PCMCIA support have been able to hot-swap a variety of devices, including hard disks, for quite a while. Even if the hot swapping *isn't* handled by the RAID controller, it's not as suprising as it might sound.
I hope the authors remember that Linux supports a bunch of different disk partitioning schemes (DOS and MacOS to name two), and provide a consistent interface regardless of what partitioning scheme is used. If this same tool can be used to manage partitions on my Linux/x86, Linux/Alpha and Linux/mac68k boxes, it becomes much more useful.
> I can't find a resolution on that page
Looking lower down on the page, the description of the LCD used is: "0.7 inch 155M dots, 832 (H) x 624 (V)". That's good enough for me...
Um...
You *can* win on a look-and-feel basis, if you're talking about the look-and-feel of something material, and you've got a design patent for it. That's sorta what design patents are *for*.
Does Apple have a design patent on the iMac?
...my wife is *much* more of a Star Wars geek than I am, so when I said "want to go to a midnight showing", this was taken as a *good* thing.
Triboot is easy. I've got triboot W98/Linux/BeOS at home right now. I've had as much as pentaboot (5 OSes) on one machine.
I'm using Linux with BellAtlantic ADSL right now.
They claim to support only Windows, but they don't use DHCP or anything goofy like that. All that it *really* means is that their techs will only know how to make it work for Windows.
During the install, while debugging problems, we even used Linux to debug problems that were hard to figure out under Windows (like whether a particular ethernet problem was a hardware problem or a Windows driver problem).