I'm not all that interested in the latest Porsche. Is that because Porsches are bad cars or because I'm not in the target audience?
Google wants wave to completely replace e-mail, meaning anyone with an e-mail address is their target audience.
For the comment about doing one thing right, he didn't mean only one thing for all of Google. It was probably the same meaning as the unix philosophy: each of those things you listed is it's own separate product, and each only does one thing. And each does that one thing well. By contrast, wave does many things, and to agree with the GP, it seems to do many things not well.
Like the GP, I also have little interest in wave, and I don't think it will get very far. (If I am wrong, someone from the future might link here and make me eat my words:-P)
If you like Forth, you should check out Factor, which is basically a modernized version of Forth (dynamically typed, no *very* low level filesystem junk that Forth has). I've recently started playing with it.
Your solution to it is the best one: leave them to their own devices. Most people are not virtuous enough to want to improve their decision-making when someone else is willing to deal with the fallout from their poor decisions.
One of the most insightful comments I ever read on Slashdot. Thanks!
Carbon dioxide produced by breathing is part of the current carbon cycle, so it doesn't count. Electricity provided by coal or oil releases carbon that was stored away for millions of years. It comes from outside the cycle, which is the problem.
The.docx format isn't directly XML. It's a zip file with XML in it, so that would have to manually be dealt with (unzipping) before checking it into a version control system, if one wanted to do any real change tracking/merging. This might be able to be done with some hook. It sounds pretty complicated, though.
There is also the issue with consistent output. If I open a.docx file, make a small change, and save it again, then pull the XML out and look at it, will the XML have only changed where I made my changes? Or did Word reindent/rearrange/refactor the XML over the entire document? Will it be consistent across different versions of the same "year" of Word? If it makes large scale changes all the time it will break the version control paradigm and won't play well with version control.
I love using LaTeX with version control. I have my resume (written in LaTeX) checked in, and I made branches to customize it for certain applications. I can update my resume on the main branch and just merge these changes into the customized branches as needed. A GUI word processor will never be able to do that.
In college I had to take a technical writing course, which was one of those poorly managed classes they make everyone take. Thanks to the clueless grad student they had teaching it I actually lost points for using LaTeX. It would get marks like: "-1.5 margins too big". Heh.
I can confirm this. I an American, 6'3", and drive an '03 Toyota Camry. I fit comfortably.
When I was car shopping a couple years ago I found that many cars really were too small and didn't have enough head room. Worse, the roof would cut off my vision. There was actually one car salesman who said I was too tall for cars and refused to show me anything but SUVs (so I left).
But, like the Camry, there are still lots cars for tall people. If you're not taller than at least 6'3", being tall isn't an excuse.
No, there are a number of free ones if you really care that much.
Read my original statement as libre free, and there are none. The swiss-army-knife tools, like 7-zip, all use the proprietary DLL/shared library/code from the WinRAR people in order to access archives. There is an old GPL version for reading RARs, but it won't work on any RARs made (>= 2.0) in the last ~10 years because the format has completely changed.
I would rather not rely on a secret, proprietary format in the first place, which is why I shun RARs. We have free alternatives that can perform the same functions.
A few years ago I read Flyboys which has a lot of information about Japanese cannibalism during WW2. The Japanese government abandoned soldiers, without supplies, on islands all over the Pacific as the American military hopped over/around them. When the Japanese soldiers ran out of food, they started eating the locals. When they ran out of locals, they started eating each other. In some cases where they had captured American POWs, the officers make a special meal out of them. Particularly with their livers.
Probably one of the most horrifying descriptions was how they would actually eat people alive... slowly. In order to keep the human meat fresh they would cut off part of a victim, like leg muscles, and keep them alive for later meals. Living flesh doesn't rot.
Except that there is only one implementation that can read RARs, which is the proprietary one. It's worse than using a Word doc. Better to stick with a free format.
I never heard of it, but it seems interesting. The spec is straightforward, royalty-free, non-proprietary, and is basically a bunch of standards put together. The content of.epub books is just XHTML and CSS. However, I can't find any free software that can specifically work with epub.
The dark side to it is that it uses the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) for metadata. OCF reserves a "rights.xml" ("restrictions.xml" would be more apt) for storing DRM information. That means when you see a.epub file you won't know if it is defective or not without closer inspection, which may not be possible.
I guess PDF is the same way. The spec has some very trivial DRM built in, but other people have managed to hack some DRM on top of it, so any given PDF may also be defective.
I'd really rather see an ebook format analogous to Ogg, where adding DRM really isn't possible.
I used NoScript up until the recent events where it became malware and obscured its code. It can no longer be trusted. I'll look into using a fork when one comes along.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not all that interested in the latest Porsche. Is that because Porsches are bad cars or because I'm not in the target audience?
Google wants wave to completely replace e-mail, meaning anyone with an e-mail address is their target audience.
For the comment about doing one thing right, he didn't mean only one thing for all of Google. It was probably the same meaning as the unix philosophy: each of those things you listed is it's own separate product, and each only does one thing. And each does that one thing well. By contrast, wave does many things, and to agree with the GP, it seems to do many things not well.
Like the GP, I also have little interest in wave, and I don't think it will get very far. (If I am wrong, someone from the future might link here and make me eat my words :-P)
I took that NoScript malware off my computers weeks ago.
If you like Forth, you should check out Factor, which is basically a modernized version of Forth (dynamically typed, no *very* low level filesystem junk that Forth has). I've recently started playing with it.
Look at all these redundant, detailed responses you got! People around here (myself included) really like hearing themselves talk, huh? :-D
Circular references won't leak with garbage collectors, as in Java, but they will with reference counting interpreters, such as perl.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:MD4JvRTKk10J:thesims3.ea.com/view/pages/newsItem.jsp%3Fitem%3D-608201177
The game will have disc-based copy protection
a.k.a. DRM
You are confused. It does have DRM, just not SecuROM.
Your solution to it is the best one: leave them to their own devices. Most people are not virtuous enough to want to improve their decision-making when someone else is willing to deal with the fallout from their poor decisions.
One of the most insightful comments I ever read on Slashdot. Thanks!
You just have to hope that NoScript doesn't turn into malware again.
Here's one for you. This guy implemented the Sieve of Eratosthenes in Ocaml and in C as best he could and found that the Ocaml version is faster.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.ai.genetic/msg/0e6338ae12f1f653?pli=1
Could you write it in C so that it's faster?
Carbon dioxide produced by breathing is part of the current carbon cycle, so it doesn't count. Electricity provided by coal or oil releases carbon that was stored away for millions of years. It comes from outside the cycle, which is the problem.
Really, the tricycle is carbon neutral.
The .docx format isn't directly XML. It's a zip file with XML in it, so that would have to manually be dealt with (unzipping) before checking it into a version control system, if one wanted to do any real change tracking/merging. This might be able to be done with some hook. It sounds pretty complicated, though.
There is also the issue with consistent output. If I open a .docx file, make a small change, and save it again, then pull the XML out and look at it, will the XML have only changed where I made my changes? Or did Word reindent/rearrange/refactor the XML over the entire document? Will it be consistent across different versions of the same "year" of Word? If it makes large scale changes all the time it will break the version control paradigm and won't play well with version control.
I love using LaTeX with version control. I have my resume (written in LaTeX) checked in, and I made branches to customize it for certain applications. I can update my resume on the main branch and just merge these changes into the customized branches as needed. A GUI word processor will never be able to do that.
In college I had to take a technical writing course, which was one of those poorly managed classes they make everyone take. Thanks to the clueless grad student they had teaching it I actually lost points for using LaTeX. It would get marks like: "-1.5 margins too big". Heh.
Avoiding TeX is a false economy.
I can confirm this. I an American, 6'3", and drive an '03 Toyota Camry. I fit comfortably.
When I was car shopping a couple years ago I found that many cars really were too small and didn't have enough head room. Worse, the roof would cut off my vision. There was actually one car salesman who said I was too tall for cars and refused to show me anything but SUVs (so I left).
But, like the Camry, there are still lots cars for tall people. If you're not taller than at least 6'3", being tall isn't an excuse.
That's more gas than I use in an entire year. And I drive to and from work weekdays.
No, there are a number of free ones if you really care that much.
Read my original statement as libre free, and there are none. The swiss-army-knife tools, like 7-zip, all use the proprietary DLL/shared library/code from the WinRAR people in order to access archives. There is an old GPL version for reading RARs, but it won't work on any RARs made (>= 2.0) in the last ~10 years because the format has completely changed.
I would rather not rely on a secret, proprietary format in the first place, which is why I shun RARs. We have free alternatives that can perform the same functions.
A few years ago I read Flyboys which has a lot of information about Japanese cannibalism during WW2. The Japanese government abandoned soldiers, without supplies, on islands all over the Pacific as the American military hopped over/around them. When the Japanese soldiers ran out of food, they started eating the locals. When they ran out of locals, they started eating each other. In some cases where they had captured American POWs, the officers make a special meal out of them. Particularly with their livers.
Probably one of the most horrifying descriptions was how they would actually eat people alive ... slowly. In order to keep the human meat fresh they would cut off part of a victim, like leg muscles, and keep them alive for later meals. Living flesh doesn't rot.
I'm getting sick thinking about it.
Except that there is only one implementation that can read RARs, which is the proprietary one. It's worse than using a Word doc. Better to stick with a free format.
If you can hack together a script that can automatically post a YouTube video, this could be done with a simple cron job running on a remote system.
I never heard of it, but it seems interesting. The spec is straightforward, royalty-free, non-proprietary, and is basically a bunch of standards put together. The content of .epub books is just XHTML and CSS. However, I can't find any free software that can specifically work with epub.
The dark side to it is that it uses the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) for metadata. OCF reserves a "rights.xml" ("restrictions.xml" would be more apt) for storing DRM information. That means when you see a .epub file you won't know if it is defective or not without closer inspection, which may not be possible.
I guess PDF is the same way. The spec has some very trivial DRM built in, but other people have managed to hack some DRM on top of it, so any given PDF may also be defective.
I'd really rather see an ebook format analogous to Ogg, where adding DRM really isn't possible.
Whoooosh!
Yes, 15 years ago they were the ones that threatened the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts for singing campfire songs.
I used NoScript up until the recent events where it became malware and obscured its code. It can no longer be trusted. I'll look into using a fork when one comes along.