This sounds like one of those cases where paying cash for 'grey' goods is a smart move. Unless they have some other means of tracking smartcard owners?
Not that I have, want or need a smartcard reader or DirecTV for that matter (there is little enough on telly to warrant much more than basic cable for the occassional sporting event). It'll be interesting to watch who pays up, who fights it in court and just whether any of this activity will dampen the desire for smartcard readers.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:MS takes Linux extremely seriously ...
on
Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 1
In other news: The village of Lioux has become a giant smoking crater, just a little while after Bill Gates decided to take a short business trip to the village.
I must have been using some bizarre keyboard layout, cos there is no way I could hit the 'O' key by accident when aiming for the 'N'. Unless I'd been debugging some particularly mind bending regexp code... or maybe I'd been eating too much alphabet soup...
There are a lot of other minor problems in the article. E.g. that you don't need to confirm that you agree to the GPL while installing the software. (That's similiar to unacceptable "with opening this box you agree to the EULA" when the EULA is *in* the box). You simply can't agree to sth. you haven't seen.
Don't get confused - the GPL is not a license you agree to when you install it. The GPL (and brethren) ask you to agree to the terms of the license when you distribute the software - normally you would not have the rights to do this (copyright remains with the software's author) so you either agree to the (L)GPL and distribute or you are bound by the copyright laws and can't distribute.
The strength of the (L)GPL licenses lies in expanding the rights you normally have beyond the restrictions provided by the copyright laws. If the GPL can't be applied, then normal copyright applies and the software can't be distributed. Commercial EULAs usually require you to waive rights you would normally have had.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
MS takes Linux extremely seriously ...
on
Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, but it does make me really curious about a few things.
What is Microsoft's true impression of Linux as both an OS and as a competitor?
How clued in are the top-level people about the capabilities of Linux?
Will their strategy of ignoring it and spreading FUD change if Linux starts getting nearer to 10% market share?
You only have to look at the leaked MS memos that get publicized on Slashdot to see just how seriously MS treats Linux. Without too much speculation, MS views Linux as the most serious threat to its dreams of dominating the data centres, you can assume that their top technical people spend a lot of time analyzing the capabilities of Linux to find weak points (witness the carefully chosen MS vs Linux benchmarks they have sponsored) and there is no way that MS is ignoring Linux where it really matters - on the sales pitch. The frantic flying of top MS executives to wavering MS houses (such as governments) is evidence enough. The memo to Sales executives to "not lose a sale to Linux under any circumstances" is further proof.
So don't ever assume that MS takes Linux lightly. There are a lot of smart people employed by MS - Lioux is the single biggest threat to MS today - they know it. That should also be a wake up that we should never get complacent simply because Billy G. isn't publicly endorsing Linux.
Odd as it may seem, wireless networking may be the only viable answer for some of these countries. Having just returned from a trip to East Africa, I was struck by the number of mobile phones in use. Most Kenyans who can afford a telephone of any variety will get a mobile phone and/or one of the prepaid phone cards available. The reason is cost - land lines are expensive to lay and expensive to maintain. From our high-density populations in the developed world, it's easy to overlook the problems of communications in a more evenly distributed population.
The same may be true for remote rural areas in europe, where the chance of seeing a xDSL enabled exchange close enough to the house are slim. Bulk wireless technology may prove to be a cost-saver there too.
... is the technical term for the way that the continental plates sit on top of the oceanic plates as though they were corks in a bucket of water (only much heavier and slower).
I was taught (only a couple of decades ago, honest!) that this sort of rebound after the ice age was supposed to be going on - in fact it was (if I remember correctly) one of the justifications for the Thames flood barrier. However, no-one (at school anyway) ever let on how this rebound was measured. It's nice to know that modern technology allows for easier monitoring of this sort of measurement. That said, does anyone know whether measurements of this sort had been done before and if so, what were the techniques?
Don't have to believe it. That is the case. The company is made up of individuals. Those individuals actions constitute the actions of the company, case closed. If one of those employees makes a mistake that hurts the company financially they have little to no recourse outstide of the company. They can fire him or penalize him in any legally allowable way.
If you work for almost any software development company, the stuff you write is (C)The Company and not (C)Joe Programmer. As a result, you can't slap the GPL on stuff you write because you are NOT the copyright holder. Ergo, you can't release GPL'd software you write on company time UNLESS the company authorises you to.
Did it ever occur that maybe a lot of those people who dont use Linux are happy with windows? Various distributions are available for free or for little cost but you dont see droves of users dumping windows and moving to Linux. Partly due to inertia as you say but also the majority of them are probably happy enough with what they have and see no compelling reason to change.
Did it occur to you that a vast army of computer users really don't know what they are using? Most of the circles I move in are populated with people who are used to multiple operating systems but occasionally I step back into the normal populace to help out a neighbour and I realise just how wide the gap is.
Take, for instance, someone I helped fix their system after it was upgraded by another friend. The term 'operating system' is not one that the average computer user really understands. Therefore 'Windows is an operating system' is something that probably half the computer users out there don't have any serious comprehension of. This means that not only do a large number of people use Windows because they have it, they are unlikely to change it because they really don't know it 'exists' as a product. When they get a new computer, it comes preinstalled and they never really have to worry about it. I'm reminded of a survey where a significant chunk of people in the street thought that 'Pentium' was a chip maker.
People rant a lot about how getting Linux preinstalled on new computers is the absolutely critical step in getting people to use Linux. From the ivory towers of the tech elite, it's way too easy to think that because people have a choice of OSs, they will exercise or even understand that choice. When you think of a store selling computers, people generally want a list of utilities (email, web, office suite, photo galleries, etc) - how that is acheived is irrelevant to them as long as it works. Much as people are now of the opinion that a virus checked is an essential item on any system (does anyone know of one for AIX:-) ).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Only Infocom ever gets AutoFrotzing...
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 1
The competitive environment must be reason number one for a free operating system. On the desktop, there is no genuine competitive market. Does anyone honestly believe that Microsoft Office is worth $300 or more?
MS Office is worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it. I certainly don't believe it is worth it - with OpenOffice.org on one side for people who need to knock fairly complex documents together and lyx/LaTeX/DocBook for serious publication work, I have no need for MS Office.
My view is more along the lines of print publishing. Nothing prevents you from using it or seeing how it's done. There's nothing proprietary about it but if I write something, you aren't allowed to rearrange the ideas or the words if I don't grant that right. There is nothing harsh about that concept. The harsh part comes from the Linux community alienating the people with the power to speed things along.
Funnily enough, that is almost exactly the license that the BSD provides. The GPL only goes the extra mile and says that if I offer this to you under these conditions, then you should do likewise if you offer it others.
I don't see the Linux community alienating the people with the power to speed things along either. Most of the inhibitors to people getting on board with Free software has more to do with rumours and FUD than legal hurdles.
You might not like it and I might not like it but money makes things happen. You cannot tell companies that OSS is a good idea but they will have to abandon everything they understand in order to benefit from it.
I don't believe that companies have to abandon everything they understand to benefit from OSS. How many companies rely on perl for some critcal part of their environments, for example? That doesn't make their perl scripts OSS. Nor does it magically infect all the other parts of the infrastructure that perl glues together and make them OSS either.
Companies need assurances that they can write software without giving it away.
They have it today and it's not going away. What has changed is that there may be a free alternative out there that they will have to be (considerably) better than in order to get sales. I work on DB2 Universal Database - I look around and see MySQL, SAP DB and other Free database projects. Many of these provide plenty for a basic database and many people will not need to look outside those Free packages to get the features they need. The challenge for companies writing software to sell (as opposed to writing software under contract for other companies) is to ensure that they provide sufficient extra value to justify the cost.
There's no evidence that working with display screen equipment is harmful to the eyes, nor that it makes visual problems worse, although a few people who have difficulties with their sight may become more aware of them. But working at a screen for a long time without a break can have effects similar to reading or writing uninterruptedly, and may make your eyes feel 'tired' or sore. You might find that it helps to look away from the screen from time to time and focus your eyes on a distant object.
Agreed but there are side effects to looking at a screen for an extended period of time. The major one is that you blink less. Normally you would blink every couple of seconds or so during activities like walking, painting, etc. If you are reading, you blink less - about once every 5-10 seconds. With a CRT computer screen, the average period between blinks can extend beyond 30 seconds. This causes the eye to dry out and causes soreness and irritation. I find that LCD screens are much easier to work with. Funnily enough, just having your monitor a little lower on your desk means that your eyes are slightly more closed and this can help reduce the evaporation rate off the surface of the eye.
Where I disagree with you is on piracy. I think the operating system should be free, programming languages should be free and that's it. The point of a free operating system is to foster a competitive environment. Companies still need assurances that they can write software without giving it away.
So you think that all software developed, excepting OS-level stuff, should be proprietary? That seems a little harsh. Would you really like to remove the right of people to give their work away? A vast collection of software is available today because people have chosen to work on something in their spare time and distribute it, mostly because it worked for them and someone else might benefit as well.
And is the point of a free operating system to foster a competitive environment? I view it as a side effect not the reason.
Even if it comes to a point where you can't make money writing software, people are always going to want someone/some company to help them use it, implement it or merely document it. There will always be opportunities for making money with software. You just might find selling it tough. I don't think that hurts the software industry one iota - people will end up paying for the most competitive system implemented in the most effective and useful fashion. Companies who build the expertise to make such installations will be the ones who will stand to make the most money in such an economy. Finally we might see a software economy where the talents and knowledge of the companies employees are the real financial capital rather than the number of patents you hold.
As for Windows Media Player -- I'm not even sure what Microsoft's goals were for that.;)
WMP is a multi-pronged strategy. First, it helps cut off the Apple publishing/video editing platform leakage. Secondly it cuts off the air supply to other video format vendors/producers (such as Real Networks) by making those external products surplus to requirements for the average user. The Window Media formats hold the potential to control the encodings and base formats of a large amount of digital video in the future and thereby increase vendor lockin.
Funnily enough, this is a very similar strategy to the IE vs Netscape strategy. Establish a base in the core product that displaces external vendors and acheive market share as a result. Expect the same sort of maneouvre with SQL Server 2000 (or at least parts of the core engine) - it's already been seen in several places (MS VS.Net, MS Visio).
So Linux vs SCO has reached the edge of the cliff. SCO stumbles around, looking for something to grab hold of. It yells in fear. It screams in terror. It hopes, desperately, that someone will either weaken it's opponent or will throw SCO a lifeline. SCO's foot slips out over the edge of the abyss...
... tune in at the Court to find out if SCO takes the fall. There are lots of people watching. If SCO falls, Linux will emerge from this with a lot a FUD put by the side as a very public failure to sue Linux out of existance fails.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Power 4/PPC970 vs Intel Architecture 64
on
More on the PowerPC 970
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· Score: 4, Interesting
With the POWER 4 chips from IBM knocking passed 1.7GHz now, it's a reasonable assumption to make that the PPC970 will clock at similar levels to the POWER 4 chips. So at release, 2GHz plus isn't out of th reach for the fastest chips. Remember that the Athlons with Barton cores aren't clocked much faster than that with the 3200XP clicking around 2.2GHz.
It's not just AMD clocking lower either. The Itanium 2 isn't clocked that fast. Given that 32 POWER 4 1.7GHz processors smoked the 64 Itanium2 1.3GHz processors configuration in the latest TPCC non-clustered benchmark, the POWER and PPC architecture is capable of putting a lot more work through in the same number of clock cycles. There are a lot of nay-sayers trotting out the GHz-is-god line and it is particularly misleading for 64 bit architectures.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Disclaimer - I work in SOFTWARE for IBM, not hardware.
I'm not impressed with the Radeon 9800 Pro. What I really want is the Radeon 9500 ASC [bbspot.com]. The price is steadily coming down. Mmmmm, I can't wait to play Nethack in full 3D:-)
Time shifting FM? Or time shifting MP3 radio?
on
TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 1
Timeshifting MP3 radio stations works well because the MP3 stream software reads the title and artist off each track as it arrives and the MP3s get nicely parcelled up with sane information about each track. Makes it easy to quickly sort through the stuff you want to listen to and discard the rest.
If FM radio time shifting is going to work, users are going to need to receive some sort of meta-data along with the tracks, talks and plays so that they can tell what has been received. For some programmes, being able to pick out the morning news bulletin may be enough. For a top 40 show, you'd probably want every track labelled and packaged.
I don't expect much in the way of correct spelling, good grammar, and typos here on slashdot, and I make plenty of these mistakes myself. But when I'm paying north of $20 for a hardback book, like Cryptonomicon, I really expect to see the work of a professional editor. This book was filled with typos and even spell-checker kinds of errors (e.g. cannon vs canon).
Its rare to find a book without at least half a dozen typos, spelling errors or bad typesetting. And yet for all the years I've been reading, I've never bothered to make a note of where and what and send it to the publishers. We moan about the lack of accuracy but how many of us actually try and improve later editions? Like all the postings about how many eyes make bugs shallow, maybe we should submit corrections to the publishers a little more often... At least then the next printing stands some chance of improvement.
Has anyone sent corrections to a publisher? Were they well received? Did they get applied?
And I'm just curious, I understand the bad parts to an all flash site, accessability, need for a plugin etc. but with flash installed on 93(90,91?)% of all browsers is it really all that bad to use?
Flash is fine if you are a) able to install it and b) able to drive it as an able bodied human. It sucks if you want to search through the contents of the site using, say, Google to find all the references to, say, gatling guns. It totally sucks if you are disabled and rely on braille readers, text to speech browsers or other such aids, because at this point flash doesn't support those sorts of accessibility features at anything more than a trivial level.
Not too many people I'd guess. At least, not enough people for it to matter.
Actually, it may prove to be a huge achillies heel to not have coverage of non-Windows platforms. I remember when Java first appeared and a lot of people took a look at it and thought it would make a neat way to have little animations embedded in their browsers.
Today, the usage of Java couldn't be further from that early view. Java is making huge strides in the data centre, as servlets and similar rapid development environments. So missing out on all the other servers in the data centre could stop C# getting the ground that Java now holds.
Now that leaves MS in a sticky spot. They may not achieve market dominance without ports of C# to other platforms (and all the associated libraries) but if they do, they lose the customer lock-in that they normally rely on.
If you are missing a.fonts directory, just create one:
mkdir ~/.fonts
Fontconfig keeps tabs on what is happening to the font directories it is monitoring and updates the X server lists as appropriate. All the other directories it monitors by default are only accessible by the superuser but you can add your own personal fonts to your own.fonts directory and fontconfig will pick up the new entries. If you ever get stuck and you think that fontconfig is missing some entries it should have seen, you can run fc-cache to regenerate the cache files. fc-list will tell you what is currently available via fontconfig.
If you want to know more about the fonts on your Gnome 2 system, I also recommend installing Fontilus for Nautilus which supports access to fonts via the fonts:/// virtual directory. It also allows you to query font files on your file system.
As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.
20 minutes with hindsight? Ok - here is the state of the art.
Open your.fonts directory in your home directory.
Drop your new fonts in there
....
errr
...
That's it.
That requires fontconfig on your machine, but I don't see how it can get much easier.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Of course, the documentation needs to be better promoted.
Hey, strcpy is no buggier than anything else if you use it properly. I recently was forced to change my code as follows:
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1];
strcpy(foo,bar);
to
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1];
strncpy(foo,bar,strlen(bar));
Shame your reviewers knew enough to know about strncpy() but not enough to know about strnlen() and how to handle the out-of-range conditions from strnlen()... But then of course, you must have rewritten your code better than you indicate here.
So what were you programming? Ah - you were working on Mozilla. Still, I'm sure that is completely stable and crashpr
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like one of those cases where paying cash for 'grey' goods is a smart move. Unless they have some other means of tracking smartcard owners? Not that I have, want or need a smartcard reader or DirecTV for that matter (there is little enough on telly to warrant much more than basic cable for the occassional sporting event). It'll be interesting to watch who pays up, who fights it in court and just whether any of this activity will dampen the desire for smartcard readers. Cheers, Toby Haynes
In other news: The village of Lioux has become a giant smoking crater, just a little while after Bill Gates decided to take a short business trip to the village.
I must have been using some bizarre keyboard layout, cos there is no way I could hit the 'O' key by accident when aiming for the 'N'. Unless I'd been debugging some particularly mind bending regexp code ... or maybe I'd been eating too much alphabet soup...
There are a lot of other minor problems in the article. E.g. that you don't need to confirm that you agree to the GPL while installing the software. (That's similiar to unacceptable "with opening this box you agree to the EULA" when the EULA is *in* the box). You simply can't agree to sth. you haven't seen.
Don't get confused - the GPL is not a license you agree to when you install it. The GPL (and brethren) ask you to agree to the terms of the license when you distribute the software - normally you would not have the rights to do this (copyright remains with the software's author) so you either agree to the (L)GPL and distribute or you are bound by the copyright laws and can't distribute.
The strength of the (L)GPL licenses lies in expanding the rights you normally have beyond the restrictions provided by the copyright laws. If the GPL can't be applied, then normal copyright applies and the software can't be distributed. Commercial EULAs usually require you to waive rights you would normally have had.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yeah, but it does make me really curious about a few things.
You only have to look at the leaked MS memos that get publicized on Slashdot to see just how seriously MS treats Linux. Without too much speculation, MS views Linux as the most serious threat to its dreams of dominating the data centres, you can assume that their top technical people spend a lot of time analyzing the capabilities of Linux to find weak points (witness the carefully chosen MS vs Linux benchmarks they have sponsored) and there is no way that MS is ignoring Linux where it really matters - on the sales pitch. The frantic flying of top MS executives to wavering MS houses (such as governments) is evidence enough. The memo to Sales executives to "not lose a sale to Linux under any circumstances" is further proof.
So don't ever assume that MS takes Linux lightly. There are a lot of smart people employed by MS - Lioux is the single biggest threat to MS today - they know it. That should also be a wake up that we should never get complacent simply because Billy G. isn't publicly endorsing Linux.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Odd as it may seem, wireless networking may be the only viable answer for some of these countries. Having just returned from a trip to East Africa, I was struck by the number of mobile phones in use. Most Kenyans who can afford a telephone of any variety will get a mobile phone and/or one of the prepaid phone cards available. The reason is cost - land lines are expensive to lay and expensive to maintain. From our high-density populations in the developed world, it's easy to overlook the problems of communications in a more evenly distributed population.
The same may be true for remote rural areas in europe, where the chance of seeing a xDSL enabled exchange close enough to the house are slim. Bulk wireless technology may prove to be a cost-saver there too.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I was taught (only a couple of decades ago, honest!) that this sort of rebound after the ice age was supposed to be going on - in fact it was (if I remember correctly) one of the justifications for the Thames flood barrier. However, no-one (at school anyway) ever let on how this rebound was measured. It's nice to know that modern technology allows for easier monitoring of this sort of measurement. That said, does anyone know whether measurements of this sort had been done before and if so, what were the techniques?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
... to be cross with Microsoft licenses.
Don't have to believe it. That is the case. The company is made up of individuals. Those individuals actions constitute the actions of the company, case closed. If one of those employees makes a mistake that hurts the company financially they have little to no recourse outstide of the company. They can fire him or penalize him in any legally allowable way.
If you work for almost any software development company, the stuff you write is (C)The Company and not (C)Joe Programmer. As a result, you can't slap the GPL on stuff you write because you are NOT the copyright holder. Ergo, you can't release GPL'd software you write on company time UNLESS the company authorises you to.
Feel silly now?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Did it ever occur that maybe a lot of those people who dont use Linux are happy with windows? Various distributions are available for free or for little cost but you dont see droves of users dumping windows and moving to Linux. Partly due to inertia as you say but also the majority of them are probably happy enough with what they have and see no compelling reason to change.
Did it occur to you that a vast army of computer users really don't know what they are using? Most of the circles I move in are populated with people who are used to multiple operating systems but occasionally I step back into the normal populace to help out a neighbour and I realise just how wide the gap is.
Take, for instance, someone I helped fix their system after it was upgraded by another friend. The term 'operating system' is not one that the average computer user really understands. Therefore 'Windows is an operating system' is something that probably half the computer users out there don't have any serious comprehension of. This means that not only do a large number of people use Windows because they have it, they are unlikely to change it because they really don't know it 'exists' as a product. When they get a new computer, it comes preinstalled and they never really have to worry about it. I'm reminded of a survey where a significant chunk of people in the street thought that 'Pentium' was a chip maker.
People rant a lot about how getting Linux preinstalled on new computers is the absolutely critical step in getting people to use Linux. From the ivory towers of the tech elite, it's way too easy to think that because people have a choice of OSs, they will exercise or even understand that choice. When you think of a store selling computers, people generally want a list of utilities (email, web, office suite, photo galleries, etc) - how that is acheived is irrelevant to them as long as it works. Much as people are now of the opinion that a virus checked is an essential item on any system (does anyone know of one for AIX :-) ).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
... and don't you forget it.
MS Office is worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it. I certainly don't believe it is worth it - with OpenOffice.org on one side for people who need to knock fairly complex documents together and lyx/LaTeX/DocBook for serious publication work, I have no need for MS Office.
My view is more along the lines of print publishing. Nothing prevents you from using it or seeing how it's done. There's nothing proprietary about it but if I write something, you aren't allowed to rearrange the ideas or the words if I don't grant that right. There is nothing harsh about that concept. The harsh part comes from the Linux community alienating the people with the power to speed things along.
Funnily enough, that is almost exactly the license that the BSD provides. The GPL only goes the extra mile and says that if I offer this to you under these conditions, then you should do likewise if you offer it others.
I don't see the Linux community alienating the people with the power to speed things along either. Most of the inhibitors to people getting on board with Free software has more to do with rumours and FUD than legal hurdles.
You might not like it and I might not like it but money makes things happen. You cannot tell companies that OSS is a good idea but they will have to abandon everything they understand in order to benefit from it.
I don't believe that companies have to abandon everything they understand to benefit from OSS. How many companies rely on perl for some critcal part of their environments, for example? That doesn't make their perl scripts OSS. Nor does it magically infect all the other parts of the infrastructure that perl glues together and make them OSS either.
Companies need assurances that they can write software without giving it away.
They have it today and it's not going away. What has changed is that there may be a free alternative out there that they will have to be (considerably) better than in order to get sales. I work on DB2 Universal Database - I look around and see MySQL, SAP DB and other Free database projects. Many of these provide plenty for a basic database and many people will not need to look outside those Free packages to get the features they need. The challenge for companies writing software to sell (as opposed to writing software under contract for other companies) is to ensure that they provide sufficient extra value to justify the cost.
Trust me - it can be a great incentive.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
However good your skills may be, I don't know how many people are going to want to be operated on by a doctor who spells the word 'surgury'.
Now you know why Doctors need bad handwriting :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There's no evidence that working with display screen equipment is harmful to the eyes, nor that it makes visual problems worse, although a few people who have difficulties with their sight may become more aware of them. But working at a screen for a long time without a break can have effects similar to reading or writing uninterruptedly, and may make your eyes feel 'tired' or sore. You might find that it helps to look away from the screen from time to time and focus your eyes on a distant object.
Agreed but there are side effects to looking at a screen for an extended period of time. The major one is that you blink less. Normally you would blink every couple of seconds or so during activities like walking, painting, etc. If you are reading, you blink less - about once every 5-10 seconds. With a CRT computer screen, the average period between blinks can extend beyond 30 seconds. This causes the eye to dry out and causes soreness and irritation. I find that LCD screens are much easier to work with. Funnily enough, just having your monitor a little lower on your desk means that your eyes are slightly more closed and this can help reduce the evaporation rate off the surface of the eye.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Where I disagree with you is on piracy. I think the operating system should be free, programming languages should be free and that's it. The point of a free operating system is to foster a competitive environment. Companies still need assurances that they can write software without giving it away.
So you think that all software developed, excepting OS-level stuff, should be proprietary? That seems a little harsh. Would you really like to remove the right of people to give their work away? A vast collection of software is available today because people have chosen to work on something in their spare time and distribute it, mostly because it worked for them and someone else might benefit as well.
And is the point of a free operating system to foster a competitive environment? I view it as a side effect not the reason.
Even if it comes to a point where you can't make money writing software, people are always going to want someone/some company to help them use it, implement it or merely document it. There will always be opportunities for making money with software. You just might find selling it tough. I don't think that hurts the software industry one iota - people will end up paying for the most competitive system implemented in the most effective and useful fashion. Companies who build the expertise to make such installations will be the ones who will stand to make the most money in such an economy. Finally we might see a software economy where the talents and knowledge of the companies employees are the real financial capital rather than the number of patents you hold.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
As for Windows Media Player -- I'm not even sure what Microsoft's goals were for that. ;)
WMP is a multi-pronged strategy. First, it helps cut off the Apple publishing/video editing platform leakage. Secondly it cuts off the air supply to other video format vendors/producers (such as Real Networks) by making those external products surplus to requirements for the average user. The Window Media formats hold the potential to control the encodings and base formats of a large amount of digital video in the future and thereby increase vendor lockin.
Funnily enough, this is a very similar strategy to the IE vs Netscape strategy. Establish a base in the core product that displaces external vendors and acheive market share as a result. Expect the same sort of maneouvre with SQL Server 2000 (or at least parts of the core engine) - it's already been seen in several places (MS VS.Net, MS Visio).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
... tune in at the Court to find out if SCO takes the fall. There are lots of people watching. If SCO falls, Linux will emerge from this with a lot a FUD put by the side as a very public failure to sue Linux out of existance fails.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's not just AMD clocking lower either. The Itanium 2 isn't clocked that fast. Given that 32 POWER 4 1.7GHz processors smoked the 64 Itanium2 1.3GHz processors configuration in the latest TPCC non-clustered benchmark, the POWER and PPC architecture is capable of putting a lot more work through in the same number of clock cycles. There are a lot of nay-sayers trotting out the GHz-is-god line and it is particularly misleading for 64 bit architectures.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Disclaimer - I work in SOFTWARE for IBM, not hardware.
I'm not impressed with the Radeon 9800 Pro. What I really want is the Radeon 9500 ASC [bbspot.com]. The price is steadily coming down. Mmmmm, I can't wait to play Nethack in full 3D :-)
I guess this is what you are really after :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Timeshifting MP3 radio stations works well because the MP3 stream software reads the title and artist off each track as it arrives and the MP3s get nicely parcelled up with sane information about each track. Makes it easy to quickly sort through the stuff you want to listen to and discard the rest.
If FM radio time shifting is going to work, users are going to need to receive some sort of meta-data along with the tracks, talks and plays so that they can tell what has been received. For some programmes, being able to pick out the morning news bulletin may be enough. For a top 40 show, you'd probably want every track labelled and packaged.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I don't expect much in the way of correct spelling, good grammar, and typos here on slashdot, and I make plenty of these mistakes myself. But when I'm paying north of $20 for a hardback book, like Cryptonomicon, I really expect to see the work of a professional editor. This book was filled with typos and even spell-checker kinds of errors (e.g. cannon vs canon).
Its rare to find a book without at least half a dozen typos, spelling errors or bad typesetting. And yet for all the years I've been reading, I've never bothered to make a note of where and what and send it to the publishers. We moan about the lack of accuracy but how many of us actually try and improve later editions? Like all the postings about how many eyes make bugs shallow, maybe we should submit corrections to the publishers a little more often... At least then the next printing stands some chance of improvement.
Has anyone sent corrections to a publisher? Were they well received? Did they get applied?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Flash is fine if you are a) able to install it and b) able to drive it as an able bodied human. It sucks if you want to search through the contents of the site using, say, Google to find all the references to, say, gatling guns. It totally sucks if you are disabled and rely on braille readers, text to speech browsers or other such aids, because at this point flash doesn't support those sorts of accessibility features at anything more than a trivial level.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Not too many people I'd guess. At least, not enough people for it to matter.
Actually, it may prove to be a huge achillies heel to not have coverage of non-Windows platforms. I remember when Java first appeared and a lot of people took a look at it and thought it would make a neat way to have little animations embedded in their browsers.
Today, the usage of Java couldn't be further from that early view. Java is making huge strides in the data centre, as servlets and similar rapid development environments. So missing out on all the other servers in the data centre could stop C# getting the ground that Java now holds.
Now that leaves MS in a sticky spot. They may not achieve market dominance without ports of C# to other platforms (and all the associated libraries) but if they do, they lose the customer lock-in that they normally rely on.
Tricky, tricky.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you are missing a .fonts directory, just create one:
mkdir ~/.fonts
Fontconfig keeps tabs on what is happening to the font directories it is monitoring and updates the X server lists as appropriate. All the other directories it monitors by default are only accessible by the superuser but you can add your own personal fonts to your own .fonts directory and fontconfig will pick up the new entries. If you ever get stuck and you think that fontconfig is missing some entries it should have seen, you can run fc-cache to regenerate the cache files. fc-list will tell you what is currently available via fontconfig.
If you want to know more about the fonts on your Gnome 2 system, I also recommend installing Fontilus for Nautilus which supports access to fonts via the fonts:/// virtual directory. It also allows you to query font files on your file system.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.
20 minutes with hindsight? Ok - here is the state of the art.
That requires fontconfig on your machine, but I don't see how it can get much easier.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. Of course, the documentation needs to be better promoted.
Hey, strcpy is no buggier than anything else if you use it properly. I recently was forced to change my code as follows:
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1]; strcpy(foo,bar);
to
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1]; strncpy(foo,bar,strlen(bar));
Shame your reviewers knew enough to know about strncpy() but not enough to know about strnlen() and how to handle the out-of-range conditions from strnlen()... But then of course, you must have rewritten your code better than you indicate here.
So what were you programming? Ah - you were working on Mozilla. Still, I'm sure that is completely stable and crashpr
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