Well, there's one pretty decent news site that won't go behind a paywall - the BBC. They're not perfect, but they are a lot more impartial than most of Murdoch's awful rags, and will remain free because of the way the BBC is funded by license payers. If people are going to pay for other content it has to be better enough to be worth paying extra for, and Murdoch sure as hell can't provide that.
New Scientist? I subscribe to that and it gives free access to their online archive, but if I remember right they only use cookies to keep nonsubscribers out and you can still link to stories fine.
To a certain extent I agree with you - there are too many distros that are just Ubuntu with a different wallpaper and a bunch of codecs preinstalled. However, after that I have little sympathy for that view. There's plenty of good reasons to remix a Linux distro for a particular purpose.
Take mass installs. Say you're installing Ubuntu on a large number of corporate desktops, but you want to change a few of the installed applications (say, switch the email client to Thunderbird, replace Firefox with Chrome etc, install Gnome Do and all the necessary multimedia codecs and update all the packages to the latest versions). Yes, you could install it on each individual machine, then manually install all the packages, or you could write a script to install them, but that's a huge waste of time, and of bandwidth. Even if you have your own apt-get mirror on the company network, it still results in a lot of unnecessary network traffic. A much better idea is to roll your own custom Ubuntu respin with everything you want preinstalled, and just install that on all the machines.
Also, in this case the respin clearly fills a niche - who wants to go through all the crap of installing Ubuntu then changing it all? Far better to have everything prepackaged for what you want, and ready to go. It's a labour-saving tool to be able to make your own respin.
Besides, I've never yet heard of a Linux newbie getting confused and winding up using something like BackTrack or INSERT as their desktop - most manage to find their way to one of the more mainstream distros OK, so I don't buy the whole "people are confused by all the different distros" argument. There are only a few major distros, after all.
I think you need to distinguish between respins and distros - something like this clearly falls in the former camp as it's intended for a specific purpose, while Ubuntu is a general-purpose distro.
I did an exam on SQL and database design recently and used The Manga Guide to Databases as part of my studies. If you don't want something too rigorous it's very good indeed - I found it a lot better at making stuff sink in than a dry, stuffy book. It gives a reasonably good idea of things like the first, second and third normal forms. Don't be put off by the fact that it looks a bit childish - the storytelling idea really works well.
It probably won't work for everyone, but it did work well for me (I passed the exam with flying colours).
The UK's laws on use of unsecured wi-fi are asinine in the extreme. People have been prosecuted for using unsecured home access points to check their email in the past.
I think laws should recognise that computers and smartphones will, by default, connect to an unsecured access point (presumably manufacturers set it up this way because it's easier for non-technical end users) and that the onus is therefore on the access point owner to secure the device if he wants to limit access to it. By broadcasting its SSID he is quite blatantly offering a public service, and IMHO he has NO right whatsoever to complain that people are using that public service if he has not secured it. There is no way of telling just from a list of access points whether one is intended for public access or not, and in fact many people do keep their wi-fi unsecured specifically to allow for public access.
By setting up WEP or WPA on an access point, or by using an alternative method of securing the access point such as a captive portal, the owner is clearly indicating that the access point is not for public use. If someone chooses to try and break the encryption or use some other method to get around this, then that probably should be a crime.
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"
In all seriousness, there are plenty of restaurants that offer prizes for eating insane amounts of food, and I guess this is just a variant of that. When I was a kid, there was a pub near me that did a challenge where you got a gammon steak topped with as many fried eggs as you wanted, and if you broke the record for the number of eggs eaten with it (and ate the whole steak as well as the eggs) you got it free. Last I heard the record was 42.
I think LogFS seems like a great idea. It's kind of ridiculous that flash memory is normally formatted as FAT, a filesystem that predates the invention of flash memory, just because it's the only one supported by virtually every OS. I'm sure it must hobble a lot of flash-based devices such as MP3 players. Of course, since LogFS is GPL, support is unlikely to be ever provided out of the box in Windows or OS X, so I imagine FAT will continue to hold sway, unless the LogFS developers were to make it available under another license as well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the GPL in general, but I think for something like this they'd benefit from BSD or MIT licensing it.
Would it not make more sense to open source the existing code base? As I understand it some of the code was created by Microsoft so they probably can't do so with that, but the Wikipedia article suggests that code from ReactOS might be able to fill the gap. That said, I guess it would have years of development to catch up on anyway, but surely it would require less work that way than something like Haiku?
Re:Linux is still not ready for desktop use
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
I don't think something being Unix-based necessarily makes it less good as a desktop - OS X does alright after all.
Probably - Google are supposed to use a lot of Java and he wouldn't be the first creator of a programming language to work there, he'd be alongside Guido van Rossum and Ken Thompson. Or IBM use a lot of Java too, so they'll probably be falling over themselves to offer him a job.
I use Facebook Ad Remover:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/68361
It works fine on Firefox and Chrome, and does a great job of removing ads on Facebook, which AdBlock seems to miss.
I've long been of the opinion that Enlightenment is the ideal UI for netbooks - it's fast and lightweight, but looks great. Of course it's been held back by the sedate pace of development, but if E17 is finally released I can see it really going down a storm, especially on ARM-based netbooks where Windows isn't an option.
I'm inclined to think that for most sites IE6 support isn't worth bothering about. I think IE6 users probably fall into two groups:
1) People using company hardware where the IT department hasn't upgraded IE yet.
2) Non-technical users who've disabled Windows updates because they made their computer slower.
In respect of the second group I think nagging reminders such as IE6nomore are a good idea, since if every site shows those then maybe these people might get the message eventually. The first group are more difficult since it's not their fault and many of them no doubt would actively like to upgrade since IE6 is such a bad way to browse the Internet today compared to a more modern browser (they certainly do where I work), but often legacy web apps prevent that. Probably the best way is to stop supporting IE6 and it'll make it harder for companies to keep using IE6. If someone can't use a website on IE6 at work but can that evening on Firefox at home, then they can do that.
I guess for an e-commerce site then they'd probably need to find out which users actually buy anything as if IE6 users visit the site but don't buy anything, then they can do without supporting them.
Personally, I do actually have one netbook with IE6 on but I use Chrome as the browser on that and I figured since I never use IE anyway then might as well stick with the smaller IE6 if I have to have IE on there at all, and it makes sense to have a copy available to test sites in IE if I need to.
Having worked on death claims on life insurance in the past I've seen plenty of cases of elderly couples where the wife dies first and the husband dies soon after, but I'm pretty sure that they don't die of a broken heart. Instead my theory is that they don't look after themselves properly, since if all of a sudden you have to cook for yourself all the time it's a bit of a struggle, and it may be that many of them are still used to the traditional roles of wife as homemaker, husband as breadwinner, so it's hard for the husband to look after himself once he's on his own.
It's kind of hard to decide which way to go, precisely for that reason. If I was freelancing I would be inclined to make IE6 support an optional extra and charge a little more for it (maybe 10-20%).
A system of brown dwarfs (dwarves?) like this must be an awesome sight, although I expect this one is probably too widely separated to be all that spectacular. But the idea of a gas giant/brown dwarf so large it has planets the size of Jupiter as moons is pretty staggering.
Would a language that runs in a VM, like Java, Scala or C#, be faster? After all, Twitter rewrote their backend in Scala and they seem to have gotten better performance.
I'm in the process of building a personal website as I'm planning a new career in web development and I can point to that as evidence I know what I'm doing. I'm thinking that the best thing to do is include the code from http://www.ie6nomore.com/ to notify IE6 users that they need to upgrade to be able to use the site properly, but I'm interested to know what others would do.
Really it depends what he wants to do - if he's interested in programming for the web, for instance, then something like PHP might be a better choice, or if he wants to write games for Windows and the XBox 360, maybe C# and XNA. But in general I think Python is your best bet. It's pretty easy to get your head round, the syntax is nice and clear, it can do pretty much anything he's likely to want, although it may not be the fastest language around. It's easy to get into game programming using PyGame, or GUI programming using Tkinter, wxPython or another GUI toolkit, or web development using Django.
However, I will also suggest something slightly off the wall. You might want to check out MikeOS (http://mikeos.berlios.de/), which is a simple x86 operating system written in assembly. It now incorporates a simple BASIC interpreter, and can boot from a floppy drive, USB key or CD-R so it could easily be used alongside Windows, or can be run in a virtual machine if you'd prefer. Applications can be written in BASIC or assembly.
Because MikeOS is so simple, writing programs for it should be similarly simple, and the experience is not entirely dissimilar to on old 8-bit computers.
People are accusing you of trolling, but I did recently see an advert for a.NET developer job where it actually did say "Please note we are not interested in individuals who work in C#".
Now, I'm only a hobbyist programmer at the moment, but as far as I can see you should have no problem adapting to VB.NET if you're already familiar with C#. Is there any rational basis for this, or are the people advertising these jobs the sort of recruiters-who-use-grep described in Joel Spolsky's post at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html ?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's one pretty decent news site that won't go behind a paywall - the BBC. They're not perfect, but they are a lot more impartial than most of Murdoch's awful rags, and will remain free because of the way the BBC is funded by license payers. If people are going to pay for other content it has to be better enough to be worth paying extra for, and Murdoch sure as hell can't provide that.
New Scientist? I subscribe to that and it gives free access to their online archive, but if I remember right they only use cookies to keep nonsubscribers out and you can still link to stories fine.
To a certain extent I agree with you - there are too many distros that are just Ubuntu with a different wallpaper and a bunch of codecs preinstalled. However, after that I have little sympathy for that view. There's plenty of good reasons to remix a Linux distro for a particular purpose.
Take mass installs. Say you're installing Ubuntu on a large number of corporate desktops, but you want to change a few of the installed applications (say, switch the email client to Thunderbird, replace Firefox with Chrome etc, install Gnome Do and all the necessary multimedia codecs and update all the packages to the latest versions). Yes, you could install it on each individual machine, then manually install all the packages, or you could write a script to install them, but that's a huge waste of time, and of bandwidth. Even if you have your own apt-get mirror on the company network, it still results in a lot of unnecessary network traffic. A much better idea is to roll your own custom Ubuntu respin with everything you want preinstalled, and just install that on all the machines.
Also, in this case the respin clearly fills a niche - who wants to go through all the crap of installing Ubuntu then changing it all? Far better to have everything prepackaged for what you want, and ready to go. It's a labour-saving tool to be able to make your own respin.
Besides, I've never yet heard of a Linux newbie getting confused and winding up using something like BackTrack or INSERT as their desktop - most manage to find their way to one of the more mainstream distros OK, so I don't buy the whole "people are confused by all the different distros" argument. There are only a few major distros, after all.
I think you need to distinguish between respins and distros - something like this clearly falls in the former camp as it's intended for a specific purpose, while Ubuntu is a general-purpose distro.
I did an exam on SQL and database design recently and used The Manga Guide to Databases as part of my studies. If you don't want something too rigorous it's very good indeed - I found it a lot better at making stuff sink in than a dry, stuffy book. It gives a reasonably good idea of things like the first, second and third normal forms. Don't be put off by the fact that it looks a bit childish - the storytelling idea really works well. It probably won't work for everyone, but it did work well for me (I passed the exam with flying colours).
The UK's laws on use of unsecured wi-fi are asinine in the extreme. People have been prosecuted for using unsecured home access points to check their email in the past. I think laws should recognise that computers and smartphones will, by default, connect to an unsecured access point (presumably manufacturers set it up this way because it's easier for non-technical end users) and that the onus is therefore on the access point owner to secure the device if he wants to limit access to it. By broadcasting its SSID he is quite blatantly offering a public service, and IMHO he has NO right whatsoever to complain that people are using that public service if he has not secured it. There is no way of telling just from a list of access points whether one is intended for public access or not, and in fact many people do keep their wi-fi unsecured specifically to allow for public access. By setting up WEP or WPA on an access point, or by using an alternative method of securing the access point such as a captive portal, the owner is clearly indicating that the access point is not for public use. If someone chooses to try and break the encryption or use some other method to get around this, then that probably should be a crime.
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" In all seriousness, there are plenty of restaurants that offer prizes for eating insane amounts of food, and I guess this is just a variant of that. When I was a kid, there was a pub near me that did a challenge where you got a gammon steak topped with as many fried eggs as you wanted, and if you broke the record for the number of eggs eaten with it (and ate the whole steak as well as the eggs) you got it free. Last I heard the record was 42.
I did the same course and used that. It was an interesting way to learn about networking. I'd love to find something similar that was free to use.
I think LogFS seems like a great idea. It's kind of ridiculous that flash memory is normally formatted as FAT, a filesystem that predates the invention of flash memory, just because it's the only one supported by virtually every OS. I'm sure it must hobble a lot of flash-based devices such as MP3 players. Of course, since LogFS is GPL, support is unlikely to be ever provided out of the box in Windows or OS X, so I imagine FAT will continue to hold sway, unless the LogFS developers were to make it available under another license as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the GPL in general, but I think for something like this they'd benefit from BSD or MIT licensing it.
Would it not make more sense to open source the existing code base? As I understand it some of the code was created by Microsoft so they probably can't do so with that, but the Wikipedia article suggests that code from ReactOS might be able to fill the gap. That said, I guess it would have years of development to catch up on anyway, but surely it would require less work that way than something like Haiku?
I don't think something being Unix-based necessarily makes it less good as a desktop - OS X does alright after all.
Probably - Google are supposed to use a lot of Java and he wouldn't be the first creator of a programming language to work there, he'd be alongside Guido van Rossum and Ken Thompson. Or IBM use a lot of Java too, so they'll probably be falling over themselves to offer him a job.
As said by Douglas Reynholm in The IT Crowd: "God damn, These electric sex pants!"
I believe it's Cassandra that they use - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(database)
I use Facebook Ad Remover: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/68361 It works fine on Firefox and Chrome, and does a great job of removing ads on Facebook, which AdBlock seems to miss.
I've long been of the opinion that Enlightenment is the ideal UI for netbooks - it's fast and lightweight, but looks great. Of course it's been held back by the sedate pace of development, but if E17 is finally released I can see it really going down a storm, especially on ARM-based netbooks where Windows isn't an option.
I'm inclined to think that for most sites IE6 support isn't worth bothering about. I think IE6 users probably fall into two groups: 1) People using company hardware where the IT department hasn't upgraded IE yet. 2) Non-technical users who've disabled Windows updates because they made their computer slower. In respect of the second group I think nagging reminders such as IE6nomore are a good idea, since if every site shows those then maybe these people might get the message eventually. The first group are more difficult since it's not their fault and many of them no doubt would actively like to upgrade since IE6 is such a bad way to browse the Internet today compared to a more modern browser (they certainly do where I work), but often legacy web apps prevent that. Probably the best way is to stop supporting IE6 and it'll make it harder for companies to keep using IE6. If someone can't use a website on IE6 at work but can that evening on Firefox at home, then they can do that. I guess for an e-commerce site then they'd probably need to find out which users actually buy anything as if IE6 users visit the site but don't buy anything, then they can do without supporting them. Personally, I do actually have one netbook with IE6 on but I use Chrome as the browser on that and I figured since I never use IE anyway then might as well stick with the smaller IE6 if I have to have IE on there at all, and it makes sense to have a copy available to test sites in IE if I need to.
Having worked on death claims on life insurance in the past I've seen plenty of cases of elderly couples where the wife dies first and the husband dies soon after, but I'm pretty sure that they don't die of a broken heart. Instead my theory is that they don't look after themselves properly, since if all of a sudden you have to cook for yourself all the time it's a bit of a struggle, and it may be that many of them are still used to the traditional roles of wife as homemaker, husband as breadwinner, so it's hard for the husband to look after himself once he's on his own.
It's kind of hard to decide which way to go, precisely for that reason. If I was freelancing I would be inclined to make IE6 support an optional extra and charge a little more for it (maybe 10-20%).
A system of brown dwarfs (dwarves?) like this must be an awesome sight, although I expect this one is probably too widely separated to be all that spectacular. But the idea of a gas giant/brown dwarf so large it has planets the size of Jupiter as moons is pretty staggering.
Really I mean a runtime, I guess. I do think the JVM is somewhat misnamed.
Would a language that runs in a VM, like Java, Scala or C#, be faster? After all, Twitter rewrote their backend in Scala and they seem to have gotten better performance.
I'm in the process of building a personal website as I'm planning a new career in web development and I can point to that as evidence I know what I'm doing. I'm thinking that the best thing to do is include the code from http://www.ie6nomore.com/ to notify IE6 users that they need to upgrade to be able to use the site properly, but I'm interested to know what others would do.
Really it depends what he wants to do - if he's interested in programming for the web, for instance, then something like PHP might be a better choice, or if he wants to write games for Windows and the XBox 360, maybe C# and XNA. But in general I think Python is your best bet. It's pretty easy to get your head round, the syntax is nice and clear, it can do pretty much anything he's likely to want, although it may not be the fastest language around. It's easy to get into game programming using PyGame, or GUI programming using Tkinter, wxPython or another GUI toolkit, or web development using Django. However, I will also suggest something slightly off the wall. You might want to check out MikeOS (http://mikeos.berlios.de/), which is a simple x86 operating system written in assembly. It now incorporates a simple BASIC interpreter, and can boot from a floppy drive, USB key or CD-R so it could easily be used alongside Windows, or can be run in a virtual machine if you'd prefer. Applications can be written in BASIC or assembly. Because MikeOS is so simple, writing programs for it should be similarly simple, and the experience is not entirely dissimilar to on old 8-bit computers.
Found it! It actually said "Please note that we are not interested in anyone who develops software or works with C#." http://www.myeastangliajobs.co.uk/Jobsite/Jobs/View_Job_Details_1364506
People are accusing you of trolling, but I did recently see an advert for a .NET developer job where it actually did say "Please note we are not interested in individuals who work in C#".
Now, I'm only a hobbyist programmer at the moment, but as far as I can see you should have no problem adapting to VB.NET if you're already familiar with C#. Is there any rational basis for this, or are the people advertising these jobs the sort of recruiters-who-use-grep described in Joel Spolsky's post at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html ?