Although I'm not a professional programmer (yet!) I do code a bit, and I've found that listening to music can be helpful to maintain concentration by shutting out external stimuli - it makes it easier to get into the right sort of flow, at least for me.
I've also used my iPod at my day job in customer services for a life insurer, and that worked well. It made it eaier to concentrate, which was very important as I was working on complaints and technical enquiries, which involved a lot of digging so it was a similar situation. I had them on low enough that if the phone rang I could still hear it. It prevented people from interrupting me as well (which is odd as people seem to feel it's OK to interrupt you if you're busy, but not if you are listening to music), or from getting distracted. Sadly we had a new department head come in and ban them.
I find more ambient sounding music works well - I'm particularly fond of Joy Division or the Cocteau Twins for these purposes.
I would be tempted to use this for honourable reasons (ie wait for phishers to email me, then get the details off their site and let someone know that these account details had been stolen) but I'm not sure how. I strongly suspect actually posting them on a website would likely get you in trouble with the authorities, and I'm not sure how effective emailing either the bank(s) or websites in question, or the people whose details were stolen, would be.
I've wondered for a while what possibilities prepaid mobile broadband in the UK offer for hackers/crackers. Surely, a mobile broadband USB stick, is a hugely valuable hacking tool? You could buy one in cash so they can't trace your credit-debit card, don't register with the provider so you're effectively anonymous (most mobile ISP's require you to register before letting you access adult content), and you can be moving round a lot. Although they do seem to block web proxies, which is one point against.
It's the same with Vodafone's prepaid mobile broadband. They do prevent you from visiting some websites unless you register with them to prove you're over 18, but they don't block access to The Pirate Bay. Mind you, I haven't tried BitTorrent over a mobile connection and I expect they probably make some attempt to block it.
It's depressing that we so often wind up getting stuck with using the lowest common denominator filesystem if we want to share a hard drive partition or flash drive among formats.
It's not so much of an issue with hard drives unless you're dual-booting, but with flash memory and portable devices such as iPods I think it's a big deal. Flash memory is a relatively recent invention (mid-90's I believe), but we're stuck using a filesystem that predates it and was never designed to work with it, and flash-based devices are hobbled by having to use a filesystem that's not designed for them.
Take the iPod. You've got two choices - Windows formatting (basically FAT32), which is not designed for such a device, or HFS+, which isn't exactly the greatest choice for a filesystem for an iPod anyway, and isn't supported on Windows, and has only limited support in Linux.
It's less of an issue with hard-drive based iPods, but I strongly suspect that with flash memory becoming more prominent in iPods then a decent cross-platform filesystem designed for flash memory is long overdue. Someone really needs to create one (call it something like Universal Flash File System), and release it under a liberal enough license that it can be included by default with all modern OS's -something like the BSD or MIT license.
Weren't Microsoft talking about doing this years ago? It may have been in respect of Office instead of Windows, but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of prior talk about it.
I wouldn't mind a free copy of Office or Visual Studio if it was ad-supported, but I draw the line at operating systems. I would not be prepared to use an OS that bombarded me with ads - that would be enough to make me switch to Ubuntu exclusively.
Emulators may be the way to go for lots of choice in games. If you have a load of old DOS games you can always run them in DOSBox, and even if you don't a lot of these can be downloaded free of charge from sites that offer abandonware. I'm particularly fond of Frontier: Elite 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown. I also like Amiga emulators - K-240 is one of my favourite games of all time.
Stuff like that makes me wonder about what they haven't said. For instance, if it's that locked down it wouldn't surprise me if it incorporates a keylogger of some kind, and other ways of monitoring usage. While I can see how they might choose to justify something like that (such as to make sure kids aren't doing something they shouldn't during lessons), it's a monstrous breach of privacy.
I don't think too many kids will have their netbooks broken into by hackers - most school-age kids don't have credit cards. More likely someone will find a crack and release it to the world for the kids to use.
anyone that have been reading Cory Doctorow`s little brother, will see strong parallels to the school computers handed out to the students and how they manged to get around the spyware in them. Wonder what other bright ideers from that book they are going to implementate.
Pretty much what I was thinking - and I imagine they're likely to fall just as quickly as the SchoolBooks in that. I'm pretty sure hackers everywhere will see that as a challenge. I give it a month or two once they're available.
I really hope they don't implement the constant stream of advertising as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but although Mono is largely based around C# it does support other languages such as IronPython, VB.NET, and Boo, and the MonoTouch website implies that you can use other languages as well. That could potentially mean being able to use MonoTouch to write applications in these other languages, which could be handy.
I'd imagine it probably uses GTK+, since that's what the Chrome browser uses on Linux, and why would Google make it artificially hard for themselves by having to maintain two Linux versions of Chrome? Still, one thing's for sure - Linux definitely won't be saddled with a shoddy version of the browser, which is advantageous to any Linux user.
I was thinking probably relicensed under the GPL - I guess this would make sense for Oracle to do this as it would mean it could be integrated into the Linux kernel, and if they were to relicense the whole of OpenSolaris under the GPL it wouldn't cause any problems. However, I guess it could mean Apple might not want to use it anymore - my (very!) shaky understanding is that you can't link GPL'd code to code under an incompatible license at compile time, and isn't the license Apple use for their OS kernel incompatible with the GPL? That would mean they could no longer incorporate ZFS into the kernel unless they were to fork it. It could still be implemented in user space, I guess, but that would slow it down, and it would still be impractical to use as the main OS.
And of course there's the issue of Btrfs - will Oracle relicense ZFS so it's Linux compatible when they're already working on a rival? I guess we'll know sometime soon.
That kind of issue is usually for legal reasons and not Ubuntu's fault. They can't include those codecs because some nations have legal restrictions that prevent them from doing so.
However, not every distro uses the same means to get round this. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but has two versions, the full and light versions. The full version includes those codecs, and the light version doesn't, and the website directs you to choose the appropriate version for your area, putting responsibility for downloading the correct version onto you. If you download the full version, Flash should work out of the box. It's also got a great default theme.
I did hear that functional programming was likely to become the dominant programming paradigm in the near future because it was well-suited to developing with multiple cores.
I'm currently learning Python and I daresay it will take a while to get used to OOP. Is functional programming appreciably harder or is it just different? I'd certainly be open to learning another language.
I think a lot of this is actually due to lack of mental exercise. There are a scary number of people who once they leave school, never read a book again. Also, a lot of jobs are mind-numbingly dull (even more so than school), so while kid's minds may be getting exercised at school, that comes to a crashing halt when they leave.
I'd be interested to know how this pans out across people in different professions. I bet scientists, university professors or software developers probably display much less degredation in their mental capacity than people in less mentally demanding jobs.
Well, I have yet to compile something from source on Ubuntu and have it not work when I've satisfied the dependencies. And I'd argue that the fact that apt-get is already built in makes it quicker and easier to satisfy those dependencies in the first place.
Not according to Wikipedia. However, I guess the closest is OpenSolaris, since it shares much of its code base with Sun Solaris, which is a certified Unix, and will apparently be used as the base for the next Sun Solaris.
Sun Solaris is actually available as a free download, although it's not open source.
Very true. I mean, OS X actually uses a lot of the same GNU tools as Linux does, and as it's using the Mach kernel I don't think that contains any of the original Unix kernel. The userland is based on FreeBSD, which as far as I know isn't allowed to call itself Unix.
As far as I can see the whole "real Unix" thing is primarily about meeting a set of requirements and paying to have it certified as that. I strongly suspect that if any Linux vendor wished to certify their distro as Unix, then they could, but they've got better things to spend their money on. And isn't the Linux Standard Base stricter than the single Unix specification?
It would certainly be interesting if a Linux vendor did attempt to get certified as Unix.
In response to that you could always point out that they can easily buy that kind of support from Linux vendors. Red Hat, Novell and Canonical offer that kind of support for those who are willing to pay.
No. ITV is notoriously lacking in any kind of comedy whatsoever. Or if they do come up with something another channel steals it, as happened with Men Behaving Badly.
Channel 4 were responsible for The IT Crowd. Graham Linehan, the creator, has worked with Channel 4 before, as he was co-creator with Arthur Matthews of Father Ted (genius comedy!), and also created Black Books.
I think it would be a lot better if ISP's stopped sending people those stupid setup CD's and just gave them the information they need to set it up themselves. They might need a driver for some devices, which is fair enough, but most operating systems include a simple setup wizard, so why don't they just use that?
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Although I'm not a professional programmer (yet!) I do code a bit, and I've found that listening to music can be helpful to maintain concentration by shutting out external stimuli - it makes it easier to get into the right sort of flow, at least for me. I've also used my iPod at my day job in customer services for a life insurer, and that worked well. It made it eaier to concentrate, which was very important as I was working on complaints and technical enquiries, which involved a lot of digging so it was a similar situation. I had them on low enough that if the phone rang I could still hear it. It prevented people from interrupting me as well (which is odd as people seem to feel it's OK to interrupt you if you're busy, but not if you are listening to music), or from getting distracted. Sadly we had a new department head come in and ban them. I find more ambient sounding music works well - I'm particularly fond of Joy Division or the Cocteau Twins for these purposes.
I would be tempted to use this for honourable reasons (ie wait for phishers to email me, then get the details off their site and let someone know that these account details had been stolen) but I'm not sure how. I strongly suspect actually posting them on a website would likely get you in trouble with the authorities, and I'm not sure how effective emailing either the bank(s) or websites in question, or the people whose details were stolen, would be.
I've wondered for a while what possibilities prepaid mobile broadband in the UK offer for hackers/crackers. Surely, a mobile broadband USB stick, is a hugely valuable hacking tool? You could buy one in cash so they can't trace your credit-debit card, don't register with the provider so you're effectively anonymous (most mobile ISP's require you to register before letting you access adult content), and you can be moving round a lot. Although they do seem to block web proxies, which is one point against.
It's the same with Vodafone's prepaid mobile broadband. They do prevent you from visiting some websites unless you register with them to prove you're over 18, but they don't block access to The Pirate Bay. Mind you, I haven't tried BitTorrent over a mobile connection and I expect they probably make some attempt to block it.
I have a Vodafone prepaid 3G broadband stick, and the price is a flat £15 per 1GB. As at right now, apparently that's $26.9203 Australian dollars.
It's depressing that we so often wind up getting stuck with using the lowest common denominator filesystem if we want to share a hard drive partition or flash drive among formats. It's not so much of an issue with hard drives unless you're dual-booting, but with flash memory and portable devices such as iPods I think it's a big deal. Flash memory is a relatively recent invention (mid-90's I believe), but we're stuck using a filesystem that predates it and was never designed to work with it, and flash-based devices are hobbled by having to use a filesystem that's not designed for them. Take the iPod. You've got two choices - Windows formatting (basically FAT32), which is not designed for such a device, or HFS+, which isn't exactly the greatest choice for a filesystem for an iPod anyway, and isn't supported on Windows, and has only limited support in Linux. It's less of an issue with hard-drive based iPods, but I strongly suspect that with flash memory becoming more prominent in iPods then a decent cross-platform filesystem designed for flash memory is long overdue. Someone really needs to create one (call it something like Universal Flash File System), and release it under a liberal enough license that it can be included by default with all modern OS's -something like the BSD or MIT license.
Weren't Microsoft talking about doing this years ago? It may have been in respect of Office instead of Windows, but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of prior talk about it. I wouldn't mind a free copy of Office or Visual Studio if it was ad-supported, but I draw the line at operating systems. I would not be prepared to use an OS that bombarded me with ads - that would be enough to make me switch to Ubuntu exclusively.
Emulators may be the way to go for lots of choice in games. If you have a load of old DOS games you can always run them in DOSBox, and even if you don't a lot of these can be downloaded free of charge from sites that offer abandonware. I'm particularly fond of Frontier: Elite 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown. I also like Amiga emulators - K-240 is one of my favourite games of all time.
Stuff like that makes me wonder about what they haven't said. For instance, if it's that locked down it wouldn't surprise me if it incorporates a keylogger of some kind, and other ways of monitoring usage. While I can see how they might choose to justify something like that (such as to make sure kids aren't doing something they shouldn't during lessons), it's a monstrous breach of privacy.
I don't think too many kids will have their netbooks broken into by hackers - most school-age kids don't have credit cards. More likely someone will find a crack and release it to the world for the kids to use.
anyone that have been reading Cory Doctorow`s little brother, will see strong parallels to the school computers handed out to the students and how they manged to get around the spyware in them. Wonder what other bright ideers from that book they are going to implementate.
Pretty much what I was thinking - and I imagine they're likely to fall just as quickly as the SchoolBooks in that. I'm pretty sure hackers everywhere will see that as a challenge. I give it a month or two once they're available. I really hope they don't implement the constant stream of advertising as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but although Mono is largely based around C# it does support other languages such as IronPython, VB.NET, and Boo, and the MonoTouch website implies that you can use other languages as well. That could potentially mean being able to use MonoTouch to write applications in these other languages, which could be handy.
I'd imagine it probably uses GTK+, since that's what the Chrome browser uses on Linux, and why would Google make it artificially hard for themselves by having to maintain two Linux versions of Chrome? Still, one thing's for sure - Linux definitely won't be saddled with a shoddy version of the browser, which is advantageous to any Linux user.
I was thinking probably relicensed under the GPL - I guess this would make sense for Oracle to do this as it would mean it could be integrated into the Linux kernel, and if they were to relicense the whole of OpenSolaris under the GPL it wouldn't cause any problems. However, I guess it could mean Apple might not want to use it anymore - my (very!) shaky understanding is that you can't link GPL'd code to code under an incompatible license at compile time, and isn't the license Apple use for their OS kernel incompatible with the GPL? That would mean they could no longer incorporate ZFS into the kernel unless they were to fork it. It could still be implemented in user space, I guess, but that would slow it down, and it would still be impractical to use as the main OS. And of course there's the issue of Btrfs - will Oracle relicense ZFS so it's Linux compatible when they're already working on a rival? I guess we'll know sometime soon.
Only one I've heard of outside Apple is Ma.gnolia, which isn't a great endorsement since they went down and lost all their data...
That kind of issue is usually for legal reasons and not Ubuntu's fault. They can't include those codecs because some nations have legal restrictions that prevent them from doing so. However, not every distro uses the same means to get round this. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but has two versions, the full and light versions. The full version includes those codecs, and the light version doesn't, and the website directs you to choose the appropriate version for your area, putting responsibility for downloading the correct version onto you. If you download the full version, Flash should work out of the box. It's also got a great default theme.
I did hear that functional programming was likely to become the dominant programming paradigm in the near future because it was well-suited to developing with multiple cores. I'm currently learning Python and I daresay it will take a while to get used to OOP. Is functional programming appreciably harder or is it just different? I'd certainly be open to learning another language.
I think a lot of this is actually due to lack of mental exercise. There are a scary number of people who once they leave school, never read a book again. Also, a lot of jobs are mind-numbingly dull (even more so than school), so while kid's minds may be getting exercised at school, that comes to a crashing halt when they leave. I'd be interested to know how this pans out across people in different professions. I bet scientists, university professors or software developers probably display much less degredation in their mental capacity than people in less mentally demanding jobs.
Well, I have yet to compile something from source on Ubuntu and have it not work when I've satisfied the dependencies. And I'd argue that the fact that apt-get is already built in makes it quicker and easier to satisfy those dependencies in the first place.
Well, UI's are always going to be subjective. For me KDE works much better for the way I work than the OS X desktop.
Not according to Wikipedia. However, I guess the closest is OpenSolaris, since it shares much of its code base with Sun Solaris, which is a certified Unix, and will apparently be used as the base for the next Sun Solaris. Sun Solaris is actually available as a free download, although it's not open source.
Very true. I mean, OS X actually uses a lot of the same GNU tools as Linux does, and as it's using the Mach kernel I don't think that contains any of the original Unix kernel. The userland is based on FreeBSD, which as far as I know isn't allowed to call itself Unix. As far as I can see the whole "real Unix" thing is primarily about meeting a set of requirements and paying to have it certified as that. I strongly suspect that if any Linux vendor wished to certify their distro as Unix, then they could, but they've got better things to spend their money on. And isn't the Linux Standard Base stricter than the single Unix specification? It would certainly be interesting if a Linux vendor did attempt to get certified as Unix.
In response to that you could always point out that they can easily buy that kind of support from Linux vendors. Red Hat, Novell and Canonical offer that kind of support for those who are willing to pay.
No. ITV is notoriously lacking in any kind of comedy whatsoever. Or if they do come up with something another channel steals it, as happened with Men Behaving Badly. Channel 4 were responsible for The IT Crowd. Graham Linehan, the creator, has worked with Channel 4 before, as he was co-creator with Arthur Matthews of Father Ted (genius comedy!), and also created Black Books.
I think it would be a lot better if ISP's stopped sending people those stupid setup CD's and just gave them the information they need to set it up themselves. They might need a driver for some devices, which is fair enough, but most operating systems include a simple setup wizard, so why don't they just use that?