If they are only concerned with a non-technical, non-Linux using customer base, then why go to the trouble of advertising their use of Linux and GPL compliance?
Obvious answer: because "Linux on the inside" is properly buzzword compliant, and the "GPL compliance" part boils down to "Moglen don't sue us."
...where Verizon is actively trying to dump their business off to Fairpoint to avoid keeping their "FIOS to all our customers" pledge, I find myself unable to care about who has what on Long Island. Sorry.
Before AT&T was broken up 20+ years ago, they essentially owned the wiring and phone equipment in the user's home. If you had an issue, they sent out the friendly neighborhood telephone repairman and he did what it took, including replacing your phone if necessary.
For a while after the divestiture, you had to report any new equipment you were installing to the local phone company, mainly so they could tell you if you were going to put too much load on the line for the phones to ring.
Now, they don't even do that. They can come after you if you disturb the public network, but other than that they don't care.
All such work must be done by licensed data/telco electricians here in Australia.
Boy, were they able to set up a nice little racket for themselves. In the US (or at least in my state), you can not only do your own low-voltage wiring, you can do your own full-power work, so long as it's your house and you don't tamper with the meter or disrupt the distribution network. No restrictions or codes at all regarding low-power work (i.e., CAT5-type stuff) unless, again, you're disrupting the outside world or trying to put a power outlet and a CAT5 jack in the same box.
If anything, Google could publish a set of guidelines for web designers. They could then use their clout to declare flash-based websites profane, standards compliance a necessity, and in general promote common sense design principles. It would work, too.
No, it wouldn't, because the masses of people who use Google have no objection to Flash and could care less about W3C standards. OTOH, if movie websites (which are primarily Flash-based in my experience) were to stop showing up in Google searches, the same masses of people would decide that Google has become defective or anal and would take their searches back to Altavista.
One quick OT question for you: do you receive Heroes with full 5.1 sound, or in 2-channel stereo? I'm only getting stereo, and I'm wondering if it's my cable provider, my local affiliate, or NBC that is setting the sound standard. I get 5.1 for plenty of other shows on othe rnetworks.
You know, they charge me more than enough for my account as it is. Issuing challenge-response keys to every account holder would be absolutely ridiculous, and something I have no desire to pay for.
There is a limit as to how far we need to go to protect users from themselves. Society is not perfectable.
Others sniff that it's an unnecessary remedy for a problem that doesn't exist.
From the earlier articles on this, I hadn't realized that my cable company is going to be banned from supplying the current models of set-top boxes. What a complete pain in my ass. TV is at the top of my list of things that should be as much like a toaster as possible.
TiVo can knows how many active subscribers it has and can determine very accurately what each of those TiVo boxes is viewing/recording/skipping around.
But that self-selected group of subscribers is probably not statistically representative of the broader viewing public. Nielsen Media has spent years working on exactly that question.
jwz wrote an article on their original attempt to do so, basically saying what was said above: no competent programmer wants to spend free time building something they desperately don't want to touch once it's done. Novell has since given up on the project, but that (IMHO) may have more to do with their new Microsoft contract than with the actual merits of the software.
You know, honestly, I don't mind the commercials. Period. Yes, usually I zap them when watching something on the DVR, but I'm not one to not watch something when it's being broadcast just so I can skip the ads.
We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.
Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser), I doubt that that would be productive.
So, I can use the same cable box with a built-in DVR that I have now, or I can go out, spend a couple hundred for one (or for a TiVO), and plug in a cablecard for which I will probably pay the same monthly rate I am paying for the existing setup. Net result: I'm out of pocket the cost of a box which does the same thing the one I already have does. So long as the cable company doesn't decide to stop providing the existing boxes, I can ignore this whole thing.
[blockquote]Free-desktop developers are "wedded" to Linux because it's the Windows of the unix world.[/blockquote]
I was wondering when I read the initial question, though: perhaps a better way to phrase it would have been, "Why are free-desktop developers wedded to Unix-like operating systems?"
Seriously: I think I understand the original meaning of the phrase, to refer to known bugs in the first release of a piece of software, but we're talking about Office 2000 or maybe even earlier in some cases (although MS won't support the older stuff anyway), so what is "zero-day" supposed to refer to? Yes, I looked at Wikipedia, but their Zero-day page (or at least the US-English version) reads to me like a garbled mess.
Well, it's important because David Harris has been producing a very high-quality gratis email client for Windows for nearly 17 years, funded entirely by voluntary manual purchases and support subscriptions, and he cannot do so any longer. For an idea of exactly how advanced the capabilities of Pegasus Mail are, take a look at his still-available-if-you-know-where-to-look Overview page, and especially at the "history of Pegasus Mail" link thereon.
So far as opening the source goes, I'd love to see it happen (actually, I'd love to see someone hire him to run it as an open-source project), but I don't know how dynamic a community could be forged around a Win32 codebase that I understand to be optimized for performance and minimum resource use over modularity, portability, and ease of future development.
I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw this, or what it was for, but I saw a commercial for some gadget (or something) recently, and the tagline at the end of the ad, on screen below the product image, in what looked like the Helvetica-style type Nintendo is using, read "dare to be wiild", or "born to be wiild," or something like that. Has anyone else seen that? It made me think that Nintendo might be doing some subtle cross-promoting.
Slashdot Mirror
...where Verizon is actively trying to dump their business off to Fairpoint to avoid keeping their "FIOS to all our customers" pledge, I find myself unable to care about who has what on Long Island. Sorry.
Before AT&T was broken up 20+ years ago, they essentially owned the wiring and phone equipment in the user's home. If you had an issue, they sent out the friendly neighborhood telephone repairman and he did what it took, including replacing your phone if necessary.
For a while after the divestiture, you had to report any new equipment you were installing to the local phone company, mainly so they could tell you if you were going to put too much load on the line for the phones to ring.
Now, they don't even do that. They can come after you if you disturb the public network, but other than that they don't care.
Boy, were they able to set up a nice little racket for themselves. In the US (or at least in my state), you can not only do your own low-voltage wiring, you can do your own full-power work, so long as it's your house and you don't tamper with the meter or disrupt the distribution network. No restrictions or codes at all regarding low-power work (i.e., CAT5-type stuff) unless, again, you're disrupting the outside world or trying to put a power outlet and a CAT5 jack in the same box.
No, it wouldn't, because the masses of people who use Google have no objection to Flash and could care less about W3C standards. OTOH, if movie websites (which are primarily Flash-based in my experience) were to stop showing up in Google searches, the same masses of people would decide that Google has become defective or anal and would take their searches back to Altavista.
One quick OT question for you: do you receive Heroes with full 5.1 sound, or in 2-channel stereo? I'm only getting stereo, and I'm wondering if it's my cable provider, my local affiliate, or NBC that is setting the sound standard. I get 5.1 for plenty of other shows on othe rnetworks.
You know, they charge me more than enough for my account as it is. Issuing challenge-response keys to every account holder would be absolutely ridiculous, and something I have no desire to pay for.
There is a limit as to how far we need to go to protect users from themselves. Society is not perfectable.
You don't suppose they'd actually try writing, would you? Maybe it's time for a revival of the Mighty Leno Art Players!
jwz wrote an article on their original attempt to do so, basically saying what was said above: no competent programmer wants to spend free time building something they desperately don't want to touch once it's done. Novell has since given up on the project, but that (IMHO) may have more to do with their new Microsoft contract than with the actual merits of the software.
You know, honestly, I don't mind the commercials. Period. Yes, usually I zap them when watching something on the DVR, but I'm not one to not watch something when it's being broadcast just so I can skip the ads.
Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser), I doubt that that would be productive.
What is this APL, and why are they named after a programming language with its own character set?
How about "from the cmdrtaco-went-overboard-at-CES-and-now-he-has-to- sleep-on-the-couch dept."?
Maine Governor John Baldacci (D) has commented on the proposed selloff. As is his wont, the comment said absolutely nothing.
You know what I have observed? The unreal work pays much better than the real work.
So, I can use the same cable box with a built-in DVR that I have now, or I can go out, spend a couple hundred for one (or for a TiVO), and plug in a cablecard for which I will probably pay the same monthly rate I am paying for the existing setup. Net result: I'm out of pocket the cost of a box which does the same thing the one I already have does. So long as the cable company doesn't decide to stop providing the existing boxes, I can ignore this whole thing.
[blockquote]Free-desktop developers are "wedded" to Linux because it's the Windows of the unix world.[/blockquote]
I was wondering when I read the initial question, though: perhaps a better way to phrase it would have been, "Why are free-desktop developers wedded to Unix-like operating systems?"
Now that makes sense. Thanks!
Seriously: I think I understand the original meaning of the phrase, to refer to known bugs in the first release of a piece of software, but we're talking about Office 2000 or maybe even earlier in some cases (although MS won't support the older stuff anyway), so what is "zero-day" supposed to refer to? Yes, I looked at Wikipedia, but their Zero-day page (or at least the US-English version) reads to me like a garbled mess.
Well, it's important because David Harris has been producing a very high-quality gratis email client for Windows for nearly 17 years, funded entirely by voluntary manual purchases and support subscriptions, and he cannot do so any longer. For an idea of exactly how advanced the capabilities of Pegasus Mail are, take a look at his still-available-if-you-know-where-to-look Overview page, and especially at the "history of Pegasus Mail" link thereon.
So far as opening the source goes, I'd love to see it happen (actually, I'd love to see someone hire him to run it as an open-source project), but I don't know how dynamic a community could be forged around a Win32 codebase that I understand to be optimized for performance and minimum resource use over modularity, portability, and ease of future development.
He doesn't work for any organization that has initials.
I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw this, or what it was for, but I saw a commercial for some gadget (or something) recently, and the tagline at the end of the ad, on screen below the product image, in what looked like the Helvetica-style type Nintendo is using, read "dare to be wiild", or "born to be wiild," or something like that. Has anyone else seen that? It made me think that Nintendo might be doing some subtle cross-promoting.
+8 Geographical Superiority
(I tend to refer to that other city with the left-handed ocean as "Portland Jr.")