Recall Toolbar for Internet Explorer is an even better idea. It lets you search in your browser history for web pages you know you've visited earlier. I believe that today searching a much more obvoius way of "remembering" and "navigating" favorite web sites than organizing bookmarks is.
I know this is off topic, but I see they call the iPod one of the most important products in Apple history. How does one value their individual products, and how would a list of importantness lokk like? Like this?
1. Apple I for starting the whole thing? 2. Apple II for making Apple a business? 3. Macintosh for paving the way to the future? 4. iMac for saving the company? 5. iPod for attracting buyers outside of the crowd of believers?
Can Steve Jobs be called a "product" these days, and thus earn a place on the top 5?
Watchmen can't be done in 90-120 minutes with Big Name Actors. Leastwise, it can't be done right, and if it can't be done right, it shouldn't be done at all.:(
You know what? This is exactly what a lot of fans said when they first heard about the little-known director Peter Jackson taking on Lord of the Rings.
As far as I'm concerned those movies were pretty good, so I wouldn't write of a Watchmen movie yet. Who knows? It might be good!
I'm surprised that the article discusses several stand alone programs but not the simples backup tool of them all (in Windows XP, that is): The xcopy command.
If you've mounted your iPod as a disk, open a command line window and execute the following command:
xcopy/s/h/f {path to your ipod} {path to a folder on your computer where you want to store the music files}
This will copy the folder structure on your iPod to your hard drive. The downside is that the music files will be in the iPod's internal (and somewhat strange) directory structure. But if structure matters to you, you can reimport the files into iTunes, and the files will be organized for you.
This is not a great solution if you want to backup just a few files, though.
High hopes for the linguistic parts of OpenOffice
on
OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The Open Office software is OK, but what I actually have high hopes for is the parts of Open Office that's not just code, i.e. stuff like thesauruses, dictionaries, determining prefixes and suffixes, and so on.
In short: I have hopes for this part of OpenOffice, since I can see that it can become incredibly useful for other kinds of applications, search applications especially.
Open Source search implementations are held back because they know little or nothing about grammar or common spelling errors, and until they do they will never get the same quality as Google or Fast's products.
I'm one of the heretics that believe that free (as in beer) has helped spread Linux, Apache and MySQL more than free (as in speech), based on nothing more than the fact that the free beer part was what made me start using those products.
But I don't think this announcement will be met by anything but a shrug from most Linux and open source DB users, whetever version of free they believe in. The thought of a product having limitations at all will stop them from even trying it.
It can be relevant for some people, though, and that's for those who're evalutating commercial DB's in the first place and have the budget to buy them.
Separate program logic from design and let a designer do the interface. Much happier for everyone involved.
Isn't this simpler said than done?
In my experience, even with a good templating system you're unable to let the designer do the interface 100%. Of course designers can make fairly sophisticated sketches, but I'm always astonished by the amount of logic that's needed to create a user interface.
In my experience web application interfaces in particular are dynamic, not static; they often change and adapt dynamically to the context, user credentials, etc.
So I think a user interface will always be the product of both designers and programmers, and as such there is no sharp separation between logic and design.
Strange quirks like this are one of the reasons why the FSF asks people to give the copyright of code over to them rather than to have all of the individual programmers retain copyright.
I think the FSF only asks this for GNU products, not for every GPL product that exists.
Isn't FSF's asking people to give them the copyright just the same as MySQL does, the only difference being thar MySQL is a commercial entity?
Together with the fact that all his recent software has been licensed under the GPL this indicates that he no longer has anything to do with any "cracking" groups.
In what way does using the GPL prove that someone isn't a cracker?
could it be that South Korea will be the home of the first million player MMORPG?
According to this article one of the the massive multiplayer games, Lineage, has 3 million subscribers. That's one in twelve South Koreans! So I guess South Korea is already the home om the first million player massive multiplayer game.
A conference I attended had South Korea as one of its topics. According to what was told there online gaming is very popular there, yes. But almost as popular was _watching_ the games.
Apparently chatting and meeting people was very central to everything they did, so the "game arenas" was just another meeting place.
Another strange thing for those of us with a little paranoia, is that in South Korea authentication and registration is done almost on every web site with full name and social security number! That means that if Slashdot had had an equivalent there, no one would be anonymous.
This is the fact I find strangest. But I can see that it has it's strong points when it comes to shopping, preventing fraud, etc.
At the end of the day, my own Open Source projects that I do on nights and on weekends are in Ruby (if they are web apps) and O'Caml (otherwise).
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You say one of the reasons you hate perl because you hate interpreters. That makes me curious as to why you choose Ruby for your personal projects? As far as I know Ruby is as interpreted as Perl.
Re:Legitimate question.
on
BSD Hacks
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· Score: 3, Informative
Is a hacks book a good way to go about learning more about the insides of an OS (BSD) and how it works, or are there other books out there for this purpose?
I haven't read "BSD Hacks", but I have read O'Reilly's "Linux hacks". If BSD Hacks is anything like the O'Reilly book "Linux hacks", I'd have to say that the answer is no.
Don't misunderstand -- "Linux hacks" is an awesome book, but it is a book that helps users that have some experience solve a couple of (or more like 100) special problems you really have to experience before you even know they exist. I don't know if this makes any sense, but what I'm trying to say is that it may be more suited for experienced users.
Since you seem to be an OS X user I think you'd get more help from another O'Reilly book: Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther. It teaches you the basics and might even get you far enough to experience the kind of situations where you'd start wanting a Hacks book.
In may not be about price in spirit, but I think it'd be wrong to downplay the fact that in many cases the price (FREE as in beer) is one of the major reasons for switching to open source solutions.
In 1999 my company started using FreeBSD on Intel hardware, and just a few months later we started using Linux on Intel based web servers in addition to Solaris based servers. We had used both SGI and Sun hardware and OS-es before, but saw that switching was a cost effective thing to do.
Linux and FreeBSD was similar enough to proprietary unices so that our staff's skills was relevant even after switching. At the same time would save a lot of money when we had to add and upgrade hardware. Quite simply, choosing open source software enabled us to grow even on a very limited hardware and software budget.
I dont know, again, not a troll, UNIX rocks - just wondering why there isn't (or if there is?) any group out there writing completely new from the ground up without using UNIX as their model?
I don't know if this is satifying enough for you, but check out ReactOS. These guys are writing a Windows NT 4 clone from the ground up. Granted, they're not starting from scratch with entirely new ideas, but at least they're satisfying your demand of writing an OS "without using UNIX as their model".
I believe Apple is right in that. The cell phone and the PDA market will converge. WIth the Microsoft Smartphones and phones like the Nokia 6600 one might argue that the two markets have converged already.
But I think Apple should add another belief to their list of worries: When will the cell phone market will overtake the MP3 player market?
In addition to getting PDA capabilities, cell phones have gotten digital photo abilities -- in short time it will be the most used platform for taking digital photos. Many cell phones now also comes with MP3 playback ability, although limited memory limits the fun a little bit right now.
But it's improving month by month. The cell phone seems to be a very adaptive unit; it adds non-telephony techology wells, and customers doesn't mind it doing so.
Years ago I read a few books by Erich von Däniken. I can't say I believe a lot of his theories, but I remember one point he made which made a lot of sense to me:
Basically he said it was naive to be listening to radio signals, and his reasoning was like yours (how long will we continue using such a techology?). He wanted to explore other alternatives, such as telepathy. Now, I don't believe in telepathy, but I thought his point was good.
Ironically, the man who wanted to explore telepathy is a founding member of SETI.
I agree with your conclusion, but not the reason why. The PDA market isn't really going to take off unless the mobile phone market goes away.
Cell phones are getting more and more PDA features for each new generation. Most people have never owned a PDA, and what they find in their cell phones are more than enough to satisfy the needs of the vast majority.
I can understand why this seems like i frightening move, but is it really that bad? Isn't numbers just numbers?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 2.6.8 is a stable kernel, but thing breaks at.9 when trying to implement some new development. Why not just continue using 2.6.8, if it's stable, it works -- and you don't have access to armies of patch people?
In my opinion it doesn't really matter whether the unstable kernel is named 2.7.x or 2.6.9.
I read the article, but I think I asked the question wrong. I really was wondering about their methodology.
If it is what it seems to be -- people surfing the web hunting smut -- I can't help to think that it's a little like hunting a moving target. New sites appear regularily, others are shut down, so this has to be a job that's never completed? In other words, BT can't guarantee that they've covered everything?
Reading stories like these always makes me wonder how British Telecom (and others) knows what is child porn and not?
Do they have staff consisting of "smut surfers", that surfs the web and makes note of URL with unwanted content?
Although I'm of the opinion that free spech doesn't nescessarily secure the rights of spreading child porn, I always get a little suspicious when I read about these things. I always think "what can or will they block next".
It may be right that PHP5 is targetting ASP.Net, but I can't say I think PHP5 and ASP.Net will appeal to the same audiences.
PHP shines because it's not so much a language, as it is a front end for different C libraries. This is PHP's strength, but it's also it's main weakness. It lacks a coherent object model, or even a coherent naming system for the different libraries it integrates. As such it is a mess, and difficult to learn -- though it's more feature packed than you can dream of in ASP.Net.
Both.Net and Java are better in this way, things look and feel like ASP.Net/Java from library to library. Even Perl are better in this respect. (PHP is becoming a little bit better, with the new DB classes in Pear, but the core is still very function oriented).
So even though I'm "born and raised" (as a web developer) in the Unix/Linux/OSS world, I can't bring myself to quite like PHP. It's a mess (but a lot of people doesn't seem to mind, so I guess the problem lies with me, not PHP).
Ever since the day Apple started selling iPod models with several hard disk sizes, the low end model have always been sold without the dock. So this isn't new, but it may be confusing that the old "middle" model (20gb) now is the low end model.
Slashdot Mirror
Recall Toolbar for Internet Explorer is an even better idea. It lets you search in your browser history for web pages you know you've visited earlier. I believe that today searching a much more obvoius way of "remembering" and "navigating" favorite web sites than organizing bookmarks is.
I know this is off topic, but I see they call the iPod one of the most important products in Apple history. How does one value their individual products, and how would a list of importantness lokk like? Like this?
1. Apple I for starting the whole thing?
2. Apple II for making Apple a business?
3. Macintosh for paving the way to the future?
4. iMac for saving the company?
5. iPod for attracting buyers outside of the crowd of believers?
Can Steve Jobs be called a "product" these days, and thus earn a place on the top 5?
As far as I'm concerned those movies were pretty good, so I wouldn't write of a Watchmen movie yet. Who knows? It might be good!
I'm surprised that the article discusses several stand alone programs but not the simples backup tool of them all (in Windows XP, that is): The xcopy command.
/s /h /f {path to your ipod} {path to a folder on your computer where you want to store the music files}
If you've mounted your iPod as a disk, open a command line window and execute the following command:
xcopy
This will copy the folder structure on your iPod to your hard drive. The downside is that the music files will be in the iPod's internal (and somewhat strange) directory structure. But if structure matters to you, you can reimport the files into iTunes, and the files will be organized for you.
This is not a great solution if you want to backup just a few files, though.
The Open Office software is OK, but what I actually have high hopes for is the parts of Open Office that's not just code, i.e. stuff like thesauruses, dictionaries, determining prefixes and suffixes, and so on.
In short: I have hopes for this part of OpenOffice, since I can see that it can become incredibly useful for other kinds of applications, search applications especially.
Open Source search implementations are held back because they know little or nothing about grammar or common spelling errors, and until they do they will never get the same quality as Google or Fast's products.
Wasn't this story reported -- and discussed here -- in august last year as well?
8 /1 0/0014206&tid=134&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0
(Of course, I didn't RTFA)
I'm one of the heretics that believe that free (as in beer) has helped spread Linux, Apache and MySQL more than free (as in speech), based on nothing more than the fact that the free beer part was what made me start using those products.
But I don't think this announcement will be met by anything but a shrug from most Linux and open source DB users, whetever version of free they believe in. The thought of a product having limitations at all will stop them from even trying it.
It can be relevant for some people, though, and that's for those who're evalutating commercial DB's in the first place and have the budget to buy them.
In my experience, even with a good templating system you're unable to let the designer do the interface 100%. Of course designers can make fairly sophisticated sketches, but I'm always astonished by the amount of logic that's needed to create a user interface.
In my experience web application interfaces in particular are dynamic, not static; they often change and adapt dynamically to the context, user credentials, etc.
So I think a user interface will always be the product of both designers and programmers, and as such there is no sharp separation between logic and design.
Isn't FSF's asking people to give them the copyright just the same as MySQL does, the only difference being thar MySQL is a commercial entity?
A conference I attended had South Korea as one of its topics. According to what was told there online gaming is very popular there, yes. But almost as popular was _watching_ the games.
Apparently chatting and meeting people was very central to everything they did, so the "game arenas" was just another meeting place.
Another strange thing for those of us with a little paranoia, is that in South Korea authentication and registration is done almost on every web site with full name and social security number! That means that if Slashdot had had an equivalent there, no one would be anonymous.
This is the fact I find strangest. But I can see that it has it's strong points when it comes to shopping, preventing fraud, etc.
Don't misunderstand -- "Linux hacks" is an awesome book, but it is a book that helps users that have some experience solve a couple of (or more like 100) special problems you really have to experience before you even know they exist. I don't know if this makes any sense, but what I'm trying to say is that it may be more suited for experienced users.
Since you seem to be an OS X user I think you'd get more help from another O'Reilly book: Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther. It teaches you the basics and might even get you far enough to experience the kind of situations where you'd start wanting a Hacks book.
In 1999 my company started using FreeBSD on Intel hardware, and just a few months later we started using Linux on Intel based web servers in addition to Solaris based servers. We had used both SGI and Sun hardware and OS-es before, but saw that switching was a cost effective thing to do.
Linux and FreeBSD was similar enough to proprietary unices so that our staff's skills was relevant even after switching. At the same time would save a lot of money when we had to add and upgrade hardware. Quite simply, choosing open source software enabled us to grow even on a very limited hardware and software budget.
He didn't ask for something completely new. He asked if there was an OS project being built from the ground up that wasn't based on Unix.
ReactOS meets that demand.
I believe Apple is right in that. The cell phone and the PDA market will converge. WIth the Microsoft Smartphones and phones like the Nokia 6600 one might argue that the two markets have converged already.
But I think Apple should add another belief to their list of worries: When will the cell phone market will overtake the MP3 player market?
In addition to getting PDA capabilities, cell phones have gotten digital photo abilities -- in short time it will be the most used platform for taking digital photos. Many cell phones now also comes with MP3 playback ability, although limited memory limits the fun a little bit right now.
But it's improving month by month. The cell phone seems to be a very adaptive unit; it adds non-telephony techology wells, and customers doesn't mind it doing so.
Years ago I read a few books by Erich von Däniken. I can't say I believe a lot of his theories, but I remember one point he made which made a lot of sense to me:
Basically he said it was naive to be listening to radio signals, and his reasoning was like yours (how long will we continue using such a techology?). He wanted to explore other alternatives, such as telepathy. Now, I don't believe in telepathy, but I thought his point was good.
Ironically, the man who wanted to explore telepathy is a founding member of SETI.
I agree with your conclusion, but not the reason why. The PDA market isn't really going to take off unless the mobile phone market goes away.
Cell phones are getting more and more PDA features for each new generation. Most people have never owned a PDA, and what they find in their cell phones are more than enough to satisfy the needs of the vast majority.
I can understand why this seems like i frightening move, but is it really that bad? Isn't numbers just numbers?
.9 when trying to implement some new development. Why not just continue using 2.6.8, if it's stable, it works -- and you don't have access to armies of patch people?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 2.6.8 is a stable kernel, but thing breaks at
In my opinion it doesn't really matter whether the unstable kernel is named 2.7.x or 2.6.9.
I read the articled, but I don't think I made it clear what I was wondering about. See my reply to another guy about this.
I read the article, but I think I asked the question wrong. I really was wondering about their methodology.
If it is what it seems to be -- people surfing the web hunting smut -- I can't help to think that it's a little like hunting a moving target. New sites appear regularily, others are shut down, so this has to be a job that's never completed? In other words, BT can't guarantee that they've covered everything?
Reading stories like these always makes me wonder how British Telecom (and others) knows what is child porn and not?
Do they have staff consisting of "smut surfers", that surfs the web and makes note of URL with unwanted content?
Although I'm of the opinion that free spech doesn't nescessarily secure the rights of spreading child porn, I always get a little suspicious when I read about these things. I always think "what can or will they block next".
It may be right that PHP5 is targetting ASP.Net, but I can't say I think PHP5 and ASP.Net will appeal to the same audiences.
.Net and Java are better in this way, things look and feel like ASP.Net/Java from library to library. Even Perl are better in this respect. (PHP is becoming a little bit better, with the new DB classes in Pear, but the core is still very function oriented).
PHP shines because it's not so much a language, as it is a front end for different C libraries. This is PHP's strength, but it's also it's main weakness. It lacks a coherent object model, or even a coherent naming system for the different libraries it integrates. As such it is a mess, and difficult to learn -- though it's more feature packed than you can dream of in ASP.Net.
Both
So even though I'm "born and raised" (as a web developer) in the Unix/Linux/OSS world, I can't bring myself to quite like PHP. It's a mess (but a lot of people doesn't seem to mind, so I guess the problem lies with me, not PHP).
Ever since the day Apple started selling iPod models with several hard disk sizes, the low end model have always been sold without the dock. So this isn't new, but it may be confusing that the old "middle" model (20gb) now is the low end model.