Maybe this is a threat to Google, but I don't think the competitors are far behind. Nat Friedmans Dashboard and Sideboard have been mentioned elsewhere, and it seems like Microsoft is planning a similar application themselves.
So I guess Blinx won't be left alone for long. However, when it comes to search, the more players the better. Google is well on its way to become the new Microsoft, and I don't think it's in anybodys best interest to get a search monopolist.
Well, Don Quijote believed he were fighting knights, while he actually was fighting windmillds.
Most people would say that it would be impossible if not futile to attack windmills and believe you could win over them. But Don Quijote never doubted his abilites, no matter what Sancho Panza thought.
Maybe this is what ESA has thought about when they named their mission: Keep hope up, no matter how impossible the task seems.
One thing has nothing to do with the other, so there is no conflict. It's the same thing as saying, "people are capable of refining gasoline, but standard oil is fixing prices?"
I see what you're trying to say, but I think that you've streched that metaphor a few light years too far. People are capable of refining oil, compared with the ability to download a few megabytes from the Internet? Please.
Also, I just can't see, if I understand your metaphor correctly, how Microsoft has made it inconvenient to download and install another browser on your computer.
silly users, Security is for nerds. Now what was your password again?
I just want to point out that I wasn't saying that security was for nerds. What I was asking was whether fine grained privacy control was for nerds.
In my view privacy control and security are not necessarily the same thing. The former has more to do with blocking cookies on a per site basis, blocking ads, and other more or less paranoid stuff.
Security, for Joe Average, has more to do with preventing your computer from being hijacked, broken into or attacked by viruses.
It feels to me like you're contradicting yourself. You say that people _are_ capable of downloading browsers (and it's elitist to think otherwise), and on the other hand you say that Microsoft has stifled innovation and competition.
If the other browsers are so much better, and most people are capable of downloading, choosing and make informed choices, why aren't Firefox or Opera (or whatever) the dominant browser?
What differentiates the other browsers from Explorer is tabbed browsing, (which isn't all that nescessary if you're used to the old way of browsing), gestures (I don't know anyone who uses them) and fine grained privacy control. But isn't all this stuff is for nerds, and therefore only stuff that matters for nerds?
The truth may be that Explorer is good enough -- not only for Microsoft, but also for the vast majority of its users.
On my iPod this is stored in a file called iTunesDB in the folder \iPodControl\iTunes (or/iPodControl/iTunes for those of you on Linux/Unix or OS X)
It seems to be some kind of a binary version of the xml file that is the iTunes database on your PC or Mac.
If you're really interested, this guy has tried to document the format of the file. For me the play count and ratings are not as essential to preserve as the music files themselves.
I thought this was impossible for a while, until I mounted the iPod as a disk in Windows and used the command line to poke around the iPod. It's very simple: All the MP3 files are stored in hidden directories, and you can copy them to your heart's content with regular DOS commands such as copy.
The only downside is that the files are stored with cryptic names in directories with meaningless names. But if your files have correct ID3 tagging, the organization of the files won't matter much.
Well, this perhaps isn't exactly what you want, but every copy of Windows XP ships with the Windows Scripting Host. What this means is that you can write small and large programs in JScript/Ecmascript or VBScript. You can do quite a lot of automation trough this technology. It's a surprisingly capable environment, though if you want something for creating apps with GUI's you're out of luck.
This new version of Visual Basic.Net has an VB6 to.Net upgrade wizard, that will try to rewrite your code for you so that it'll compile under VB.Net 2005.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I think this is a good thing. The complete break with the past was alienating far too many Visual Basic programmers. Maybe this will convince some VB6 users to upgrade.
Even though VB.Net is very different from VB6, it's not _that_ different. With the new My-class, VB.Net 2005 seems to be far easier -- and more like VB6 -- than before.
BTW, I usually program Perl and I'm eagerly awaiting Perl 6, but cannot help but being a little off put by the lack of compatibility with Perl 5. I hope this won't be as alienating for perl users, as the upgrade from VB 6 to VB.Net was for VB programmers.
Sasser is mostly annoying. It causes your computer to restart repeatedly, while scanning nearby ip adresses and spreading itself to them (if they're not patched). Doesn't sound too bad does it?
Well, even though it's "just annoying" and "poorly written" according to F.Secure, it caused Sampo (a large bank in Finland) to shut down yesterday. Both computer networks and telephony systems were hurt. The same happened to If, a Norwegian / Swedish insurance company, and today another Norwegian insurance company had to halt operations (Vesta).
So even annoyances can stop entire operations, and thus we can say that it's a pretty serious problem until most (Windows) computers are patched.
The original poster is not correct when claiming Internet Explorer has a problem. This time it's a hole in the so called "Local Security Authority Subsystem Service" that's causing problems.
BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).
Actually, they're not. Every copy of Windows XP, and probably Windows 2000 and ME and maybe even 98, ships with the Windows Scripting Host. One of the languages supported by WSH is VBScript ("Visual Basic Script").
Maybe vi shouldn't be everywhere; maybe the time has come to move on to something more intuitive? Even Bill Joy (the original author of vi) doesn't use vi anymore, and once said this to Linux Magazine:
People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.
Did you check out the link I gave you? $99 buys you a piece of software which recovers lost dBase passwords for you. Using the password the data'll be decrypted. Isn't this what you're trying to achieve?
So you want to crack a dbase III file? How about spending $99 on this product? Seems to do what you want, and you don't have to hire anyone to do it: http://www.accessdata.com/Product73_Overview.htm?P roductNum=73
Chris Schlager, vice president of research and development for SUSE, thinks the differences between KDE and Gnome developers have been overstated. Apparently he's not a regular/. reader.
I don't understand what reading Slashdot could teach you about differences between KDE and Gnome developers. The flame wars are usually between the users, not the developers.
Man am I a geek and boy is this off topic, but still: As far as I remember Aprictor never really made an IBM Compatible computer, at least not in the beginning. What they produced, however, was an Intel based computer that could run MS-DOS. The downside was they they never cloned the BIOS and some other stuff.
What this meant was that many MS-DOS (or PC-DOS as it was mostly known as at the time) programs could run on the Apricot machines, but a lot of programs adressed hardware and called routines in BIOS directly, and those programs never ran on the Apricots. This was a major shortcoming at the time.
Check this article. It seems to verify my memory of Apricot and PC Compatibility. Take a look at the pictures as well. These machines were stylish, even by today's standards.
I know you're trying to be funny (and your post are), but is this correct?
Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster.
Don't ask me why, but one of my servers (running Debian) creates a lot of animated gif files automatically. Using the version of ImageMagick provided by Debian, this job typically takes 2 seconds per gif file.
Just for fun I recompiled a static version of ImageMagick using gcc 3.3, with Pentium IV optimizing, on a RedHat Linux box, and tried running these binaries on my Debian box. And you know what? The same job now takes just under one second.
So for me recompiling was a significant factor for speeding up my program.
MySQL is very easy to set up, relatively easy to configure and well documented. Most of the time all you need to do is to save som tabular/spreadsheet like data and do some queries on them. In these cases MySQL rocks (I use MySQL a lot), and its fast as well.
There's a lot of examples of what MySQL can't do, but I'll just give two. Let's say you want to do this:
SELECT word FROM dictionary WHERE id IN (SELECT word_id FROM article WHERE article_id = 1)
This SELECT gets all words used in an article, and looks them up in a dictionary. You can't do this in MySQL.
What you can do in the latest alpha versions is this:
SELECT word FROM dictionary WHERE id = (SELECT word_id FROM article WHERE article_id = 1)
But this will only return one row, so it's not the same. Other DB systems will also let you create functions inside the database, which can be reused later.
Another thing you can't do with MySQL is set up DOMAINs (or constraints); with Postgres you can specify that a field in a table should be an integer, but only integers between (for instance) 1 and 1,000,000.
And it's a lot more. But admittedly most people won't be needing the advanced functions a lot, if at all, so if MySQL suits your need just use it. Databases are a little like other tools: You use the one that's best suited for the job.
I've not tried Firebird since the pre-1.0 versions, but I have to say that it was nice to use. What was most interesting for me was the availability of subselects, referential integrity between tables and the stored procedures. All of the stuff that MySQL lacked (and still lacks in usable form).
Firebird was extremely easy to set up and configure (= almost no configuration). So that couldn't have been easier.
But then there was the speed issue: At the time Firebird was not a speed daemon. The one thing that bugged me most, though, was that when connecting to the database -- even if you did so from a remote host -- you had to know the physical location of the database file on the server!
It's strange what turns you off, and this peculiarity annoyed me enough to start investigating other options instead. I'm now using Postgresql when I need the more advanced SQL features.
I see what you mean with the RedHat/KDE comparison. Maybe the Yahoo Search is a bit worse without Google, and maybe Yahoo loses some customers because of this. So far your analogy works. But isn't Yahoo's situation a little bit different?
What I think is different is the fact that Yahoo was doing was paying big money to what became its worst competitor. RedHat, as far as I know, haven't paid anything to the KDE folks, so if RedHat switched to an inferior product it would make no sense because only RedHat would lose. They would have to finance the new desktop, and perhaps lose sales at the same time.
But for Yahoo to continue paying Google and see them continue to grow, while Yahoo itself loses market share, is meaningless from a business perspective. There's just no way to win anything in that situation.
Now Yahoo can finance their own search technology, try to become better and regain market share on Google's expense. This makes sense from a business perspective, and perhaps they as a side effect prevents Google from becoming an Information Monopolist (that's the situation I fear).
Why give Yahoo! thumbs down for using their own technology? If you're an average Slashdot user, shouldn't you be an advocate of choice?
To simplify: We have Gnome and we have KDE, we have Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, we have Perl and Python. Would you like a world where everbody used Windows, or everybody said that Perl was mandatory? Or to live in a one party state?
Maybe Yahoo! and MSN's new search engines won't be of Google quality in the beginning, but I guess they'll catch up. We should cheer them on. Google's starting to get a position where they actually can (if they want, I'm not saying they are) control the flow of information. So my position on this is that the more search engines, and the more equal they are both in capabilities and market share, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone seems to be fond of Maven. This guy lists both pros and cons with Maven, but lands on the negative side.
I havent used Maven myself, but since this was mostly a very positive announcement, I guess it cant hurt to point to another point of view.
Maybe this is a threat to Google, but I don't think the competitors are far behind. Nat Friedmans Dashboard and Sideboard have been mentioned elsewhere, and it seems like Microsoft is planning a similar application themselves.
Apparently Google is planning local hard drive searches as well, in a pre-emptive move against improved search techologies that will be a part of Windows/Longhorn.
So I guess Blinx won't be left alone for long. However, when it comes to search, the more players the better. Google is well on its way to become the new Microsoft, and I don't think it's in anybodys best interest to get a search monopolist.
Well, Don Quijote believed he were fighting knights, while he actually was fighting windmillds.
Most people would say that it would be impossible if not futile to attack windmills and believe you could win over them. But Don Quijote never doubted his abilites, no matter what Sancho Panza thought.
Maybe this is what ESA has thought about when they named their mission: Keep hope up, no matter how impossible the task seems.
Also, I just can't see, if I understand your metaphor correctly, how Microsoft has made it inconvenient to download and install another browser on your computer.
I just want to point out that I wasn't saying that security was for nerds. What I was asking was whether fine grained privacy control was for nerds.
In my view privacy control and security are not necessarily the same thing. The former has more to do with blocking cookies on a per site basis, blocking ads, and other more or less paranoid stuff.
Security, for Joe Average, has more to do with preventing your computer from being hijacked, broken into or attacked by viruses.
It feels to me like you're contradicting yourself. You say that people _are_ capable of downloading browsers (and it's elitist to think otherwise), and on the other hand you say that Microsoft has stifled innovation and competition.
If the other browsers are so much better, and most people are capable of downloading, choosing and make informed choices, why aren't Firefox or Opera (or whatever) the dominant browser?
What differentiates the other browsers from Explorer is tabbed browsing, (which isn't all that nescessary if you're used to the old way of browsing), gestures (I don't know anyone who uses them) and fine grained privacy control. But isn't all this stuff is for nerds, and therefore only stuff that matters for nerds?
The truth may be that Explorer is good enough -- not only for Microsoft, but also for the vast majority of its users.
On my iPod this is stored in a file called iTunesDB in the folder \iPodControl\iTunes (or /iPodControl/iTunes for those of you on Linux/Unix or OS X)
It seems to be some kind of a binary version of the xml file that is the iTunes database on your PC or Mac.
If you're really interested, this guy has tried to document the format of the file. For me the play count and ratings are not as essential to preserve as the music files themselves.
I wrote a reply on this just a couple of minutes ago. It's right here.
Some of the replies to that comment mentions EphPod as an excellent tool for copying songs off the iPod.
I thought this was impossible for a while, until I mounted the iPod as a disk in Windows and used the command line to poke around the iPod. It's very simple: All the MP3 files are stored in hidden directories, and you can copy them to your heart's content with regular DOS commands such as copy.
The only downside is that the files are stored with cryptic names in directories with meaningless names. But if your files have correct ID3 tagging, the organization of the files won't matter much.
Well, this perhaps isn't exactly what you want, but every copy of Windows XP ships with the Windows Scripting Host. What this means is that you can write small and large programs in JScript/Ecmascript or VBScript. You can do quite a lot of automation trough this technology. It's a surprisingly capable environment, though if you want something for creating apps with GUI's you're out of luck.
This new version of Visual Basic .Net has an VB6 to .Net upgrade wizard, that will try to rewrite your code for you so that it'll compile under VB .Net 2005.
.Net is very different from VB6, it's not _that_ different. With the new My-class, VB .Net 2005 seems to be far easier -- and more like VB6 -- than before.
.Net was for VB programmers.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I think this is a good thing. The complete break with the past was alienating far too many Visual Basic programmers. Maybe this will convince some VB6 users to upgrade.
Even though VB
BTW, I usually program Perl and I'm eagerly awaiting Perl 6, but cannot help but being a little off put by the lack of compatibility with Perl 5. I hope this won't be as alienating for perl users, as the upgrade from VB 6 to VB
It's not that I distrust them or anything, it's just that I couldn't find any information on who these people are and why they're making MyUID.
Since this is Slashdot I can only assume that these guys are on the "good" side, but a few answers to "why?" and "who?" in their FAQ wouldn't hurt.
Sasser is mostly annoying. It causes your computer to restart repeatedly, while scanning nearby ip adresses and spreading itself to them (if they're not patched). Doesn't sound too bad does it?
Well, even though it's "just annoying" and "poorly written" according to F.Secure, it caused Sampo (a large bank in Finland) to shut down yesterday. Both computer networks and telephony systems were hurt. The same happened to If, a Norwegian / Swedish insurance company, and today another Norwegian insurance company had to halt operations (Vesta).
So even annoyances can stop entire operations, and thus we can say that it's a pretty serious problem until most (Windows) computers are patched.
The original poster is not correct when claiming Internet Explorer has a problem. This time it's a hole in the so called "Local Security Authority Subsystem Service" that's causing problems.
See this and this for more details.
VBScript is surprisingly capable. Read more about it here.
As if it wasn't difficult enough for a geek to get laid in the first place, now the chicks don't even need us for reproduction...
Did you check out the link I gave you? $99 buys you a piece of software which recovers lost dBase passwords for you. Using the password the data'll be decrypted. Isn't this what you're trying to achieve?
So you want to crack a dbase III file? How about spending $99 on this product? Seems to do what you want, and you don't have to hire anyone to do it: http://www.accessdata.com/Product73_Overview.htm?P roductNum=73
I don't understand what reading Slashdot could teach you about differences between KDE and Gnome developers. The flame wars are usually between the users, not the developers.
Man am I a geek and boy is this off topic, but still: As far as I remember Aprictor never really made an IBM Compatible computer, at least not in the beginning. What they produced, however, was an Intel based computer that could run MS-DOS. The downside was they they never cloned the BIOS and some other stuff.
What this meant was that many MS-DOS (or PC-DOS as it was mostly known as at the time) programs could run on the Apricot machines, but a lot of programs adressed hardware and called routines in BIOS directly, and those programs never ran on the Apricots. This was a major shortcoming at the time.
Check this article. It seems to verify my memory of Apricot and PC Compatibility. Take a look at the pictures as well. These machines were stylish, even by today's standards.
Don't ask me why, but one of my servers (running Debian) creates a lot of animated gif files automatically. Using the version of ImageMagick provided by Debian, this job typically takes 2 seconds per gif file.
Just for fun I recompiled a static version of ImageMagick using gcc 3.3, with Pentium IV optimizing, on a RedHat Linux box, and tried running these binaries on my Debian box. And you know what? The same job now takes just under one second.
So for me recompiling was a significant factor for speeding up my program.
There's a lot of examples of what MySQL can't do, but I'll just give two. Let's say you want to do this:This SELECT gets all words used in an article, and looks them up in a dictionary. You can't do this in MySQL.
What you can do in the latest alpha versions is this:But this will only return one row, so it's not the same. Other DB systems will also let you create functions inside the database, which can be reused later.
Another thing you can't do with MySQL is set up DOMAINs (or constraints); with Postgres you can specify that a field in a table should be an integer, but only integers between (for instance) 1 and 1,000,000.
And it's a lot more. But admittedly most people won't be needing the advanced functions a lot, if at all, so if MySQL suits your need just use it. Databases are a little like other tools: You use the one that's best suited for the job.
I've not tried Firebird since the pre-1.0 versions, but I have to say that it was nice to use. What was most interesting for me was the availability of subselects, referential integrity between tables and the stored procedures. All of the stuff that MySQL lacked (and still lacks in usable form).
Firebird was extremely easy to set up and configure (= almost no configuration). So that couldn't have been easier.
But then there was the speed issue: At the time Firebird was not a speed daemon. The one thing that bugged me most, though, was that when connecting to the database -- even if you did so from a remote host -- you had to know the physical location of the database file on the server!
It's strange what turns you off, and this peculiarity annoyed me enough to start investigating other options instead. I'm now using Postgresql when I need the more advanced SQL features.
I see what you mean with the RedHat/KDE comparison. Maybe the Yahoo Search is a bit worse without Google, and maybe Yahoo loses some customers because of this. So far your analogy works. But isn't Yahoo's situation a little bit different?
What I think is different is the fact that Yahoo was doing was paying big money to what became its worst competitor. RedHat, as far as I know, haven't paid anything to the KDE folks, so if RedHat switched to an inferior product it would make no sense because only RedHat would lose. They would have to finance the new desktop, and perhaps lose sales at the same time.
But for Yahoo to continue paying Google and see them continue to grow, while Yahoo itself loses market share, is meaningless from a business perspective. There's just no way to win anything in that situation.
Now Yahoo can finance their own search technology, try to become better and regain market share on Google's expense. This makes sense from a business perspective, and perhaps they as a side effect prevents Google from becoming an Information Monopolist (that's the situation I fear).
Why give Yahoo! thumbs down for using their own technology? If you're an average Slashdot user, shouldn't you be an advocate of choice?
To simplify: We have Gnome and we have KDE, we have Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, we have Perl and Python. Would you like a world where everbody used Windows, or everybody said that Perl was mandatory? Or to live in a one party state?
Maybe Yahoo! and MSN's new search engines won't be of Google quality in the beginning, but I guess they'll catch up. We should cheer them on. Google's starting to get a position where they actually can (if they want, I'm not saying they are) control the flow of information. So my position on this is that the more search engines, and the more equal they are both in capabilities and market share, the better.