Re:Throwing the baby out with the bathwater
on
W3C Approves DOM Level 2
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sorry, I misstated my problems. They're with CSS, not with XHTML. But if you go with strict XHTML, you really shouldn't be doing placement with tables, etc., as is common with HTML-based sites.
All true.
I can make an HTML 4 site using tables for placement that works well (pixel-pefect in most cases) with the vast majority of browsers, more quickly, and with less code, than I can with XHTML/CSS, because you have to specify so many different things via CSS, it takes up a lot of code.
And I can make an XHTML 1.0 Strict site using CSS for layout that works well (read, also pixel-perfect if I want it to be, which I usually don't want. Read on for why.), that also works in the vast majority of browsers, degrades well, and write it just as fast as you can write your table based layout, and in less code than your table based layout. And less for people to download.
Pixel-perfect layout is a Bad Thing, because you are effectively screwing users in the process. You've made your site unusable for a lot of people with disabilities (since, pixel-perfect usually also entails that you have made it such that fonts, for example, are specified in absolute sizes of one form or another, and the layout itself doesn't flow to the size of the window you're actually working with in the first place). If you're using tables for layout, that's a double-whammy, since not only have you made it so that fonts can't be resized easily, you've also neglected users of non-traditional browsers (screen readers and Lynx, for a few examples) by presenting them with layout that means absolutely nothing to them. Tables are not for layout. They never were.
CSS is for layout. Anyone reasonably versed in web development of any sort can tell you that. And unless you're actively trying to present the same design in Netscape 4 as you do to everyone else (Why trying to make sites render identically in Netscape 4 is a Bad Thing...), it doesn't take more code than a table layout that's otherwise identical. The other nice thing about CSS is that it doesn't have to be embedded in the code. Yes, it does make it easier to update, but that's not actually the point. It's something that only has to be downloaded once, not on every page, so you've just made your load time faster after the first hit to the site. And you don't have to use all of the attributes that are provided by CSS. They do have their purposes, but for 90% of the things you'll end up doing, they aren't necessary.
Yes, it makes it harder to update, but most sites don't get updated all that much, anyway. And I can make sites that are fairly easy to update with regular HTML, anyway. Making a clearly-commented HTML template that my customers can then edit later on is a LOT easier than the equivalent with XHTML/CSS. This stuff is just way too complicated, now, and defeats one of the great things about HTML, that it was _easy_.
You've just negated yourself there. If HTML is easy, why make it harder to change?
And, making a clearly-commented CSS file isn't that difficult. It's not all that complicated, no more so than, for example, a 3 column layout in pure HTML compared to the same with XHTML and CSS: 3-column.html:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd ">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>3 column layout in XHTML+CSS</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="3-column.css"/>
</head>
<body>
<div id="LeftColumn">
<p>This is the left column of your layout</p>
</div>
<div id="MiddleColumn">
<p>This is the middle column of your layout</p>
</div>
<div id="RightColumn">
<p>This is the right column of your layout</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Or, the equivalent in tables:
3-column-tables.html:
<html>
<head>
<title>3 column layout in HTML</table>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="33%">This is the left column of your layout</td>
<td width="33%">This is the middle column of your layout</td>
<td width="34%">This is the right column of your layout</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Granted, the XHTML+CSS might look a bit more complex given the simplicity of what I just presented. But when you go to filling it in, and trying to locate which column was which width and change it for some reason or another (say, to make the columns the same width as those here, for example), they'll be almost impossible to find. And with the former, you can also change the ordering of your columns to suit what's best for users who aren't getting the columns, for example.
Either way of doing it is fairly easy, all things considered. Until you have to use one of them in a real-world situation.
VMware GSX Server operates in a similar matter to the workstation product. It's ESX server that runs it's own kernel and then runs other operating systems on top of it.
So, when will I be seeing my 70G IBM MicroDrive?;)
If they can fit 70G of storage into a square inch, I would certainly think that they could fit 70G into a drive that has little more than a square inch of surface area.:)
Personally, I'd love to see a Linux MTA/IMAP system which uses an SQL message-store. The ability to replicate a message-store across multiple physical sites without having to get into distributed filesystems like Coda would be a huge benefit for those who need to provide a redundant mail service.
I actually found a nifty little package called dbmail which uses an SQL messagestore. I've been playing with such things at work since they wanted me to write them a web-based mail client, and I wanted something which would let me deal with a MySQL database on the web client, but also allow people to connect to it via IMAP or POP3.
Of course, the whole replication part of it might be a bit more difficult, but it could probably be arranged as well. I'm pretty sure there are tools in existance for doing replication on a MySQL database (of course, don't ask me the names of any of them...)
Did you consider that perhaps they simply didn't have the time to do any of the above with the release? I wouldn't doubt that Sony made numerous patches to all of the packages listed to make them work on the PS2. If they were releasing an x86 distribution, I might go complaining to them asking why they didn't include, at the very least, glibc 2.2.4, XFree 4.0.3, kernel 2.4.14 or such, a newer version of gcc, and the like. But, keep in mind, this is a highly targeted distribution, probably with a lot of bugfixes and support issues that they did themselves, given the architecture, so it's not worth even bitching about anyway.
>this kit wouldn't be horribly out of date.
>glibc 2.2.2?
Since when is glibc 2.2.2 horribly out of date? I can see the kernel being mentioned as out of date (2.2.1 from what I saw), but the C library? Sure, it's been out for a year, but there have only been 2 point releases since then, nothing more.
>gcc 2.95.2?
Uhm. What does 2.95.3, or 2.95.4 offer that 2.95.2 doesn't? (And don't even try telling me about 3.0.x.) And how often to you use those features?
>XFree86 3.3.6?
OK, so that might be just a little out of date. But it works. And I really doubt that you'll be doing a whole hell of a lot of 3D on it to begin with; if that were the case, I wouldn't doubt that Sony would release a new version with XFree 4 or something like that in it.
So... what exactly was this about completely out of date software?
Yet we've seen screenshots showing Internet Explorer on top of KDE.
I've seen IE run on top of KDE. I've ran IE on top of KDE. (I was suprisedc that it ran with Wine to begin with.) It works fine, albeit a few rendering issues with the menubar and the like. I've not tried installing it though -- it's running from a copied installation of Win95 that's sitting inside of ~/wine. I think I tried installing it once and it failed.. so apparently it can't just be installed.:\
It seems like MS will get criticized for making schools pay for software, yet they also get criticized for donating software.
That's more likely because of the fact that in the long run, these schools that MS is donating software to will end up paying the Microsoft Tax that we've all grown to know and hate.
Besides, once they've got their foot in the door, most places won't turn back so quickly. "It's here, and we've already spent $xxx making it work...".
The software may be donated software, but it's never actually free. Sure, you don't have to pay for the $100 software tax, but you still have to have the people around who are knowledgeable enough about said software in order to make it work properly. The same is true for all pieces of software, Linux included.
Until Microsoft can provide the bang-for-the-buck that other alternatives can provide, I think that they'll still be criticized for moves such as this.
OK, so this is a reply to a lot of comments here. I've just been reading the article and noticing that about half of the people here have something negative to say about this.
This comment mentions that they aren't figuring out "pressing educational problems." I would personally say that they are: having been in schools where they had computers that were avaliable for everyone to use (even if they were just computer labs) they did many things to help the students, thereby alleviating some of the issues that seemed pressing at the time:
Students don't do their work.
Sure, some students don't do their work. Some don't do it because they find it overly difficult, others because they aren't good at it, and some out of pure laziness (such as my brother). Others didn't do it because they found the pencil (or pen) and paper based approaches too difficult. Writing becomes much faster when sitting in front of a computer. Research becomes easier - Google is an excellent research tool (honestly - enter anything you happen to want and it comes up, and the most relevant stuff happens to be sitting right there). Much of everything seems to become easier because you aren't spending so much time dealing with the issues of, for example, copying an entire paper because you need to make 3 or 4 changes to it. Pop it up in your word processor, make the changes, print it out. Voila, done.
Teachers can't keep track of everything.
Of course they can't - they're human too. Do you expect everyone to know everything?
The expense of the whole thing to begin with.
I'm sure it's expensive. But giving students access to technology provides greater benefits than it really costs - see #1. Sure, the machines aren't PC's. But does that mean that they aren't going to know how to use a PC when one is placed in front of them? Remember that most (all) of these students have been around computers (or at least have known of their existance, and have used a few) all of their life, and could most likely navigate their way through Windows 3.1 just as easily as they could through MacOS, and just as easily as they could through KDE. The fact that they're not PC's is a non-issue. And the fact that they happen to be running MacOS is also a non-issue. See here for someone else's comments on the topic. And as for support, it's been done before.
As for comments that claim that this whole thing is pointless, they aren't pointless. See #1 in the previous section for some reasons why they aren't pointless. Beyond that, some other reasons:
"... vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?"
Well, now the teachers, at the very least, no longer have to compete for lab time: I know that while I was in high school, and we had access to many computer labs, the teachers would generally find some use for them. English classes: we would go type our reports. It was easier for the teachers to read and grade (because they didn't have to deal with illegible handwriting, which computers didn't help, but it's still no worse than it was originally to begin with), and easier for us to type as opposed to write because we didn't have to go through the repetitive steps of write, copy, copy, copy, (wash-rinse-repeat, you get the idea).
"...computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math..."
Well, given that you really don't have computer literacy without either of the above in the first place...
And furthermore:
Children who are intrinistically inclined to writing or other creative activities which can involve a computer will do more of it. All of a sudden, your hand doesn't get sore from holding a pencil for too long. The keyboard and mouse becomes your digital paintbrush and you can do whatever you want with it. And you didn't like what you just did? Oh well, that's what the undo button is for.
Children who are intrinistically inclined towards mathematics can do everything that they would want to do with a computer (besides for things like chemistry and other things which still have physical reactions and the like, where, at least I personally prefer holding the instruments and doing everything else rather than having it simulated on the display), and will likely start writing their own programs because they can do it (and, since writing code requires some mathematical knowledge, as a result they will still get their math skills).
"... recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students..."
Maybe true. So go back to text editors. Or use older word processors that don't try doing everything for you.
You aren't the only one. MacOS has always been a good operating system of choice for school desktops and laptops:
Easy to configure for the school
Everything you would want to configure is right there. Open up the Control Panel, and you get access to everything that would need to be configured for the machine. That's not enough? Every school that I've ever been at that uses Apple systems (post-Mac of course) has plenty of software to safeguard the system from the students so that they don't do things to the system to make it unusable for everyone else.
Easy for the students to use
Everything has a standard interface. Going from one program to another is easy, because they all follow the same UI guidelines. There isn't anything difficult to use about a Mac. They're designed for people who aren't necessarily the best with computers, but can be used by even the most knowledgeable people with little hassle and do the job well.
Plenty of educational software
Keeping in mind that plenty of schools have them, there happens to be all kinds of educational software for the Mac. Nowhere near as much as for Windows or Linux. Sure, one could use Windows for it, but now you've got machines that are suitable for word processing (and if they're trying to use ancient hardware with the latest software, barely suitable for that even) and little more. Same goes for Linux.
And, sure, there is no need for computers in education, but not only are they helpful to the teachers (every teacher of mine from 9th grade on up used a computer for everything from preparing lesson plans to keeping students grades to doing presentations for the class), but they're also helpful to the students (see #1 in the first section of this comment).
Anyway, that whole long-winded comment is my 2c for this.
Even under the "license" model. The person has purchased a license to listen to a piece of music. The media in which it is stored is irrelevant. Of course if the RIAA ever switched to a convoluted EULA like MS's...
I could have sworn that even Microsoft's EULA allowed you to keep *archival* copies of the software. That doesn't mean that I can legally install the software on 5 machines but it is perfectly legal for me to burn a copy of my Win95 CD-ROM for backup purposes.
In fact, I believe that the part about "archival copies" is part of copyright law, at least in the US, which is why I want to seriously bludgeon all of the software companies here in the US that put out copy-protected CDs in the first place - it's generally nice to be able to put away your original copies of stuff, especially if you're prone to destroying CDs.
Well, I knew there was a reason why I stuck to my old PCI Voodoo3 2000 card. It works. It doesn't crash my system. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't really have a problem with nVidia, except for the closed-source drivers. I'll use their cards in Windows boxes (such as the machine that I'm sitting in front of now, with a Riva TNT ZX in it, even though the card isn't supported by their newer drivers..), but never in a Linux or *BSD machine until there are decent Open Source (free as in make changes, fix bugs, etc. that happen to be in the drivers, and make it work properly) drivers for it.
Besides, I have no need for a new video card. The only games that I play that even require 3D support (the *rare* game of Q3A) run just fine at 35+ fps on the card. Why bother spending $200+ for a new card, when the 2 year old card that I have (which I could just as easily drop into a 486 and it would still work, though I couldn't really take advantage of it) works just fine?
Nice machines. I've got a Satellite Pro 405CS and a 435CDS. Former is a p75, 8M ram (it had 40, but I put the 32M expansion into the 435), 700M hd, and a broken display, latter is a p133, 48M ram, 1.3G hd. The only problem I have with them is that they're far too heavy for the power that they have. (I use the 405 as a terminal with an external 14" monitor, and the 435 sits elsewhere to be used as a second machine for surfing & etc.) Linux runs like a charm on both of them though. I'd forgotten what I had on the hard disk in the 405, so I plugged it in. The hard disk had been bashed up like no other, yet it fired up Linux the first time. Excluding the display, quite durable machines.
On the other hand, my portable machine is an IBM Workpad z50. Sure, it runs WinCE natively. (makes me wince in pain thinking about it.;) But even then, it's a decent machine. It's obviously a major pain in the arse to set up Linux on, but after about a month of prodding away, I managed to get something mostly functional on it, and if I want, I just pop it on a network and I have an instant webserver. Now to just get a web browser running without a kernel oops...
I just decided to go take a poke around, and as a test, I decided to perform a search on linux mips. (I've been browsing around recently and doing a bit of hacking on it lately, and I know which sites I found the most relevant for it.)
The results, currently, are pretty similar. The first link on the page pointed directly to the Linux/MIPS HOWTO, which I've been referring to quite often recently. Everything else is quite similar down the rest of the first 10 results as well.
Google still has it's advantages over Teoma at the moment though:
The nested links for pages on the same site.
It's one of those things that quite frequently are useful when you're searching for something: instead of landing on the main page of the site (if that contains your search terms, and is of course linked more often), you can go directly to the part of the site that addresses exactly what you're looking for.
The Google cache.
I really hate it when a site that I want to go visit has pulled it's content or moved it around. But if I'm doing a search on Google, or I even know the last known address of a page, I can just head over to the Google cache and often pull up exactly what I'm looking for, even if the content has been moved or deleted on it's original server. Sites, unfortunately, do vanish from time to time. It's always nice to be able to access that content when you need it most.
been a long time (3+ years) since I have seen a Linux as stable as Windows
Uhh... Windows 3.1?
I have yet to see a properly-configured Win32 (sic) machine hold it's own against a properly-configured Linux machine. Especially considering that any Win32 machine put under any sort of actual use tends to get unstable after, oh, I'll give it 48 hours max.
I get security announcements and patches from Microsoft when problems are discovered. I read about them months after the fact for Linux - and if an RPM patch isn't available oh well.
It all depends on where you go looking for information. There are plentyofsecurityrelated sites out there that cover Linux.
And what's this bullshit about RPM patches? Have you ever heard of just compiling your own and being done with it? That is why such things are provided for download -- if something goes wrong, you can fix it.
And as far as the level of expertise, I can hire Microsoft engineers all day long. Finding a competent Linux person is near impossible - make sure you add that cost into your evaluation.
I can hire MS engineers all day long too. Can I hire competent engineers of any sort all day long? I highly doubt it. MCSE's are a dime a dozen, but if something just happens to go wrong on that W2k server over there, what are they going to do to fix it? "Oh, reboot the machine, it'll all be fine." Er.. stability?
Of course. But, why on Earth would he not say that?
I'll admit that after having read the whole thing (and no I haven't really read much of the other similar stories that have been posted on the subject) that there are good points in it.
I feel like I'm in school. "Do insert-3rd-grade-task-here." 2 days later: repeat.
It is just a little ridiculous. Why do we keep beating the horse?
Are you sure about this? I've had IE crash a fair amount of times recently. Of course, being a web developer, I also know what kind of stuff will make almost any browser crash. I just love getting the "Internet Explorer has crashed" dialog box.
is stable, stable, stable
You haven't used Mozilla 0.9 yet. That's all I can say.
does not waste resources with stupid themable interface
I don't see it as a waste of resources -- it has to load a set of pixmaps/bmps/etc whether it's using a single "theme" that's part of the browser in the first place (see MSIE, Netscape 4.x), or loading multiple "themes" out of files (see WinAmp, XMMS, etc).
does not have major parts of the browser written in java script
Just the UI.
does not require 128 megs of ram to run
Mozilla-0.8.1 embedded on a Pentium/120 with 48M ram. It flew. Repeat that please?
does not include stupidity such as AIM clients and IRC clients
Both of which are fully optional if I'm not mistaken? Some people like doing everything out of one interface. Live with it.
at some point mozilla may become a better browser, but right now it is not. it is behind.
Try it before you knock it. Sure, it has it's bugs, but so does MSIE.
The primary reason that I see for AOL including MSIE over Mozilla (which, BTW, has been stated many times over on this article by other people) is for getting their icon on the WinXP desktop. It's all a marketing ploy to get people to sign up with them -- if you didn't know anything about the internet or anything else, but found an AOL icon sitting on your desktop, would you be more likely to call your local ISP, install the insert-service-provider-name-here cd that showed up in your mail the day before, or use what was already there? Considering that my mother used AOL for a while.. I think it's that much more likely that they'll use what already exists on their system before installing something else or getting online with a real ISP.
Yes, in it's own sort of way, it is "cool". We all know that emulation has it's "problems" (which, in this case, aren't really problems IMHO -- they're insulation between the host and guest OS's. I mean, if you're running Win98 inside of VMware, you don't want W98 to crash and take down Linux with it, do you?)
VMware has limited support for DirectX. Meaning that your games, if they run, won't run well. (See here and here.)
It also won't handle OpenGL, SDL, etc. because all of those require direct access to the video card (unless you're running them in software. But anyone who has tried playing a game that uses OpenGL with software rendering knows that it's not worth it).
Sure, VMware is worth it. But if you simply want it for gaming (and you *have* to do it under Win32...), save the $100 you'd spend on it and go get yourself another machine.
First off, America isn't all that great!! In terms of wealth and that lot of crap, sure it is, but in terms of everything else, what in the **** are you thinking? Hello!! Our children slaughter their own schoolmates! That makes US the greatest nation in the history of the world?! Being the most "christian" doesn't make us any better either - hello, religion promotes discrimination and racism, you think that makes us good? And freedom is a load of horseshit. (Just my 2 bits.:p)
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, RSAREF is open source, in the case that the RSAREF license allows you to patch the library to make it run faster. If it's closed-source, you wouldn't be able to do so, and there would be no point in having such a clause in the license for it.
Fluorescent brown? Yeah, ok.. you go right ahead. I doubt anyone would buy the rights to the patent in the first place, I mean, brown? First thing that comes to mind there is a pile of... well, you know.
Re:haha NT is clearly faster then linux
on
EDA: Unix vs. NT
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· Score: 1
First thing, what's with your english? > If Linux can't server... >... cuz... >... gotta... Come back tomorrow when you can speak proper english. BTW, that's obviously bullshit, 345 billion hits every other hour. On a p100. You couldn't even forge those logfiles, or even have enough bandwidth for that.
Re:chmod wont work. It doesnt matter what permisio
on
EDA: Unix vs. NT
·
· Score: 1
If i heard right, wasn't that C2 security rating when you disabled networking on the NT machine? If so, what the hell is the point of a C2 rating? BTW, the modem -is- a device, so you need the privileges to OPEN the device before you can do jack shit with it. Unix may have more holes in it than NT but it also has the userbase behind it to quickly fix them. You probably love installing the bi-annual NT service pack that corrects holes discovered the day after the last service pack was released, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
All true.
And I can make an XHTML 1.0 Strict site using CSS for layout that works well (read, also pixel-perfect if I want it to be, which I usually don't want. Read on for why.), that also works in the vast majority of browsers, degrades well, and write it just as fast as you can write your table based layout, and in less code than your table based layout. And less for people to download.
Pixel-perfect layout is a Bad Thing, because you are effectively screwing users in the process. You've made your site unusable for a lot of people with disabilities (since, pixel-perfect usually also entails that you have made it such that fonts, for example, are specified in absolute sizes of one form or another, and the layout itself doesn't flow to the size of the window you're actually working with in the first place). If you're using tables for layout, that's a double-whammy, since not only have you made it so that fonts can't be resized easily, you've also neglected users of non-traditional browsers (screen readers and Lynx, for a few examples) by presenting them with layout that means absolutely nothing to them. Tables are not for layout. They never were.
CSS is for layout. Anyone reasonably versed in web development of any sort can tell you that. And unless you're actively trying to present the same design in Netscape 4 as you do to everyone else (Why trying to make sites render identically in Netscape 4 is a Bad Thing...), it doesn't take more code than a table layout that's otherwise identical. The other nice thing about CSS is that it doesn't have to be embedded in the code. Yes, it does make it easier to update, but that's not actually the point. It's something that only has to be downloaded once, not on every page, so you've just made your load time faster after the first hit to the site. And you don't have to use all of the attributes that are provided by CSS. They do have their purposes, but for 90% of the things you'll end up doing, they aren't necessary.
You've just negated yourself there. If HTML is easy, why make it harder to change?
And, making a clearly-commented CSS file isn't that difficult. It's not all that complicated, no more so than, for example, a 3 column layout in pure HTML compared to the same with XHTML and CSS:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>3-column.html:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dt
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>3 column layout in XHTML+CSS</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="3-column.css"
</head>
<body>
<div id="LeftColumn">
<p>This is the left column of your layout</p>
</div>
<div id="MiddleColumn">
<p>This is the middle column of your layout</p>
</div>
<div id="RightColumn">
<p>This is the right column of your layout</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
3-column.css:
#LeftColumn { position: absolute; left: 0; width: 32%; margin: 0; padding: 0; }#MiddleColumn { position: absolute; left: 33%; width: 33%; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
#RightColumn { position: absolute; left: 67%; width: 32%; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
Or, the equivalent in tables: 3-column-tables.html:
<html><head>
<title>3 column layout in HTML</table>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="33%">This is the left column of your layout</td>
<td width="33%">This is the middle column of your layout</td>
<td width="34%">This is the right column of your layout</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Granted, the XHTML+CSS might look a bit more complex given the simplicity of what I just presented. But when you go to filling it in, and trying to locate which column was which width and change it for some reason or another (say, to make the columns the same width as those here, for example), they'll be almost impossible to find. And with the former, you can also change the ordering of your columns to suit what's best for users who aren't getting the columns, for example.
Either way of doing it is fairly easy, all things considered. Until you have to use one of them in a real-world situation.
Microsoft sells cars? Hm. Now I'm afraid to leave the house.
OK, so I'm nitpicking...
VMware GSX Server operates in a similar matter to the workstation product. It's ESX server that runs it's own kernel and then runs other operating systems on top of it.
So, when will I be seeing my 70G IBM MicroDrive? ;)
If they can fit 70G of storage into a square inch, I would certainly think that they could fit 70G into a drive that has little more than a square inch of surface area. :)
That's not neccessarily the case anymore.
I actually found a nifty little package called dbmail which uses an SQL messagestore. I've been playing with such things at work since they wanted me to write them a web-based mail client, and I wanted something which would let me deal with a MySQL database on the web client, but also allow people to connect to it via IMAP or POP3.
Of course, the whole replication part of it might be a bit more difficult, but it could probably be arranged as well. I'm pretty sure there are tools in existance for doing replication on a MySQL database (of course, don't ask me the names of any of them...)
Did you consider that perhaps they simply didn't have the time to do any of the above with the release? I wouldn't doubt that Sony made numerous patches to all of the packages listed to make them work on the PS2. If they were releasing an x86 distribution, I might go complaining to them asking why they didn't include, at the very least, glibc 2.2.4, XFree 4.0.3, kernel 2.4.14 or such, a newer version of gcc, and the like. But, keep in mind, this is a highly targeted distribution, probably with a lot of bugfixes and support issues that they did themselves, given the architecture, so it's not worth even bitching about anyway.
>this kit wouldn't be horribly out of date.
>glibc 2.2.2?
Since when is glibc 2.2.2 horribly out of date? I can see the kernel being mentioned as out of date (2.2.1 from what I saw), but the C library? Sure, it's been out for a year, but there have only been 2 point releases since then, nothing more.
>gcc 2.95.2?
Uhm. What does 2.95.3, or 2.95.4 offer that 2.95.2 doesn't? (And don't even try telling me about 3.0.x.) And how often to you use those features?
>XFree86 3.3.6?
OK, so that might be just a little out of date. But it works. And I really doubt that you'll be doing a whole hell of a lot of 3D on it to begin with; if that were the case, I wouldn't doubt that Sony would release a new version with XFree 4 or something like that in it.
So... what exactly was this about completely out of date software?
I've seen IE run on top of KDE. I've ran IE on top of KDE. (I was suprisedc that it ran with Wine to begin with.) It works fine, albeit a few rendering issues with the menubar and the like. I've not tried installing it though -- it's running from a copied installation of Win95 that's sitting inside of ~/wine. I think I tried installing it once and it failed.. so apparently it can't just be installed. :\
That's more likely because of the fact that in the long run, these schools that MS is donating software to will end up paying the Microsoft Tax that we've all grown to know and hate.
Besides, once they've got their foot in the door, most places won't turn back so quickly. "It's here, and we've already spent $xxx making it work...".
The software may be donated software, but it's never actually free. Sure, you don't have to pay for the $100 software tax, but you still have to have the people around who are knowledgeable enough about said software in order to make it work properly. The same is true for all pieces of software, Linux included.
Until Microsoft can provide the bang-for-the-buck that other alternatives can provide, I think that they'll still be criticized for moves such as this.
OK, so this is a reply to a lot of comments here. I've just been reading the article and noticing that about half of the people here have something negative to say about this.
This comment mentions that they aren't figuring out "pressing educational problems." I would personally say that they are: having been in schools where they had computers that were avaliable for everyone to use (even if they were just computer labs) they did many things to help the students, thereby alleviating some of the issues that seemed pressing at the time:
Sure, some students don't do their work. Some don't do it because they find it overly difficult, others because they aren't good at it, and some out of pure laziness (such as my brother). Others didn't do it because they found the pencil (or pen) and paper based approaches too difficult. Writing becomes much faster when sitting in front of a computer. Research becomes easier - Google is an excellent research tool (honestly - enter anything you happen to want and it comes up, and the most relevant stuff happens to be sitting right there). Much of everything seems to become easier because you aren't spending so much time dealing with the issues of, for example, copying an entire paper because you need to make 3 or 4 changes to it. Pop it up in your word processor, make the changes, print it out. Voila, done.
Of course they can't - they're human too. Do you expect everyone to know everything?
I'm sure it's expensive. But giving students access to technology provides greater benefits than it really costs - see #1. Sure, the machines aren't PC's. But does that mean that they aren't going to know how to use a PC when one is placed in front of them? Remember that most (all) of these students have been around computers (or at least have known of their existance, and have used a few) all of their life, and could most likely navigate their way through Windows 3.1 just as easily as they could through MacOS, and just as easily as they could through KDE. The fact that they're not PC's is a non-issue. And the fact that they happen to be running MacOS is also a non-issue. See here for someone else's comments on the topic. And as for support, it's been done before.
As for comments that claim that this whole thing is pointless, they aren't pointless. See #1 in the previous section for some reasons why they aren't pointless. Beyond that, some other reasons:
- "... vast majority of teachers don't know what to do with the computers in the computer lab down the hall. How is that going to be improved by putting them in every backpack?"
- "...computer literacy is important in the modern world, but so is writing and math..."
- Children who are intrinistically inclined to writing or other creative activities which can involve a computer will do more of it. All of a sudden, your hand doesn't get sore from holding a pencil for too long. The keyboard and mouse becomes your digital paintbrush and you can do whatever you want with it. And you didn't like what you just did? Oh well, that's what the undo button is for.
- Children who are intrinistically inclined towards mathematics can do everything that they would want to do with a computer (besides for things like chemistry and other things which still have physical reactions and the like, where, at least I personally prefer holding the instruments and doing everything else rather than having it simulated on the display), and will likely start writing their own programs because they can do it (and, since writing code requires some mathematical knowledge, as a result they will still get their math skills).
- "... recently that linked the rise of the modern word processor with the decline of writing skills in college students
..."
You aren't the only one. MacOS has always been a good operating system of choice for school desktops and laptops:Well, now the teachers, at the very least, no longer have to compete for lab time: I know that while I was in high school, and we had access to many computer labs, the teachers would generally find some use for them. English classes: we would go type our reports. It was easier for the teachers to read and grade (because they didn't have to deal with illegible handwriting, which computers didn't help, but it's still no worse than it was originally to begin with), and easier for us to type as opposed to write because we didn't have to go through the repetitive steps of write, copy, copy, copy, (wash-rinse-repeat, you get the idea).
Well, given that you really don't have computer literacy without either of the above in the first place...
And furthermore:
Maybe true. So go back to text editors. Or use older word processors that don't try doing everything for you.
Everything you would want to configure is right there. Open up the Control Panel, and you get access to everything that would need to be configured for the machine. That's not enough? Every school that I've ever been at that uses Apple systems (post-Mac of course) has plenty of software to safeguard the system from the students so that they don't do things to the system to make it unusable for everyone else.
Everything has a standard interface. Going from one program to another is easy, because they all follow the same UI guidelines. There isn't anything difficult to use about a Mac. They're designed for people who aren't necessarily the best with computers, but can be used by even the most knowledgeable people with little hassle and do the job well.
Keeping in mind that plenty of schools have them, there happens to be all kinds of educational software for the Mac. Nowhere near as much as for Windows or Linux. Sure, one could use Windows for it, but now you've got machines that are suitable for word processing (and if they're trying to use ancient hardware with the latest software, barely suitable for that even) and little more. Same goes for Linux.
And, sure, there is no need for computers in education, but not only are they helpful to the teachers (every teacher of mine from 9th grade on up used a computer for everything from preparing lesson plans to keeping students grades to doing presentations for the class), but they're also helpful to the students (see #1 in the first section of this comment).
Anyway, that whole long-winded comment is my 2c for this.
I could have sworn that even Microsoft's EULA allowed you to keep *archival* copies of the software. That doesn't mean that I can legally install the software on 5 machines but it is perfectly legal for me to burn a copy of my Win95 CD-ROM for backup purposes.
In fact, I believe that the part about "archival copies" is part of copyright law, at least in the US, which is why I want to seriously bludgeon all of the software companies here in the US that put out copy-protected CDs in the first place - it's generally nice to be able to put away your original copies of stuff, especially if you're prone to destroying CDs.
Well, I knew there was a reason why I stuck to my old PCI Voodoo3 2000 card. It works. It doesn't crash my system. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't really have a problem with nVidia, except for the closed-source drivers. I'll use their cards in Windows boxes (such as the machine that I'm sitting in front of now, with a Riva TNT ZX in it, even though the card isn't supported by their newer drivers..), but never in a Linux or *BSD machine until there are decent Open Source (free as in make changes, fix bugs, etc. that happen to be in the drivers, and make it work properly) drivers for it.
Besides, I have no need for a new video card. The only games that I play that even require 3D support (the *rare* game of Q3A) run just fine at 35+ fps on the card. Why bother spending $200+ for a new card, when the 2 year old card that I have (which I could just as easily drop into a 486 and it would still work, though I couldn't really take advantage of it) works just fine?
Nice machines. I've got a Satellite Pro 405CS and a 435CDS. Former is a p75, 8M ram (it had 40, but I put the 32M expansion into the 435), 700M hd, and a broken display, latter is a p133, 48M ram, 1.3G hd. The only problem I have with them is that they're far too heavy for the power that they have. (I use the 405 as a terminal with an external 14" monitor, and the 435 sits elsewhere to be used as a second machine for surfing & etc.) Linux runs like a charm on both of them though. I'd forgotten what I had on the hard disk in the 405, so I plugged it in. The hard disk had been bashed up like no other, yet it fired up Linux the first time. Excluding the display, quite durable machines.
On the other hand, my portable machine is an IBM Workpad z50. Sure, it runs WinCE natively. (makes me wince in pain thinking about it. ;) But even then, it's a decent machine. It's obviously a major pain in the arse to set up Linux on, but after about a month of prodding away, I managed to get something mostly functional on it, and if I want, I just pop it on a network and I have an instant webserver. Now to just get a web browser running without a kernel oops...
I just decided to go take a poke around, and as a test, I decided to perform a search on linux mips. (I've been browsing around recently and doing a bit of hacking on it lately, and I know which sites I found the most relevant for it.)
The results, currently, are pretty similar. The first link on the page pointed directly to the Linux/MIPS HOWTO, which I've been referring to quite often recently. Everything else is quite similar down the rest of the first 10 results as well.
Google still has it's advantages over Teoma at the moment though:
It's one of those things that quite frequently are useful when you're searching for something: instead of landing on the main page of the site (if that contains your search terms, and is of course linked more often), you can go directly to the part of the site that addresses exactly what you're looking for.
I really hate it when a site that I want to go visit has pulled it's content or moved it around. But if I'm doing a search on Google, or I even know the last known address of a page, I can just head over to the Google cache and often pull up exactly what I'm looking for, even if the content has been moved or deleted on it's original server. Sites, unfortunately, do vanish from time to time. It's always nice to be able to access that content when you need it most.
Anyway, that would just be my whole 2c on it.
Uhh... Windows 3.1? I have yet to see a properly-configured Win32 (sic) machine hold it's own against a properly-configured Linux machine. Especially considering that any Win32 machine put under any sort of actual use tends to get unstable after, oh, I'll give it 48 hours max.
It all depends on where you go looking for information. There are plenty of security related sites out there that cover Linux.
And what's this bullshit about RPM patches? Have you ever heard of just compiling your own and being done with it? That is why such things are provided for download -- if something goes wrong, you can fix it.
I can hire MS engineers all day long too. Can I hire competent engineers of any sort all day long? I highly doubt it. MCSE's are a dime a dozen, but if something just happens to go wrong on that W2k server over there, what are they going to do to fix it? "Oh, reboot the machine, it'll all be fine." Er.. stability?
Of course. But, why on Earth would he not say that?
I'll admit that after having read the whole thing (and no I haven't really read much of the other similar stories that have been posted on the subject) that there are good points in it.
I feel like I'm in school. "Do insert-3rd-grade-task-here." 2 days later: repeat.
It is just a little ridiculous. Why do we keep beating the horse?
Are you sure about this? I've had IE crash a fair amount of times recently. Of course, being a web developer, I also know what kind of stuff will make almost any browser crash. I just love getting the "Internet Explorer has crashed" dialog box.
You haven't used Mozilla 0.9 yet. That's all I can say.
I don't see it as a waste of resources -- it has to load a set of pixmaps/bmps/etc whether it's using a single "theme" that's part of the browser in the first place (see MSIE, Netscape 4.x), or loading multiple "themes" out of files (see WinAmp, XMMS, etc).
Just the UI.
Mozilla-0.8.1 embedded on a Pentium/120 with 48M ram. It flew. Repeat that please?
Both of which are fully optional if I'm not mistaken? Some people like doing everything out of one interface. Live with it.
Try it before you knock it. Sure, it has it's bugs, but so does MSIE.
The primary reason that I see for AOL including MSIE over Mozilla (which, BTW, has been stated many times over on this article by other people) is for getting their icon on the WinXP desktop. It's all a marketing ploy to get people to sign up with them -- if you didn't know anything about the internet or anything else, but found an AOL icon sitting on your desktop, would you be more likely to call your local ISP, install the insert-service-provider-name-here cd that showed up in your mail the day before, or use what was already there? Considering that my mother used AOL for a while.. I think it's that much more likely that they'll use what already exists on their system before installing something else or getting online with a real ISP.
Just my 0.02.
Yes, in it's own sort of way, it is "cool". We all know that emulation has it's "problems" (which, in this case, aren't really problems IMHO -- they're insulation between the host and guest OS's. I mean, if you're running Win98 inside of VMware, you don't want W98 to crash and take down Linux with it, do you?)
VMware has limited support for DirectX. Meaning that your games, if they run, won't run well. (See here and here.)
It also won't handle OpenGL, SDL, etc. because all of those require direct access to the video card (unless you're running them in software. But anyone who has tried playing a game that uses OpenGL with software rendering knows that it's not worth it).
Sure, VMware is worth it. But if you simply want it for gaming (and you *have* to do it under Win32...), save the $100 you'd spend on it and go get yourself another machine.
First off, America isn't all that great!! In terms of wealth and that lot of crap, sure it is, but in terms of everything else, what in the **** are you thinking? Hello!! Our children slaughter their own schoolmates! That makes US the greatest nation in the history of the world?! Being the most "christian" doesn't make us any better either - hello, religion promotes discrimination and racism, you think that makes us good? And freedom is a load of horseshit. (Just my 2 bits. :p)
Ehh, some of us in the US don't touch RSAREF with a 10 foot long pole.. or even a 100 foot long pole for that matter.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, RSAREF is open source, in the case that the RSAREF license allows you to patch the library to make it run faster. If it's closed-source, you wouldn't be able to do so, and there would be no point in having such a clause in the license for it.
Fluorescent brown? Yeah, ok.. you go right ahead. I doubt anyone would buy the rights to the patent in the first place, I mean, brown? First thing that comes to mind there is a pile of ... well, you know.
First thing, what's with your english? > If Linux can't server... > ... cuz ... > ... gotta ... Come back tomorrow when you can speak proper english.
BTW, that's obviously bullshit, 345 billion hits every other hour. On a p100. You couldn't even forge those logfiles, or even have enough bandwidth for that.
If i heard right, wasn't that C2 security rating
when you disabled networking on the NT machine? If
so, what the hell is the point of a C2 rating?
BTW, the modem -is- a device, so you need the
privileges to OPEN the device before you can
do jack shit with it.
Unix may have more holes in it than NT but it also
has the userbase behind it to quickly fix them. You
probably love installing the bi-annual NT service
pack that corrects holes discovered the day after
the last service pack was released, don't you?