Did you ever use IE3? Now that was a shitty browser. Obviously you don't remember some of the early browsers.;>
It's a product in development so of course it will tend to be slower and buggier than a final release. I look carefully daily at the latest builds and if the comments are good I try the build on one machine and if it runs better than my previous build I update all my machines. I'd say it is better than NS 4.73 in many ways already. Crashes far less often and when it does crash it does far less damage to the system. (I keep Netscape under limits so it can't crash X).
If you haven't tried a recent build you have no reason to give an opinion of where the project currently is. If you think it's failed then go write your own browser. I think Mozilla will be one of several very successful browsers for Linux and it is really starting to show some hints of the finished project. It really doesn't matter who wins the browser war. If I can choose a stable, flexible browser that I have source to modify as needed then I've won. The project will never be abandoned as long as at least I am using it.
The machine in question has 64Mb RAM. Have you tried adjusting the size of swap memory on your box? If you're swapping a lot you should make it bigger. If you seem to be spending a lot of time in swap for simple tasks then you should make it smaller and think about adding more RAM. Swapping to an IDE drive especially can slow things down a lot.
Also note I said it's been really fast/stable the past 3 days or so. This implies that it has improved greatly.
Have you tried it? In the past three days or so it's been getting dramaticly better. I run everything from 486's to dual processor PIII 900Mhz boxes and have been using Mozilla since it first became a project. And I'm telling you it is running great on a P160 (and not bad on a P100).
I can't believe how fast Mozilla's build for today is running on my P166 and so stable too. Only a few minor superficial bugs (such as when changing theme). It looks and runs great. It is already my main browser on both Linux and Windows. All I need is the Java and security tied in the rest of the way.
I've often worked through an evening of conversing with someone using translation tools and a lot of patience. It isn't easy but it can be interesting.
Not entirely true. Try living in any large city and you'll find a nice mix of languages. Miami is a good example. Spanish is at least as used as English there and you have a mix of people from all over adding little groups with different languages and cultures. Sometimes you can't understand the language but you still can connect with people. I guess the Internet is like real life. People with few interests who stay home a lot meet few people and stay in their own little box but the rest of us like to mingle. I think the Internet just makes it a lot easier to do that mingling.:) You have isolated settlements but you can be in several at once. You are your own bridge.
I keep up-to-date by watching Slashdot and other key sites which is important for sysadmins and coders I think. Sometimes I need to know something happened (like security alerts) within minutes of the rest of the world knowing it.:)
Always. Honestly though most of the geek coders I know supposedly suffer from A.D.D. (or so they were told in school). Breaking my concentration into several tasks at once with only one or two being important helps me concentrate.
Geeks can be very good managers. I think the key is that opensource projects that succeed tend to have a strong semi-centralized core and the outter fringes are self-organizing. Also opensource projects aren't businesses for the most part so they don't have to manage employee time, pay, etc and can just pay attention to the geek stuff.
Ironicly I actually made more money when I was in highschool than I do now since at that point I could get away with charging $50/hr to work on computers. Add that I have a lot more bills now and I would be lucky to be anywhere close to what I made then.
I buy more CD's because MP3's restored my interest in music which had been burnt out by years of radio and MTV that didn't serve my tastes in music. I also buy more books and movies now largely due to my growing interest in media.
You don't need to but you are assuming the web is the best possible method for distributing files. While it is good for many things I do not think it is a very reliable source for distributing binaries. A file-sharing approach allows you to mirror on a scale impossible to acheive with the web. The trick is to make digitally signed music that can be verified by the end-user as the original before downloading the music. Also I'm a geek and therefore it is in my nature to explore new possibilities.:)
Napster was a cute idea, not very original but they did a good job of promoting the service better than any previous file/music sharing service and making it easy enough for even a novice to use. File-sharing is here to stay and nobody will be able to stop it. Some of the files will be legal, others will be illegal. If a label that owned the rights to the music (or other content) provided a Napster-like service while itself dumping a lot of quality content into the service they'd gain a large market hold without nearly the hassles Napster had. You could still allow peer-peer file sharing that was unmonitored but you could also mark certain files that you proved yourself as known legal and of high quality.
I've been fighting with myself as I don't like paying for music but I do want to pay the artists. If you go through a label you end up giving them most of the money and they take that same money and use it to buy stupid laws and sue anyone they are afraid of. If you don't pay then eventually your artists will begin to bitch & moan and it'll be even harder for people to break into the business. The only real solution is to become the label so that you can pay the artists while still protecting the right to do what you want with the content. If we can't beat the RIAA in court maybe we can beat them at their own game by forcing them to play our way.
I for one would be interested in helping fund (with my cd buying money) a label that plays a part similar to that of the Free Software Foundation. Such a label would require the artists signed to them to release their music under an open-content license. In exchange the label would provide the normal features such as production, distribution, publicity, etc and only take their royalty from those sales up to the point where they've made back their costs. This would allow artists to keep a lot more of their own money and still provide the community with free music. Since free music drives sales (I for one bought far more CD's since MP3's) their should still be a lot of money to be made. A lot of new artists would also be interested as they'd have a lot more options with our FreeMusic Label.
One of my jobs I work at a University and I have several small labs to take care of. Not much to look at but mostly I have the needed room to work and enough quiet to not be to bothered by people around. I also can work from home a lot which is fantastic.
My other job I'm a programmer for travel-italy.com and they have a lovely new building of a villa style. It's not huge but it is roomy and probably the nicest looking place I've worked. It is elegant but still working enviroment. The programmers have a little area with a view of the fountains and enar the kitchen and bathrooms.
I think most people are mad because these big media companies are claiming we are the pirates for sharing things for free yet they are selling our work without our consent and making laws to protect their angle. I personally don't care if you copy every thing I've ever coded, written, drawn, whatever but if you sell it I'm going to be pissed. That is why I like GPL over BSD. This is even worse, they aren't even asking the authors.
I keep waiting for the day Bill Gates gets kidnapped and replaced by an open-source advocating look-alike so we can make M$ Flight Sim opensource and multi-platform. That's the only M$ program I can remember ever being impressed with. When they bought that one they made a good choice.:)
They'd be well off dropping the 'Internet' part of this concept and go w/ all business w/in the US. So any business in the US is liable to any of it's customers, foreign or domestic, if they are unfaithful in their privacy statement.
Re:Who would the tech community have coherent...
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
Though usually I enjoy Kats articles I must admit he does seem somewhat clueless here. However I'd argue that to be a geek is an inclusive philosophy. There are many shared traits that define geeks, such as creativity, intelligence, low interest in non-geek society, desire for freedom, etc that you'll find most of in most geeks. You have many different overlapping camps, commercial vrs completly open vrs open but forced to stay open, simplicity (GUI) vrs flexibility (CLI), etc.
I think this generation of geek will largely be freedom fighters as we have grown up with the Internet and free (as in speach) software. We are less concerned about the financial side of geekdom but more likely to profit from it. We are more political and agressive because we are born of a time when the things we have came to enjoy and count amoung our rights as human beings are being attacked by corporations, politicians, and religious nuts. When this generation reaches the age to have political clout massive changes will be very likely. By that time some of our youthful hopes will have been smashed which will keep society from as massive of shifts but they will still be big. The technology that flows from this generation will further this out of need. The Internet, genetics, and nanotech will invade every aspect of our lifes and it'll be up to these techsavvy youth to keep shortsighted nay-sayers from misguiding these technologies and causing damage. Imagine the worlds of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Distraction -- that is just a small peek at the ways society may change in the hands of these geeks. Nobody can say what the world will be like but nothing will ever be the same.
I think you're kidding yourself. Look at the people who use MUD's most. Many of them are hardcore geeks or at least above average. I think such NLP interfaces are a good way to do things the shell doesn't do well such as communicating with other logged in users, w/ intelligent agents, or with the network.
Which again makes me wonder why a vendor, especially small vendors, would want to go through the expense and hassle of dealing with credit cards. For the small home business they are expensive and hard to break into with a long list of risks and hassles.
As a consumer (and someone who has had to stoop to selling credit card packages from time to time) I also have to note that a lot of credit cards aren't nearly all they claim to be. Sure they protect the people in the better programs but often they screw over anyone they don't think would have enough $ to make a decent lawsuit against them.
One of my current projects is a search engine that combs both the web and usenet based on simularity data. A portion of this data is computed using analysis of files, locations, etc and the rest is done by a sort of moderation system similar to Slashdot that lets users group and rate files. To the system both text and binary files are able to be searched. So if you found a pic you liked you could use it as your sample and the search engine would return all of the others that matched the search you specified. You might get back pics that matched the same signature as the sample, pics w/ a similar name, or pics that had been group moderated into the same class as the sample. Right now I'm doing a lot of research on file signatures, ways of telling how similar one pic (or mp3, or anything) is to another file of the same type (pic, sound, text).
Try looking at MUD's. A system like LambdaMOO is a strong language interface example. You could abstract this to a Unix system by allowing all of it's users to communicate with each other, agents, and the computer itself. Using a system of XML meta-documents for each file on the drive that could be manipulated through this interface would be useful. You would want to make the system use the under-lying users/groups foundation for security as well as possibly adopting somethings from the MUD's. Another bonus from making it a sort of shared-shell enviroment would be the fact that you could execute any program on the system that you could usually access and it could work as well as having special programs (written in your choice of languages) that was MULO (Multi-user Language-oriented) specific in the way X programs usually only work in X. This shouldn't even be a hard project to do for anyone with enough time to do it. Write a small daemon to act as the server and some sort of client program. It shouldn't seek to replace the command-line but only to compliment it.
CC's f^%* over both the merchant and the consumer so why bother? Use PayPal, they can handle credit cards in their backend I believe. Myself I like E-Gold. Has anyone managed to get the MD5 signature from an E-Gold transaction to match up? Doing it under PHP4 doesn't seem to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you ever use IE3? Now that was a shitty browser. Obviously you don't remember some of the early browsers. ;>
It's a product in development so of course it will tend to be slower and buggier than a final release. I look carefully daily at the latest builds and if the comments are good I try the build on one machine and if it runs better than my previous build I update all my machines. I'd say it is better than NS 4.73 in many ways already. Crashes far less often and when it does crash it does far less damage to the system. (I keep Netscape under limits so it can't crash X).
If you haven't tried a recent build you have no reason to give an opinion of where the project currently is. If you think it's failed then go write your own browser. I think Mozilla will be one of several very successful browsers for Linux and it is really starting to show some hints of the finished project. It really doesn't matter who wins the browser war. If I can choose a stable, flexible browser that I have source to modify as needed then I've won. The project will never be abandoned as long as at least I am using it.
The machine in question has 64Mb RAM. Have you tried adjusting the size of swap memory on your box? If you're swapping a lot you should make it bigger. If you seem to be spending a lot of time in swap for simple tasks then you should make it smaller and think about adding more RAM. Swapping to an IDE drive especially can slow things down a lot.
Also note I said it's been really fast/stable the past 3 days or so. This implies that it has improved greatly.
Have you tried it? In the past three days or so it's been getting dramaticly better. I run everything from 486's to dual processor PIII 900Mhz boxes and have been using Mozilla since it first became a project. And I'm telling you it is running great on a P160 (and not bad on a P100).
I can't believe how fast Mozilla's build for today is running on my P166 and so stable too. Only a few minor superficial bugs (such as when changing theme). It looks and runs great. It is already my main browser on both Linux and Windows. All I need is the Java and security tied in the rest of the way.
I've often worked through an evening of conversing with someone using translation tools and a lot of patience. It isn't easy but it can be interesting.
Not entirely true. Try living in any large city and you'll find a nice mix of languages. Miami is a good example. Spanish is at least as used as English there and you have a mix of people from all over adding little groups with different languages and cultures. Sometimes you can't understand the language but you still can connect with people. I guess the Internet is like real life. People with few interests who stay home a lot meet few people and stay in their own little box but the rest of us like to mingle. I think the Internet just makes it a lot easier to do that mingling. :) You have isolated settlements but you can be in several at once. You are your own bridge.
Also in my defense for always being on Slashdot..
:)
The boss is usually on too..
I keep up-to-date by watching Slashdot and other key sites which is important for sysadmins and coders I think. Sometimes I need to know something happened (like security alerts) within minutes of the rest of the world knowing it.
Always. Honestly though most of the geek coders I know supposedly suffer from A.D.D. (or so they were told in school). Breaking my concentration into several tasks at once with only one or two being important helps me concentrate.
Geeks can be very good managers. I think the key is that opensource projects that succeed tend to have a strong semi-centralized core and the outter fringes are self-organizing. Also opensource projects aren't businesses for the most part so they don't have to manage employee time, pay, etc and can just pay attention to the geek stuff.
Ironicly I actually made more money when I was in highschool than I do now since at that point I could get away with charging $50/hr to work on computers. Add that I have a lot more bills now and I would be lucky to be anywhere close to what I made then. I buy more CD's because MP3's restored my interest in music which had been burnt out by years of radio and MTV that didn't serve my tastes in music. I also buy more books and movies now largely due to my growing interest in media.
You don't need to but you are assuming the web is the best possible method for distributing files. While it is good for many things I do not think it is a very reliable source for distributing binaries. A file-sharing approach allows you to mirror on a scale impossible to acheive with the web. The trick is to make digitally signed music that can be verified by the end-user as the original before downloading the music. Also I'm a geek and therefore it is in my nature to explore new possibilities. :)
Napster was a cute idea, not very original but they did a good job of promoting the service better than any previous file/music sharing service and making it easy enough for even a novice to use. File-sharing is here to stay and nobody will be able to stop it. Some of the files will be legal, others will be illegal. If a label that owned the rights to the music (or other content) provided a Napster-like service while itself dumping a lot of quality content into the service they'd gain a large market hold without nearly the hassles Napster had. You could still allow peer-peer file sharing that was unmonitored but you could also mark certain files that you proved yourself as known legal and of high quality.
I've been fighting with myself as I don't like paying for music but I do want to pay the artists. If you go through a label you end up giving them most of the money and they take that same money and use it to buy stupid laws and sue anyone they are afraid of. If you don't pay then eventually your artists will begin to bitch & moan and it'll be even harder for people to break into the business. The only real solution is to become the label so that you can pay the artists while still protecting the right to do what you want with the content. If we can't beat the RIAA in court maybe we can beat them at their own game by forcing them to play our way.
I for one would be interested in helping fund (with my cd buying money) a label that plays a part similar to that of the Free Software Foundation. Such a label would require the artists signed to them to release their music under an open-content license. In exchange the label would provide the normal features such as production, distribution, publicity, etc and only take their royalty from those sales up to the point where they've made back their costs. This would allow artists to keep a lot more of their own money and still provide the community with free music. Since free music drives sales (I for one bought far more CD's since MP3's) their should still be a lot of money to be made. A lot of new artists would also be interested as they'd have a lot more options with our FreeMusic Label.
SOS? I thought that was only what people who tried running Solaris OS on random home x86 machines called their OS. ;>
One of my jobs I work at a University and I have several small labs to take care of. Not much to look at but mostly I have the needed room to work and enough quiet to not be to bothered by people around. I also can work from home a lot which is fantastic.
:)
My other job I'm a programmer for travel-italy.com and they have a lovely new building of a villa style. It's not huge but it is roomy and probably the nicest looking place I've worked. It is elegant but still working enviroment. The programmers have a little area with a view of the fountains and enar the kitchen and bathrooms.
Overall I'd say I have it good.
I think most people are mad because these big media companies are claiming we are the pirates for sharing things for free yet they are selling our work without our consent and making laws to protect their angle. I personally don't care if you copy every thing I've ever coded, written, drawn, whatever but if you sell it I'm going to be pissed. That is why I like GPL over BSD. This is even worse, they aren't even asking the authors.
I keep waiting for the day Bill Gates gets kidnapped and replaced by an open-source advocating look-alike so we can make M$ Flight Sim opensource and multi-platform. That's the only M$ program I can remember ever being impressed with. When they bought that one they made a good choice. :)
They'd be well off dropping the 'Internet' part of this concept and go w/ all business w/in the US. So any business in the US is liable to any of it's customers, foreign or domestic, if they are unfaithful in their privacy statement.
Though usually I enjoy Kats articles I must admit he does seem somewhat clueless here. However I'd argue that to be a geek is an inclusive philosophy. There are many shared traits that define geeks, such as creativity, intelligence, low interest in non-geek society, desire for freedom, etc that you'll find most of in most geeks. You have many different overlapping camps, commercial vrs completly open vrs open but forced to stay open, simplicity (GUI) vrs flexibility (CLI), etc.
I think this generation of geek will largely be freedom fighters as we have grown up with the Internet and free (as in speach) software. We are less concerned about the financial side of geekdom but more likely to profit from it. We are more political and agressive because we are born of a time when the things we have came to enjoy and count amoung our rights as human beings are being attacked by corporations, politicians, and religious nuts. When this generation reaches the age to have political clout massive changes will be very likely. By that time some of our youthful hopes will have been smashed which will keep society from as massive of shifts but they will still be big. The technology that flows from this generation will further this out of need. The Internet, genetics, and nanotech will invade every aspect of our lifes and it'll be up to these techsavvy youth to keep shortsighted nay-sayers from misguiding these technologies and causing damage. Imagine the worlds of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Distraction -- that is just a small peek at the ways society may change in the hands of these geeks. Nobody can say what the world will be like but nothing will ever be the same.
I think you're kidding yourself. Look at the people who use MUD's most. Many of them are hardcore geeks or at least above average. I think such NLP interfaces are a good way to do things the shell doesn't do well such as communicating with other logged in users, w/ intelligent agents, or with the network.
Which again makes me wonder why a vendor, especially small vendors, would want to go through the expense and hassle of dealing with credit cards. For the small home business they are expensive and hard to break into with a long list of risks and hassles.
As a consumer (and someone who has had to stoop to selling credit card packages from time to time) I also have to note that a lot of credit cards aren't nearly all they claim to be. Sure they protect the people in the better programs but often they screw over anyone they don't think would have enough $ to make a decent lawsuit against them.
One of my current projects is a search engine that combs both the web and usenet based on simularity data. A portion of this data is computed using analysis of files, locations, etc and the rest is done by a sort of moderation system similar to Slashdot that lets users group and rate files. To the system both text and binary files are able to be searched. So if you found a pic you liked you could use it as your sample and the search engine would return all of the others that matched the search you specified. You might get back pics that matched the same signature as the sample, pics w/ a similar name, or pics that had been group moderated into the same class as the sample. Right now I'm doing a lot of research on file signatures, ways of telling how similar one pic (or mp3, or anything) is to another file of the same type (pic, sound, text).
Try looking at MUD's. A system like LambdaMOO is a strong language interface example. You could abstract this to a Unix system by allowing all of it's users to communicate with each other, agents, and the computer itself. Using a system of XML meta-documents for each file on the drive that could be manipulated through this interface would be useful. You would want to make the system use the under-lying users/groups foundation for security as well as possibly adopting somethings from the MUD's. Another bonus from making it a sort of shared-shell enviroment would be the fact that you could execute any program on the system that you could usually access and it could work as well as having special programs (written in your choice of languages) that was MULO (Multi-user Language-oriented) specific in the way X programs usually only work in X. This shouldn't even be a hard project to do for anyone with enough time to do it. Write a small daemon to act as the server and some sort of client program. It shouldn't seek to replace the command-line but only to compliment it.
CC's f^%* over both the merchant and the consumer so why bother? Use PayPal, they can handle credit cards in their backend I believe. Myself I like E-Gold. Has anyone managed to get the MD5 signature from an E-Gold transaction to match up? Doing it under PHP4 doesn't seem to work.