Inflitrate the organizations from the bottom up with open source software is the way Nat puts it.
While I wholeheartedly agree with this approach, do you think it is long-term feasibile given the legal problems on the horizon? Between DMCA's anti-reverse engineering clause and Microsoft's implicit trade-secret EULA evidenced in the Kerberos matter, does free software or open source have a chance to even be compatibile sans legal support and corresponding financial backing to pay for it?
I don't mean to be a doomsayer, but this is the obvious tactic for Microsoft to stop future FS/OSS projects from being compatibile and thereby gain a monopoly on all future enterprise technologies.
Obviously, you are not a lawyer, but what is your gut feeling?
This looks outstanding. Does anyone know if it is compatible with the enterprise calendaring that outlook uses? On the web page it only says "iCalendar" and other existing calendering standards... It would be great to use this at work and not have to use outlook!
DrakConf also includes the new Lothar utility which is a set of tools that offers auto-detecting and configuring of additional hardware devices such as sound cards, network cards and many others.
This really is a great distro, if you are a RedHat user and haven't tried it, check it out...
IMHO, it is all-around better than RedHat. There tend to be some surprisingly cool packages installed, such as colorgcc, and supermount support is in the kernel. The install program is neat too, allowing you to download secure crypto packages from some european sites during the install. I believe it uses fbcon instead of X windows (a bit of overkill for an install program).
The system configuration tool is also nice, and the update-finder also seems to work well.
It also came with the BlueSteel E-theme, and lets you choose enlightenment without gnome from the kdm/gdm login without any extra configuring. It is actually usable out of the box...
I am speaking from the 7.0 release, haven't tried 7.1 yet, but I plan to.
I certainly am not buying a VHS copy of Jar Jar. It wasn't that good of a movie that I want to see it again anytime soon. However, the Jedi scenes alone are quite good and I'd like to see them a few time, but I am in no hurry.
If lucas was smart, he would release a crappy DVD version very soon with no commentary and only pan and scan format, then later on release the collector's edition with letterbox, lots of info, etc.
Katz finally seems to be learning something about our culture. I see no evidence of MS Word pasting, and Katz has abandoned the term geek profiling in favor of oddball profiling (much more fitting!)... In any case, thanks to Katz for speaking up. With continued work, maybe some reform will come out of the school system, where the main problem lies.
As Jefferson said, "those who would trade Freedom in order to find Security shall not have, nor do they deserve either one." Too bad no one listens to Jefferson anymore.
Very well put. Freedom today is very much being dilulted in favor of safety nets and "security". I feel embarassed going to the Jefferson Memorial nowadays. I can't face our founding fathers knowing what a horror our nation has become and that I'm not doing anything about it.
...is not anarchism. Of course everyone has their own viewpoint for the definition of the term, so I will avoid a semantical argument. However, it is not at all contradictory to one's self-interest to engage in collective bargaining. It is also not contradictory to the individual self-interest to have the government enforce citizens' "rights from" things (as opposed to "rights to").
Fundamentally, the author of the article confuses libertarianism with anarchism, so her observations are not surprising in their surprise.
NT may have earned POSIX compliance through some loophole, but you can't run vanilla posix unix programs as is, there are a lot of implementation details that are different in NT that sneak up on you and bite you.
For instance, you can't do socket I/O without calling some socket init functions that you don't have to do in unix.
Okay, this is slightly tangential but I think it is worth mentioning. 8')
I don't really see the point of having operator overloading. The advantage of being able to overload them is fully consumed by the resulting confusing code. I don't want my + operator to be overloaded. I don't want to work on code where I have to look up what the + operator actually means. If assumptions I have about such simple things as + and - no longer hold true I can't do my work properly.
Try to make a transparent persistent store without operator overloading. I've been trying for quite some time to make on in Java, and I can't seem to do it. Perhaps you, or someone more clever than I can manage it (please tell me how!). But until then, I find Java to be insufficient for my needs because of this key lack of facility.
I also think this reflects a fundamental problem with Java that you have touched on. It is restrictive such that developers can't write code which they consider good form and useful unless the Java designers also consider it good form. Specifically because they break their own rule in one case and overload operators with string types (and I'm glad they let us have some better string facilities, don't get me wrong) but they won't let us make our own operators on our own types which we think are useful! Coding standards are certainly good, and I certainly recommend it within an organization. For a language meant for many different organizations, however, it is this kind of arrogance that leaves a bad taste in a lot of developer's mouths and make people like myself not want to use what is otherwise an excellent language.
I was a fan of Katz until he started this "please die" tirade. But now, this pithy collection of platitudes just disgusts me.
The single greatest barrier to free speech in the united states is THE LAW. Finally we get a medium where we can actually express ourselves without fear of frivolous lawsuits from megacorps from which the individual has no hope of defense, and Katz wants to shut it down. Gag orders have become the mode of life for the physical world, free speach is dead. The net is the one place where one can have at least some semblance of anonymity (even if it can be traced through copious effort) and speak our minds. Of course, this puts a lot of responsibility in the mind of the reader, which, of course, we can't have in America, the land of free and the home of the blame.
Katz has a few good points with respect to the welcoming of newbies - newbies should be welcomed and encouraged. But there are only so many times you can tell a person not to post microsoft word documents with MISPRINTED SPECIAL CHARACTERS to a forum if they insist on doing it. It's about free speech, and following the convention of courtesy so that EVERYONE can read what you write. It's a lot like posting to a gardening forum talking about how you use kilos of rock salt as fertilizer, yet still complain because your garden won't grow.
If you have a better idea of how to run a technology forum, why don't you start one? You can set it up all Nazi-like as you like, with everyone on your list so best to single them out for the firing squad, and see what kind of response you get.
I, for one, don't care if people act like children and flame eachother in a public forum. I think this is because I learned one important lesson in kindergarden that Katz and kadre seem to have missed:
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
The main problem with the internet today is not the flaming jerks, but the haughty, condescending jerks who seek to lord over everyone they encounter and tell them how to behave. The blissful BBS days of yesteryear where people could speak their minds are gone, the thought police have come and cast us out of eden, from where we will never return.
Good road system/public transit. A city where you can get everywhere you want to go without a car is best, but barring that, you need a low traffic area. If geeks can tolerate high traffic, they will go to Silicon Valley and you won't get them anyway.
Low cost of living in a safe area. If geeks want a high cost of living, they will go to Silicon Valley and you won't get them anyway.
Geek salary significantly higher than average for area.
Food variety: thai, indian, japanese, ethiopian, french, etc.
Some facilities open all hours of the day.
These are the main things you need. The most important is the variety of geek jobs. And to have this, you need a lot of geeks there already. So, you need some tax-free zones for technology companies to start. It should be outside of the urban area so you don't have to worry about traffic, safety, or cost of living. Or, inside an urban area with VERY GOOD PUBLIC TRANSIT. Also, you need to subsidize things like fast net access. Then you will have a good body of geeks on the way. The rest can come in time.
If you want to save money AND still be principled, buy it for 19.97 at buy.com. Shipping is reasonable. http://www.buy.com/books/product.asp?sku=30549158
I could see this being very painful if the person you're swapping out with is not capable with a decent editor or is a really slow typist. I know this has been one of my pet peeves when programming in pairs/groups in the past.
The one problem that people don't seem to see is with these simple modeline calculator tools that I've seen posted, you can't set some very important parameters for your screen. These parameters are the ones that determine how the image is centered on your screen, and how wide/narrow and tall/short the image is. If these aren't set properly, some of the image might be projected into a non-viewable area off the side of the screen, or you may end up with a postage-stamp sized image on your 21" monitor.
As a preemptive reply to people about to point out the buttons and dials that do that on many monitors: not all monitors have them, and when you switch resolutions (or OSs), you have to go about setting them again. You should be able to set these controls once, then software configure the adapter to display properly to this monitor.
You can always get a monitor to work under X if it works at all using ESR's modeline tweaking document. Unfortunately, this is a real pain to do. The document is rather stream of consciousness, with lots of loops in the process rather than one straight process which will work every time - it even involves some fudge-factoring and guessing! The first step is calling the manufacturer and getting ALL the monitor settings, since they don't always send them all. The parameters you will need are arcane things like front porch and back porch, all of which are explained well in ESR's document. With these numbers, you do a lot of calculations and come up with all of those numbers on the modeline line. And the monitor should work perfectly. It would be nicer if we had a program that you could type in all these extra parameters and it would calculate a modeline for you specific to those parameters. That's one thing we need.
For those of you who had problems setting up LCD monitors, this is the way to go right now. I set up a Viewsonic VG180 flatscreen LCD this way and now it looks great, while by default under RedHat 6.1 it looks bad (Redhat's video detection has gotten worse and worse overall since 5.2 - many video cards also used to autodetect and now don't). The extra parameters besides the refresh rates are extremely important for configuring an LCD monitor. If these aren't set right, and your screen is squashed or expanded in some way, the points drawn by your adapter won't line up with the physical LCD cells on the monitor, instead being half in each in bands on the monitor. This results in blurry banding across your screen. This is not a problem with X rendering, it just needs some configuring.
A better option for newer monitors is the so-called plug-and-play monitor, in which the monitor somehow seems to reveal its parameters when probed. If we had this type of functionality, it would solve problems with most newer monitors made. Monitor manufacturers want their monitors to be easy to set up without sending out a disk, so most are motivated to do this.
The last thing we need is a list of all the modelines for old monitors that you can't probe. We have a pretty good one now, that's one way that is used now to setup the monitor, but there are some gaps.
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I'd like to see them get the latency down. What good is extra bandwidth if it doesn't improve your gaming experience? 8')
Inflitrate the organizations from the bottom up with open source software is the way Nat puts it.
While I wholeheartedly agree with this approach, do you think it is long-term feasibile given the legal problems on the horizon? Between DMCA's anti-reverse engineering clause and Microsoft's implicit trade-secret EULA evidenced in the Kerberos matter, does free software or open source have a chance to even be compatibile sans legal support and corresponding financial backing to pay for it?
I don't mean to be a doomsayer, but this is the obvious tactic for Microsoft to stop future FS/OSS projects from being compatibile and thereby gain a monopoly on all future enterprise technologies.
Obviously, you are not a lawyer, but what is your gut feeling?
This looks outstanding. Does anyone know if it is compatible with the enterprise calendaring that outlook uses? On the web page it only says "iCalendar" and other existing calendering standards... It would be great to use this at work and not have to use outlook!
I have a suggestion for the next Slashdot poll:
How many days until Sony sues over this?
which begs the question, when will we see something from the Mandrake team named 'Lothar' (Mandrake's trusted offsider in the comic strip)?
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Presentat ion/
This really is a great distro, if you are a RedHat user and haven't tried it, check it out...
IMHO, it is all-around better than RedHat. There tend to be some surprisingly cool packages installed, such as colorgcc, and supermount support is in the kernel. The install program is neat too, allowing you to download secure crypto packages from some european sites during the install. I believe it uses fbcon instead of X windows (a bit of overkill for an install program).
The system configuration tool is also nice, and the update-finder also seems to work well.
It also came with the BlueSteel E-theme, and lets you choose enlightenment without gnome from the kdm/gdm login without any extra configuring. It is actually usable out of the box...
I am speaking from the 7.0 release, haven't tried 7.1 yet, but I plan to.
I certainly am not buying a VHS copy of Jar Jar. It wasn't that good of a movie that I want to see it again anytime soon. However, the Jedi scenes alone are quite good and I'd like to see them a few time, but I am in no hurry.
If lucas was smart, he would release a crappy DVD version very soon with no commentary and only pan and scan format, then later on release the collector's edition with letterbox, lots of info, etc.
Katz finally seems to be learning something about our culture. I see no evidence of MS Word pasting, and Katz has abandoned the term geek profiling in favor of oddball profiling (much more fitting!)... In any case, thanks to Katz for speaking up. With continued work, maybe some reform will come out of the school system, where the main problem lies.
Very well put. Freedom today is very much being dilulted in favor of safety nets and "security". I feel embarassed going to the Jefferson Memorial nowadays. I can't face our founding fathers knowing what a horror our nation has become and that I'm not doing anything about it.
...is not anarchism. Of course everyone has their own viewpoint for the definition of the term, so I will avoid a semantical argument. However, it is not at all contradictory to one's self-interest to engage in collective bargaining. It is also not contradictory to the individual self-interest to have the government enforce citizens' "rights from" things (as opposed to "rights to").
Fundamentally, the author of the article confuses libertarianism with anarchism, so her observations are not surprising in their surprise.
NT may have earned POSIX compliance through some loophole, but you can't run vanilla posix unix programs as is, there are a lot of implementation details that are different in NT that sneak up on you and bite you.
For instance, you can't do socket I/O without calling some socket init functions that you don't have to do in unix.
Okay, this is slightly tangential but I think it is worth mentioning. 8')
I don't really see the point of having operator overloading. The advantage of being able to overload them is fully consumed by the resulting confusing code. I don't want my + operator to be overloaded. I don't want to work on code where I have to look up what the + operator actually means. If assumptions I have about such simple things as + and - no longer hold true I can't do my work properly.Try to make a transparent persistent store without operator overloading. I've been trying for quite some time to make on in Java, and I can't seem to do it. Perhaps you, or someone more clever than I can manage it (please tell me how!). But until then, I find Java to be insufficient for my needs because of this key lack of facility.
I also think this reflects a fundamental problem with Java that you have touched on. It is restrictive such that developers can't write code which they consider good form and useful unless the Java designers also consider it good form. Specifically because they break their own rule in one case and overload operators with string types (and I'm glad they let us have some better string facilities, don't get me wrong) but they won't let us make our own operators on our own types which we think are useful! Coding standards are certainly good, and I certainly recommend it within an organization. For a language meant for many different organizations, however, it is this kind of arrogance that leaves a bad taste in a lot of developer's mouths and make people like myself not want to use what is otherwise an excellent language.
> If they made a Ford Mustang with a linux logo on it, would you buy it? If they called it the Ford Tux and it was black and white with a yellow hood.
This is awesome, just what I have been looking for to play my old Chimpunk albums!
I was a fan of Katz until he started this "please die" tirade. But now, this pithy collection of platitudes just disgusts me.
The single greatest barrier to free speech in the united states is THE LAW. Finally we get a medium where we can actually express ourselves without fear of frivolous lawsuits from megacorps from which the individual has no hope of defense, and Katz wants to shut it down. Gag orders have become the mode of life for the physical world, free speach is dead. The net is the one place where one can have at least some semblance of anonymity (even if it can be traced through copious effort) and speak our minds. Of course, this puts a lot of responsibility in the mind of the reader, which, of course, we can't have in America, the land of free and the home of the blame.
Katz has a few good points with respect to the welcoming of newbies - newbies should be welcomed and encouraged. But there are only so many times you can tell a person not to post microsoft word documents with MISPRINTED SPECIAL CHARACTERS to a forum if they insist on doing it. It's about free speech, and following the convention of courtesy so that EVERYONE can read what you write. It's a lot like posting to a gardening forum talking about how you use kilos of rock salt as fertilizer, yet still complain because your garden won't grow.
If you have a better idea of how to run a technology forum, why don't you start one? You can set it up all Nazi-like as you like, with everyone on your list so best to single them out for the firing squad, and see what kind of response you get.
I, for one, don't care if people act like children and flame eachother in a public forum. I think this is because I learned one important lesson in kindergarden that Katz and kadre seem to have missed:
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
The main problem with the internet today is not the flaming jerks, but the haughty, condescending jerks who seek to lord over everyone they encounter and tell them how to behave. The blissful BBS days of yesteryear where people could speak their minds are gone, the thought police have come and cast us out of eden, from where we will never return.
These are the main things you need. The most important is the variety of geek jobs. And to have this, you need a lot of geeks there already. So, you need some tax-free zones for technology companies to start. It should be outside of the urban area so you don't have to worry about traffic, safety, or cost of living. Or, inside an urban area with VERY GOOD PUBLIC TRANSIT. Also, you need to subsidize things like fast net access. Then you will have a good body of geeks on the way. The rest can come in time.
Cheaper still at buy.com. http://www.buy.com/books/product.asp?sku=30549158
If you want to save money AND still be principled, buy it for 19.97 at buy.com. Shipping is reasonable. http://www.buy.com/books/product.asp?sku=30549158
I could see this being very painful if the person you're swapping out with is not capable with a decent editor or is a really slow typist. I know this has been one of my pet peeves when programming in pairs/groups in the past.
The one problem that people don't seem to see is with these simple modeline calculator tools that I've seen posted, you can't set some very important parameters for your screen. These parameters are the ones that determine how the image is centered on your screen, and how wide/narrow and tall/short the image is. If these aren't set properly, some of the image might be projected into a non-viewable area off the side of the screen, or you may end up with a postage-stamp sized image on your 21" monitor.
As a preemptive reply to people about to point out the buttons and dials that do that on many monitors: not all monitors have them, and when you switch resolutions (or OSs), you have to go about setting them again. You should be able to set these controls once, then software configure the adapter to display properly to this monitor.
You can always get a monitor to work under X if it works at all using ESR's modeline tweaking document. Unfortunately, this is a real pain to do. The document is rather stream of consciousness, with lots of loops in the process rather than one straight process which will work every time - it even involves some fudge-factoring and guessing! The first step is calling the manufacturer and getting ALL the monitor settings, since they don't always send them all. The parameters you will need are arcane things like front porch and back porch, all of which are explained well in ESR's document. With these numbers, you do a lot of calculations and come up with all of those numbers on the modeline line. And the monitor should work perfectly. It would be nicer if we had a program that you could type in all these extra parameters and it would calculate a modeline for you specific to those parameters. That's one thing we need.
For those of you who had problems setting up LCD monitors, this is the way to go right now. I set up a Viewsonic VG180 flatscreen LCD this way and now it looks great, while by default under RedHat 6.1 it looks bad (Redhat's video detection has gotten worse and worse overall since 5.2 - many video cards also used to autodetect and now don't). The extra parameters besides the refresh rates are extremely important for configuring an LCD monitor. If these aren't set right, and your screen is squashed or expanded in some way, the points drawn by your adapter won't line up with the physical LCD cells on the monitor, instead being half in each in bands on the monitor. This results in blurry banding across your screen. This is not a problem with X rendering, it just needs some configuring.
A better option for newer monitors is the so-called plug-and-play monitor, in which the monitor somehow seems to reveal its parameters when probed. If we had this type of functionality, it would solve problems with most newer monitors made. Monitor manufacturers want their monitors to be easy to set up without sending out a disk, so most are motivated to do this.
The last thing we need is a list of all the modelines for old monitors that you can't probe. We have a pretty good one now, that's one way that is used now to setup the monitor, but there are some gaps.