You already need to pay a toll to get into Manhattan, across every bridge and tunnel, maybe with the exception of one or two local bridges way up north. So, 'they' already know you are on the island; this just would help narrow down whether you were below 86th. And not very well-they probably won't record when you left. Given that prime Manhattan parking space is as expensive per square foot as prime manhattan real estate, and most traffic in Manhattan is cabs, I doubt this will have the impact they want. It seems to me the biggest impact will be for people who regularly make the trip across 86th street, which might cut down traffic on the George Washington Bridge, and might reduce traffic above 86th, and might get people to take a cab to 86th street and then transit the rest of the way home. It will bring in revenue, which is really what this is about.
Ellison's announcement was not about acquiring Novell--it was an announcement meant to punish Red Hat for acquiring JBoss out from under Oracle's nose. If Ellison can't have JBoss, he's threatening to compete directly against the firm that has it. The stock market has taken back all the gains RHAT had since they announced the JBoss deal; down 5-6% yesterday. So forget about Ubuntu, this is just PR.
That 'SIOX' object selection stuff looks really really cute; you have to wonder if it would come in useful for machine vision/AI as well.
It presumably would, as long as machine vision/AI people have pictures of their bosses that they want to place on supermodels' bodies, or need to prove to their girlfriends that they really were at the ballgame and not at the strip club.
Switching can be done, but it isn't easy. Just like you need to practice to change, you also need to practice switching to be able to switch easily--it does not just come naturally, like speaking two languages. I find it can take a few seconds to shift from one mode to another, but then I'm fine, and I often can't even tell what mode I'm in without looking at the keyboard. There are times, of course, when I get confused, but with practice you can eliminate much of the interference.
What is really interesting is that the typing mode is closely tied to the context you have used it in before. I learned Dvorak by transcribing text, and it didn't transfer as easily to other tasks that you might expect it too, even like writing papers, and especially things like programming. I had to re-learn to type in each programming language again, which sounds wierd, and is probably tied to overlearned keyword sequences and how brackets and parens change position. Also, if you use command-line tools a lot, you will have highly overlearned keypress sequences that will cause some trouble. Ditto for emacs/vi key combos. These would be difficult to transfer between typing modes flawlessly without intentional practice. I switched on a normal square keyboard, and found it relatively easier to type QWERTY on a split keyboard I used rarely, because there were more context cues that helped me. This is not true anymore, since I use a split keyboard all the time.
The moral: you can move between keyboards easily with practice, but highly overlearned things are more difficult.
But the audio code is the sticker. There is no free cross-platform sound code (other than relativly simple stuff like SDL (simple by comparison to some of the more interesting things you can do native)). So if you were to port the audio engine, then it should be easy. Either that or write an ALSA emulation layer for Windows or OS X.
Actually, PortAudio solves the cross-platform audio problem quite well (cf. audacity), although I don't know if Rosegarden uses it. But, the QT toolkit may be the real stumbling block--it requires an expensive license to develop with on windows. And probably, the developers just don't care about windows users, which in my opinion is a mistake. One reason why Audacity, for example, is such a good linux audio editor is because it is cross-platform, and gets lots of testing with windows users.
For all you "Synthetic Lifeforms Assembled for Sabotage and Harm/Devices Optimized for Troubleshooting", don't forget CyborgName.com. Not only will it make a robot for you out of your own name, it will print you up one on a mug or a T-Shirt.
It is pretty much true that the spatial nautilus isterrible at managing deep hierarchical directory structures. Hierarchies are extremely powerful ways to organize complex things, and if done systematically, are essentially content-addressable memory. Q: "Where is that article I wrote last year on spatial nautilus?" A:/home/me/Documents/Articles/2003/spatial-nautilus. If my tool can't help me get there, I'm not going to use it. Fine, I won't, and I can change back to the normal version, but Gnome has this tendency to adopt unpopular standards, state "You can use whatever you want", and then abandon you. cf. metacity vs. sawfish w.r.t. raising windows to the top; cf. gnome-terminal changes that lead to incredibly sluggish behavior; cf. the desktop-versus-viewport fiasco; cf. the overzealous pruning of preferences; cf. the new file selector; cf. galeon/epiphany; cf. spatial nautilus. And don't tell me to use something else or create a fork or something--I like Gnome; I want it to be successful; I HAVE contributed to the project in numerous ways; yet I have a job of my own that I try to use Gnome to help perform, and I get annoyed when things that work well for me are changed with an obstinate and pompous attitude that "We know best because we are a core developer". Such a change to default behavior shouldn't be permitted without significant user testing that compellingly shows its superiority.
Errr..... I'm pretty sure Word is written in C++. I am certain that OpenOffice is as well (except, I think, the optional help system. I'm totally speculating here, but Word's startup advantages probably come mostly because it uses the native windows toolkit instead of building its own and using that, like OO.o does. This extra layer probably doesn't slow down performance noticeably, but it may require extra time at startup loading dozens of extra dynamic runtime libraries that contain all the extra widgets that may not even get used unless you, say, create a graph or use Starbasic or something. But, this probably isn't all--Microsoft has a bunch of pretty good HCI researchers that do user tests of where users perceive problems to occur, and they can then put pressure on the Office group to make changes that improves the perceived program performance, even if it amounts to what a developer might consider an ugly hack like preloading libraries or delaying loading of libraries and drawing a base empty window even if the program isn't fully loaded yet. If OO.o, and most other open source projects, probably don't have as many people interested in doing this, and consequently less pressure to do so.
Email did not used to be as open as it is today. Although many academic and business systems were not much different, it was often a hassle to communicate between different systems. Even ten years ago, my college was using a system called "All-In-One", and to send something off campus, you had to prefix the address it with some bizarre code, because for some reason the computer couldn't figure it out otherwise. I think that some early internet services like compuserve and prodigy were even more disinterested in letting you email with people not on your system.
But, somewhat ironically, the ancestors of IM that we used at the time (unix talk and ytalk) were free, sans advertising, and used well-understood communication protocols. So as email has grown more open, chat tools have grown less so. But this is probably just because a lot of IM used in business/school is not officially sanctioned, and also not budgeted, so management is letting their employees pay (by looking at advertising) for an increasingly-important business infrastructure.
One of the authors is something like my academic half-brother. He's no slouch, and brain imaging is so common nowadays that I doubt they would fail to control for button presses. But don't be fooled into thinking they found out anything novel. Problem solving and insight research has been going on seriously for at least 50 years--one famous insight problem from the 50s (I think, it may have been earlier) is the Luchin's water jugs problem, which you may remember from the Die Hard movie with Samuel L. Jackson. People have long known that there is a fundamental difference between "insight" and normal problems, and all this did was show that you can see the difference when you look at the brain. I seriously doubt there is any respectable or half-way knowledgeable scientist who would have predicted otherwise.
For the most part, copy/paste works well, but try cutting things from emacs into gnumeric or nedit. I'm constantly frustrated by this.
Probably because of Borland's support of wx
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In Julian Smart's recent announcement of the wxwindows foundation, he noted that Borland is supporting wxwindows development and that an employee of Borland is on the Board of Directors at the foundation. This is probably behind Borland's 'neglect' of kylix--expect the next generation to support wxWindows. This doesn't sound like abandonment to me.
Don't kid yourself. They all use the same backend databases (i.e., NavTech) and direction-finders. The only difference you are likely to find is in the interface, and how they choose to present the maps, directions, information. That is where they are different.
I've got 2 se401 webcams hooked up through USB on Linux, they go to/dev/video1 and/dev/video2 or something. Much better than I was able to pull off in Windows. I'd imagine 3 webcams would be a piece of cake as well.
...If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, 12 pounds of nutritious green wafers, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.
Sorry, it is you who are wrong; the original statement is correct. Although the original codebase was StarOffice, the main tree is now OpenOffice, which StarOffice is now just a branded child of (there are others, like Ximian's OpenOffice). StarOffice includes some other things as well, which can't or won't be open-sourced.
SVG is often takes much less room than the equivalent jpg/png/gif. It has great potential to eliminate the need for a lot of crappy graphics hacks used out there. For example, once easy-to-script graphing libraries are available, you will be able to make svg graphs of real-time data (of web activity, stock prices, etc.) instead of using bitmaps. For much data, this will be much smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. Some large interesting background images etc. will be possible because they are not constrained by the actual size of the image, just the detail. Although svg is being compared to Flash, it is really more proper to think of it as an embeddable.eps or something; I'm not even sure if it handles animation and I don't think it can embed sound events.
This reminds me of the great NY Blackout Baby Boom. Legend has it, on a Monday, 9 months after the big 1965 blackout, a nurse in a hospital noticed a larger-than average number of births. The NYT picked up on this, and reported it. By Wednesday, births had fallen off. It was later shown that there was no real statistical increase, and the numbers may have reflected normal weekly fluctuation (probably because people like to schedule planned births at the beginning of the week. see snopes for more detail.
One week fluctuations are pretty meaningless, especially when there is a huge confounding factor like the July 4 Holiday. But that doesn't mean the RIAA won't use it as evidence to coerce people.
This patch has been around for months. The latest bugfix release was two weeks ago. This didn't just happen, and I'm surprised to read it here as news.
For those of you who are waiting to get it into your distro, don't hold your breath. It is a self-proclaimed ugly hack that works reasonably well but will not be part of the main GTK. But, a similar hack is used for QT/KDE, which gives you an idea of where GTK hackers priorities are. You'll have to wait until true alpha transparency makes it into X for this done right.
Despite the many comments about this just being eye-candy, this probably benefits usability as well (like Anti-Aliasing). Shadow is an important depth cue, which helps segregate the menu from the background. This probably makes it slightly easier and faster to find the proper menu item (tens or hundreds of ms), which over a lifetime or across an organization can add up to some real money.
Unlike just about every other pundit writing on this matter, notice that RMS did not lambast SCO or try to claim that Linux is clean. Everyone who is following this case and rooting for Linux should consider this possiblility: somebody (IBM) may have stolen SCO's code. The community does not owe IBM loyalty, and should be wary of them for apparently contributing code that _at least_ could be construed by a former partner as their intellectual property. Maybe they are guiltless, and maybe this is just a SCO cash grab, but I don't owe IBM anything and will not be surprised if someone from a big corporation accidentally or purposefully contributed code that wasn't their's.
Hell, why not just get all/.ers to toss in $20 and BUY SCO?
Because, if you had read the article, you would know that the Canopy group and related cronies already own a majority of the stock, and if they sell out right now to you, they might be in for it from the SEC and shareholders.
Slashdot Mirror
You already need to pay a toll to get into Manhattan, across every bridge and tunnel, maybe with the exception of one or two local bridges way up north. So, 'they' already know you are on the island; this just would help narrow down whether you were below 86th. And not very well-they probably won't record when you left. Given that prime Manhattan parking space is as expensive per square foot as prime manhattan real estate, and most traffic in Manhattan is cabs, I doubt this will have the impact they want. It seems to me the biggest impact will be for people who regularly make the trip across 86th street, which might cut down traffic on the George Washington Bridge, and might reduce traffic above 86th, and might get people to take a cab to 86th street and then transit the rest of the way home. It will bring in revenue, which is really what this is about.
Ellison's announcement was not about acquiring Novell--it was an announcement meant to punish Red Hat for acquiring JBoss out from under Oracle's nose. If Ellison can't have JBoss, he's threatening to compete directly against the firm that has it. The stock market has taken back all the gains RHAT had since they announced the JBoss deal; down 5-6% yesterday. So forget about Ubuntu, this is just PR.
That 'SIOX' object selection stuff looks really really cute; you have to wonder if it would come in useful for machine vision/AI as well.
It presumably would, as long as machine vision/AI people have pictures of their bosses that they want to place on supermodels' bodies, or need to prove to their girlfriends that they really were at the ballgame and not at the strip club.
Switching can be done, but it isn't easy. Just like you need to practice to change, you also need to practice switching to be able to switch easily--it does not just come naturally, like speaking two languages. I find it can take a few seconds to shift from one mode to another, but then I'm fine, and I often can't even tell what mode I'm in without looking at the keyboard. There are times, of course, when I get confused, but with practice you can eliminate much of the interference.
What is really interesting is that the typing mode is closely tied to the context you have used it in before. I learned Dvorak by transcribing text, and it didn't transfer as easily to other tasks that you might expect it too, even like writing papers, and especially things like programming.
I had to re-learn to type in each programming language again, which sounds wierd, and is probably tied to overlearned keyword sequences and how brackets and parens change position. Also, if you use command-line tools a lot, you will have highly overlearned keypress sequences that will cause some trouble. Ditto for emacs/vi key combos. These would be difficult to transfer between typing modes flawlessly without intentional practice. I switched on a normal square keyboard, and found it relatively easier to type QWERTY on a split keyboard I used rarely, because there were more context cues that helped me. This is not true anymore, since I use a split keyboard all the time.
The moral: you can move between keyboards easily with practice, but highly overlearned things are more difficult.
Here's a link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire) that explains it all for you.
But the audio code is the sticker. There is no free cross-platform sound code (other than relativly simple stuff like SDL (simple by comparison to some of the more interesting things you can do native)). So if you were to port the audio engine, then it should be easy. Either that or write an ALSA emulation layer for Windows or OS X.
Actually, PortAudio solves the cross-platform audio problem quite well (cf. audacity), although I don't know if Rosegarden uses it. But, the QT toolkit may be the real stumbling block--it requires an expensive license to develop with on windows. And probably, the developers just don't care about windows users, which in my opinion is a mistake. One reason why Audacity, for example, is such a good linux audio editor is because it is cross-platform, and gets lots of testing with windows users.
For all you "Synthetic Lifeforms Assembled for Sabotage and Harm/Devices Optimized for Troubleshooting", don't forget CyborgName.com. Not only will it make a robot for you out of your own name, it will print you up one on a mug or a T-Shirt.
It is pretty much true that the spatial nautilus isterrible at managing deep hierarchical directory structures. Hierarchies are extremely powerful ways to organize complex things, and if done systematically, are essentially content-addressable memory. Q: "Where is that article I wrote last year on spatial nautilus?" A: /home/me/Documents/Articles/2003/spatial-nautilus. If my tool can't help me get there, I'm not going to use it. Fine, I won't, and I can change back to the normal version, but Gnome has this tendency to adopt unpopular standards, state "You can use whatever you want", and then abandon you. cf. metacity vs. sawfish w.r.t. raising windows to the top; cf. gnome-terminal changes that lead to incredibly sluggish behavior; cf. the desktop-versus-viewport fiasco; cf. the overzealous pruning of preferences; cf. the new file selector; cf. galeon/epiphany; cf. spatial nautilus. And don't tell me to use something else or create a fork or something--I like Gnome; I want it to be successful; I HAVE contributed to the project in numerous ways; yet I have a job of my own that I try to use Gnome to help perform, and I get annoyed when things that work well for me are changed with an obstinate and pompous attitude that "We know best because we are a core developer". Such a change to default behavior shouldn't be permitted without significant user testing that compellingly shows its superiority.
Errr..... I'm pretty sure Word is written in C++. I am certain that OpenOffice is as well (except, I think, the optional help system. I'm totally speculating here, but Word's startup advantages probably come mostly because it uses the native windows toolkit instead of building its own and using that, like OO.o does. This extra layer probably doesn't slow down performance noticeably, but it may require extra time at startup loading dozens of extra dynamic runtime libraries that contain all the extra widgets that may not even get used unless you, say, create a graph or use Starbasic or something. But, this probably isn't all--Microsoft has a bunch of pretty good HCI researchers that do user tests of where users perceive problems to occur, and they can then put pressure on the Office group to make changes that improves the perceived program performance, even if it amounts to what a developer might consider an ugly hack like preloading libraries or delaying loading of libraries and drawing a base empty window even if the program isn't fully loaded yet. If OO.o, and most other open source projects, probably don't have as many people interested in doing this, and consequently less pressure to do so.
Email did not used to be as open as it is today. Although many academic and business systems were not much different, it was often a hassle to communicate between different systems. Even ten years ago, my college was using a system called "All-In-One", and to send something off campus, you had to prefix the address it with some bizarre code, because for some reason the computer couldn't figure it out otherwise. I think that some early internet services like compuserve and prodigy were even more disinterested in letting you email with people not on your system.
But, somewhat ironically, the ancestors of IM that we used at the time (unix talk and ytalk) were free, sans advertising, and used well-understood communication protocols. So as email has grown more open, chat tools have grown less so. But this is probably just because a lot of IM used in business/school is not officially sanctioned, and also not budgeted, so management is letting their employees pay (by looking at advertising) for an increasingly-important business infrastructure.
One of the authors is something like my academic half-brother. He's no slouch, and brain imaging is so common nowadays that I doubt they would fail to control for button presses. But don't be fooled into thinking they found out anything novel. Problem solving and insight research has been going on seriously for at least 50 years--one famous insight problem from the 50s (I think, it may have been earlier) is the Luchin's water jugs problem, which you may remember from the Die Hard movie with Samuel L. Jackson. People have long known that there is a fundamental difference between "insight" and normal problems, and all this did was show that you can see the difference when you look at the brain. I seriously doubt there is any respectable or half-way knowledgeable scientist who would have predicted otherwise.
Your wish is fulfilled.
http://wvware.sourceforge.net/
For the most part, copy/paste works well, but try cutting things from emacs into gnumeric or nedit. I'm constantly frustrated by this.
In Julian Smart's recent announcement of the wxwindows foundation, he noted that Borland is supporting wxwindows development and that an employee of Borland is on the Board of Directors at the foundation. This is probably behind Borland's 'neglect' of kylix--expect the next generation to support wxWindows. This doesn't sound like abandonment to me.
Don't kid yourself. They all use the same backend databases (i.e., NavTech) and direction-finders. The only difference you are likely to find is in the interface, and how they choose to present the maps, directions, information. That is where they are different.
As time passes, the more I think warez is free promo, no matter how much they whine about loosing sales.
/. too long. That word ("loosing") is misspelled so much here that it is beginning to look correct.
I've been reading
I've got 2 se401 webcams hooked up through USB on Linux, they go to /dev/video1 and /dev/video2 or something. Much better than I was able to pull off in Windows. I'd imagine 3 webcams would be a piece of cake as well.
...If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, 12 pounds of nutritious green wafers, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.
Sorry, it is you who are wrong; the original statement is correct. Although the original codebase was StarOffice, the main tree is now OpenOffice, which StarOffice is now just a branded child of (there are others, like Ximian's OpenOffice). StarOffice includes some other things as well, which can't or won't be open-sourced.
I know this is a troll, but I'll bite.
.eps or something; I'm not even sure if it handles animation and I don't think it can embed sound events.
SVG is often takes much less room than the equivalent jpg/png/gif. It has great potential to eliminate the need for a lot of crappy graphics hacks used out there. For example, once easy-to-script graphing libraries are available, you will be able to make svg graphs of real-time data (of web activity, stock prices, etc.) instead of using bitmaps. For much data, this will be much smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. Some large interesting background images etc. will be possible because they are not constrained by the actual size of the image, just the detail. Although svg is being compared to Flash, it is really more proper to think of it as an embeddable
That's easy. It helps represent the diversity of the American Populace, who the bureau is counting.
This reminds me of the great NY Blackout Baby Boom. Legend has it, on a Monday, 9 months after the big 1965 blackout, a nurse in a hospital noticed a larger-than average number of births. The NYT picked up on this, and reported it. By Wednesday, births had fallen off. It was later shown that there was no real statistical increase, and the numbers may have reflected normal weekly fluctuation (probably because people like to schedule planned births at the beginning of the week. see snopes for more detail.
One week fluctuations are pretty meaningless, especially when there is a huge confounding factor like the July 4 Holiday. But that doesn't mean the RIAA won't use it as evidence to coerce people.
Unlike just about every other pundit writing on this matter, notice that RMS did not lambast SCO or try to claim that Linux is clean. Everyone who is following this case and rooting for Linux should consider this possiblility: somebody (IBM) may have stolen SCO's code. The community does not owe IBM loyalty, and should be wary of them for apparently contributing code that _at least_ could be construed by a former partner as their intellectual property. Maybe they are guiltless, and maybe this is just a SCO cash grab, but I don't owe IBM anything and will not be surprised if someone from a big corporation accidentally or purposefully contributed code that wasn't their's.
Hell, why not just get all /.ers to toss in $20 and BUY SCO?
Because, if you had read the article, you would know that the Canopy group and related cronies already own a majority of the stock, and if they sell out right now to you, they might be in for it from the SEC and shareholders.