What do you want to bet that those big blocks are the things which have been copied from BSD?
10-15 lines, and bigger chunks, could have come from many common legal sources, not just BSD. I don't even think it is likely to come from BSD, because presumably SCO checked that source out (although maybe those functions had been altered in the version they examined). Maybe both original coders lifted a hash table or a linked list definition from the same computer reference book (or from "The dummy's guide to operating system programming"), which gave explicit license to do whatever you want with it. Although if it is something that simple, it hardly warrants calling it enterprise-ready trade secrets. There are a million legal places to get free code, and everybody does it without attribution. If the original linux coder of the suspect lines can't be found, people may never find out that the offending heapsort algorithm was originally found in a the 1978 edition of 'Learn the C programming language in 24 hours.'
(You mean malloc(3), BTW, not malloc (1), which would be a user command rather than a C function)
Is that what the (#) after man entries means? I have been baffled by that for two years. There is always some elite bastard telling me a command with a number after it, and I could never determine why. What is the secret decoder for all of these numbers?
...the.mp3 wars of '00, MusicBrainz has been around a long time, and their 'trm' tech was apparently the stuff used by emusic to stick it to Napster: cf. slashdot and wired.
Why would Apple spend money to buy software they could get for free, or crusty hardware they wouldn't ever use? Or, desks that they would have to ship halfway around the world?
Why is it every time a computer company is in trouble, someone roots for another company they like to buy it out? I've seen it here so many times it makes me sad. Here are the ones I remember off the top of my head:
"Why doesn't Apple buy Mandrake?" "Why doesn't Apple buy SGI?" "Why doesn't IBM buy Eazel?" "Why doesn't IBM buy Loki?" "AOL should buy Red Hat." "HP should buy Compaq."
Uhhhmm...forget that last one. But get over it. Companies don't acquire unprofitable debt-ridden companies unless the payoff is worthwhile.
MS Outlook innovation? Depends on your point of view, I guess.
Hardly. Many monolithic email solutions of yesteryear had this. Like a product called All-in-One which my college used on a vax until the mid 90s. It actually only held a single copy of any email sent to a distribution list, and everyone's inbox would just have pointers to it. It may have been efficient storage-wise, but that thing could be incredibly slow when the system was busy. Anyway, when email was centrally managed like this, it made recalls easy and undetectable. The email was just removed and nobody was the wiser.
I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.
With busybox, you just end up leaving dozens of symlinks littered all over the root filesystem. (bb looks at what the symlink it is called from is named and executes the proper command). From a file-system path search perspective, it is exactly the same thing as a bunch of little binaries. Plus, you get the advantage of easier maintenance, more functionality, better performance, easier drop-in replacement, and less chance of a developer turf-war (the maintainers of 'find' don't ever need to talk to the maintainers of 'grep', etc.).
For a long time now, gnome has had the 'mini-commander' (now the 'command-line tool'). It sits on your panel, and if you type a command into it, it will execute that command. Extremely fast and easy--it almost completely replaces the menus for me.
Additionally, there is a "Run Program" option in Gnome2, and you can set up a simple script in Nautilus (see here) that allows you to type an arbitrary command into a dialog box and have it execute that on the files that were selected in Nautilus.
I must agree. I'm a big debian fan, and love how the system takes care of itself if you don't mix-and-match.debs too much. But, I have never made it through the install successfully. I either gave up completely, or came in through the backdoor via progeny or storm and apt-get dist-upgrade. I dread putting it on another computer or telling anyone I know to run it, because I'm not sure if it is possible to get there through the installer. And even when it gets installed, there is still an enormous amount of tweaking necessary, like to get a firewall and networking usable, to set up a printer, or to configure sound, 3D, USB video/camera, etc.
And the people who are saying "we don't need a stupid graphical installer" are missing the point. It isn't about graphical versus non-graphical--the current installer assumes knowledge about things that it doesn't explain, and often doesn't make clear the consequences of options. And, as the review said, it is dumb about things it should know.
I'm just hoping the PGI installer gets integrated before I buy a new computer.
American auto workers are generally pretty tolerant of other American-made cars. If you drive to the Ford plant in a Toyota, however, you're ride home might have some scratches on it. But it probably has as much to do with union labor as it is does jingoistic national pride.
Take a lesson from emacs here
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Emacs adheres religiously to the maxim of only bumping up the release number for really major changes (i.e., those that created backwards incompatibility.). Consequently, they are on point release 21 or something--they have dropped the initial 1. or 2. because it apparently seemed redundant.
Your statistics are merely correlational. I would predict that if the businesses that are buying and replacing Windows PCs every few years would switch to Macs, they would still replace them at the same rate. Probably, an average non-gaming consumer replaces their computer every 4-6 years, regardless of whether it is a mac or a PC. And for cash-strapped schools, the replacement rate may be even lower. Comparing average mac users (schools and non-gaming consumers) to average PC users (a smaller proportion of whom are educators and more of whom are gamers and corporate users) will produce the correlation you stated, but this doesn't mean that if corporate clients change to macs, they will save money.
The decision was made because of considerations about aimed movement, which was originally codified as a mathematical relationship by Paul Fitts, who stated that times for aimed movements were related to the distance and size of the target in a logarithmic fashion. "Fitts's Law" is not about infinite height, however. It is about the mathematical relationship, and for any new application of the law, the coefficients of the formula need to be estimated. These coefficients will depend on many things, including the acceleration and rate settings on the mouse, the experience of the user, and probably things like how bright things are, the color scheme, how big the monitor is, and how far they are away from the monitor. Thus, it may be possible that in the days of black-and-white ten-inch monitors with big clunky mice, the parameters of Fitts's Law worked out so that you would get an advantage for edge menus. In todays world, with optical mice, 21" LCD displays, multiple monitors, and mouse acceleration, the parameters would be different, and there may no longer be an advantage for edge menus. And if you change your mouse rate, you might just negate any benefit for these menus as well. Of course, the formula is also affected by target size, meaning that the larger icons probably do more for 'productivity' than anything else.
The point is that the research and user testing this design decision was based on is from a different age and time. To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage. This must be done empirically, because without such testing, we are all just speculating.
You are applying antiquated notions of commercial success based on a sports metaphor of winning to non-commercial projects. Sure, StarOffice and Free Radical's office can be judged by commercial success, but their goals can be satisfied by profitability, not necessarily world domination.
The standard for success in the non-commercial open-source software world is different. Here, it doesn't even matter if a piece of software is profitable, as long as the developer wants t maintain it. It doesn't really matter how many people USE the software if it is maintained, and doesn't really matter if it is maintained if it still gets used. Bizarre, huh?
Your point about window managers shows how alive this community is, and it shows that innovation is happening. Anywhere that you are really pushing the innovation envelope, you will see the path to success littered with the dead bodies of the failures. There are tons of window managers out there, and only a couple of them make any sense to me, but their diversity has brought some interesting ideas about. The worst thing that can happen is if everyone lines up behind a single solution. Only then will the open source software community have failed.
Not only that, but since these portals are probably losing money for every non-western world click-through because their advertisers only want to advertise in North America or Europe, the sites would probably gladly allow their url to be blocked in India.
Whatever. You claim vorbis is an audio codec and ogg a bitstream manager, but you don't tell us what the sound format is. Why is the executable called oggenc (ogg encoder) if ogg is not a sound format? Why are the files name.ogg by default if ogg is not a sound format? Why don't you go troll on the xiph mailing lists, because it appears that they are the ones who have perpetuated this.
It is a demographic study for marketing purposes, not a scientific study that attempts to determine causality. They simply concluded that (for whatever reason) you can get more bang for your buck by marketing to Mac users. It probably will just make mac websites more expensive to advertise on. But it can be misinterpreted as 'news' that fuels the age-old battle of platform superiority, which is apparently why it has made the technology news.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all locals are opposed to windfarms. Up on the prairie, they are welcoming a 60 mW farm:
see here or here.
Good Luck. The kernel doesn't use cvs.
What do you want to bet that those big blocks are the things which have been copied from BSD?
10-15 lines, and bigger chunks, could have come from many common legal sources, not just BSD. I don't even think it is likely to come from BSD, because presumably SCO checked that source out (although maybe those functions had been altered in the version they examined). Maybe both original coders lifted a hash table or a linked list definition from the same computer reference book (or from "The dummy's guide to operating system programming"), which gave explicit license to do whatever you want with it. Although if it is something that simple, it hardly warrants calling it enterprise-ready trade secrets. There are a million legal places to get free code, and everybody does it without attribution. If the original linux coder of the suspect lines can't be found, people may never find out that the offending heapsort algorithm was originally found in a the 1978 edition of 'Learn the C programming language in 24 hours.'
(You mean malloc(3), BTW, not malloc (1), which would be a user command rather than a C function)
Is that what the (#) after man entries means? I have been baffled by that for two years. There is always some elite bastard telling me a command with a number after it, and I could never determine why. What is the secret decoder for all of these numbers?
...the .mp3 wars of '00, MusicBrainz has been around a long time, and their 'trm' tech was apparently the stuff used by emusic to stick it to Napster:
cf. slashdot and wired.
Why would Apple spend money to buy software they could get for free, or crusty hardware they wouldn't ever use? Or, desks that they would have to ship halfway around the world?
Why is it every time a computer company is in trouble, someone roots for another company they like to buy it out? I've seen it here so many times it makes me sad. Here are the ones I remember off the top of my head:
"Why doesn't Apple buy Mandrake?"
"Why doesn't Apple buy SGI?"
"Why doesn't IBM buy Eazel?"
"Why doesn't IBM buy Loki?"
"AOL should buy Red Hat."
"HP should buy Compaq."
Uhhhmm...forget that last one. But get over it. Companies don't acquire unprofitable debt-ridden companies unless the payoff is worthwhile.
MS Outlook innovation? Depends on your point of view, I guess.
Hardly. Many monolithic email solutions of yesteryear had this. Like a product called All-in-One which my college used on a vax until the mid 90s. It actually only held a single copy of any email sent to a distribution list, and everyone's inbox would just have pointers to it. It may have been efficient storage-wise, but that thing could be incredibly slow when the system was busy. Anyway, when email was centrally managed like this, it made recalls easy and undetectable. The email was just removed and nobody was the wiser.
I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.
With busybox, you just end up leaving dozens of symlinks littered all over the root filesystem. (bb looks at what the symlink it is called from is named and executes the proper command). From a file-system path search perspective, it is exactly the same thing as a bunch of little binaries. Plus, you get the advantage of easier maintenance, more functionality, better performance, easier drop-in replacement, and less chance of a developer turf-war (the maintainers of 'find' don't ever need to talk to the maintainers of 'grep', etc.).
Being able to search for images, more relavent searches, etc... things like that pulled me away from AltaVista.
Don't forget automatic spell-checking.
Man--you just reminded me how I would frequently type in 'digital.altavista.com' and get nowhere.
For a long time now, gnome has had the 'mini-commander' (now the 'command-line tool'). It sits on your panel, and if you type a command into it, it will execute that command. Extremely fast and easy--it almost completely replaces the menus for me.
Additionally, there is a "Run Program" option in Gnome2, and you can set up a simple script in Nautilus (see here) that allows you to type an arbitrary command into a dialog box and have it execute that on the files that were selected in Nautilus.
I must agree. I'm a big debian fan, and love how the system takes care of itself if you don't mix-and-match .debs too much. But, I have never made it through the install successfully. I either gave up completely, or came in through the backdoor via progeny or storm and apt-get dist-upgrade. I dread putting it on another computer or telling anyone I know to run it, because I'm not sure if it is possible to get there through the installer. And even when it gets installed, there is still an enormous amount of tweaking necessary, like to get a firewall and networking usable, to set up a printer, or to configure sound, 3D, USB video/camera, etc.
And the people who are saying "we don't need a stupid graphical installer" are missing the point. It isn't about graphical versus non-graphical--the current installer assumes knowledge about things that it doesn't explain, and often doesn't make clear the consequences of options. And, as the review said, it is dumb about things it should know.
I'm just hoping the PGI installer gets integrated before I buy a new computer.
American auto workers are generally pretty tolerant of other American-made cars. If you drive to the Ford plant in a Toyota, however, you're ride home might have some scratches on it. But it probably has as much to do with union labor as it is does jingoistic national pride.
Emacs adheres religiously to the maxim of only bumping up the release number for really major changes (i.e., those that created backwards incompatibility.). Consequently, they are on point release 21 or something--they have dropped the initial 1. or 2. because it apparently seemed redundant.
The Rio Volt's lack of Vorbis support is the only reason I haven't switched to encoding all my music in Vorbis.
Coincidentally, it is also the only reason why I haven't bought a Rio Volt.
Your statistics are merely correlational. I would predict that if the businesses that are buying and replacing Windows PCs every few years would switch to Macs, they would still replace them at the same rate. Probably, an average non-gaming consumer replaces their computer every 4-6 years, regardless of whether it is a mac or a PC. And for cash-strapped schools, the replacement rate may be even lower. Comparing average mac users (schools and non-gaming consumers) to average PC users (a smaller proportion of whom are educators and more of whom are gamers and corporate users) will produce the correlation you stated, but this doesn't mean that if corporate clients change to macs, they will save money.
The decision was made because of considerations about aimed movement, which was originally codified as a mathematical relationship by Paul Fitts, who stated that times for aimed movements were related to the distance and size of the target in a logarithmic fashion. "Fitts's Law" is not about infinite height, however. It is about the mathematical relationship, and for any new application of the law, the coefficients of the formula need to be estimated. These coefficients will depend on many things, including the acceleration and rate settings on the mouse, the experience of the user, and probably things like how bright things are, the color scheme, how big the monitor is, and how far they are away from the monitor. Thus, it may be possible that in the days of black-and-white ten-inch monitors with big clunky mice, the parameters of Fitts's Law worked out so that you would get an advantage for edge menus. In todays world, with optical mice, 21" LCD displays, multiple monitors, and mouse acceleration, the parameters would be different, and there may no longer be an advantage for edge menus. And if you change your mouse rate, you might just negate any benefit for these menus as well. Of course, the formula is also affected by target size, meaning that the larger icons probably do more for 'productivity' than anything else.
The point is that the research and user testing this design decision was based on is from a different age and time. To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage. This must be done empirically, because without such testing, we are all just speculating.
It's called a "run-on sentance". Perhaps you should have spent more time in english class instead of in front of "Baldur's"...
For those keeping score, the above retort is officially ironic.
I had an onion tied to my belt, as was the style at the time.
Abe Simpson, right? Which episode was that?
You are applying antiquated notions of commercial success based on a sports metaphor of winning to non-commercial projects. Sure, StarOffice and Free Radical's office can be judged by commercial success, but their goals can be satisfied by profitability, not necessarily world domination.
The standard for success in the non-commercial open-source software world is different. Here, it doesn't even matter if a piece of software is profitable, as long as the developer wants t maintain it. It doesn't really matter how many people USE the software if it is maintained, and doesn't really matter if it is maintained if it still gets used. Bizarre, huh?
Your point about window managers shows how alive this community is, and it shows that innovation is happening. Anywhere that you are really pushing the innovation envelope, you will see the path to success littered with the dead bodies of the failures. There are tons of window managers out there, and only a couple of them make any sense to me, but their diversity has brought some interesting ideas about. The worst thing that can happen is if everyone lines up behind a single solution. Only then will the open source software community have failed.
I sure hope they interview you. I love TuxPaint! Nice job. It makes me want to have kids so that I can make them use it (don't tell my girlfriend).
Kevin Costner. If there is one actor who COULD be replaced by a computer, it would be him.
Not only that, but since these portals are probably losing money for every non-western world click-through because their advertisers only want to advertise in North America or Europe, the sites would probably gladly allow their url to be blocked in India.
Whatever. You claim vorbis is an audio codec and ogg a bitstream manager, but you don't tell us what the sound format is. Why is the executable called oggenc (ogg encoder) if ogg is not a sound format? Why are the files name .ogg by default if ogg is not a sound format? Why don't you go troll on the xiph mailing lists, because it appears that they are the ones who have perpetuated this.
It is a demographic study for marketing purposes, not a scientific study that attempts to determine causality. They simply concluded that (for whatever reason) you can get more bang for your buck by marketing to Mac users. It probably will just make mac websites more expensive to advertise on. But it can be misinterpreted as 'news' that fuels the age-old battle of platform superiority, which is apparently why it has made the technology news.