So isn't this just like MS telling all their employees to vote for Microsoft in that last poll? Now we are telling everyone on slashdot to go out and vote and slashdot is comprised mostly of anti-Microsoft people.
You also have to have the time and money to defend your prior art in court. Say you invented and patented an algorithm for some form of super video compression years ago. Now if Microsoft decided today to use that algorithm in their product, would you try to take MS to court? Do you think your average programmer is going to have the time and money to defend his patent against a large corporations armada of lawyers hired specifically for the purpose of creating and defending patents? No, just finding prior art doesn't mean anything if you can't defend it.
Using Win XP w/o the ability to update or connect to certain online services safely will probably end up being more than sufficient protection from MS' viewpoint.
With all the IE viruses going around, not being able to connect to an MS server is probably sufficient protection to the users system too.
Voting on the Internet would allow more people to vote creating a more accurate representation of the countries ideas. Politicians don't want voters from all over the country voting, they just want the voters that support them to vote.
As for people saying that voting on the Internet would create a bias because only rich people could vote is just plain untrue. You will still have the plain old voting booths, and if not, just replace those voting booths in the town hall with terminals to log on the Internet. You don't have to own a computer to vote.
At least cut and paste someone elses response.
on
Respond To The Tunney Act
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This happened last time when the government requested comments on patents. Slashdot posted it and how many responses were there? Something like 5. I think there are more than 5 slashdot readers. Here is what I sent them below, at least cut and paste it or someone elses to show you have a vote against Microsoft:
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The current proposal for the Microsoft settlement will not prevent Microsoft from staying a monopoly in the computer industry. Microsoft employees are spreading this around as "..a victory over the government." If the government shows they are incapable or unwilling to stop Microsofts monopoly over the software industry, who else is there to stand in Microsofts way?
Since the trial has started Microsofts grip on ISP's and hardware vendors has slowly loosend up for fear of how it would be represented in the case against them. Once Microsoft accepts the current settlement they will go back to their previous methods of forcing the industry to accept their software and force out competitors, but it is not their previous methods the software industry is only worried about. By recieving the current settlement this will show the industry that even the government and it's laws cannot stop Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft will be able to expand their practices beyond strict EULA's, enforcing proprietary "standards" and harrassing/buying out small companies. They will be able to stretch more laws, find more loopholes and choose more "un-ethical" business means knowing that the most powerful system that could have stopped them was not powerful enough.
Once again I say that the DOJ and US government should be putting a stop to Microsofts monopoly. By forcing them to release their file formats, source code, protocols or something similar that will allow other companies to compete with them. But the current settlement simply shows that the government no longer has the power to enforce the laws that control our capitalist country.
I use the MUTE codec.
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 5, Funny
It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.
Do you think companies use Open Source as a political statement to say that they support individual consumers freedom? By allowing individuals to see how a product works and to contribute back to it. Or are companies finding that Open Source can give them an economic advantage over closed source in the software industry?
Commercialization isn't really bad. All corporations care about is money and so they are going to do anything possible to get it from consumers. If there are two websites that sell the same product, corporations are going to try and improve their website as much as possible making it easier and better for consumers to use. If they do that then consumers are more likely to come to their site and buy things from them. Competition in this form helps the consumer. Now if a consumer only supports a big compnay that company will become a monopoly and I think everyone here on slashdot knows what happens to the quality of products that come from a monopoly.
So in short support the smaller stores that come onto the internet and help promote competition.
I'm sure politicians will only realize how much we need to clean up space after a shuttle crew dies from a collision with space debris. I mean right now our money is much better spent on that missle defence system. I mean after Sept 11th it's clearly missles we need to defend against, right?
To quote a famouse obvious scientist. Sure it may be 1000X faster than a regular network but that just means we'll soon have machines putting out 1000x more data or have a 1000x more machines on a network, etc. No matter how much bandwidth there is it will always be maxed out.
Most of the people who know Linux well assume that everyone else can learn Linux just as easily as them. I think that's about all that needs to be said because that is all I have ever seen.
These are some of the major points I've seen guru's forget about "average" computer users.
1. Average computer users are afraid they will break their computer. Example: Many think if they mess up setting up a drive in the BIOS, the drive will physically break.
2. Average computers users need to get their information visualy. Just look at all the Visual MS products. People don't know where to look for information so they need all the info laid out in front of them. They need menus and GUI's that can show them all the options they have to use. They don't have the time or ability to hunt out where the information is they need.
3. Average computer users have a very short time span for learning something on a computer. A computer is just another utiliy they need to use. They don't learn how it works for the same reason they don't learn how their TV, VCR, microwave, refrigerator, cellphone, etc works, they don't have the time. They expect someone else to do all the detailed work for them.
4. It takes logic to understand a computer, and most people just can't grasp the concept of logical thinking. "The computer shouldn't do that when I click there!" "Why?" "Because.. that's a stupid thing to do!"
It's good that 9 of them are filing against MS but what about the other 41? Are they for or against MS? If they are Pro-MS then 9 states is just a joke.
To quote a famouse obvious scientist. Sure it may be 1000X faster than a regular network but that just means we'll soon have machines putting out 1000x more data or have a 1000x more machines on a network, etc. No matter how much bandwidth there is it will always be maxed out.
I'm still suprised no one has made a really destructive worm that trashes someones system. It shouldn't be too hard to modify one of these worms to do something like that. You'd think with all the worm/virus makers out there some of them would have different intents, unless all these worms are all being written by the same group of people.
We need some kind of super light window manager. For example take a window manager, like PWM my current wm, running on DirectFB. No bloated Xserver in the background and no bloated window manager just a simple frame buffer and a 2meg window manager.
With DirectFB though no old Xwindows dependant apps could run, but if you're using Gtk or some similar widget set for your gui then porting the widget set to DirectFB should be all that is needed to use your applications on DirectFB.
With that little overhead companies can use virtually any hardware to run their office applications. Beat that windows!
Re:Why the hell was this modded flamebait?
on
Windows XP Embedded
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· Score: 2
Microsoft organizing its employees to advocate their embedded products in online newsgroups
Couldn't his answers have been recorded and written down word for word? If the slashdot editors can handle the Slashdot website, I think they can handle a tape recorder.
If you want better cross platform support..
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 3, Insightful
..make your application interface independant. The idea is to make your program a basic application that can run without a gui. The gui is then a plugin or something. That way you can take one application and write a gui using gtk, QT, win32, whatever you want and never have to rewrite the application. This is how licq works. The licq application is stand alone and you can download interface plugins for it, QT plugins, gtk plugins even command line plugins. This is great for me since QT doesn't run on the platform I use, so I have to use the commandline plugin.
Don't lock yourself into one gui and hope that it will cover all the platforms you need, most of them don't. Allow any kind of gui to work with your program, not only is it more cross platform compatible, but other people can create guis for your application without ever have to touch the applications code.
All these phone numbers are taken from spam mailings. The whole reason these numbers were put in the emails was because spammers WANT people to call them. Most of these numbers are just automated machines with menus you have to endlessly punch through before you can get to a real person. It's just like trying to reply to a spam mailing itself asking to be taken off the mailing list.
Have a standard directory structure for every application. Put all the applications in/opt then require every application to have the subdirectory/bin so if you want to find the binaries of all applications you look through all the/opt/[app name]/bin directories. You could also have other dirs like/opt/[app name]/lib for libraries, etc... You don't need to know the specific name of each application to search all the/bin dirs, you just open/opt and get a list of the directories, then append/bin to all the names and try and open those, then search in those for the binaries.
This keeps all the application files in one directory. If you want to remove an application, you just rm -rf that one directory. Upgrading applications is much simpler since you just point to that one dir and put the files there. You can also have multiple versions of an application installed just by renaming their root directory.
Applications shouldn't spread themselves all over the system, they should be placed in one spot with a specific directory structure and be moduler to the rest of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
So isn't this just like MS telling all their employees to vote for Microsoft in that last poll? Now we are telling everyone on slashdot to go out and vote and slashdot is comprised mostly of anti-Microsoft people.
You also have to have the time and money to defend your prior art in court. Say you invented and patented an algorithm for some form of super video compression years ago. Now if Microsoft decided today to use that algorithm in their product, would you try to take MS to court? Do you think your average programmer is going to have the time and money to defend his patent against a large corporations armada of lawyers hired specifically for the purpose of creating and defending patents? No, just finding prior art doesn't mean anything if you can't defend it.
Using Win XP w/o the ability to update or connect to certain online services safely will probably end up being more than sufficient protection from MS' viewpoint.
With all the IE viruses going around, not being able to connect to an MS server is probably sufficient protection to the users system too.
Voting on the Internet would allow more people to vote creating a more accurate representation of the countries ideas. Politicians don't want voters from all over the country voting, they just want the voters that support them to vote.
As for people saying that voting on the Internet would create a bias because only rich people could vote is just plain untrue. You will still have the plain old voting booths, and if not, just replace those voting booths in the town hall with terminals to log on the Internet. You don't have to own a computer to vote.
This happened last time when the government requested comments on patents. Slashdot posted it and how many responses were there? Something like 5. I think there are more than 5 slashdot readers. Here is what I sent them below, at least cut and paste it or someone elses to show you have a vote against Microsoft:
----
The current proposal for the Microsoft settlement will not prevent Microsoft from staying a monopoly in the computer industry. Microsoft employees are spreading this around as "..a victory over the government." If the government shows they are incapable or unwilling to stop Microsofts monopoly over the software industry, who else is there to stand in Microsofts way?
Since the trial has started Microsofts grip on ISP's and hardware vendors has slowly loosend up for fear of how it would be represented in the case against them. Once Microsoft accepts the current settlement they will go back to their previous methods of forcing the industry to accept their software and force out competitors, but it is not their previous methods the software industry is only worried about. By recieving the current settlement this will show the industry that even the government and it's laws cannot stop Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft will be able to expand their practices beyond strict EULA's, enforcing proprietary "standards" and harrassing/buying out small companies. They will be able to stretch more laws, find more loopholes and choose more "un-ethical" business means knowing that the most powerful system that could have stopped them was not powerful enough.
Once again I say that the DOJ and US government should be putting a stop to Microsofts monopoly. By forcing them to release their file formats, source code, protocols or something similar that will allow other companies to compete with them. But the current settlement simply shows that the government no longer has the power to enforce the laws that control our capitalist country.
It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.
Do you think companies use Open Source as a political statement to say that they support individual consumers freedom? By allowing individuals to see how a product works and to contribute back to it. Or are companies finding that Open Source can give them an economic advantage over closed source in the software industry?
The Slashdot editors post their biased comments on the front page, in the articles...
Commercialization isn't really bad. All corporations care about is money and so they are going to do anything possible to get it from consumers. If there are two websites that sell the same product, corporations are going to try and improve their website as much as possible making it easier and better for consumers to use. If they do that then consumers are more likely to come to their site and buy things from them. Competition in this form helps the consumer. Now if a consumer only supports a big compnay that company will become a monopoly and I think everyone here on slashdot knows what happens to the quality of products that come from a monopoly.
So in short support the smaller stores that come onto the internet and help promote competition.
I'm sure politicians will only realize how much we need to clean up space after a shuttle crew dies from a collision with space debris. I mean right now our money is much better spent on that missle defence system. I mean after Sept 11th it's clearly missles we need to defend against, right?
The court ruled that the online journalist was protected under the First Amendment...
Why should you have to be a journalist to have your 1st amendment rights protected?
To quote a famouse obvious scientist. Sure it may be 1000X faster than a regular network but that just means we'll soon have machines putting out 1000x more data or have a 1000x more machines on a network, etc. No matter how much bandwidth there is it will always be maxed out.
Most of the people who know Linux well assume that everyone else can learn Linux just as easily as them. I think that's about all that needs to be said because that is all I have ever seen.
These are some of the major points I've seen guru's forget about "average" computer users.
1. Average computer users are afraid they will break their computer. Example: Many think if they mess up setting up a drive in the BIOS, the drive will physically break.
2. Average computers users need to get their information visualy. Just look at all the Visual MS products. People don't know where to look for information so they need all the info laid out in front of them. They need menus and GUI's that can show them all the options they have to use. They don't have the time or ability to hunt out where the information is they need.
3. Average computer users have a very short time span for learning something on a computer. A computer is just another utiliy they need to use. They don't learn how it works for the same reason they don't learn how their TV, VCR, microwave, refrigerator, cellphone, etc works, they don't have the time. They expect someone else to do all the detailed work for them.
4. It takes logic to understand a computer, and most people just can't grasp the concept of logical thinking. "The computer shouldn't do that when I click there!" "Why?" "Because.. that's a stupid thing to do!"
It's good that 9 of them are filing against MS but what about the other 41? Are they for or against MS? If they are Pro-MS then 9 states is just a joke.
To quote a famouse obvious scientist. Sure it may be 1000X faster than a regular network but that just means we'll soon have machines putting out 1000x more data or have a 1000x more machines on a network, etc. No matter how much bandwidth there is it will always be maxed out.
Revolutionary new developments in extremely shiny rockets, artillery shells, and even mortars.
Don't forget smoke screens.
I'm still suprised no one has made a really destructive worm that trashes someones system. It shouldn't be too hard to modify one of these worms to do something like that. You'd think with all the worm/virus makers out there some of them would have different intents, unless all these worms are all being written by the same group of people.
We need some kind of super light window manager. For example take a window manager, like PWM my current wm, running on DirectFB. No bloated Xserver in the background and no bloated window manager just a simple frame buffer and a 2meg window manager.
With DirectFB though no old Xwindows dependant apps could run, but if you're using Gtk or some similar widget set for your gui then porting the widget set to DirectFB should be all that is needed to use your applications on DirectFB.
With that little overhead companies can use virtually any hardware to run their office applications. Beat that windows!
Microsoft organizing its employees to advocate their embedded products in online newsgroups
Maybe that has something to do with it...
How long until Sircam starts transfering money from one persons ATM machine to another?
I send you this financial transaction in order to have your advice.
I wonder how long this site will be around if a terrorist uses it to avoid security cameras and plant a bomb...
Couldn't his answers have been recorded and written down word for word? If the slashdot editors can handle the Slashdot website, I think they can handle a tape recorder.
..make your application interface independant. The idea is to make your program a basic application that can run without a gui. The gui is then a plugin or something. That way you can take one application and write a gui using gtk, QT, win32, whatever you want and never have to rewrite the application. This is how licq works. The licq application is stand alone and you can download interface plugins for it, QT plugins, gtk plugins even command line plugins. This is great for me since QT doesn't run on the platform I use, so I have to use the commandline plugin.
Don't lock yourself into one gui and hope that it will cover all the platforms you need, most of them don't. Allow any kind of gui to work with your program, not only is it more cross platform compatible, but other people can create guis for your application without ever have to touch the applications code.
All these phone numbers are taken from spam mailings. The whole reason these numbers were put in the emails was because spammers WANT people to call them. Most of these numbers are just automated machines with menus you have to endlessly punch through before you can get to a real person. It's just like trying to reply to a spam mailing itself asking to be taken off the mailing list.
Have a standard directory structure for every application. Put all the applications in /opt then require every application to have the subdirectory /bin so if you want to find the binaries of all applications you look through all the /opt/[app name]/bin directories. You could also have other dirs like /opt/[app name]/lib for libraries, etc... You don't need to know the specific name of each application to search all the /bin dirs, you just open /opt and get a list of the directories, then append /bin to all the names and try and open those, then search in those for the binaries.
This keeps all the application files in one directory. If you want to remove an application, you just rm -rf that one directory. Upgrading applications is much simpler since you just point to that one dir and put the files there. You can also have multiple versions of an application installed just by renaming their root directory.
Applications shouldn't spread themselves all over the system, they should be placed in one spot with a specific directory structure and be moduler to the rest of the system.